According to today’s New York Times “it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.” The effort to use abundant and cheap coal in a cleaner gasified form and capture the resulting carbon may come too late to be useful in the push to decrease greenhouse gas emissions:
“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.
…only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.
May 30th, 2008
From the Center for the Study of the Presidency comes an intelligent and inspirational work, Declaration on Civility and Inclusive Leadership, setting an appropriately high bar for our nation’s leadership. It’s high time we stop being primarily Republicans and Democrats and become (deep breath, this is radical) Americans. As David Abshire and Max Kampelman write:
Civility does not require citizens to give up cherished beliefs or “dilute”
their convictions. Rather, it requires respect, listening, and trust when
interacting with those who hold differing viewpoints. Indeed, civility
and inclusive leadership have often been exercised in the American
experience as a means of moving to higher, common ground and
developing more creative approaches to realize shared aspirations.
May 28th, 2008
The HBO Miniseries John Adams features in it a conversation between Dr. Benjamin Rush and Mr. Adams that probably never happened. They were discussing who should be told of Abigail Adams death (since Dr. Rush apparently preceded Mrs. Adams in death, it’s safe to assume the conversation is fictitious).
Dr. Benjamin Rush: What about Mr. Jefferson. Surely he will wish to share your sorrow.
Adams: If I should receive a letter from him, I would not fail to answer.
Rush: Perhaps if you were to write yourself?
Adams: The man did me and my reputation great insult. He honored and salaried every villain he could find who was my enemy.
Rush: Well that is why it is you who must show the magnanimity of great minds. I always considered you and him the north and south poles of our revolution. Some talked some wrote and some fought to promote and establish it but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.
Thus, fictitiously of course, began the real letters between the “north and south poles” of our revolution that ended, poetically, in the death of Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson on the same day, the 4th of July, 50 years from the birth of the nation that they formed.
Adams wrote to Jefferson:
You and I have passed our lives in serious times and we have suffered ourselves to be the passive subjects of public discussion and reaped animosity and bitterness… But you and I ought not to die until we have explained ourselves to each other. As long as there is government, there will be differences of opinion… Whether you or I were right, posterity must judge, yet I ask of you who shall write the history of our revolution. Who can write it?
Who shall write the history of our revolution? Why, of course, it is no one but us.
Adams last words before his death were “Thomas Jefferson lives.”
Ironically, Jefferson had at that time already passed away.
But we live. The philosophical descendants of Jefferson and Adams are alive and well. The history of our revolution is still being written, this amazing experiment in “the course of human events.”
We write.
May 4th, 2008
Bill Moyers commentary on the week of political goings-on with the Reverend Wright media blitz contained in it both a finger-wag at politics as usual (hard not to love that) and the daggone best quote I’ve ever heard. Moyers:
Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this - this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men, no doubt, will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we’re paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burkhardt who said: “Beware the terrible simplifiers.”
May 2nd, 2008
