Blue Bayou

In addition to visiting New Orleans, I also wanted to drive down the Mississippi to visit places I had never actually seen, but read much about in the wake of Katrina.

St. Bernard Parish is immediately adjacent Orleans Parish. It was the site of the Battle of New Orleans; it was also where the levee was intentionally blown up when the Mississippi River threatened the city in 1929. Back then, poor whites were sacrificed to save the city.

St Bernard largely consisted of people who would have proudly called themselves "coonasses." They also were (are?) extreme racists who, led by Leander Perez, entered New Orleans in the early 1960s to threaten black 1st grade schoolgirls integrating schools in Orleans for the first time in 90 years (yes, America, we had integrated schools in 1869). St Bernard is proud to be associated with Perez even today; their main street is named after him.

Plaquemines is actually whence Perez hailed. In Port Sulphur, Perez refused to provide plumbing to the black community until his death.

Anyway, these places do not necessarily exist any longer, at least not as they did before Katrina. They were wiped out by a 22 foot wall of water in parts, and Venice LA was even flooded during Hurricane Ida last week, which did not even cause rain in Orleans.

For some pictures of what's going on down there today, see my slideshow.

How much Germans and Americans spend on books

This just in from Deutsche Bank:

Whereas in the US e-book sales between January and August 2009 already exceeded USD 100 m (equivalent to about 1% of total book sales at last count), electronic books have not generated even 0.1% of Germany’s total book sales of about EUR 9 bn.

That means that 300 million Americans spend around 10 bn USD on books, roughly the same as 80 million Germans - or 30% less, if we convert the euro figure at the current exchange rate. We then get 13.5 bn USD in Germany.

My point is that Germans are apparently spending several times as much per capita on books. And lest you think that the lack of ebook sales are a sign of German technophobia, keep in mind that Europe just got the Kindle a few weeks ago, and still Kindle books are ordered from the US in English (there are almost no German titles available). All kings of gadgets (iPhones, eee PCs, etc.) are released in the US as much as a year before being released in Europe.

Me and Thomas in New Orleans

When Thomas Mann visited his home country of Germany shortly after WW II (he had been in exile in California), he visited a town that had been nearly completely destroyed (as almost all German towns had). He wrote that the mayor took him up on a hill and showed him what was left - there you can still see the medieval tower, that's the old church, and the historic city hall is over there. Thomas Mann noted in his dairy, "Nothing was there."

For my first visit to New Orleans since December 2005 (which started last Sunday), New Orleanians said, Craig, you're gonna love it. It's better than before Katrina.

So I took Thomas Mann along on this trip to see what he thinks. True, he said, the worst is behind us, and I do not have to think what I did not have the heart to say to my German host 64 years ago. But Craig, he asked, you wrote in Dec 2005 that New Orleans had retained all of its character even with only 70-80,000 people. What has changed since then?

Thomas, I answered, I'm not going to try to pass as someone who can judge that. But he and I agreed that not all parts of town are a happy sight. The site of the 17th St Canal levee breach has been cleaned up, so between inhabited homes are empty lots. For out-of-towners, it could be a new suburb under development.

The 9th Ward -- see my pic from 2005 of the devastation -- is now also cleaned up, but almost completely empty. Yet here, a solar housing project is underway that will dwarf the largest such neighborhood in Freiburg when completed.

Nonetheless, traffic seems less in Orleans Parish now, and pics like the one here could be taken almost all over town.

Near the end of the trip, Thomas noticed that a slight sadness overcame me as I thought about going back to Germany, especially with the New Orleans Saints undefeated. I know that feeling, he said, but listen: your kids in Germany go around the house singing "jock-amo fee na ne"; they eat spicy cheese grits (made from "chopped dried corn" bought at little Russian shops - it has to be cooked for ages like 100 years ago) and red beans & rice; they know it's time to go to bed when you say, "fais do-do"; and they know that boyds are small animals that fly (and that they live in Geoymany). And they've never even been to the States.

So, Thomas told me, when you go back to Germany, as you must, remember what I told the press in 1938 upon reaching US soil as a German exile:

Germany is wherever I am. I carry my German culture inside me.

(Wo ich bin, ist Deutschland. Ich trage meine deutsche Kultur in mir.)

And next time you come back, Thomas added, bring your kids.

The Guardian got it right! Almost...

The Guardian has published another article on Vauban, a Freiburg neighborhood considered progressive in many respects but largely misrepresented. But this author does not make any mistakes in his admittedly brief presentation.

He also points out that other car-free districts often physically prevent you from driving up to your front door, which is only an inconvenience. Why should I not be able to transport a new fridge by truck or a giant load of groceries by car?

Unfortunately, the Guardian also references a laughable previous article it seems to be proudly sticking to. I dissect it here.

Germans oppose lower rates for solar

Solarserver.de has published a summary of a poll taken by a German real estate magazine, which found that 69% of the German public opposes the "drastic cut" in rates for solar that has been discussed.

Feed-in tariffs—the new school of thought

(This article appeared at Grist.org)

As a boy growing up near the Louisiana Gulf Coast, I remember looking out of the car window at times and seeing gigantic flames over the bayous: gas flares. Around 1970, the flaring of natural gas peaked. Oil prices were so low back then that marketing gas would not have been profitable.

Today, far less natural gas is flared off both in terms of volume and, consequentially, as a percentage of our much higher current energy consumption. Oil prices have, of course, risen dramatically over the past 40 years, but environmentalists have also been working hard to get oil and gas companies to reduce gas flaring. Nonetheless, it is estimated that the world still flares off several weeks’ worth of natural gas supply each year.

Left with far fewer resources, future generations will be dumbfounded at our wastefulness. Why did we not take action sooner?

Ask anyone today, and the answer would be that we leave matters up to the market. And for a long time, the market’s answer was that natural gas was a waste product of oil extraction in many cases. We chose to implement legislation banning gas flaring; here, government intervention trumped the market. Another option would have been to mandate a higher price for gas so that the profit margin for oil and gas would have been more equal. Utilities would have at least been encouraged to use gas turbines to generate electricity where gas is plentiful; the higher prices could then have been spread across all power consumers. The market would still have been free—companies still could have done whatever they want—but it simply would have covered more resources.

Here, we see why this option was not pursued: while our resources would have been used more efficiently, electricity rates would have gone up. Rate hikes are politically unpalatable in the Anglo world, even if they help us use resources more efficiently. So we let oil compete with gas, and oil won for decades. And we flared off tremendous amounts of natural gas.

Competing companies: While the proposal I describe above—leveling the profit margins for energy resources—was not implemented for fossil fuels, it has been used successfully for renewables. It is called feed-in tariffs (FITs), and it is the driver behind Europe’s main success stories.

Its detractors in the English-speaking world used the same logic that was used 40 years ago in the petroleum industry: we need competition, and price fixing is anathema to free markets. Of course, the United States has had price fixing in the electricity sector since the 1930s (that’s what is meant when we say that utilities are “regulated”)—but let’s focus on what is meant by “competition.”

Normally, when we think about competition, companies come to mind: GM versus Toyota, Dell vs. Apple, etc. Of course, there is also competition between products and technologies, such as between VHS and Betamax (or, for my younger readers, between Blu-ray and HD DVD). Notice that Betamax and HD DVD disappeared from the market completely—which is itself a considerable waste of effort and investment, though having a single format certainly has its advantages.

If we now look at ways of generating electricity, we see that it would be nice to have competition between companies, but what sense does it make to have competition between resources? If we can leave the resource untouched, then it remains available for future generations—no problem. But if we have to discard one (natural gas) in order to get at another (crude oil), then it makes sense to ensure that the profit margins on both resources are roughly equal so that it pays to exploit both resources instead of wasting one. The resources need not compete as long as the extraction companies do.

Wind and solar may seem to differ in one respect: we cannot exhaust them. The sun will not be depleted regardless of how many solar panels we have, and no number of wind turbines will measurably reduce the amount of wind on Earth. Nonetheless, the amount of renewable energy we neglect to use can also be considered waste. Each day, we get a certain amount of potential solar and wind power. Were we to use more of it, our consumption of non-renewable resources would be reduced. As a result, the range of our fossil fuels could be extended dramatically.

RPS, cap-and-trade, FIT: If we agree that we would be willing to pay more today in order to use both our renewable and non-renewable resources more efficiently, the question is which policy promotes competition among companies, not resources. Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) are old-school thinking; utilities have to meet a target for “renewables,” and if no further specifications are made, then renewables compete with each other. The cheapest wins, and the rest go nowhere.

Emissions trading is a more recent idea, but it is even worse in a way. Here, large energy producers and consumers are required to reduce emissions. The scheme is praised for allowing decision-makers the flexibility to choose the cheapest way to meet their target: technology overhauls (“clean coal”), investments in third-party offsets (tree plantations funding oor technological overhauls abroad), the purchase of allowances from other market players, new low-carbon technologies (renewables), or perhaps just paying a fine. Here, renewables not only compete with each other, but also with all of these options.

Neither RPSs nor emissions trading ensures a comparable, reasonable return on investments in both wind and solar. FITs do. Critics of FITs charge that the policy “picks winners,” but the charge only applies to the energy sources promoted—not to any particular companies or technologies. True, those of us who support FITs for solar and wind have picked these two resources as winners—guilty as charged. But we have not, to take the example of solar, picked any particular company, nor have we even picked a particular technology. Who can say whether crystalline or thin film panels (or perhaps something else) will be more popular in 2020? Indeed, if we provide roughly the same profit margin for concentrated solar power and photovoltaics today, we may find that the one or the other is clearly preferable by 2030—but then, we may nonetheless choose to keep the more expensive one as a niche product despite the price difference. After all, it would have been the sensible thing to do with natural gas 40 years ago.

We have a history of taking only the cheapest energy first. Our children will pay the price that we refused to pay, so they may very well view our old-school thinking as myoptic. FITs are the new school.

Al Gore with Jon Stewart

For roughly the next two weeks, you should be able to stream this show, featuring an interview with Al Gore on his new book. Skip to around a minute 11 for the beginning of the interview, but also be sure to view it until the very end, where Colbert comes on with a great question.

I have faced a number of doubters of renewables, but I don't think I have ever faced such difficult questioning as Gore faced with Stewart here. I wonder how many of the renewables activists reading this blog would have enjoyed facing his questions.