I can't login to comment, but apparently I can still post. They told me on chat that TPM may be canceling blogging, which is a shame, if not a complete surprise. I have just read some very well-written and perceptive comments advising against that course of action, but the phrase, "it was too good to last," keeps running through my head.

I feel that the opportunity to publish, unedited, and be read and be criticized or applauded was a great gift, for which I was thankful. I've seen a lot of writing skills blossom and flourish in the Cafe' and met a lot of fine folks, too. I think a lot of you will be an asset to whatever community you choose to join, and if the future of the internet is really in apps, there will probably be opportunities to do more than write and clip photos.

I'll talk to many of you in chat, and farewell to the others.

Monday, March 22nd was World Water Day, coordinated by the UN Environment Programme, and dedicated to the theme of water quality. I was flummoxed that day to find that the office water cooler wasn't running, but consider that the average Asian or African woman walks six kilometers each day to fetch water. And then there's Pakistan:

CircleofBlue.org

The Indus Basin irrigation system is the largest in the world, with the Pakistani system including 12 river-linking canals and 45 main irrigation canals. Pakistan shares the system with India through a 50-year-old treaty that divides control of the Indus tributaries between the two countries.

And critics in Pakistan are complaining that drought conditions are exacerbated by new dams being built in India.

Read more »

Suppose you're watching someone's dog. They tell you that Fido barks constantly when hungry, but when you feed him well, he barks less than five percent of the time. When Fido is barking, what is the likelihood that he is hungry?

I put the answer at the end of this blog. I barely remember Prob/Stat, but this seems like an easy puzzle. We're given 100% barking when hungry and only 5% otherwise, so if Fido is barking it seems obvious that there is 95% probability that he is hungry rather than just ornery. Right?

Read more »

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood seemed like a car guy, but blogs Pro-Bike, Pro-Pedestrian:

My view from atop the table at the National Bike Summit

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

Read more »

Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers have linked to Ryan Sager of True Slant, who asks the provocative question:

Is Porn Good For Us?

While the question of free speech is philosophical, the question of whether porn does any social harm is an empirical one. And the data is pretty clear: Pornography either reduces sex crime by giving males a non-violent outlet for excess sexual impulses, or it has no effect.

Sager's source is The New Scientist which also asks:

Porn: Good for us?

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20-24 and 25-34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic.

In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

... What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of "normal" males.

New Scientist adapted their article from, and quoted, a 2009 paper published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry:

Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review

Abstract:

A vocal segment of the population has serious concerns about the effect of pornography in society and challenges its public use and acceptance. This manuscript reviews the major issues associated with the availability of sexually explicit material. It has been found everywhere scientifically investigated that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased. It is further been found that sexual erotica has not only wide spread personal acceptance and use but general tolerance for its availability to adults. This attitude is seen by both men and women and not only in urban communities but also in reputed conservative ones as well. Further this finding holds nationally in the United States and in widely different countries around the world. Indeed, no country where this matter has been scientifically studied has yet been found to think pornography ought be restricted from adults. The only consistent finding is that adults prefer to have the material restricted from children's production or use.

Within the paper Milton Diamond mentions another concern, that was echoed by a female contributor to True Slant who commented on Sager's piece:

Others argue, that pornography, although not always leading to physical crimes, contribute to the degradation of women. They claim there is harm to the women who perform sexually, (whether or not they appear to consent to participate in it they are being exploited economically or physically coerced to do so): they claim there is harm to the women who do not participate in it but are denied their own, supposedly non-pornographic, sexuality, because they are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it: and they claim harm in the sense that the depicted acts can lead directly to conditions of physical endangerment for all women.

Diamond's answer is that pluralism leads to both more choices for women and pornography:

... in one measure of societal attitudes Baron found, contrary to the hypothesis that exposure to porn lowers status of women, the states with higher circulation rates of pornography had higher measure of sexual equality. His conclusion is that pornography and gender equality both flourish in politically tolerant societies.

All the above pieces focus on diminished occurrence of rape as a positive result of pornography. For years I have been reading that rape is an act of violence, or dominance, and that view is mentioned in the article, but apparently the researchers cited also feel that porn is a convenient substitute for rape in some instances.

But I'm more interested in the comment about non-pornographic sexuality. While Alex Comfort felt there was Joy in variation, porn sex strikes me as the opposite of intimate sex. When you actually make the beast with two backs - you are close to and focused on your lover. In porn sex, for the benefit of the cameras, the performers are often as physically removed as two people can be while copulating. So while the availability of porn may be reducing opportunistic rape, I have to wonder if it is turning consensual sex into a more impersonal experience.

(Thank you for a good discussion, but I have closed comments to stop feeding the needy troll.)

The other two posted online aren't as bad, but I can't believe GQ would feature a crummy, artless photo like this in their magazine. It looks like she was adjusting for a posed shot and they snapped by mistake - then ran it because there was a lot of skin showing.

Hunter claims she wasn't paid for the interview, but I find it hard to believe that she would sit partially undressed for a photoshoot without getting paid. She claimed that she cried for two hours after seeing the photos GQ published, but I wonder how long the art director cried.

Señor Wences: Why did MJ delete my post?

Johnny: S'awright

The Economist blogs on a cautionary report (pdf), a compendium of surveys really, from The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). Briefly, despite a small upturn in the economy, NFIB finds that small business owners are not optimistic:

Warning signs

But the real trouble comes in examining the individual indicators. In particular, the February index showed a major shift in small business outlook, where in January slightly more owners expected conditions six months ahead to be better than they currently are, many more now say that conditions will be worse. Sales expectations, expansion plans, and perceptions of credit conditions also worsened. And while deterioration in hiring slowed, small business owners were still cutting jobs on net in February, according to the NFIB survey.

Read more »

Right after I blogged about the obvious growth and increasing importance of China, I ran across a number of articles claiming that their government was stimulating a bubble economy that would take us all down. China still holds a lot of American paper, though they seem to have lost their taste for it, and both countries have been accused of printing a lot of currency to try to ride out the recession.

Stuart Staniford pointed to a slideshow by Vitaliy Katsenelson called, China - The Mother of All Black Swans, which accuses China of obscuring the bubble with a compliant media structure.

Tom Whipple chimed in with China's Year of the Tiger:

... Beijing embarked on a massive stimulus program much larger in proportion to its GDP than the one undertaken in the U.S. In China, where the government directly controls the bulk of the banking system, and state-owned enterprises receive most of the loans, there do not exist the internal frictions and efforts for profit maximization that exist in other financial systems. The government simply orders and the banking system obeys.

The problem in China is what to stimulate. With well over half of its population mired in rural poverty and in no position to step up consumption of consumer goods, the state turned to expanding its infrastructure and housing - whether their was a need or demand for new projects or not. Millions of still empty apartments and retail establishments were built. Speculation drove real estate prices well beyond the means of the average worker. New highway and railroad projects were started. Production capacity was expanded and modernized. It was not long before foreign and few domestic critics of all this growth were starting to ask the question - Why?

It is one thing to build a trillion dollar dam that will supply massive amounts of electricity for decades, but another to spend trillions on 11,000 miles of ultra high-speed passenger lines that will whisk a relatively few passengers between cities at unprecedented speeds and costs. While improved electrified rail lines makes sense in a resource limited world, the 40,000 miles of new expressways that the Chinese will have completed in another few years does not make sense. Neither does the serious overcapacity in industrial production that is constantly being increased in the drive to keep growing. In short a lot of what is going on in China does not or will not have much real economic value outside of keeping the economy growing over the short term.

As economic troubles grow in the OECD nations, it is becoming apparent that a major rebound in China's exports outside of Asia is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Unless China can find a replacement for this market either in Asia or domestically, growth cannot grow indefinitely. This is the crux of China's dilemma.

The National People's Congress seems to have obliquely questioned the economy, but based on Premier Wen Jiabao's address, little will change.

Today Arthur Kroeber tries to quell fears in the Financial Times. While the US housing market seems overbuilt, Kroeber feels the Chinese housing market can grow for quite some time:

Is China 'the mother of all bubbles'?

To the short-sellers, a cursory inspection of various indicators makes it "obvious" that China is a giant bubble. We agree that China's economy suffers from many distortions and systemic mispricing of capital.

...

Roughly 80 per cent of China's urban residents own their homes - an astonishing number for a country that only began to privatise its housing stock in 1998. In most Western countries, by comparison, average home-ownership rates are around 60 per cent.

The biggest driver of home ownership has been implicit government subsidies. One-third of home owners purchased their homes at subsidised rates from their work units during the initial housing reform programme.

So long as these hidden subsidies continue to have a market impact - and many Chinese urbanites flipping luxury homes today started with a small, government-subsidised apartment - house prices can continue to look strangely high.

Eventually - meaning over the next five years or so - prices will have to normalise, and new housing construction will need to reflect underlying demand from new, low-income urbanites, rather than the desire of the existing urban middle class to store their wealth.

...

Nobody is arguing that the imbalances and inequities in China's housing market are not great. But we have a hunch that this is a market that can stay irrational longer than those betting against it can remain solvent.

So is China too big to fail, or just big enough to outlast the rest of us?

Now this is depressing. Johann Hari of the Nation feels that many environmental groups have let themselves be co-opted by cash :

The Wrong Kind of Green

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That's where my house was... I had to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path--one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.

Hari goes on to explain that, "Companies like Shell and British Petroleum" find donations to The Nature Conservancy or The Sierra Club or World Wildlife Fund to be, "valuable 'reputation insurance': every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation."

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous -- yet it is now taken for granted.

...

For example, in 2009 the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety"--a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is "compatible with human safety": restore us to 350 ppm. Suckling explains, "I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA's side. They threw climate science out the window."

The NGOs that Hari criticizes defend themselves as working within the system for incremental gains, but Hari feels that climate science is so compelling that it is time to work outside the system - to take up physically risky climate activism: "Direct-action protesters have physically blocked coal trains and new airport runways for the past five years--and as a result, airport runway projects that looked certain are falling by the wayside, and politicians have become very nervous about authorizing any new coal power plants."

How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we have left? Charles Komanoff, who worked as a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council for thirty years, says, "We're close to a civil war in the environmental movement. For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing.... We need to create new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals."

Some of the failing green groups can be reformed from within. The Sierra Club is a democratic organization, with the leadership appointed by its members. There are signs that members are beginning to put the organization right after the missteps of the past few years. Carl Pope is being replaced by Mike Brune, formerly of the Rainforest Action Network--a group much more aligned with the radical demands of the climate science. But other organizations--like Conservation International and TNC--seem incapable of internal reform and simply need to be shunned. They are not part of the environmental movement: they are polluter-funded leeches sucking on the flesh of environmentalism, leaving it weaker and depleted.

Already, shining alternatives are starting to rise up across America. In just a year, the brilliant 350.org has formed a huge network of enthusiastic activists who are demanding our politicians heed the real scientific advice--not the parody of it offered by the impostors. They have to displace the corrupt conservationists as the voice of American environmentalism, fast.

This will be a difficult and ugly fight, when we need all our energy to take on the forces of ecocide. But these conservation groups increasingly resemble the forces of ecocide draped in a green cloak. If we don't build a real, unwavering environmental movement soon, we had better get used to a new sound--of trees crashing down and an ocean rising, followed by the muffled, private applause of America's "conservationists."

One value, to the rich, if not everyone, of having a stable middle class has been that we have too much to lose, and are too busy, to be serious activists. As the middle class breaks down, we might find more people willing to undertake such activism.

When I got my electric bills from Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH), their Seabrook nuclear plant was nothing but delays, cost overruns and bad news. They completed the first plant after I moved away, but hearing about it on the local news has colored my view of nukes ever since. Those costs and delays, and a lack of financing, led PSNH to cancel a planned second plant (during his campaign, John McCain talked about reviving it). But Vermonters seem to have had it worse:

Wikipedia recounts the bald facts well:

In May 2009, Jay Thayer, the vice-president of operations at Vermont Yankee at the time, told the Vermont Public Service Board under oath that there was no underground piping at Vermont Yankee. In October 2009, Arnie Gundersen, a member of a special oversight panel of nuclear experts convened by the Vermont General Assembly, confirmed the presence of contaminated underground pipes. An Entergy spokesperson told Vermont Public Radio that the denial of any underground pipes was a "miscommunication."

...

In February 2010, Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 against re-licensing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant after 2012, in reaction to radioactive tritium leaks, misstatements in testimony by plant officials, a cooling tower collapse in 2007, and other problems.

A piece in the Professional Reactor Operator Society gives a little flavor:

David v Goliath, Vermont style

At the heart of Wednesday's debate was the erosion of public trust in Entergy. "Vermonters deserve better than an aging, unreliable nuclear power plant owned by an untrustworthy out-of state corporation," argued Senate Pro-Tem President Peter Shumlin, who organized the vote and has been the legislature's most vocal opponent of re-licensing. Sen. Randy Brock, a Republican, put it even more bluntly. "If the board of directors and management were infiltrated by anti-nuclear activists, I do not believe they could have done a better job in destroying their own case." But then he added a caveat - that if new information came to his attention, he might vote differently in the future. For indeed, a new legislature could vote anew on the issue up until the plant's 40 year license is up in 2012. For this reason, Republican Governor Jim Douglas stated "the vote has little practical or legal impact."

In other words, Vermont's power struggle over power is not over yet. Meanwhile, Entergy has yet to find the exact location of the leak, and legislators seem hamstrung about getting Entergy to even temporarily shut off the plant to find it. As Senator Susan Bartlett exclaimed in frustration, "No one has control over this!" Legislators couldn't even go to the Department of Natural Resources to impose a fine for leaking tritium into Vermont's waters because "we don't have jurisdiction."

At the heart of this predicament is a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that issues of health and safety fall under the jurisdiction of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not the states. In Vermont, this ruling has had the effect of confining debate, at least among legislators, to issues like utility rates, the state's economy and energy future, and even during Wednesday's debate, legislators were worried about discussing what was really on everyone's mind: the health and safety of Vermonters after they learned about the tritium leaks threatening the safety of drinking water and spilling into the Connecticut River that runs next to the plant. As long as lawmakers discussed the leaks in terms of Vermont Yankee's reliability, they were on safe ground, but the Senate majority leader at one point called a brief recess to clarify what could and could not be said - even though Vermont Constitution allows for free and open debate -- for fear that Entergy would find some violation that would give the company grounds for suing the legislature!

And Carolyn Baker interviews anti-Yankee activist Kathleen Krevetski:

PEOPLE POWER TRUMPS CORPORATE POWER: R.I.P. VERMONT YANKEE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

As a registered nurse and after many years of working in the medical profession, I am acutely aware of the health and environmental dangers that make people sick. Myself a breast cancer survivor, I have watched over the years as the incidence of breast cancer continues to increase with nobody asking the right questions. One out of 13 women got breast cancer when I was first diagnosed in 1984. Today the incidence is one woman out of eight. What is that about? Passionately wanting to protect my family and my community, I have committed myself to the crusade to stop the relicensing of what my research revealed: that thyroid cancer, a marker for radiation exposure was on the rise in women not only in Vermont but across the country.

Although I am only one of hundreds of Vermonters against Yankee I was irate when the Vermont Department of Public Health re-wrote Vermont's radiation protection regulations weakening the laws to allow Vermont Yankee an uprate in 2006 which also allowed greater amounts of radioactive contaminants to be emitted from the site. The ionizing radiation to which people are exposed as a result of Vermont Yankee's operations is a known human carcinogen. No dose is without risk, and the best science today tells us that even very low doses of radiation pose a risk over a person's lifetime.

The NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who are in charge of radiation protection are still using standards that do not take into account the differences in susceptibility to radiation-induced cancer, with women facing a risk about 50 percent higher than men while the risk for children is several times higher. What is happening to the health of women and children is not being captured in national or state health statistics because the data being publicized on men and women is condensed and aggregated over 5 years so that the public health significance is being lost. It is a national issue because the Center for Disease Control (CDC) does not have jurisdiction over the NRC. Nobody does. The NRC is charged with protecting the public, but all we see here in Vermont is the NRC protecting the industry that pays their salaries.

...

In the United States, the NRC's technical and safety regulations governing nuclear power plants are developed by the private nuclear industry using voluntary consensus standards. The owners of the nuclear power plants, the suppliers and manufacturers who sell the nuclear fuel, as well as the builders of nuclear power plants, are providing the oversight on themselves--policing their own industry just like the banking and financial industry did before their massive taxpayer bailout. Most of those standards in use are outdated but are still in use by the nuclear industry. They would never pass muster today knowing what we know.

Of course, what we know today as far as the effect of radioactive contamination is being ignored. The NRC is allowing radioactive tritium contamination across the country. Tritium caused mutagic effects on DNA especially in the unborn, but the NRC thinks it's OK for the decrepit, aging plants to wash it away in our rivers. That's OK with them, but it's not to the kids or women drinking that water downstream. The NRC tells us it will not harm us and no one has the jurisdiction over them to dispute what they say or are allowed to do.

...

The industry's rhetoric about jobs and such is not trumped by the deceit and lies they have demonstrated, and I believe those are only the tip of the iceberg. It was recently revealed that Neil Sheehan, our NRC spokesman, did not think it was a public concern nor important enough to report to the public that over a million gallons of tritium- laced water was dumped into the Hudson river by Entergy's Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant--the drinking water supply of New York City! We only find this out because of a whistleblower. If a whistleblower goes to the NRC with a complaint, the NRC does not have to report it to the public. In my opinion, the NRC is deeply corrupted.

My opinion is that nuclear power plants are a great benefit - but only to the contractors that build the plants, and to the contractors that decommission and dismantle the plants. France has had some success with their breeder reactors, and some failures such as Superphénix, but all reactors require huge amounts of water for cooling, and returning that heated water to the environment has consequences. And all reactors will leave a legacy of waste that will last far into the future.

Some of you may be familiar with the debate about Easter Island. Jared Diamond, Ronald Wright and others have written books theorizing that the Rapa Nui society collapsed because they cut down all of their stout palm trees in making scaffolding for their very famous and very large religious icons. Once the trees were gone, they couldn't make canoes, couldn't fish, and killed each other off while fighting over the few resources that remained. Others blame the introduction of rats that ate the saplings, others blame disease from outsiders, etc. but to some anthropologists it is a perfect example of resource collapse and to some economists it is an example of The Tragedy of the Commons.

The commons ecologist Garrett Hardin was talking about were common village pastures. Sensible animal herders would not allow their fields to be damaged or ruined by over-grazing. But, Hardin asserted, as no one owned the commons, everyone behaved in a selfish manner to get the most they could, and ultimately everyone lost when the commons were over-grazed. Economists in favor of privatization have expanded the principle to challenge the concept of commonly held property, or even commonly offered services, but Hardin's interpretation of history has been seriously challenged. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for theories that greatly challenge Hardin's.

I find Hardin's tragedy similar to Jevon's paradox. In the short term of both cases, the responsible actors "lose" to the irresponsible actors. If the irresponsibility continues, everyone ultimately loses in the long term. Hence I find Ostrom's work encouraging, though challenging to implement.

So how does this relate to the Café? Well, even though JMM owns it, in many ways we have a commons here. Some people spam it, some post drivel, some try to start flame wars, and lately it has seemed as though the Café may be getting over-grazed as so many internet sites do.

8 Keys to a Successful Commons:

Define clear group boundaries.

Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

Make sure the rulemaking rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members' behavior.

Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Yes! Magazine recently interviewed Ostrom:

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we're talking about is how people work together. We've used an immense array of different methods to look at this question--case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy's work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

Fran: Many people associate "the commons" with Garrett Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." He says that if, for example, you have a pasture that everyone in a village has access to, then each person will put as many cows on that land as he can to maximize his own benefit, and pretty soon the pasture will be overgrazed and become worthless. What's the difference between your perspective and Hardin's?

Elinor: Well, I don't see the human as hopeless. There's a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family's long-term benefit is that you don't destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn't have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won't organize, and there will be failures.

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right? We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we're helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say "No, that's not right. I've not disproved him. I've shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong." But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It's just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we've done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property--such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don't allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, "Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?" Then they can come to an agreement.

Fran: But what about the "free-rider" problem--where some people abide by the rules and some people don't? Won't the whole thing fall apart?

Elinor: Well if the people don't communicate and get some shared norms and rules, that's right, you'll have that problem. But if they get together and say, "Hey folks, this is a project that we're all going to have to contribute to. Now, let's figure it out," they can make it work. For example, if it's a community garden, they might say, "Do we agree every Saturday morning we're all going to go down to the community garden, and we're going to take roll and we're going to put the roll up on a bulletin board?" A lot of communities have figured out subtle ways of making everyone contribute, because if they don't, those people are noticeable.

Fran: So public shaming and public honoring are one key to managing the commons?

Elinor: Shaming and honoring are very important. We don't have as much of an understanding of that. There are scholars who understand that, but that's not been part of our accepted way of thinking about collective action.

...

Fran: You've done your research on small- and medium-sized natural resource jurisdictions. How about the global commons? We have the problems of climate change and oceans that are dying. Are there lessons from your work that are relevant to these massive problems we're now facing?

Elinor: I really despair over the oceans. There is a very interesting article in Science on the "roving bandit." It is so tempting to go along the coast and scoop up all the fish you can and then move on. With very big boats, you can do that. I think we could move toward solving that problem, but right now there are not many instrumentalities for doing that.

Regarding global climate change, I'm more hopeful. There are local public benefits that people can receive at the same time they're generating benefits for the global environment. Take health and transportation as an example. If more people would walk or bicycle to work and use their car only when they have to go some distance, then their health would be better, their personal pocketbooks would be better, and the atmosphere would be better. Of course, if it's just a few people, it won't matter, but if more and more people feel "This is the kind of life I should be living," that can substantially help the global problem. Similarly, if we invest in re-doing the insulation of a lot of buildings, we can save money as well as help the global environment. Yes, we want some global action but boy, if we just sit around and wait for that? Come on!

Fran: Do you have a message for the general public?

Elinor: We need to get people away from the notion that you have to have a fancy car and a huge house. Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn't know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we're helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

I've been reading Laura Lippman's Baltimore-based mysteries while riding the Light Rail. I'm on her third book, Butchers Hill:

... She caught Highway 175 at the last possible moment and headed west, into the the heart of Maryland's last fling with Utopia.

The planned community of Columbia, brought forth during the giddy optimism of the sixties, was to have revolutionized the suburbs, with its "villages" and mandated proportions of green space.

But that wasn't really Maryland's last fling with Utopia. Smart Growth has been the watchword in MD development lately, and to the extent that it favors New Urbanist goals, I suppose I'm a big fan.

Smart Growth Online

In general, smart growth invests time, attention, and resources in restoring community and vitality to center cities and older suburbs. New smart growth is more town-centered, is transit and pedestrian oriented, and has a greater mix of housing, commercial and retail uses. It also preserves open space and many other environmental amenities.

But Smart Growth is about to run smack into environmental concern, and I'm a fan of that, too. Our site planning consultants have informed us that Maryland's Stormwater Management Act of 2007 is finally starting to be enforced (these things take time).

Stormwater Management protects land from erosion by uncontrolled runoff of storm water, and protects water systems from being polluted by whatever decomposing organic matter, oil, pesticides, etc, that may be carried away with that runoff. If you pave a quarter of your site, the water tends to rush across the impervious pavement instead of being absorbed into natural terrain, so you have to control the water through site engineering. The usual rural or suburban solution has been to send excess runoff into a man-made pond - a retention pond. In cities, where there is little space for ponds, extensive storm sewer systems take the runoff.

While I have been in practice, the general idea has been to not increase the present runoff onto neighboring sites, or into streets. But sites have been "grandfathered" to allow the runoff present around 1970, which may be far removed from the natural conditions. The new Act is more oriented to treating every site as a pristine piece of land, which greatly restricts the runoff in certain sites.

Meeting the requirements of the new Act, we are told, will raise site costs maybe 20% in suburban and rural sites. It will require, we are told, a lot of more involved site features, like Bioretention Areas, and Open Channels. In this economy, talk of increased upfront engineering and construction costs is worrisome.

But what is more worrisome is the prospect of satisfying these requirements on urban sites, which we are being told is going to cost substantially more than in the suburbs. How does the state encourage urban growth with one hand while jacking up the cost of entry with the other?

So it will be interesting to see what happens next. My guess is that intimate urban development, especially by small businesses, will stagnate in the face of these upfront costs, and the lack of credit. Perhaps some sort of compromise can be reached between the conflicting goals of state agencies. My current clients tend to be institutions, but even they will be affected because most of their master plans were predicated on old-fashioned stormwater strategies.

Whenever gasoline prices are too high we hear a Greek chorus blaming speculation. So where have the speculators been lately? Oil prices have been ticking up a little, down a little for months, roughly between $70 and $80/bbl. Positive economic news, like the stimulus in China, sends them a bit higher, but depressing reality of the European financial crisis reigns them back in. Potential war in Iran, the refinery strike in France, the all-flighty dollar, and contradictory signs about the US economy all leave enough doubts about supply and demand that commodity investors are too nervous to jump on another oil bandwagon. How can speculators stay in business?

Business Week suggests that lower gasoline prices are in the cards, which would be good news for auto commuters, but bad for the prospect of staying or becoming a worker. Low gasoline price means low demand, and low demand usually means that the economy continues to be bad.

Gasoline May Tumble to $1.95 This Week: Technical Analysis

Gasoline for April delivery may fall to $1.95 a gallon [wholesale, I assume, but wouldn't it be nice if it were retail] this week after prices established a bearish reversal pattern on candlestick charts yesterday, according to technical analysis by ACT Currency Partner AG.

The April contract formed a so-called hanging man formation, signaling a rally from early February has lost momentum and prices will head lower, according to Bill Adams, an energy trader at ACT, a currency and commodity specialist in Zurich.

Searching for the term, Hanging Man, I found this video at Sclipo and this article at Money Talks. It isn't the best drawing because there's also a short tick, or shadow, above the block. But the long ticks below indicating lower prices are the important part:

Hanging man or hangman is a candlestick market reversal pattern which indicates a market reversal. Hangman candlestick occurs at the end of an uptrend and is named because it resembles a man hanging on a rope.

Hanging man candlestick is a small candlestick either white (colorless) or dark (colored). It has no, or very small, upper shadow (indicating highest price of the day) and long lower shadow (indicating lowest price of the day) which often more than double the length of candlestick body. Hangman candlestick pattern is created when there is high selling pressure at opening hours of the day, but bulls have managed to bring back the price near the opening price at the end of the trading day.

Hanging man candlestick formations favor day traders more as they are more easily identified in intraday trading charts. Hangman is considered as a modestly reliable candlestick formation; and the reliability increase with the increase of the length of the lower shadow, with the decrease in length of candlestick body and with the formation of a colored candlestick. Most traders initiate trade after the confirmation of trend reversal, which can be a gap or decrease in price in succeeding day.

So it seems that the day traders, the professional speculators, are still out there, still making money even without $100/bbl oil.

A few items popped out from Tom Whipple's Peak Oil Review and Energy Briefs:

The API reported that total US oil consumption is now at the lowest level, 18.4 million b/d, in 12 years despite the fact that gasoline rose steadily in January. US gasoline consumption is now about 8.7 million b/d as opposed to a high of 9.6 million reached in July 2007. Consumption of low sulfur diesel fuel, used in heavy trucks is down by 11.5 percent, a bad sign for the US economy. [Tends to support Business Week's prediction.]

Saudi Arabia is gradually reducing crude oil exports to the US as it is pushing deeper into China and other fast-growing Asian markets. [Look! Paying customers!]

Because of overbuilding in the late '90s sparked by deregulation of energy markets, there are so many US gas-fired power plants that on average, they are used only about 25 percent of the time. A few gas companies have begun to offer long-term contracts to utilities at a price that comes close to making it competitive for base-load generation. [Yet they were building another in CT.]

Nearly all the major oil companies are looking across Europe for shale gas, an unconventional energy source that has transformed the US energy market. Unlike in the US, Europe does not have as many as land rigs available to search for shale gas--an estimated 20 land rigs in Europe vs. well over 1,500 in the U.S. [Just lucky I guess.]

State regulators are doing a good job overseeing a key natural gas production technique called hydrofracking and there's no evidence the process causes water contamination, a senior official with the US Environmental Protection Agency said Monday. [See, Big Brother is looking out for you. News outlets like the WSJ have reported this, but others note that Waxman's House Energy and Commerce committee is investigating the practice.]

Offshore Mexico, a new oil field was identified in the southern Gulf that could help rescue Mexico's lagging industry. The field is located off the coast of the Mexican state of Campeche, and contains an estimated 900 million barrels. The discovery is one of the largest in the past decade. [Oil yields are often highly exaggerated at the beginning, but Mexico could use some good news. By comparison, Prudhoe Bay was ~25 billion barrels and Tupi was ~8 billion barrels.]

In, How slums can save the planet, new urbanists extol the efficiencies of city life:

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book's optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: "Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner's eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density--1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai--and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Magic strikes me as a odd choice of word for squatting in slums, though I'm sure it can be colorful. That last line is funny because I just happened to read Orlando's blog entry, Death by Angkot, on surviving a shared taxi ride in Jakarta.

But back to the slums:

In his 1985 article, [architect Peter] Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: "The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities." "Green Manhattan" was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. "By the most significant measures," he wrote, "New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world...The key to New York's relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan's population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful." He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world's most energy-efficient apartment buildings.

And somewhat further along:

And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat--and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.

So be just and fear not, because the green city will be our salvation. But not so fast, because in Are Cities Becoming As Obsolete As Farms?, The Contrary Farmer thinks giving up your patch of land is a big mistake:

The movement of population has been throughout history from rural areas to cities and inevitably that migration proves fatal. The "growth" of the dispersed but strong Etruscan economy to the final rot of ancient Rome is a great example. But that kind of migration goes on always, and still today, all over the world. The Chinese are the latest to flock naively from farm to city in search of a better life.

As far as this obstinate person can figure, people leave the countryside because they are encouraged to do it. Social prejudice says that only "yokels" stay out in the "backwaters" of society. The good jobs are all in cities. But why can't good jobs be out in the country, too, especially in this computer age?

People streaming from the rural areas to cities do so by government and business fiat, in my obstinate opinion. In every civilization's early days, even poor people own land. The rich people want it and can get it every time by offering enough money. The poor people take it: the fatal bribe. An economy that loves building bank towers into the clouds is happy about that. It needs a large population of consumers, people who don't produce anything of their own but must buy all their food, clothing or shelter.

This all works very well for awhile. Some people get continually richer; a far greater number get continually poorer.

In the USA most people have split the difference by living in suburbs, and probably only a few of us would really have a choice whether to pack into the city or go back to the country.