A message we should all endorse

The passive voice was used

Image by catheroo via FlickrOne of the great losses with the collapse of newspapers is the end of editors. Newspapers are stretched so thin that the editing function has essentially disappeared or is being handled by unqualified people or, worse, software. This creates a vicious cycle, where the product put onto the page is so poorly crafted that readers conclude that there really is no reason to pay a corporation for stale news. When the writing in the only daily in town wouldn't cut it in the local high school paper, you know things are in a bad state. Today's example:

"A Salem man has been arrested for allegedly shooting another man during an apparent attempt to steal medical marijuana Monday."

I bet being allegedly shot doesn't hurt a bit. The writer makes a hash of the lede by casting it into the passive voice, which is why "alleged" -- a fifty-cent word for "said" that journalists clearly don't understand and toss into all their police and legal stories haphazardly -- has to be converted to the bizarre modifier "allegedly," which makes no sense when attached to "shooting."

You know what's great about the active voice? It immediately points up what's missing from that lede (which is pretty much everything in this instance). Good journalism answers this question: Who did what to whom. Convert that lede to active voice and the gaps stand out:

(Jurisdiction) police arrested a Salem man, (name), on (date) (in place, if not same as jurisdiction or is otherwise significant). Police believe (name) shot (victim's name) while trying to steal (victim's last name)'s medical marijuana. . . .

The original garbled lede is 20 words of nonsense. Recast in the active voice and with the gaps filled in, it takes just 23 words to deliver a whole lot more news:

Salem police arrested a Salem man, Scott Farler, on Tuesday. They believe Farler shot Jamison Nguyen, while trying to steal Nguyen's medical marijuana. . . .

Help collect the data needed for better bike facilities in Salem

Eric L., the indefatigable instigator of incessant bike information sends:

Image via Wikipedia

Hello!











Last summer, 21 volunteers counted bicycles at 32 locations and generated
40 manual counts. It was a great success! Already it is informing decisions about bicycle infrastructure, funding, and future demand.

And it's time to do it again!

Help document the way biking is growing in the Salem-Keizer area. We need volunteers to count bicycles at key intersections in the region. We hope to bring the number of locations up to about 50. There are areas of town where we didn't count, significant new pieces of infrastructure to assess (hello Union St. Railroad Bridge!), and year-over-year changes to note.

Counts will be performed in July, August, and some in September. They will be scheduled for a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and occur during rush hour - either between 7am and 9am, or between 4pm and 6pm. You can choose the day and time slot that works best for you!

If you'd like to participate, we'll treat you to some pizza and soda. On Wednesday, June 24th at 5pm, the City of Salem, Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study, and Mid-Willamette Valley Bicycle Transportation Alliance will hold a training and orientation. It will last about an hour. Please RSVP to salembikes [at] gmail [dot] com.

For more see the Breakfast on Bikes site (2008 or 2009).

A little reality with the bark off

The acerbic (cranky, dyspeptic, misanthropic, you pick the adjective) James Howard Kunstler is one of the best at describing the period we're entering and perhaps the most-consistent advocate of a sensible policy approach to responding. From this week's blog post:

Which brings me back to the New Urbanist annual meet-up last week in Denver. Given the gathering conditions of what I variously call The Long Emergency or the economic clusterf[log], they have had to shift their focus starkly. For years, their stock-in-trade was the greenfield New Town or Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), a severe reform of conventional suburban development. That sort of reform work was only possible when

1. the continued expansion of suburbia seemed utterly inevitable, requiring heroic mitigation and
   
   
2. when they could team up with the production home-builders to get their TND projects built.

To the group's credit, they realize that these conditions are no more. Suburbia is now cratering, both as a repository of wealth in real estate and as a practical matter of everyday existence. They get that the energy crisis and all its implications are real and that our response to it had better be deft. They understand that the capital resources we thought we had for Big Projects are flying into a black hole at the speed of light. Mostly they see that he time for "cutting edge" fashionista techno-triumphalist grandiosity is over.

To put it bluntly, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is perhaps the only surviving collective intelligence left in the United States that is producing ideas consistent with the reality. They recognize that our survival depends on down-scaling and re-localization. They recognize the crisis we will soon face in food production, and the desperate need to reactivate the relationship between the way we inhabit the landscape and the way we feed ourselves. They recognize that the solution to the liquid fuels crisis is not cars that can run by other means but on walkable towns and cities connected by public transit.

This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or the political corridors of power. Oh, by the way, the Obama administration contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after the inauguration. He never heard back from the White House. I guess they're not interested.

Estimating your own energy demand (cont.)

A natural gas processing plant. Essentially all industrial agriculture depends entirely on fertilizers derived from natural gas, just one of many reasons that the energy used to produce industrial food often dwarfs the energy content of the food itself. (Image via Wikipedia)

Last time the discussion showed you how to convert the three most-obvious forms of energy purchases to common units (kilowatt-hours, kWh). They were electricity, natural gas, and gasoline, the most recognizable types of energy that people in Salem commonly buy.

Recall that the global average energy consumption (total consumption divided by total world population) is about 48 kWh/day per person. This is the energy equal to burning 20 100w light bulbs for 24 hours. And the average consumption in the US is about six times as much -- burning 120 of those 100w bulbs all day and all night.

But this overlooks a disguised kind energy buying that we all do. The reason it is disguised is that we don't think of these purchases as involving energy at all, because we conceal the energy content of the purchases under another name: calories.

That's right, buying food means buying energy. That's all that food is, actually: one big macronutrient (energy, usually counted in calories) and a variety of micronutrients that the body needs in order to be able to access and use the food to make energy.

And food (energy in plant or animal form) is amazingly energy-dense. 860 food calories -- which you can easily get in a single dessert -- is the energy of 1 kWh, so it's the same energy that would keep 10 of our 100w light bulbs burning for an hour. So if you're on the nominal 2000 calorie diet, your daily energy intake represents 2.33 kWh of your daily energy consumption. If you're a man on the nominal 2500 calorie diet, you consume the equivalent of 2.9 kWh/day in food form.

Thus, a man eating 2500 calories a day and using only 48 kWh/day, the global average, consumes 6% of his daily energy as food, leaving him only 45 kWh left for everything else. His partner, a woman eating 2000 calories a day, uses 5% of the global average daily energy consumption to support her diet.

Where it gets really interesting is when you try to figure out how much energy it took to grow the food, process it, and deliver it to you. That's a complex question that's impossible to answer with certainty; however, numerous groups have tried to estimate this for the US, and the figure that is commonly heard is that every calorie we eat represents about 10 more (mostly from fossil fuels) that were burned delivering that one calorie to us. So our a daily 2500-calorie diet actually demands 25,000 calories, which is 29 kWh (23.25 kWh for the 2000-daily-calorie woman).

Staggering isn't it? The average global citizen only uses 48 kWh per day; in the US, we use 50-60% of that just to feed ourselves, even if we stay in bed all day with no heat or lights on, and certainly not driving or flying or using any electrical devices or tools.

Sad but true: Humans prefer cocky to expertise

Even talking about uncertainty can make you seem like an egghead. Image via Wikipedia

This is quite significant when you think about the wicked problems and predicaments that we face where we have to sort through a lot of uncertainty about what to do. People with real expertise often make confident predictions, but when dealing with complex issues, real experts tend to focus on the huge uncertainties that are inevitably part and parcel of the thing.

Meanwhile, blowhards (like those who pooh-pooh evidence that we are destabilizing the climate on the only planet we've got) can duplicate the confidence without any of the expertise:

The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident. Describing his work at an Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco last month, Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiar (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 107, p 179).

There are times, however, when this link breaks down. With complex but politicised subjects such as global warming, for example, scientific experts who stress uncertainties lose out to activists or lobbyists with a more emphatic message.

Getting a feel for how much energy you really use

World energy sources in TeraWatts; note the dominance of the fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas). Image via Wikipedia

A lot of people have heard that North Americans are the energy hogs of the universe, and that we waste most of the energy. But until you know how much energy you are personally using, and how much of that is from fossil fuels, you really can't begin to grasp how much we need to change.

The global average energy use is about 17,500 kilowatt-hours/yr (kWh/yr), or 48 kWh/day.

That's the energy needed to burn 20 100W bulbs all year. On average, for all purposes, people in the USA use six times as much --- like burning 120 100W bulbs all year.

You can get a rough first guess at the amount of energy you use directly as follows. We do it by converting everything to kWh.

1) Electric use.

Luckily, your electric bill already comes that way, so we start there. You can find the information you need on your electric bills. Simply add up a year's worth of use. (Your bill probably reports how much you used per day during each billing period, so you multiply the figure given for each month by 30 and then add those up.)

2) Natural gas use

Multiply the "therms" (10o cubic feet of natural gas = 1 therm) of natural gas you use in a year by 30 to get your natural gas use in kWh for the year.

3) Gasoline use

Multiply the number of gallons of gas you buy in a year by 33 get kWh.

(You DO keep track of your gas consumption so you can follow your mileage, right? If not, how do you know when your car needs a tuneup or alignment or your tires are underinflated?). If you, for some reason, don't have your average gas consumption, figure 600 gallons a year if you drive a normal amount (14000 miles) in a normal car (24 mpg). Adjust that as needed if you drive more or less and to correct for your ride's probable mileage --- i.e., don't use 24 mpg if you drive a Prius or an Explorer.

Note what this suggests: the average American uses more energy just driving the average car the average amount than the average person in the world uses for EVERYTHING.

4) Add 'em up. That's your direct energy use per year.

We'll start figuring how to account for indirect use next time.

Your family came here when? I can top that: I AM an Oregon Pioneer

The terrific High Country News has a great essay from an Idahoan titled "Call me a local and forget about my grandpappy" (subscription required -- and well worth it!), where a woman notes the same peculiar habit that is also common in Oregon: starting every public pronouncement by locating the number of generations between you and your pioneer ancestors on the Oregon Trail.

That HCN essay made me realize a couple things:

First, pioneers tended to be the kind of folks who left where they were to get away from people who determined a person's social standing by referring to the person's family. In other words, whenever you start off by saying "As a fifth-generation Oregonian . . . " you're saying "I'm the kind of person that my pioneer ancestors fled from."

Second, people who emigrate to Oregon today have more in common with your ancestors than you do, because we packed up all our things and moved to this beautiful state just like they did. We are pioneers, in other words.

We didn't have the luck to be born here, but we did have the luck to see how much worse it can be elsewhere, in places where they despoil their wildernesses and pave over their best land. And, like your pioneer ancestors, we found that our destination was already inhabited. Be glad that we are treating you much better than your pioneer ancestors treated the inhabitants they found here.

The Transition Challenge

Thinking about how Salem will respond to the nascent "energy descent" --- the rapid decline in availability of cheap energy --- and the global need to radically reduce greenhouse emissions (which will further drive up the costs of energy and of moving people and goods around, driving limits on doing so), it becomes clear that these linked challenges will affect everything.

But, it's also helpful to remember that, past a certain point --- a point which most Salem folks are well past indeed --- material affluence is simply not that well correlated with happiness or fulfillment. Energy descent and the need to restrain emissions can actually create a paradox where the fact of doing the right thing for the future generations (a higher order satisfaction in Maslow's terminology, illustrated above) helps smooth out the bumps as we learn to use much less energy and to have much lower material flows (reduced affluence in the disposable-society mode -- our standard of consumption -- while enjoying more real affluence in the quality of life).

A Tale of Two Maps

Who causes climate change and who suffers (dies) from it:

Top map has countries adjusted to show relative greenhouse emissions; bottom shows increased mortality from climate change.

So much for the golden rule.

When you think about things like this, Jefferson's fear comes to mind:

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

(h/t Ezra Klein, WA Post blogger, via Energybulletin.net)

Get ready for the bipartisan attack on Social Security

Although this may seem pretty far afield for a locally focused blog, the noises indicating that the rich are getting close to the long-held dream of rolling back the key reform of the 20th Century in America, universal social pension and disability insurance has huge implications for Salem. As a government town with a disproportionately large disabled and needy population, cuts in Social Security will have an especially devastating impact on Salem.

The most important thing to watch as the debate cranks up is to see which assumptions are treated as givens and which givens are totally suppressed and ignored (like the use of different assumptions for economic growth depending on the desired outcome).

The chart above shows just how pessimistic projections are being used to justify rolling back benefits for working people, even while raising the cap on income subject to the social security withholding is never even whispered.

Robert Reich - Fifteen years ago, when I was a trustee of the Social Security and the Medicare trust funds (which meant, essentially, that I and a few others met periodically with the official actuary of the funds, received his report, asked a few questions, and signed some papers) both funds were supposedly in trouble. But as I learned, the timing and magnitude of the trouble depended a great deal on what assumptions the actuary used in his models. As I recall, he then assumed that the economy would grow by about 2.6 percent a year over the next seventy-five years. But go back into American history all the way to the Civil War -- including the Great Depression and the severe depressions of the late 19th century -- and the economy's average annual growth is closer to 3 percent. Use a 3 percent assumption and Social Security is flush for the next seventy-five years. . .

Even if you assume Social Security is a problem, it's not a big problem. Raise the ceiling slightly on yearly wages subject to Social Security payroll taxes (now a bit over $100,000), and the problem vanishes under harsher assumptions than I'd use about the future. President Obama suggested this in the campaign and stirred up a hornet's nest because this solution apparently dips too deeply into the middle class, which made him backtrack and begin talking about raising additional Social Security payroll taxes on people earning over $250,000. Social Security would also be in safe shape if it were slightly more means tested, or if the retirement age were raised just a bit. The main point is that Social Security is a tiny problem, as these things go. . .

Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it's quickly rising health-care costs. Look more closely and the real problem isn't even health-care costs; it's a system that pushes up costs by rewarding inefficiency, causing unbelievable waste, pushing over-medication, providing inadequate prevention, over-using emergency rooms because many uninsured people can't afford regular doctor checkups, and spending billions on advertising and marketing seeking to enroll healthy people and avoid sick ones.

Equal Justice Rocks!

Justice Rocks II
Second Annual Campaign For Equal Justice Benefit Concert

Rock out and raise your glass for a noble cause with local musicians. Join us at The Roxxy this Friday night at 8pm-2am for an evening of non-stop music. Live music by Norman, the Upsidedown, Coco Cobra & The Killers with DJ JD between sets. $5 (minimum donation) at the door to benefit the Campaign for Equal Justice. Unique items provided by the bands will also be available for auction and sale.

This event aims to raise funds for The Campaign for Equal Justice, which provides free legal assistance to thousands of low-income Oregonians in need. The CEJ mission is to champion access to justice for low-income Oregonians through education and by working to increase funding for legal aid. We live in a free society and The Campaign for Equal Justice plays an essential role to realize that freedom for some of the 600,000 Oregonians living in poverty.

Kaylie Heimel (503)581-1240 / kheimel@kite.com Crowell Ing, LLP -

Additional information:
The Event - http://www.myspace.com/justice_rocks_music
Campaign for Equal Justice - THE ROXXY •1230 State Street

Your Right to Know about Toxic Releases

OMB Watch today launched a redesigned and expanded website for the Right-to-Know Network (RTK NET) at www.rtknet.org. The website serves as a source for information about environmental and public health threats and opportunities for public engagement with environmental policy, and it offers news, data, and analysis of environmental right-to-know issues.

Constantly evolving since its initial launch in 1989, RTK NET continues to provide free access to several government databases of environmental information. Users can identify sources of pollution in their communities, learn about the transport of hazardous waste, search reports of chemical spills and accidents, and much more.

RTK NET allows users to conduct countless types of data searches, including in the Toxics Release Inventory - a database containing information on toxic pollution from facilities across the nation. Visitors will also find interactive maps for comparing states and easy-to-understand graphs that clearly identify pollution trends.

In addition to offering access to extensive amounts of environmental data, the redesigned RTK NET presents information on how environmental data are being used to protect air and water quality, wildlife habitats, children's health, and more.

Visitors will also find news items dealing with government transparency, public access to information, and public participation in environmental decision making. Opportunities for grassroots action and citizen involvement are available, as well as tools for outreach and education.

By providing both the raw information and the context for how it can be used, RTK NET empowers citizens to make a difference in their communities and beyond.

RTK NET can be found at http://www.rtknet.org. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Eldertown -- the city as a place for humans

As hellish as life was in the primitive factory towns (see Steven Johnson's fine study of early industrial London, The Ghost Map), cities at last have matured into the most ecologically enlightened habitat for a world that numbers billions of human beings. Urban density compacts population and saves the land, its resources, natural beauties, and human lives. Cities are where ideas are exchanged most rapidly and where medical progress is made. Subtract the cars and freeways, condense the suburbs back into urban centers — some large, some small — mix in a good measure of social justice, and we have the best design for living in a world where over 50 percent of the human race now chooses to reside in cities. Eldertown makes all this more possible.

As the budget cuts slice deeper and deeper in Salem and Marion County

Someone notices that it's starting to resemble the Gilded Age again.

Sharon Astyk nails it: What hunger in China means for Salem

Sharon Astyk, author of the excellent "Depletion and Abundance" and the upcoming "A Nation of Farmers" has such a good piece with such importance for Salem that I'm going to shamelessly reprint it too:

Lester Brown has a lead article in _Scientific American_ this month, on the potential unrest caused by growing food insecurity worldwide. The article is appropriately dark about the potential problems in feeding ourselves, and he asks whether it is possible that widespread food insecurity could “bring down civilization” by destroying functioning nation states from the inside. It is a fascinating article, and well worth a read.

What struck me about it was one rather brief point that Brown makes - along with his discussions of soil loss, falling water tables, climate change and population, he very briefly debunks what I think is a prevailing idea - that because the US is a major producer, if things get tough, we’ll simply stop exporting grain. He writes:

“No country is immune to the effects of tightening food supplies, not even the U.S., the world’s breadbasket. If China turns to the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has recently done for soybeans, it will have to buy from the U.S. For U.S. consumers, that would mean competing for the U.S. grain harvest with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with fast-rising incomes—a nightmare scenario. In such circumstances, it would be tempting for the U.S. to restrict exports, as it did, for instance, with grain and soybeans in the 1970s when domestic prices soared. But that is not an option with China. Chinese investors now hold well over a trillion U.S. dollars, and they have often been the leading international buyers of U.S. Treasury securities issued to finance the fiscal deficit. Like it or not, U.S. consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, no matter how high food prices rise.”

This, I think is an important point, and one that becomes more acute as we become more dependent on buyers for our Treasuries - and we are presently becoming more and more dependent, not less and less. As Bloomberg reported a few days ago, lost tax revenue in the US means that we need to sell dramatically more Treasuries, even as nations have indicated they are inclined to pull back.

Brown predicted this - in _Depletion and Abundance_ I quoted Brown’s Plan B 2.0 (he’s up to 3.0, and I admit, I wish he’d change book titles ;-)) on just this subject:

“The first big test of the international community’s capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain. If the latter is teh case, this could occur when China - whose grain harvest fell by 34 million tons or 9 percent between 1998 and 2005 - turns to the world market for massive imports of 30 million, 50 million or even 100 million tons of grain per year. Demand on this scale could quickly overwhelm world grain markets. When this happens, China will have to look to the United States which controls [over 40 percent of] the world’s grain exports…some 200 million tons.”

Brown has written an entire book on the subject, _Who Shall Feed China_ as well.

Last week, China Daily and other Chinese papers reported that China has begun a national audit of its grain supplies due to recent speculation that grain reserves have been exaggerated, and due to expressed concern that it may not be able to weather an extended drought. China now imports about 5% of its national grain demand, but because it depends on irrigation for 80% of its grain production, that figure is expected to rise, as soybean imports have already risen.

This is important, not to scapegoat China (I’m always a little wary of the “bad China - poor us” narrative), but to realize that while many peak oil and climate change activists fear an absolute scarcity of food - periods where food is simply not on the shelves - they perhaps should be at least as concerned with dramatic rises in food prices, and an increasing number of everyday Americans who go hungry. This is already the case, of course. But a poor to seriously crappy economy, combined with rising food prices is a recipe for real and serious trouble for all of us.

I think a lot of people express skepticism about the idea that the US, the world’s breadbasket, will have bare shelves. And while I think that is technically possible, it is far more likely that, as in most places with deep endemic hunger, the US will likely have full shelves - and more and more people peering in at them, unable to purchase food.

This is why we need, at every level, from family farms to family gardens, a renewed focus on food security, increased access to food in its cheapest form (the seed), local food trade, a nation of people who can eat grain, rather than processed foods, and a nation of farmers.

Sharon

Rule 1: Don't burn the house down to save a buck

Homemade biofuel makers: burning down the house.

Hugely important behavioral study

Crucial study here. If this finding can be generalized---and I see no reason that it should not be---then this is a vital challenge to those of us who are interested in fostering sustainable behavior in Salem (or anywhere else, for that matter). Hat tip to Sightline Institute's blog "The Daily Score:"

Yes, I'd Like Fries With That
New study shows we're our own worst enemy.
ERIC HESS

People you should know -- or become!

Salem City Watch reaches the intertubes.

A life and death reminder

Your support means so much!

Thanks to you and your generous blood donations, our community will be able to help our victims of tragedy and ill health.

You are someone who cares enough about our community to give life-giving blood. Our neighbors depend on us for life... and we depend on you for continued loyalty. Your continued support is greatly appreciated by us as well as the many people you help with your donations. Have a good day!

Visit our website or call 1-800-GIVE LIFE (448-3543) for more information.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The American Red Cross
Pacific Northwest Blood Services Region
3131 N. Vancouver Avenue
Portland, OR 97227
(503) 284-1234

Happens every year. Weather improves. Sun-starved Salemites seek sensuous, salubrious solar sensations. So they get outdoors. :^)

But accidents go up. While blood donations go down. :^(

It's important: if you are eligible to give blood -- and most people are -- do it. The life you save may be someone you know. And, even if not, it's someone important to someone.