What a kilowatt-hour costs

At last night’s Town Hall in Bristol, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell expressed support for off-shore wind energy, and I want to respond to his statement that we cannot afford the move to clean energy because the price per kilowatt-hour is higher for clean energy.

I believe in general that there is common ground between factions in our state and in our nation even at this most contentious time, and the common ground is the common good. I am by commitment holding fast to the idea that people all want to be happy, and nobody wants to see anybody else suffer. For the most part, disagreements arise among us because some people see the world as simple and compartmentalized, and others see the world as incredibly complex and interrelated.

With regard to the clean energy question, the objection of cost per kilowatt-hour appears reasonable if we compartmentalize energy production. We look at a power plant, calculate its costs, and arrive at a selling price that we call the cost per kilowatt-hour. We balance this cost against the effect of carbon emissions, which some of us still question. This distraction keeps us from seeing other immediately quantifiable and visible costs of dirty energy production that are distributed over the ecological and economic community.

If we can see past the simple formula we now use for cost per kilowatt-hour, we can see that a more accurate reflection of the cost of coal and oil energy production would have to include these costs as well:

• land use lost to pollution from run-off and residue
• health effects of fly ash that dusts heavy metals and radiation across our landscape and in our children’s schools and play areas
• loss to sea and maritime industries including food production related to oil spills at sea
• cleanup from oil spills at sea
• losses to insurers and investors when coal and oil production damages occur
• loss of income to families of dead or disabled workers
• medical care and loss of income associated with black lung and similar rock and coal dust effects to miners
• costs of oil-related conflicts like the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

I am sure that I have left out something in this formula, but you can see the point. To compartmentalize the calculation of costs we pay for carbon-based energy to the amount that a power plant has to charge for a kilowatt-hour is neither honest nor accurate. We are paying more for dirty energy than we think we are, because in the interest of dirty energy, our economy must absorb all of these costs.

Why I am voting for Rick Boucher in November

Anyone familiar with the posts on this web site knows that I am not in agreement with Congressman Rick Boucher on some issues. I am, however, supporting him with my vote in November. Here are the reasons why:

• He has always kept his local office open for his constituents, and over the years he has helped countless people with Social Security, black lung claims, and other needs. His office is central to us as a place where we find help.
• He knows the Ninth District, it is his home as it is mine, and he has demonstrated over the years that he understands and cares about the Ninth.
• He works hard in Washington. He is virtually always present for votes, and he always represents the Ninth.
• He supports women’s right to choose. He knows, as everyone should, that anti-abortion legislation will not stop abortions. Ultimately it will be women who repudiate abortion and find a better way. We will do that one by one, by our own personal choices, because we love babies more than governments and churches do. In nations with abortion on demand, the abortion rate is already lower than ours. Women choose babies, and most of the people working in childcare and child advocacy are women. Your Mom was a woman. When women choose, children win.
• He isn’t a tax and spend liberal, because he always knows where the money is going. But he is also not an ideologue dedicated to a failed mantra of “No, no, no” that he has to keep reciting. In today’s definition, he is right of center, a true representative of the Ninth.
• He understands Cap and Trade. I want clean energy, but I understand how coal fits into our economy, so I understand his focus. The move to clean energy will be made, perhaps within our lifetimes. Cap and Trade is a transitional compromise that lets our miners keep working. Without Congressman Boucher’s influence, the Cap and Trade rules would be more difficult for Virginia coal miners. I hope nobody votes against Congressman Boucher because of his hard work on Cap and Trade. If they do, they will be tossing away their best chance of continuing to do business.
• He has brought us recognition, jobs, money, and resources. He is committed to our people and our economic development. He has worked consistently to build infrastructure, roads, broadband access, and utilities including clean water to people in the Ninth. He has brought in companies and businesses. We need him to continue this important work.

Sarah Palin doesn’t speak for me

This is a really cute video. I have to state that the title is somewhat unclear in this context, since I am Sarah. What it actually means is that Sarah Palin doesn’t speak for me.

What bears repeating

If there were critical fact-based comment, people would notice that under the “small government” conservatives, government grew by leaps and bounds. Also, they would see that the surplus that “tax-and-spend” liberals handed to cost-conscious conservatives was rendered — by conservatives — into a staggering deficit.

“How American Democracy Isn’t Working,” from way back on March 4th.

President Obama demos the health care website

healthcare.gov invitation

Visit http://www.healthcare.gov to see all of the options for you in the new health care plan. You select your state and put in your individual information, and the page directs you to useful information!

Robin’s Nest

Robin36.jpg

Originally uploaded by Thirdlayer

This is our robin! Really she is not ours, but she is close to the house. This photo was taken from a window. She doesn’t mind my going out into the back yard, and in fact in the last couple of hot dry days has actually watched me set up the garden hose with a small trickle of water for the birds to play in.

Prayer requests

I posted a this request on the Facebook “resources on prayer you’d like to see offered” discussion board of the National Prayer Center of the Assemblies of God:

I would like to see you denounce imprecatory prayers and specifically the Facebook page praying for the death of President Obama. If the people signed on to these pages actually believe in the effectiveness of prayer, they are making serious threats on President Obama’s life, and that is disrespect for the law as well as the President. If they believe their action is harmless, they do not believe in prayer or in God. If you permit it to continue without commenting, you are abdicating your leadership role, concurring in the death threat, or denying God’s power.

I received this response, posted to the discussion board:

The National Prayer Center vehemently denounces the expression of prayer for the harming of anyone, and would remove such sentiments from its page as soon as noticed.

This discussion board has only the invitation, my request, and their response since the middle of March, so not much of a discussion is going on there, and the response posted in this quiet corner does not amount to “vehemently denounces.” What I cannot understand is the quantity of mean-spirited and downright hateful rhetoric that is coming from self-proclaimed Christian people, and the silence of the church at large regarding the situation.

Here is the problem:

• If a church does not believe in the power of prayer and still asks members to invest their time and energy in a useless activity, that church is committing the worst kind of fraud.
• If a church does believe in prayer and tolerates — or worse encourages — members to pray for harm to people, that church is concurring in the curse.
• If believers are acting contrary to the understanding of the church and doing in the name of Christ something that the church denounces, that church is ineffective as a spiritual leader.

To be perfectly clear, when I say “a church,” I mean the group of people with whom you gather for worship as well as the larger denominational organization — Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Catholic, A of G, Church of God, Church of Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists, Church of the Brethren, etc. All of these should be publicly denouncing the use by Christians of imprecatory prayer to curse our nation and our leaders. So far as I have seen, they have not done so.

This world we live in

The newspaper reported that a third to half of parents at one middle school kept children home on Friday because they were afraid the children would be ritualistically sacrificed by other children who had joined a vampire cult and had to kill to gain immortality. I’m not making that up.

It appears that a girl was suspended recently for stating that she had to kill someone to gain immortality, a startling aspect of a religion that she got from a comic book. The aunt of another student heard about this cult (?), composed the details into a message titled ““Something to PRAY ABOUT!,” and sent it to ten or fifteen of her close friends on Facebook.

Well, the friends passed it on to their friends. They kept their kids home the next morning. Parents who got the message after their children had already gone to school started picking up their kids. The newspaper is unclear about how the school superintendent found out about the panic, but he went to the school personally and sent out a calming e-mail.

You can chuckle over this, but there is a serious issue embedded in this story. It says to me that religion has gotten out of hand. A school is disrupted by rumors of a vampire religion because a child reads a comic book. A relative hears about the cult and leaps to the rescue by requesting prayer on Facebook. What world do these folks live in? They are able to believe that middle school children are joining a vampire cult and planning to kill each other, and they pass around a prayer request on Facebook? In my world, if you think there is a vampire cult that is going to kill your children at school, you really should call the school principal.

Economists and politicians and greedy people

From the Tea Party to the other extreme, which so far as I know has not been adequately named, the U.S. population seems to agree that finance reform is needed to stop greedy people in powerful financial institutions from creating fraudulent products to line their pockets and designing consumer credit to empty ours. Economists agree, people agree, and on most points even banks agree. Big banks made big money and got bailed out, while some smaller banks closed their doors; so they know there is a problem.

The debate will be an interesting because there is so much agreement. Politicians cannot be seen to have agreed with the wrong people, so we have the stand-off reported in The New York Times today in an article by Wyatt and Herszenhorn titled “Bill on Finance Wins Approval of Senate Panel:”

Republicans said that they had forced Democrats back to the bargaining table to negotiate a bipartisan accord, while Democrats said that Republicans were hastily abandoning their opposition in fear of a public outcry.

Another dimension in this debate is that the people who are actually interested — it is economics, remember — are more educated, better informed, and more critical. In the health care debate, Republicans tagged end-of-life counseling as “death panels,” and they got a lot of street action from what was actually just a lie. In the financial reform debate, Democrats talked about having banks pay into a fund so that if they failed in the future this fund could be used to finance their liquidation. Republicans immediately tagged this fund a “bail-out fund,” and Fox News announced that Democrats were not preventing future bailouts, but were in fact guaranteeing future bailouts. The story worked on the street for an hour or two, then someone noticed that it was a lie. Soon after the lie died, Democrats and Republicans and the public — in what order we are not sure — found out that President Obama didn’t like the fund idea, so that left Republicans agreeing with President Obama. So everyone had to take a look at the likely effects of such a fund, and now practically nobody thinks it is a good idea, including me. I was with the Democrats at first, and I knew the Republicans were lying. But when I looked at the issue more closely, I now find that I agree with President Obama, the Republicans, and the Democrats on this particular aspect of financial reform.

What nobody can really tell is whether the Democrats proposed something and the Republicans drove them back to the bargaining table to start over, or the Democrats thought of something and reconsidered it with input from President Obama, or the Republicans abandoned their opposition because of fear of public outcry. We will never know. But among us there are some who will continue — absent any knowledge, mind you — to care deeply. That is probably because they got into a habit of calling the other side evil, sneaky, mean, lying Nazi-Fascist-Socialist idiots. So by habit they must think of something to put on a sign in no more than six words to show to each other to tell each other how bad everyone else is. But the topic is economics, and practically everyone agrees on just about all of the points. So the sign-carrying population has a lot of tried-and-true insulting adjectives and nouns, but they can’t figure out which ones go with which. So we are likely to have a substantive discussion resulting in a strong piece of legislation, which will be, well, interesting.