OK, in the How Stupid Do They Think We Are category, I'll beat this dead horse one more time.

Volt:

Chevy is claiming 230 mpg (city) for the Volt. That might be true for 52 mile trips. If you drive 40 miles on batteries, and 12 miles at 50 mpg recharge mode, your mileage will average out to 230 mpg, according to the EPA formula. If you drive to the beach, however, one would think your mileage should quickly approach that 50 mpg. Nevertheless Chevy is also predicting a triple-digit combined rating. We'll see.

BTW, Nissan claims that its all-electric Leaf will get 367 mpg (city).

Cash for Clunkers:

Initial reports showed that C4C buyers were trading in their clunkers for impressively thrifty new vehicles.

   1. Ford Focus
   2. Toyota Corolla
   3. Honda Civic
   4. Toyota Prius
   5. Toyota Camry
   6. Ford Escape
   7. Hyundai Elantra
   8. Dodge Caliber
   9. Honda Fit
  10. Chevy Cobalt

Buuut, Autosavant points out:

Or do they?  According to CNN, who got their data from the keen eyes at Edmunds-dot-com, the numbers of vehicles sold depends on how you look at the data.  The above list, compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), breaks down sales data by engine, transmission, drive wheels, and hybrid status.  For example, the Ford Escape is number Six on the above list.  It's available in six distinct versions (two- and four-wheel drive, hybrid, etc.).  According to the methodology used by the EPA, each version of the Escape is counted as a different vehicle.  Thus in the ubiquitous list above, the only version counted is the gas-powered front-driver.

Using the more common make and model, we see:

   1. Ford Escape
   2. Ford Focus
   3. Jeep Patriot
   4. Dodge Caliber
   5. Ford F-150
   6. Honda Civic
   7. Chevrolet Silverado
   8. Chevrolet Cobalt
   9. Toyota Corolla
  10. Ford Fusion

Escape and Patriot are smallish SUVs; F-150 and Silverado are full-size trucks. Not a terrible list, but not as impressive as the one with Prius, Fit, Elantra and Camry. If I was pushing C4C, I'd certainly use the EPA list.

The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

In an article for the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, "real" farmer Blake Hurst devotes his first few paragraphs to establishing the straw man of the intellectual who wants to change everything about farming on the strength of reading one book. He makes the case that farming is the way it is because of logical and often environmentally-conscious choices.

Hurst offers an anecdote about the dangers of organic farming:

Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family's, a farmer with a vision. He began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I suppose, what we would now call "free range" turkeys. Turkeys raised in a natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass, and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys, at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with his dream, and his farm.

Snopes, however, deems false the common wisdom that turkeys will drown in the rain, although it does note that domesticated turkeys don't have good survival skills.

Hurst takes aim at Michael Pollan,

Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century, the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by lightning strikes. The amount of life the earth could support was limited by the amount of nitrogen available for crop production.

In his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't I think of that?

even for being right:

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons. Nitrogen quadrupled in price over the last several years, and farmers are still using it, albeit more cautiously. We are using GPS monitors on all of our equipment to ensure that we do not use too much, and our production of corn per pound of nitrogen is rapidly increasing. On our farm, we have increased yields about 50 percent during my career, while applying about the same amount of nitrogen we did when I began farming. That fortunate trend will increase even faster with the advent of new GMO hybrids. But as much as Pollan might desire it, even President Obama cannot reshuffle the chemical deck that nature has dealt. Energy may well get much more expensive, and peak oil production may have been reached. But food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we have learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs.

But at Daily Bread, on Big Money, Dan Mitchell deconstructs the straw man:

"I'm so tired," Hurst writes, "of people who wouldn't visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food."

That is, plainly and simply, a crock. Doctors still use stethoscopes all the time and, except for perhaps a few nuts, none of the proponents of ecologically friendly agriculture are calling for a return to "1930s technology." Pollan, for example, is quite reasonable in his approach: He doesn't even call for the elimination of industrial farming; he simply wants to mitigate its many harms.

...

Again, almost nobody is calling for bringing down the entire industrial food system and replacing it with tiny organic farms. The idea is to incorporate certain "sustainable" principles into that system to lessen the very real bad impacts it has on our health and on the environment. For instance, to reduce its use of petroleum and its reliance on the nastiest of pesticides that befoul our waterways.

Pollan and the rest aren't pretending that this is a zero-sum game--a simple choice between an organic and an industrial system. But Bailey and Hurst sure are.

What is disheartening here is that Hurst makes some good points under all the confrontational bluster. Proponents of "sustainable" agriculture do tend to downplay the often painful, often expensive tradeoffs that must be made. "Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety," Hurst writes. True. But he follows that up with: "Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors?" Not true.

As conceived by Frank Herbert, the home world of the ambitious Harkonnen family was ravaged by mining and machinery, and hence intensely polluted. As a result, even Baron Vladimir needed constant medical attention.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Dr Andrew Weil feels the current health care debate focuses only on symptoms:

Washington is working on reform initiatives that focus on one problem: the fact that the system is too expensive (and consequently too exclusive.) Reform proposals, such as the "public option" for government insurance or calls for drug makers to drop prices, are aimed mostly at boosting affordability and access. Make it cheap enough, the thinking goes, and the 46 million Americans who can't afford coverage will finally get their fair share.

But what's missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what's even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly.

It's impossible to make our drug-intensive, technology-centric, and corrupt system affordable. Consider that Americans spent $8.4 billion on medicine in 1950, vs. an astonishing 2.3 trillion in 2007. That's $30,000 annually for a family of four. The bloated structure of endless, marginal-return tests; patent-protected drugs and "heroic" surgical interventions for virtually every health problem simply can't be made much cheaper due to its very nature. Costs can only be shifted in various unpalatable ways.

...

I'm not against high-tech medicine. It has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. But our health care professionals are currently using it for everything, and the cost is going to break us.