Tuesday, June 29, 2004
BACK IN THE USA
Oh, and I'm back from China ... exhausted. So, if I owe you some correspondence, please be patient.
Also, I note that at least one of my posts from China got corrupted as I was editing it. I'm trying to fix it now.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:22 AM
CASSINI PUTS ON THE BRAKES
About 24 hours from now, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will fire its small rocket engine for approximately 90 minutes to slow down so that Saturn's gravity can capture it into an orbit around the ringed giant. After almost seven years in a back-and-forth slingshot trajectory that used the gravity of other planets in the solar system as boosters, Cassini must put on the brakes or it will fly on past Saturn. Good luck to the folks at JPL during another nail-biter; the third this year after the two successful Mars Exploration Rover landings.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:12 AM
Friday, June 25, 2004
RANT
A friend forward an article about the impressive success of Operation Iron Saber, the military supression of Muqutada al Sadr's uprising. Meanwhile, scanning the news from Beijing, I see items documenting the Washington Democratic Party's all-but-official stamp of approval on Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. All of which led me to respond with the following to the group that received the original message about Iron Saber, one that includes many old friends of mine who will vote for John Kerry this year and call themselves Democrats:
Of course this success doesn't get good press coverage, because it's inconsistent with the pre-determined truth that Bush lied, the Iraq invasion was wrong, was carried out badly and represents a failure of US policy. Outside Fox and the vast right-wing AM radio conspiracy, the US press establishment has determined that Bush is a bad president and that all of his foreign and military policies are wrong and end badly. Thus no or minimal reporting of any success.
While I'm on my soap box, it occurred to me while I was scanning the news this morning that the Left has found its answer to Rush Limbaugh. For years the Left decried the fat slob Limbuagh who used the media to keep the Right on message. They said he was a liar and distorter who whipped up partisan fervor in the "echo chamber" of AM talk radio. Enter lying fat slob Michael Moore, who keeps the Left on message through the echo chamber of Hollywood's single-minded leftist power structure. The official sanction of Moore's "Farenheit 911" by the Democratic party establishment in Washington this week is shameful. Take a look at Christopher Hitchens' review of the movie at Arts & Letters Daily from yesterday (I think) to see just how grossly distorted the movie is. The Democratic Party's embrace of Moore will ensure that I never vote for a Democratic candidate for any major office. That may mean I never vote again, but so be it.
Oh, and while I'm at it, try entering "Iraq" and "al Quaida" into a search engine and limit your reading to major news sources from before the year 2000. Makes for very interesting reading. Such outlets as CNN, The NYT and the Guardian were full of reports of a real and on-going connection. Now, of course, this is all chalked up to having been misled by Chalabi. What utter partisan crap. It makes me ill.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 12:06 PM
Thursday, June 24, 2004
NASA REDUX
NASA's published its plan to reivent itself organizationally to carry out the missions with which it has been tasked by President Bush. I don't have time today to study this closely, but will be reading much more about it when I return home and probably offering comments here as I do. In the meantime, good luck, NASA!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 11:09 PM
LUTAS ON BURCH ON ENERGY
My post a couple of days ago about pollution in Beijing attracted a comment from regular reader TM Lutas. Lutas' point is that new energy sources will not cause an immediate shift from polluting hydrocarbon fuels, especially in the developing world, where price pressure from new energy sources developed in the First World will actually prolong the life of hydrocarbon-fueled internal combustion engines in cities like Beijing.
The offhand comment in my original post shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't understand Lutas' point. (Note to readers, keep scrolling and you'll see this:
I'm in Beijing this week, giving some lectures at petrochemical institutes and one of the law schools here.)
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that I'm deeply involved in many facets of China's energy economy. I'm well aware that China will be hooked on hydrocarbons for a long, long time. But that doesn't mean that things can't get much better here in China before the development of alternative energy sources slowly trickles down to the gas stations in Beijing and Shanghai. China has some very strong incentives to clean up the air here. Beijing is going to be showcased to the world during the 2008 Olympics and there are plenty of cosmopolitan Chinese people in influential positions that know that visitors from places like Europe, America and Australia will be shocked to encounter the thick grey smog that enshrouds the city most days.
Beyond that, the political and governmental leadership in Beijing is acutely aware of the strategic implications of China's growing dependence on imported oil. It is not beyond their power to adopt policies that could bend the market forces to which Lutas refers. I don't know whether that will happen, but it could. Hopefully, I'll have more time to write about that possibility when I return home from China in a couple of days.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:47 PM
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
BEIJING MORNING
It's a little clearer on this second morning of my current trip to Beijing; which means that the ever-present grey fog of particulates and smog is somewhat thinner than yesterday and I can almost see the mountains to the west and north of the city. Looking up from the horizon, I see blue sky as little as about 20 degrees above the hazy, indistinct darkening of the sky that marks the edge of the city. This is a fine clear June day in Beijing, which suffers mightily from the hydrocarbon foundation of its flourishing economy. Note to human race: Find new source of energy.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:16 PM
AMERICAN POWER -- AND ITS ABSENCE
Via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a sobering view of what a world without dominant, "unipolar" American global power might look like:
The prospect of an apolar world should frighten us a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the U.S. is to retreat from the role of global hegemon--its fragile self-belief dented by minor reversals--its critics must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony. The alternative to unpolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It may be a global vacuum of power. Be careful what you wish for.
Those who decry the exercise of American power in the world must answer the questions, "If not us, who?" and "If not thus, how?" The answers I hear from the America-haters don't convince me.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:10 PM
Monday, June 21, 2004
RUTAN SCORES
I got into Beijing last night just in time to follow Space Ship One's historic flight in real time. It looks like there was some kind of "control system" hiccup during the boost phase that cut a few tens of thousands of feet off the ultimate altitude, but the pilot still got his astronaut wings.
Mark my words, history will look back on this as a very important event.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:53 PM
BLOGGING FROM CHINA
I'm in Beijing this week, giving some lectures at petrochemical institutes and one of the law schools here.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:12 PM
Thursday, June 17, 2004
A DARK VIEW OF AMERICAN POWER
Salon has the text of a speech that new York University law professor Stephen Holmes recently gave to a group of intelligence professionals. Recommended reading for those, like me, who have supported the war in Iraq. Holmes gathers all the world's vectors of anti-Americanism together in one place for a single, long negative sigh. Interesting, also, because Holmes seems to have a pretty clear view expressed elsewhere that liberty is a value more fundamental than democracy, but throughout this talk, he keeps refering to "democracy" as the thing that America and all the world are contending over. In the end, he can't seem to bring himself to say that democracy can't succeed in the Muslim world because liberty cannot thrive there. But it seems he understands that.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:28 PM
OUR SATURN V ON PBS RADIO
The Saturn restoration project got a nice piece of coverage this morning on the Houston PBS radio station, KUHF.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:11 AM
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Victor David Hanson has a new, very lucid piece in the NRO on the war and the historical templates that explain it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:12 AM
Monday, June 14, 2004
HAYEK AND GAY MARRIAGE
Jonathan Rauch has a very thoughtful essay at Reason magazine about the Hayekian liberal analysis of the question of gay marriage. Very well worth reading.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:57 AM
Sunday, June 13, 2004
CHINESE ENERGY
For all the opening up that's gone on in China over the last 25 years, when the government's official news agency, Xinhua, says something, it's official. Here's a story at Xinhua documenting the growing energy shortage in China, brought about by the continuing growth of China's economy. Folks here in Houston, the energy capital of the world, have known this for a while. Thus my trip to Beijing next week...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:52 AM
Saturday, June 12, 2004
CASSINI SNAPS PHOEBE
Zooming into the Saturnian system, the Cassini probe passed within 1200 miles of Saturn's tiny moon Phoebe, snapping excellent pics along the way.:
With the Phoebe flyby accomplished, Cassini is on course for Saturn. A trajectory correction maneuver is scheduled for June 16. Cassini will conduct a critical 96-minute burn before going into orbit around Saturn on June 30 (July 1 Universal Time). During Cassini's planned four-year tour it will conduct 76 orbits around the Saturn system and execute 52 close encounters with seven of Saturn's 31 known moons.
Chalk up another one for the human race ... and its robots.
GB, THHOTA
posted by Greg 10:29 PM
RESTORING THE GIANT
I've been working on a project for a couple of months with very strong personal importance for me. For years I've been seeing the steady deterioration of the Saturn V moon rocket that is on display at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Clear Lake just south of Houston. Not long after the first Chinese manned space flight, I took some important clients to see the big bird down at JSC -- sort of a "welcome to the club of space-faring nations" trip. Well, the condition of the Saturn was so bad that I began making inquiries ... which led to this.
If you have any feeling for the great accomplishment that was the Apollo program -- humanity's first tentative steps off Earth -- then stop by this site and consider doing your part, however small, to preserve the glory of Apollo for future generations.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:51 PM
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
LIFE and DEATH
Glenn Reynolds writes about the politics and sentiment of anti-aging research. Take a look.
Meanwhile, despite Nancy Reagan joining the party of life, the George W. Bush family is still solidly in the death camp.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:56 AM
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
OIL WAR
My exchange with Steven Den Beste continues to generate comments elsewhere.
I need to figure out why I'm being so misunderstood. What TM Lutas writes at the link above isn't inconsistent with anything I've written or, it turns out believe and support. For the record, I don't think that a proper energy policy would seek to replace all oil use in one fell swoop with one or more alternative technologies. Also, although I think (as I said originally) that oil revenue is artificially invigorating Arab and Muslim civilization, I agree with TM Lutas that the wealth we would create with alternative energy sources would serve as a magnet to draw the Arab and Muslim world into the sphere of modernism and reason.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 11:30 AM
Sunday, June 06, 2004
THE REASONABLE AND UNREASONABLE LEFT
Here's a very witty essay from the New York Observer (via Arts and Letters Daily) comparing the religiosity of John Kerry (or rather, refreshing lack thereof) and that of George Bush. Then, there's this horror in the Village Voice:
Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
I guess we know one person who'll be rejoicing at the passing of Ronald Reagan.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:38 AM
Saturday, June 05, 2004
WAR UPDATE
Via Little Green Footballs, some good news. It looks like Al Sadr is beaten militarily (for now, at least):
"The Moqtada militia is militarily defeated. We have killed scores of them over the last few weeks, and that is in Najaf alone," Brigadier General Mark Hertling, one of the top US commanders in charge of Najaf, told AFP. "Over the past several days, Moqtada's militia has lost much of their stomach for fighting," he said, also declaring victory in the central cities of Kut, Diwaniyah and Karbala, dogged by fighting over the past two months. We have also destroyed their weapons stores and their offensive capability," he said. What remains of them, which is a very small force, will take advantage of the governor’s announcement to disperse if not disband."
But we're losing the war, so we won't hear too much about this.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:16 PM
AN "ENERGY MANHATTAN PROJECT" and the CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Back on May 1st, I wrote:
We've got years, perhaps decades, of violent conflict with the Islamic world ahead of us. Sooner or later we'll have to realize that the only thing that is making this necessary is our dependence on oil from the Middle East. The culture that is attempting to destroy us is on artificial life support through the money pumped into the Middle East for oil. If that stopped, our enemy would wither and die, or change.
I'll say it as clearly as I can: If we're at war -- and we are -- where is the "Manhattan Project"? Where are our leaders? Why isn't developing technologies that will free us from dependence on oil our number one priority as a civilization?
Steven Den Beste responded. First, he says:
To begin with, I don't think that this war was caused by our use of Arab petroleum. It would have happened eventually anyway.
I agree that there would have been conflict, but it would not have been so threatening to us in the modern world, because the Islamic fundamentalists would have had far less capability to harm us if we had not been pumping trillions of dollars into their otherwise worthless economies over the last few decades. Other than oil, the Arab world produces nothing of value for the rest of the world. But for oil, it would be poorer than sub-Saharan Africa. If we had realized what the oil embargoes of the 1970s really portended, and had become less dependent on Arab oil in the intervening decades, there would have been no Bin Laden family fortune for Osama to use as the seed money for Al Qaida. There would have been no Saudi royal wealth to finance the spread of Wahabism over the last 25 years. And when the conflict came, we would have been able to act in the ways we needed to without Europe cowering in fear that their lights will go off.
Den Beste then goes on to write about and point to other articles he’s written about why my suggestion of a "Manhattan Project" for energy independence is foolish. First, Den Beste made some assumptions – understandable given the historical analogy of the atomic bomb project I used – about what I meant. To be clear, I don’t think any one revolutionary new technology is likely to provide the solution to dependence on Arab oil in the near term. It’s possible, but not probable. (Here I disagree with Den Beste, who seems to think that revolutionary energy technologies aren’t even possible.)
Second, reading all the links De Beste provides to his previous writing about energy technology makes me think of Clarke’s First Law:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I’m not an engineer, but I play one in the courtroom. Seriously, I’ve spent a lot of time around scientists and engineers (admittedly, many of whom are willing to go out on a limb sometimes), and I find Den Beste’s attitude here to be insupportably conservative.
A couple of specific technical points. Den Beste’s treatment of solar energy deals almost entirely with solar-thermal energy, generated centrally and then stored and transmitted in very traditional ways. I think this is attacking a straw man in a number of ways. First, I have high confidence that photovoltaic technology will continue to advance at a high rate, since it is ultimately based on solid-state electronics and we have every reason to believe that enormous strides will be made in nanometer-scale solid-state electronics in the next twenty years even without a major input of new research funds. Second, Den Beste’s stress on transmission and voltage- and phase-change losses is valid only if we continue to depend entirely on our current architecture of energy generation and distribution. Such criticisms remind me of the kinds of things people said about computers before the PC and Internet revolutions. Finally, a lot of technical improvement in energy storage technology is possible well within the bounds of what we now know in terms of physics, chemistry and engineering. Batteries will get better, and flywheel storage is a frontier that is only now being investigated. When you combine these points, solar power has a much brighter future than Den Beste allows.
Some of Den Beste’s other criticisms smell of the straw man. He’s right that geothermal energy isn’t feasible for much of the world without major advances in drilling technology. But so what? It’s only one possible source. He writes off nuclear energy as politically infeasible. But politics can change; that’s what I’m suggesting that real political leadership should be aiming at. The irrational rejection of fission nuclear energy is a cultural and political problem; just what we’re facing in our conflict with the Islamic world. And yes, the horizon for fusion power seems to recede forever, but then we’ve been pursuing just a few avenues in that direction for 30 years. Real leadership would press the scientific and engineering worlds for new, more creative thinking that just might yield results. Folding our arms and harrumphing that it’s a pipe dream won’t get us anywhere.
Den Beste doesn’t even address the potential of ocean thermal gradient (OTG) electrical generation, something that we know can work but, yes, would require some large capital inputs. The technology is available and doesn’t require any "magic physics." Nothing more than new applications of the kinds of technology used in semi-submersible deep-water oil drilling would suffice to build OTG plants, and most of the human race lives near the ocean, so transmission losses can be tolerated, especially for a generation technology that literally requires no fuel at all.
Beyond this, I think Den Beste dismisses the possibility of fuel cell powered electric cars far too quickly. Yes, this is a technology that still need a lot of work, but it can be adapted without a huge change in infrastructure if the metallic-bound hydrogen storage technologies being developed now pan out. Whether they will or not is something we’ll only know if we try.
Now, I confess that all of this may sound strange coming from a minarchist libertarian such as myself. Den Beste’s best point is that none of the technological alternatives make economic sense under current market conditions. But this is so only because the Arabs don’t play by the rules of the modern, capitalist world. They use their oil as a weapon and the profits from it for criminal enterprises. In such circumstances, I believe state action is justified and, given the scale of the threat to our civilization, justified on a large scale.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:24 AM
Thursday, June 03, 2004
DEN BESTE ON MY CALL FOR AN ENERGY "MANHATTAN PROJECT"
Steven Den Beste has picked a comment I made in a post I made some time ago as the point of departure for a critique of the idea that we should set independence from Arab oil as a societal goal.
I have a lot of respect for Den Beste, and I'll be studying and then replying to what he's written (probably this weekend) in more depth. But in the meantime, I'll note that I think Steven has made an understandable assumption about what I meant when I said that we needed a "new Manhattan Project" to address the problem of dependence on Arab oil. Although I did have a technology program in mind, I did not have the idea in mind of a program to develop some one particular technology as a panacea for the problem. As I say, I'll write more about this soon.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:00 PM
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
A DATE WITH HISTORY
Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's privately funded and developed rocket plane Spaceship One will attempt to put the first non-governmental astronaut into space on June 21. This announcement marks a significant break from past policy for the Rutan/Allen team, which has previously refused to make announcements about their flight program before specific milestones are attempted. Given Rutan's typically taciturn character, I assume this means they have very high confidence of success. They should, since the Spaceship One system is dead-solid simple.
For the non-space-geeks, note that this will be a "space flight" in the technical sense that the vehicle will ballistically pop up out of the Earth's atmosphere, but it will not be an orbital flight. Rutan's bird doesn't have the power for that. But it's exceedingly cool, nevertheless! Unfortunately, I'll be out of the country when this happens...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:43 AM
