Without comment

"Again and again it has been demonstrated that the unpredictable cocktail of fading energy and seasoned talent, of mortality and desperation (just another word for ambition) can accomplish wonders." -- Roberta Smith, in her review of "Dalí, The Late Work" at the High Museum, Atlanta; New York Times, September 3, 2010.

Ambling in Ambleside

I'm in England's Lake Country, for the Mathematical Virology meeting, which begins tomorrow at the Ambleside campus of the University of Cumbria. Came a couple of days early to de-jetlag, and caught a spot of nice weather.

A nice walk up a local hill yesterday. Spent this morning preparing and practicing my talk and was headed out for a light lunch and a moderately serious half-day walk when I ran into Peter Prevelige. He'd just arrived, we haven't seen each other in a year or two, and we were both hungry, so the plans got a bit waylaid -- fish and chips, a couple of pints, and long conversation... The moderately serious walk turned into a very moderate and very non-serious stroll along the river.

Maybe I'll do better tomorrow morning...

Bloggers and Disasters

I put the following into a blog about the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon last night (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/oil_spill_approaches_louisiana.html):

I love bloggers.

The blog mentions everyone from the Flying Spaghetti Monster to Chief Seattle. One analysis discusses the role of globalization in the spill, while another compares the spill to the Holocaust. Proposed solutions range from prayer to peat moss to bringing in the army or truckloads of welfare deadbeats.

There are the inevitable rants, with all the usual suspects hauled up for either praise or damnation -- the president, Al Gore, Sarah Palin, even Ted Kennedy. Ms. Palin is neither a goddess nor a devil in this, because she has appeared on the scene too recently. Instead, she's a symbol, a saint to some, a sinner to others. Her rise to national prominence is a consequence of the intensity of the energy debate -- not a cause -- although she is now becoming another contributor to it. Whether you love her or hate her, she's going to be around for a while (no way yet of knowing how long), because of the importance of this issue.

This is, of course, a serious disaster. Any thoughtful person grieves for the families of those who were killed or injured; mourns for the loss of wildlife, beaches, and marshes; and worries about the hard times ahead for the thousands who make their livings from the bounty of the sea -- fisherman, crabbers, shrimpers, folks who work in the tourist industry, ...

Some bloggers are screaming at one another about the relative importance of human lives vs. the environment, but there's no way to separate one from the other, when you think about it.

Thanks to those of you who work in the offshore oil industry for your enlightening comments. It's hard for the rest of us to understand what happened, how the backup systems are supposed to work (and why they didn't), and what the alternatives are for shutting off the flow. Don't worry about those who scream at you -- that's the nature of blogs -- but do keep the information coming.

In response to the sawdust/peat moss suggestion: Does anyone know if such solutions have been tried in previous cleanups? Did they work? Or did they just add to the mess? There must be huge amounts of organic waste that could be hauled out in barges and dumped, though I have no idea about the logistic difficulties, the costs, or the possible negative consequences. In addition to sawdust and peat moss, natural products might include grass, brush, agricultural waste, detritus from logging sites, and all those things suburban residents put at the curbside for pickup. On the manmade side, how about paper, cardboard, cloth -- again the things that we sort for recycling.

Thanks also to those of you encouraging others to keep this discussion calm. Like almost everyone else who's reading this, I'm 100% CERTAIN that I know the answers. But then I remember how sure I was that I had all the answers to raising kids before my own kid entered adolescence. (He's 29 now and doing fine, thanks.)

The cause? This was the failure of a complex system. All human-designed systems have (unknowable) failure rates: cars, bridges, banks, churches, marriages. Yes, it's true that corporations have economic reasons for trying to cut corners wherever they can. (You teabaggers keep that in mind as you try to get the government off of the back of business.) And yes, it's true that regulators and other government employees can be lazy or incompetent. (You liberals keep that in mind as you design a health care system.) As you wrestle with how much regulation we should have, you might ask yourself, if BIG government is bad, are there any problems with BIG corporations?

Finally, yes, it's possible that someone intentionally did something malicious, just like sales clerks and teachers and priests and car mechanics and computer geeks and carpenters sometimes intentionally wreck things. There's no evidence for that, unless you're someone who doesn't bother to read the newspapers. But even if everyone is honest and hard-working and intelligent and brave, clean, reverent and true -- well, shit does indeed happen sometimes. This was the breakdown of a very complex system.

More important, cleanup is going to be an incredibly hard problem. BP has an important role to play, and so does the government. It's going to cost bazillions, and you and I will pay for it regardless of how we divide the bill between BP and the taxpayer. (I agree that BP's liability cap ought to be big enough that they really feel some pain; Exxon-Mobil dragged the Exxon Valdez settlement out for 20 years, and only the lawyers made any money.) Sadly, most of the price will actually be borne by people who live along the Gulf Coast. Given the behavior of Big Oil in the Exxon Valdez case, and the behavior of the US Government after Hurricane Katrina, folks on the Gulf are going to be the real losers in this.

Yeah, we ought to get out of our cars, and we ought to consume less. I bought a house within a couple of miles of my workplace (in Atlanta, a city of 5 million people), so I do walk to work. Yeah, it makes me feel holy sometimes, but that's mostly BS, because the real reason I walk is that I love to walk and hate sitting in traffic. Besides, I drive halfway across the country from time to time just for fun, and I live in an air-conditioned house, and I buy plane tickets, and my garbage can is just about as full of plastic crap as my neighbors' trashcans are.

Unfortunately, for a naturally conservative person like me, the only real solutions to issues of energy/environment/climate change do require the intervention of government. Only government can control zoning and the design of our highway and rail systems, and only government can design tax systems that reward innovation and penalize waste. I'm old enough to remember how the car companies insisted that seat belts wouldn't work, that no one would wear them, and that they were too expensive. A mandatory seat belt in a car I bought in 1977 saved my life about a year later. And we might learn something from those African countries that have banned plastic bags, because of the damage these do to the environment, both in production and in disposal.

Well, enough. Thanks to all y'all for the things you've written, for reading this (I don't know why, but I feel better), and for whatever you have to say down the line...