This Year's Model

I constantly fiddle with this blog's look (I've probably gone through a few dozen templates, at least). But I think I've settled on a look that I'll be keeping for a while. Blogger tends to be regarded as the red-headed stepchild of blogging platforms, and I have considered jumping to Wordpress or Textpattern; but with some tweaking, you can actually make Blogger do some nice things.

First, perhaps most importantly, is the template: the built-in Blogger templates offer very little in the way of customization, and most of the third-party templates aren't much better -- and tend to be poorly designed and juvenile-looking, to boot. One big exception is Ourblogtemplates.com, which offers lots of professional-looking templates that can be customized in virtually every respect; the one I'm using, Newspaper, I like for being a simple, two-column, no-images design.

For specific inspiration, I looked to Wilson Miner's website, in particular the way he uses large font sizes to make things more readable, as well as the interplay he achieves between serif and sans-serif fonts. For the color scheme, I found this palette from a color website to be quite striking: blue tones and orange tones, of course, are complementary, and I've always liked the contrast between black (or nearly black), orange, and white. I think I also had in the back of my mind the cover to Penguin's Dictionary of Sociology:


Altogether, I'm pleased with how this blog looks now. Stability is seldom seen on the Internet, but I think this current design is a keeper.

Annals of Geoengineering

From io9:

A group of scientists have a radical idea for combating climate change: terraforming the Sahara Desert and replacing it with a lush forest.

[...]

The idea is to plant Eucalyptus Grandis, which survives well in heat, which would be watered using drip irrigation. The trio claim the trees would lower the Sahara's temperature by up to 8°C Celsius [sic] in some areas, bring clouds to reflect the sun's rays back into space, and capture eight billion tons of carbon each year.

The cost? $2 trillion a year. That translates to about $68/tCO₂.¹ So, expensive, but not outrageously so; certainly it would be more cost-effective than the late Cash for Clunkers program. But then, as is often the case with geoengineering, there are the side effects:

[T]he forest would also likely prevent iron-rich dust from the sands from blowing into the Atlantic Ocean, iron that nourishes marine life. And the increased moisture could bring a plague of locusts down on not just the Sahara, but the rest of Africa as well.

This is why I'm often puzzled when geoengineering is proposed as an alternative to reducing carbon emissions, as opposed to an adjunct to it: Most of these schemes have side effects that tend to be as bad as if we just did nothing about climate change. On the other hand, if iron depletion of the oceans does become an issue, we can always dump more in -- which turns out to be another, and equally dubious, geoengineering plan.

¹ $2 trillion/(8 billion tC * 3.67) = $68.12/tCO₂.

The Liberal Arts, Digitized

My alma mater, like other liberal arts schools, is facing falling applications and enrollment this year, due to the recession. More troubling is the apparent difficulty that students, and liberal arts colleges in general, are having in convincing the skeptical that a liberal education is worth pursuing. It's always been tough, but this year especially so: Given the anxiety of both students and parents, it's no surprise gaining "in-demand" training is at the forefront of their minds.

For some reason, I find myself juxtaposing this story with the recent spate of articles contending that the rise of online education will prove as devastating to the university system as the rise of online media has to the journalism business. At the most risk are big public schools that rely on freshmen taking required introductory courses to subsidize the rest of the institution, as well as private colleges that don't have built-in prestige, like the Ivies, or offer some sui generis experience, like St. John's.

Assuming such a state of affairs comes to pass (the accreditation process is a barrier to entry in education unlikely to be brought down anytime soon), is it plausible that there will still be demand for small liberal arts colleges? Or, put differently, what would an all-online liberal education program look like? I have in my mind the image of a really erudite message board, not unlike Ask Metafilter or the xkcd forum. That may just be my nostalgia talking, though: Discussion-based classes are hard to any situation, harder still when working through often difficult material, and especially hard when a group of 18-to-22-year-olds are doing most of the talking.

Still, the process of replicating online the St. John's experience would be rather interesting. Most of the books are available for free online already -- although for the better translations, you'd still need to buy a hard copy or e-book. It'd be pretty easy to do the language tutorials, at least; maybe for the Freshman and Sophomore math tutorials you could post instructions on how to build your own Ptolemy Stone. Students could cut MP3s of their compositions in the Aeolian or Mixolydian modes, or listen to clips of the St. Matthew Passion and offer their commentaries on them.

But while you could probably replicate the course content online, the connective tissue of a liberal education, what makes it unique, would be missing: i.e., the process of discussion and self-examination, what I've heard called the "one long conversation." There's a reason why St. John's and other liberal arts schools are deliberately small: A liberal education isn't merely about reading books or solving equations, but about being part of a community of learners. I want to believe that an online community could do the same thing (see above), but I'm not yet convinced.

One other thing: At St. John's, professors are called tutors and are meant to guide discussions, while letting the students do most of the talking. Would this mean that, in an online version of St. John's, tutors would essentially be glorified forum moderators?

Friday Video

In memory of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001:



Via Spencer Ackerman.

Top Chef 6.4: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

This season, as with most of the other seasons, a divide is emerging between the contestants who have some sort of background in or affinity for French cuisine, and those who don't -- with the latter usually ending up at the back of the pack. Hector, who packed his knives and went last night, was an obvious example: Latin-American food was essentially all he knew, and he seemed to flounder when asked to do something outside of that milieu. Meanwhile, Jennifer, Kevin, and the Voltaggio brothers, who all appear to have Francophilic tendencies, are consistently at the top. Occasionally you get some outliers (Ilan from Season 2 specialized in Spanish cuisine, and won); and French cooking experience doesn't automatically mean you'll excel (Ron boasted of his French background, and Mattin is actually French, but neither did well in the last challenge); but generally it seems to be the case that knowing and appreciating French cuisine is a prerequisite to doing well on Top Chef.

But why is this? Is it just culinary imperialism, or is it that, as Michael Ruhlman once wrote:

[The fundamentals of cooking] may have been best categorized and explained by French cooks beginning hundreds of years ago, [but] these fundamentals apply to every kind of cooking there is, Mexican, Italian, Russian, Asian, because food behaves the same in one country as it does in another.

That's my sense as well, based on my (admittedly limited) cooking experience. Once you figure out how to make a béchamel sauce, for example, you can do virtually any cream-based dish, from macaroni and cheese to chicken korma. And it may be that being able to see past specific dishes to the forms that they embody (how very Platonic!) is the mark of a great chef. I've noticed that self-taught cooks don't do very well on Top Chef, and it may be that lack of theoretical training that holds them back.

The Political Tipping Point for Cap-and-Trade

So a recent poll found that about 60% of Americans support a cap-and-trade program to reduce global warming, even if it meant that their monthly electric bills went up by $10; but if they went up by $25, then about 60% of Americans would oppose cap-and-trade. This naturally raises the question: What would the price of carbon emissions have to be in order to raise the average American's electric bill by those amounts -- that is, what is the effective ceiling for the price of carbon emissions, after which support collapses?

First, let's lay out some facts. According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2007 the average American household consumed 936 kWh (3.19 million BTU) of electricity per month, which, at an average retail price of ¢10.65/kWh, translates to an average monthly bill of $99.70. Now, of the sources of electricity that come from fossil fuels, about 49.9% comes from coal, 20.3% from natural gas, 1.2% from petroleum liquids (e.g., fuel oil and kerosene), 0.4% from petroleum coke, and 0.1% from other sources (e.g., propane).¹ Let's assume, for the sake of this exercise, that our average American household receives electricity from all possible sources, and in exactly the proportions listed here. (I'm not listing other sources like nuclear and hydro, as they obviously have no carbon emissions.)

We also have to consider the specific carbon content of each of these fuels; some are dirtier than others. EIA provides a handy table for this, from which I present the emission coefficients for the five types of fossil fuels just mentioned:

Coal:² 215.2 lbs_CO2/MBTU
Natural Gas: 117.08
Petroleum Liquids:³ 162.77
Petroleum Coke: 225.13
Other Gases:⁴ 132.98

Now, with all that laid out, let's do some number crunching. Factoring the consumption proportions above into our hypothetical average American's monthly electricity consumption, we get this:

Coal: 0.499 * 3.19 = 1.59 MBTU
Natural Gas: 0.203 * 3.19 = 0.65
Petroleum Liquids: 0.012 * 3.19 = 0.04
Petroleum Coke: 0.004 * 3.19 = 0.013
Other Gases: 0.001 * 3.19 = 0.003

That divvies up the fossil fuel portion of our hypothetical average American's electricity consumption. Now we find out how many carbon emissions that produces:

Coal: 215.2 * 1.55 = 342.17 lbs
Natural Gas: 117.08 * 0.65 = 76.1
Petroleum Liquids: 162.77 * 0.04 = 6.51
Petroleum Coke: 225.13 * 0.013 = 2.93
Other Gases: 132.98 * 0.001 = 0.13

All told, that's about 428 lbs of CO₂. Next, we do the same thing we did before with consumption, only now with the money spent on electricity:

Coal: 0.499 * $99.70 = $49.75
Natural Gas: 0.203 * $99.70 = $20.24
Petroleum Liquids: 0.012 * $99.70 = $1.20
Petroleum Coke: 0.004 * $99.70 = $0.40
Other Gases: 0.001 * $99.70 = $0.10

That totals $71.69. If we divide this set of numbers by the last set, we get ratios which, when multiplied by 2,000 lbs, gives us the price per ton of CO₂ for each of these fuels. Now we can attempt to answer our original question, so let us ask what would happen if we set a surcharge on carbon emissions in the following amounts (note that these figures are the portions of our hypothetical average American household's bill spent on the various fuels):

	$25/tCO2	$50	$75	$100	$125
Coal	$54.03	$58.30	$62.58	$66.86	$71.14
Natural Gas	$21.19	$22.14	$23.09	$24.05	$25.00
Petroleum Liquids	$1.28	$1.36	$1.44	$1.53	$1.61
Petroleum Coke	$0.44	$0.51	$0.47	$0.55	$0.58
Other Gases	$0.10	$0.10	$0.10	$0.11	$0.11
Total	$77.04	$82.39	$87.73	$93.08	$98.43
Addition to Bill	$5.35	$10.70	$16.04	$21.39	$26.74

I'll have to go back to get the exact prices that correspond with the increases cited in the poll, but the results seem pretty clear: It seems the price of carbon emissions could go up to $50/tCO₂, and a strong majority of Americans, according to the poll, would still support a cap-and-trade plan; it would have to go over $75/tCO₂ to raise bills by $17.50, where we might expect opinion to flip from support to opposition; and it would have to go well over $100/tCO₂ in order for Americans to turn firmly against cap-and-trade. To put things in perspective, the initial price of carbon emissions under the Waxman-Markey bill is expected to be around $15/tCO₂.

Keep in mind, however, that there are a lot of heroic assumptions being made here: For one, the proportions for fossil fuel consumption are going to vary significantly for actual households, rather than hypothetical ones, based on where one lives; some places are going to be more carbon-intensive than others. I'm also assuming that the introduction of a price on carbon emissions will result in no transition from fossil fuels to alternatives: Were the price to go permanently from $0 to $25/tCO₂, say, or $25 to $50, it would be ridiculous to believe that that wouldn't spur more investment in nuclear, hydro, efficiency measures, or renewables, or fuel-switching from coal to natural gas. And of course, one should never invest too much in a single poll.

I welcome any comments or corrections to my analysis here; I'm pretty sure someone has done this already for an older version of this poll, but I couldn't find it on the web.

¹ Sources: here and here, data from 2007 -- I'm basically subtracting out the commercial and industrial sectors in calculating these proportions.
² Average of carbon content for Anthracite, Bituminous, Sub-Bituminous, and Lignite.
³ Average of carbon content for kerosene, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, and jet fuel. Not sure how the latter is used to make electricity, though. It may just be the way EIA classifies it: Jet fuel may be a petroleum liquid, and petroleum liquids are used to make electricity, but that doesn't mean jet fuel is used to make electricity -- not to my knowledge, anyway. I considered leaving it out, but I doubt doing that would change the final analysis much.
⁴ Average of propane, flare gas, and LPG. Again, I may have screwed up here in calculating an average carbon content -- this is the Other category, after all. But again, any adjustments would likely have no effect on the final analysis.

The Course of Climate Legislation, in Graphs

Generally, it's wise to take prediction markets with a few grains of salt. But I think the Intrade graph of the probability of a cap-and-trade program being enacted by the end of 2010 tracks fairly well how climate legislation has fared thus far:


As you can see, it dips sharply in May, when it looked like Waxman-Markey might not get out of Energy and Commerce, then gets better and better, until it passes in late June and briefly crosses 50. Then nothing for a while, then the Senate delays until September, and just recently delays indefinitely -- and it tumbles.

For comparison's sake, here's the graph for the contract saying cap-and-trade will be enacted by the end of 2009:


Its activity isn't terribly different from the 2010 contract, though note that it starts to decline in mid-July, rather than mid-August. A sign, perhaps, that the health care debate was crowding out any chance of climate change legislation being acted upon this year?