Rhinocrisy

Long time since we made any mention of the black gold round these parts. When last we left it, profits were high, oil price was surging, and times were good for all and sundry except those people who happened to, for example, drive an automobile.

In recent days the price of oil has jumped up quite high - I regret not having marked the passage of that meaningless milestone when it crossed $100 per barrel. But it is worth noting that the price of oil is now ten times what it was in the late nineties, before it began to climb.

Some fraction of this rise in price may be due to the drop in the value of the dollar. Although from the American perspective this makes no difference in terms of economics, it is worthwhile to convince ourselves that there is a scarcity-driven increase in oil price, and not just a monetary one. To the right is the trend in oil price (West Texas Intermediate) in both Euros and Dollars. Assuming Europe as our economic baseline, there has at least been an almost seven-fold increase in oil price since 1999.

Gas prices are consequently running pretty high (by American standards), and as our nation has a singular reliance on the automobile for more or less every kind of activity, it is to be expected that this should have some sort of economic impact. But how much?

The usual way of measuring these things is energy intensity, a quantity which purports to capture the overall efficiency of the economy. The calculation is simple: total GDP divided by total energy consumption. If this goes up, your economy is becoming more energy efficient, and its total reliance on energy has decreased. The usual argument is that our economy is now very tech-heavy and not extremely energy-dependent, whereas before it was built on dinosaur-like technologies that burned a lot of oil. The Oil Drum has a good treatment of this question with lots of comments from parties more knowledgeable than myself.

Irregardless^*, there’s a definite consensus that high oil price is problematic, and something must be done about it. As a matter of public policy the question is framed in terms of “high gas prices”, but it has at least made some inroads into the ongoing presidential pie-slinging competition.

Probably the stupidest proposal to come out is John McCain’s “gas tax holiday” plan, which is to suspend the gas tax during the summer months. Dean Baker (amongst many others) lampooned this idea as bunk, pointing out that if you remove the gas tax, the price probably wouldn’t drop all that much - corporations would simply eat the difference, and maybe pass a few cents in savings on to the consumer.^† Hillary Clinton, ever favoring style over substance, jumped on board this brainless scheme, and also piled on with a “windfall profits tax”, which we previously discussed here. This formula is sure to result in exactly the scenario described above: if the “windfall profits tax” is identical in amount to the gas tax, as Clinton suggests it should be in order to make up for the loss in revenue, then oil companies will have zero incentive to pass savings on to consumers, and the change in gas price will be $0.0000.

Once again Obama proves himself to be the sharp tack in the bunch:

“That’s typical of how Washington works. There’s a problem: everybody’s upset about gas prices. Let’s find some short term, quick fix. That we can say we did something, even though we’re not really doing anything. Because if you actually took away the gas tax, what are the oil companies going to do? They’re gonna raise your gas by 5 cents. You’ll never see the savings. And then we pretend to do something.”

There are, of course, only two actual solutions to easing the price problem: increase supply, or decrease demand. The former is perhaps impossible; certainly in the short-term there’s nothing that can be done. The latter is the only reasonable course. Conservation can have dramatic effects on consumption. Between 1979 and 1983, US consumption dropped from 20 Mb/d to 15 Mb/d, while automobile fuel economy doubled in the same period. It’s quite clear that the technology exists to produce a similar contraction (and, let’s not forget, we have other motives to do so), and only a small nudge and tweak is needed to encourage it to happen.

^* Yes, irregardless is a word. My spell-check told me so.

^† McCain seems to be floating a whole barge of bad ideas; the more I’m exposed to his actual policy perspectives the less I respect him.

Apparently leftist pundit Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “One Market Under God”, is going to have a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal (read his debut here). I found this completely astonishing, but there is apparently astonishing precedent. A commenter on Ezra Klein’s blog informs us of a piece of ancient history: in the past the Journal featured Alexander Cockburn (of CounterPunch fame) as a regular columnist. Who knew?

Ezra takes the perspective that Frank’s presence will change nothing, since only a lefty economist would get through to Journal readers (whereas Frank is more of a sociologist). Maybe so; still, I find it surprisingly balanced for a Murdoch-owned publication.

Incidentally, I found this comment on the TNR blog thread about Frank intriguing:

Actually, having read the Frank piece, I find it suffers from the same tonedeafness people on the left generally show about “elitism.” Frank thinks “elite” means “rich”–which of course it does in part–and concludes from that that it’s ridiculous to call the relatively modestly endowed Obama an elite. But to ordinary working Americans “elite” also means “exemption from doing ‘real’ work.” In this regard they’re heirs to the Populists, whose basic distinction was not between rich and poor, but between “producers” and “nonproducing” parasites, who could be anyone from a hobo to J. P. Morgan–in the words of the Omaha Platform, a “tramp” or a “millionaire.” By this criterion, any member of the chattering classes–you guys, professors like myself–are part of the elite. Moreover, one doesn’t have to spend much time among one’s fellow elites to conclude that they’re also elitists–that they really do consider themselves superior to those who lack whatever gives them elite status: money if they’re rich, education if they’re chattering. TBS, the brouhaha over “Bittergate” was a case of right-wing pots calling the left-wing kettles black. But the fact remains that both the pots and the kettles are, in fact, black. All the self-righteous denials they can muster doesn’t change the fact that the left–and certainly Obama–has a problem with working-class white [and brown, BTW] America, and they need to do something about it.

This prompted me to consider the following notion: it would be fairly straightforward to find a handful of volunteers in America’s top ten liberal cities. These folks would each stake out a couple of Starbucks Coffee shops, and do a poll of their customers as they entered and exited the store. The questionnaire would (amongst other things) determine three important items:

• The customer’s political affiliation

• The customer’s educational attainment
• The customer’s favorite kind of coffee.

With this data, we might settle the debate about the latte-drinking liberal elite once and for all!

We humans have a nearly unparalleled lust for dramatic tension. Without it we are listless and deflated; with it, colors are more vivid, and the flavor of anticipation makes all tastes and smells more appealing. So we find it in all corners, and every squabble is magnified into a magnificent conflict - epic struggles against such redoubtable villains as the municipal recycling department, your roommate’s girlfriend, or that perennial favorite, the IRS.

Sometimes, though, this tension may be stretched thin, almost to breaking, and our pleasure becomes so acute it verges on agony. Thus the whole nation suffered for nearly three years before discovering the truth of Luke Skywalker’s parentage, and dies minor deaths every summer between television seasons. But the apotheosis of this sort of dramatic hyperextension I will illustrate by example:

Hiding my theft behind a convenient cloud of exhaled smoke, I recently availed myself of my roommate’s copy of “The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin”. The first tale, written in 1827, is “The Moor of Peter the Great”, which tells the story of the Tsar’s adopted godson, Ibrahim. He, though well-bred, genteel and charming, nevertheless must endure as an oddity in the courtly society of Europe due to his misplaced ancestry. Peter, blind to anything but his godson’s talents and fine qualities, arranges a match between Ibrahim and the (rather unwilling) young daughter of a Russian nobleman. By chapter seven, matters are coming to a head, when we are suddenly informed by parenthetical:

(Pushkin never completed this story.)

That makes 181 years and counting.

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment - I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General - having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now - are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important - one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

What a brave, brave man. His noble spirit embiggens us all.

More nobility from the media:

The mainstream media by and large seem to agree with Bush that the ABC News Report wasn’t so startling, and they have given Bush’s remarks almost no coverage. There was no mention of Bush’s admission in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. There was nothing on the major wire services. And nothing on CNN, CBS or NBC.

Finally, this video from “Condimustgo.com” is worthwhile. Although I might add ‘to jail’ to the end of that URL.

Some of you may already be familiar with Earth Hour, an effort pioneered by the Australians to increase awareness about global warming by symbolically turning off all lights in participating major cities around the world for one hour. It occurs on April 1 (already a great day, now even better) of each year, going since 2007.

When I heard about this my first thought was - “Holy shit! Dark sky!” After all, who gives a toss about stopping catastrophic climate change when there’s the possibility of seeing a really spectacular starry sky? As I’ve hinted here before, I’m more or less committed to sidereal worship, and it’s long been a fantasy of mine to become Lord Commander of Earth so that I can impose just such a venture (viz., forced blackouts) on major cities. I mean, check out the pathetic Bortle Scale map of North America. A guy like me hasn’t a chance in this country.

Or so I thought! But, cloaked in the guise of “environmentalism”, I can advance my umbratory agenda. It seems that Chicago is already on board, and certain other cities seem like ripe targets to follow. If things continue in this vein, I may even abandon my plans to sabotage certain transformers on Walpurgis Night.

A few weeks back I happened across a news story trumpeting a link between cell phones and brain tumors, containing the ominous warning that cell phones are “worse than cigarettes”. By coincidence my roommate had happened to ask me if I knew anything about the subject, and so I spent a portion of the previous day scouring PubMed to answer this very question, and had, of course, also compared against cigarettes as the outstanding example of a public-health disaster caused by personal foibles.

So my immediate reaction to the story (”Balls.”) was based on more than just a gut feeling.

But let’s start off by poisoning the well a little bit: the source for this story was an Australian neurosurgeon named Vini Khurana. Vini’s methodology in answering this question was exactly the same as mine: reading some papers on PubMed. We should be clear that reviews are an important part of scientific literature, and they are a great way to collect information and present a perspective on the field. They’re usually the product of specific solicitations by journal editors to respected members of a field - e.g., asking James Hansen to write a review on the global temperature record, or even asking someone like Carl Woese to write a review on the future directions for the entire field of biology. The idea is that someone with a demonstrated expertise in the field is surely best-positioned to report on its history and state-of-the-art.

But no one solicited Vini’s article. In fact, Vini has no history of publication in the field. In fact, Vini didn’t even publish this paper anywhere. It was published on the web and was completely unreviewed.^*

As I’ve suggested before, I think the manner of propagation of many news stories is purely viral: something happens to make it onto some wire service, and if it is interesting or sensational, it spreads. As its exposure increases, so do opportunities for further dissemination - another outlet picks it up, and the cycle continues. This process doesn’t seem to include anything like quality control or actual journalism (mayhap the journalists here can speak to why this might be the case), with the result that bad, bad science gets broadcast loudly around the globe.

At any rate, the question at hand remains to be answered: do cell phones cause brain tumors? After Vini’s own pathetic review, he recommends an actual review in the Journal of Radiation Biology, whose abstract tells us:

Biophysical considerations indicate that there is little theoretical basis for anticipating that RF energy would have significant biological effects at the power levels used by modern mobile phones and their base station antennas. The epidemiological evidence for a causal association between cancer and RF energy is weak and limited. Animal studies have provided no consistent evidence that exposure to RF energy at non-thermal intensities causes or promotes cancer. Extensive in vitro studies have found no consistent evidence of genotoxic potential, but in vitro studies assessing the epigenetic potential of RF energy are limited. Overall, a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing.

That first sentence, by the way, is an important one: there’s little justification for the notion of non-ionizing radiation being a significant cause of DNA damage.

Meanwhile, a simple comparison of some epidemiological studies on the question is revealing. This study finds odds ratios of 1.22 and 0.70 for gliomas and menigiomas respectively. This one finds an odds ratio of 0.6 for gliomas, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.4-0.9. I.e., the study finds that regular cell phone use is slightly protective against gliomas! And finally, this study examines both long- and short-term users of cell phones and finds no increased odds of acquiring tumors through phone use in either group.

By now you are probably shivering in your boots^†, so let’s take you back down a little, with a sentence from this case-control study:

The odds ratio (OR) for lung cancer in current United States smokers relative to nonsmokers was 40.4.

The short version: As you were, lieutenant.

^* Yes, reviews are normally reviewed. The reviewers of reviews are called re-reviewers, and they are required to do their reviewing work between two facing mirrors to deepen their powers of meta-analysis.

^† You are wearing your boots, right?

Having heard the phrase for the six hundred and fifteenth time today, I now proclaim the official slogan of the 2008 campaign season to be:
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

A bit late, as usual, I finally got around to watching some of the “Winter Soldier” hearings, testimony by anti-war Iraq veterans about their war-time and post-war experiences. For the unlettered, the hearings were conducted by Iraq Veterans Against the War and mimic the eponymous hearings of yesteryear held by Vietnam veterans. As expected, the testimony is sometimes nauseating and sometimes heartbreaking, and quite often insightful. The sort of thing you should show to your mom. Check it out, if you have ten minutes to spare.