The Copenhagen Climate Talks Commence

Here's the thing about the Copenhagen summit and Kyoto. The deadline for action isn't because the science says that we must act immediately, but because the Kyoto Accord expires in 2012, so the real timeframe is political, not science related. The political will is "there" to get something done.

The Times of India had an interesting comment to that effect:

"Time is up," de Boer said. "Over the next two weeks nations have to deliver".

The first week of the conference will focus on the text of a draft treaty. Major decisions may await arrival of the environment ministers next week and the heads of state in the final days of the meet, which ends on December 18.

As the first commitment period for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, regulated by the Kyoto Protocol, would expire in 2012, the international community would endeavour to map out a plan for binding emissions cuts for the second commitment period from 2012 to 2020 at Copenhagen.

Delegates must craft a blueprint for tackling manmade "greenhouse" gases and put together a funding mechanism for helping poor nations fight climate change.

Now, what exactly did Kyoto accomplish? Emissions grew at an astounding clip. Here's what actually happened:

Country Change in greenhouse gas
Emissions (1992-2007)
India +103%
China +150%
United States +20%
Russian Federation -20%
Japan +11%
Worldwide Total +38%

That includes the period covered by Kyoto. Europe fell well short of the targets, and even then, their economic growth (lack thereof) contributed to the declines. Strongly growing economies, like China and India, saw tremendous growth in emissions. Far from controlling or limiting emissions, the emissions surged.

That precedent bodes poorly on any kind of deal in Copenhagen, which is primarily political in nature. The science is actually besides the point here; just as surely as it was in the Kyoto talks. This is about the politics of wealth and the distribution (redistribution) of wealth.

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NJ Considers Gay Marriage Legislation

With just a few weeks in Gov. Jon Corzine's term remaining, proponents for a gay marriage bill have little time to act before his successor, Chris Christie takes office. Christie is on the record as opposing the measure and vowed to veto the bill if he crosses his desk. Corzine would sign it into law.

However, it is all but certain that the legislation would make it to the governor's desk. Democrats and Republicans oppose the legislation, including Democrat Paul Sarlo, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill has to make it out of committee before the full Senate can vote on the measure.

Though similar legislation died in New York’s senate last week, proponents of gay marriage here think they still have a fighting chance and are focusing their lobbying efforts on senators they believe to be undecided about the issue.

Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) said lobbyists have been burning up the phone lines.

"Both sides are working furiously. Legislative offices are extremely busy with phone calls," he said. "Lobbying and lobbying and lobbying."

Advocates for same sex marriage see this as a last stand. In just over a month, Gov.-elect Chris Christie will take office. He has made it clear he will veto any gay marriage legislation that comes to his desk. However, Gov. Jon Corzine says he is prepared to sign it.

Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen), chair of the judiciary committee, said he would be voting against the legislation (S1967/2978), but he expects it to pass by a narrow margin.

"I’ve fulfilled my commitment and now my next challenge is to run a fair and open hearing. I am not lobbying anybody for their vote. I advise the members to vote their conscience," he said.

Codey said the issue won’t be decided through backroom deals.

"This isn’t about making deals," he said. "This is about your conscience."

I give the gay marriage proposal a 50/50 chance of being approved in the Senate. It will probably get voted out of committee, where people might vote to allow everyone to register their votes, rather than kill it in committee.

The full text of the bill is here. The key provision is as follows:

3. (New section) “Marriage” means the legally recognized union of two consenting persons in a committed relationship. Whenever the term “marriage” occurs or the term “man,” “woman,” “husband” or “wife” occurs in the context of marriage or any reference is made thereto in any law, statute, rule, regulation or order, the same shall be deemed to mean or refer to the union of two persons pursuant to this amendatory and supplementary act.

4. (New section) It is the intent of the Legislature that this amendatory and supplementary act be interpreted consistently with the guarantees of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and of Article I, paragraph 4 of the New Jersey Constitution.

Marriage would no longer be defined strictly as between a man and woman, but rather between two consenting adults. It would supersede the civil union legislation passed several years ago, and other legislative changes would incorporate the new definition into relevant statutes.

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The Rebuilding of Ground Zero, Part 89

A significant portion of the steel being used at Ground Zero, including the transit hub, 1WTC (Freedom Tower) and 4WTC, comes from a facility in South Plainfield, New Jersey:

NJ steel mill is a large contributor to World Trade Center rebuilding

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On My Nightstand: Conquering the Sky

Conquering the Sky, The Secret Flights of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, by Larry Tise, is an interesting read about the early history of powered flight and the journalistic standards of the day.

Much of the insight isn't necessarily about the flights by the Wright Brothers during May 1908, when they proved that their flight control systems worked and that they could carry passengers, but how the media circus developed based on the hearsay evidence of those who didn't even witness the reports. Moreover, it shows the lengths to which newspapers went to create news and relied upon wildly inaccurate reports without even so much as a whisper of veracity.

What we do know is that the Wright Brothers were secretive about their efforts at Kitty Hawk in 1908, and that they were intent not on setting records there, but to confirm that their flight systems worked as intended. It was only incidental that one of their flights - a two-person flight - was observed by reporters, confirming that the Wright Brothers had mastered the problem of flight.

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When Is a Timetable Not a Timetable?

The news that the Obama Administration is taking to the airwaves to clarify and extend an Afghan strategy that minimizes and deemphasizes an actual deadline for removing troops isn't going to leave many of his supporters happy.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials, they said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

The television appearances by the senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council appeared to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war.

“We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”

Echoing General Jones, Mr. Gates played down the significance of the July 2011 target date and indicated that the United States might withdraw only a small number of troops at that time.

“There isn’t a deadline,” Mr. Gates said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “What we have is a specific date on which we will begin transferring responsibility for security district by district, province by province in Afghanistan, to the Afghans.”

It's actually the right thing for President Obama to have done (clarifying that the deadline wasn't a hard and fast date but a guideline. He should never have mentioned a specific date, but now that a date was released, the Administration is working overtime to focus on the weasel words he used in his speech to the cadets at West Point.

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What Happens When the Money Runs Out

A government health care program to provide breast cancer screening for women in California has closed to new patients because the funding has run dry.

The "unprecedented fiscal challenges" claimed another victim this week as health officials decided to discontinue a cigarette tax-funded program that pays for breast cancer screenings for low-income women.

Mandatory changes were required this week by California Department of Public Health to the division, Every Woman Counts. The specialized division provides a cancer detection program for California's medically underserved women by giving them access to screening and diagnostic services for breast and cervical cancer.

The two biggest changes to the program according to a release are:

* They will stop paying for breast cancer screening for women under 50.

* They will stop enrolling all new patients for breast cancer screening until July 1.

Cigarette tax funding was supposed to provide a funding mechanism for health care programs around the nation, but higher taxes and fees on cigarettes combined with fewer smokers and raiding the tobacco settlement funds have meant that revenues have fallen or have already been committed to use elsewhere and aren't available to fund these kinds of programs. That means states have to look elsewhere, or they have to shutter useful health care programs such as this.

This should also serve as a warning for the national health care debate, where Democrats are busy trying to claim that a 10-year budget under the health care changes they propose will somehow manage to be deficit neutral even as they are taking 10 years of tax revenues to pay for seven years of spending on the new system.

That is unsustainable in any form since once you're 10 years into the tax revenues, those revenues will not be able to keep up with the costs for the program and will balloon the deficit or force a restriction on the spending - reducing access to health care in order to reduce costs.

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The Dollars and Sense of Emission Reductions

There are lots of promises and proposals being made to reduce emissions by x percent in order to combat global warming. Let's set aside the science on this and talk dollars and sense.

World leaders and experts are meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss proposals to reduce carbon emissions. In particular, President Obama is looking to reduce emissions by 17% by 2020 and 83% by 2050.

At the international climate meetings in Copenhagen next month, Mr. Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said.

The figures reflect targets specified by legislation that passed the House in June but is stalled in the Senate. Congress has never enacted legislation that includes firm emissions limits or ratified an international global warming agreement with binding targets.

Mr. Obama will travel to the United Nations talks to deliver the promise in hopes of spurring significant progress there. He will appear Dec. 9, near the beginning of the 12-day session, on his way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10, officials said.

By making the pledge in an international forum, Mr. Obama is laying a bet that Congress will complete action on a climate bill next year and will be prepared to ratify an international agreement based on the commitment.

This graph shows visually what the President proposes doing, all while China and India continue growing. Moreover, the total increase in emissions (which that graph doesn't show), continues rising particularly if China and/or India do not sign on to any agreement.

The massive economic slowdown and recession have reduced carbon emissions significantly, but with the eventual end of the recession, economic growth will resume, and so will the demand for energy and production of goods and services that can and do produce carbon dioxide and other emissions.

This graph shows carbon emissions since the 1700s, and an 80% reduction in current US emissions would require a sea-change in how the nation produces power and transports goods, or else we'd be talking about a radical reduction in the quality of life. Since so much of what we take for granted in our current standard of living owes itself to power generation (which is primarily from fossil fuels) to power our economy, it would require a massive switch to nuclear power and alternative energy sources to reduce carbon emissions by the levels suggested by the President.

Moreover, it would require a massive change in how people view nuclear power and allow for the construction of dozens of new nuclear power plants in the country. Such efforts are not likely given the NIMBY attitudes across the country and the high start-up costs for a nuclear power plant as compared to coal or gas fired plants.

So, until we dedicate ourselves to building nuclear power plants, we should not expect any action towards the reduction of emissions either domestically or worldwide.

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AP: Terrorists Now Headlined As Gangsters

The AP reports that Pakistani police engaged a bunch of terrorists and killed one and captured five others, all while seizing a bunch of suicide vests, grenades, guns, and ammunition. So, how does the AP headline this report?

Pakistani police arrest gang accused in bombing.

Police said the commandos encountered fierce resistance when they stormed the compound in the village of Kaka Khel near Peshawar, the largest city in the area and the main gateway to the Afghan border region where many al-Qaida and Taliban insurgents are based.

Militants have carried out a wave of deadly attacks in and around Peshawar in apparent retaliation for an army offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan.

Three suicide jackets as well as a number of bombs, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons were seized from the compound, regional police Chief Liaquat Ali Khan said.

He said one suspect was killed and five others arrested following a gunbattle that lasted more than two hours. A search operation for more militants continued in the area, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Peshawar.

The detained are suspected of involvement in recent bombings and other attacks not only in Peshawar but in Islamabad and its sister city of Rawalpindi, Khan said, declining to be more specific.

In the latest major attack, a team of gunmen and suicide bombers struck a mosque Friday in Rawalpindi, killing 37 people, including several senior army officers.

These aren't mere gangsters, but terrorists who are seeking to undermine the Pakistani government and pushing an Islamist agenda. They want autonomy in the frontier provinces and are aligned with the Taliban in the NWFP and Waziristan to establish and maintain safe havens there for the Taliban and their al Qaeda affiliates. The terrorists continue their war against the Pakistani government and are using an agreement between certain Taliban groups and the government to spread their ideology and operate against the government forces in the region.

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The Depressingly High Costs Of Cancer Medications

The New York Times reports that a newly approved cancer medication that may be able to marginally improve the quality of life for those afflicted with a certain form of cancer costs $30,000 a month.

The price of the new drug, called Folotyn, is at least triple that of other drugs that critics have said are too expensive for the benefits they offer to patients. The colon cancer drug Erbitux, for instance, costs $10,000 a month and the drug Avastin about $8,800 when used to treat lung cancer. The price of Folotyn “seems way higher than I heard of before,” Robert L. Erwin, president of the Marti Nelson Cancer Foundation, a patient advocacy group. “I can’t imagine there not being a backlash against the pricing.”

Drug makers in general have been raising prices sharply in advance of the possible passage of health care overhaul legislation, according to various studies. But the price of cancer drugs has been an issue for several years.

Critics, including many oncologists, say that patients and the health system cannot afford to pay huge prices for drugs that, on average, provide only a few extra months of life at best.

And Folotyn has not even been shown to prolong lives — only to shrink tumors. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in late September as a treatment for peripheral T-cell lymphoma, a rare and usually aggressive blood cancer that strikes an estimated 5,600 Americans each year. It is available for sale, but its manufacturer, Allos Therapeutics, does not plan to start actively promoting it until January.

A company that seeks to produce a medicine has a limited time in which to recoup the costs for those drugs under existing patent law. If they can't recoup the costs, they can't turn around and engage in further research.

Doctors and patients have to decide whether a drug is cost-effective in their individual cases. That's regardless of the actual cost - whether it's a few hundred bucks or tens of thousands for the course of treatment. But, that's a decision to be made by the patient and doctor and whether they want to incur the costs when a drug is uncertain to make a long term difference.

There's no real way around the high cost of these kinds of drugs, unless the government is going to step in and demand the costs be dropped - and subsidize the costs, which will ultimately result in higher costs spread among many other people.

As it is, the drug manufacturer is providing co-payment assistance and giving the drug free to uninsured patients who cannot pay for it.

If the government steps in to purposefully reduce drug costs by limiting profits and/or the prices charged to patients, the result will likely be the slowdown in research and development of new and improved medications and drugs to fight rare diseases that have a limited target population. Drug companies aren't going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars if they can't recoup that investment.

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Photo of the Day

 

Threading the Needle on the Needles highway in South Dakota, taken using my Canon Rebel XTi with the Tamron 28-300mm XR Di VC (image stabilizer).

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White House Social Secretary Regularly Allowed Party Crashers

This is the kind of action that deserves an investigation. Moreover, Desiree Rogers should be fired because she violated protocol and security in the process of allowing party crashers to attend events without invitations.

There's a reason that there are invitations and Secret Service checks on those who attend events with a President. Rogers' admissions show a reckless disregard for the President's security.

Desiree Rogers claimed in an interview with the trade magazine BizBash at the Creative Coalition's annual meeting in June that she had added extra tables and benches at every event to accommodate uninvited guests.

"Lots of people just come anyways," she said. "They won't take no for an answer. Finally, I just said, 'All right, come on in. It's no use kicking you out.' "

But an administration official yesterday insisted that Rogers "was clearly making a tongue-in-cheek comment about White House staff, already cleared to be on the complex," not about the general public.

What else is the White House going to say? They don't want to admit that Rogers screwed up, so they'd rather make a joke of it?

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Photo of the Day

Mount Rushmore National Monument, taken using my Canon Rebel XTi with the Tamron 28-300mm XR Di VC (image stabilizer).

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