But only until Friday.

What can and cannot be regulated is in fact heavily regulated. In April 2007 there was a Supreme Court decision called Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which it was decided that the EPA did in fact have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, because they qualify as “polutants” under the Clean Air Act.

Actually, legally, the EPA now must regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, they still might not; the EPA could take years to draw up the rules, set the standards too low to have any effect, include the same sort of loopholes that we currently drive SUVs through in the fuel efficiency standards, or simply not enforce the resulting regulation.

But at least they’re currently asking for your feedback. They’ve put up a very official-looking page with the sassy title of Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act, wherein they announce their intention to respond to the court’s decision, and then provide about 600 more pages of material describing what the options might be. Both cars and “stationary sources” are potentially included, but the biggest issue is whether the EPA will set limits on the carbon emissions from newly manufactured cars, much as they already set fuel efficiency requirements. Then they ask for comments.

Anyway, it’s a mouthful. There’s a decent three-page factsheet, if you don’t want to get into the gory details of the full Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Also included on the web site are six pages of instructions on how to comment. Or, you can do this the easy way:

• If you’re one of those who believe that global warming is real and dangerous and that industry just won’t take care of it without government leadership, you can use the convenient form over at the We Campaign.
• On the other hand, if you take the recent financial meltdown as evidence that business does best when unfettered by communist regulations, and desire as StopTheACLU.com does to “tell them NO on their jobs killing, economy busting plans to stop non-existent global warming,” there’s another convenient form over at StopEPA.

But you better do it soon, because the comment period closes Nov. 28th. Go comment. I bet Chevron already has.

“Yeah, hi. I think we have a problem with last month’s bill. The amount due is, let’s see here, $140 million dollars.”

“What line is this, sir?”

“This is for Mars Phoenix. You know, the rover?”

“I’m sorry sir, I’m not a sports fan. Let me check on that for you; yes, that’s right, I’m showing an outstanding balance of $143,212,700. And nine cents.”

“Uh… that’s not right.”

“Is there a specific problem with your bill, sir?”

“Yes. Look. We signed up for 20,000 minutes per month of doppler ranging, and unlimited data, for $210,000 per month. Last month’s bill is obviously wrong.”

“Let me see… ah… It looks like you you went over your maximum download limit. Says here you downloaded close to eighty gigabytes last month. Wow, sir, what was all that data if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Images from Mars! We’re NASA, man. The Mars science program generates torrents of data.”

“I’m sorry sir, but we don’t support bittorrent over our network. It’s against your terms of service.”

“What? It’s not bittorrent, it’s… never mind– and what the fuck? How can you go over usage on an unlimited data plan?”

“That was the introductory offer. Unlimited for the first six months.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No sir. If you examine your contract…”

“Listen. Listen carefully. In June we switched all our Mars spacecraft to Verizon because you assured us would be cheaper than our Deep Space Network. Simplify operations, one easy bill to pay, family discounts for multiple spacecraft, that sort of thing.”

“We pride ourselves on operating the best network in the solar system, sir.”

“Then how can my bill be five hundred times what we signed up for?”

“Well, excess data is sent at SMS rates, sir.”

“SMS… rates?”

“Yes sir. I see have a package of 400 messages included in your monthly service. After that, messages are charged at 20 cents each.”

“Each?”

“Yes, 20 cents for each 160 characters.”

“For 160 characters… so… for eighty gigs… ah yes, I see now: you’re insane. Look, I’m a telecom engineer, I know it doesn’t cost that much to get data from mars, okay? Your SMS rates are simply made up. They have nothing to do with reality.”

“If you’ll examine the terms of service…”

“And if you’ll just examine– what? No. Fuck! We just lost the rovers! We had five bars and now the call’s been dropped entirely. What happened?”

“Just a moment sir… I’m checking on the connection… ah, it looks like your rover went over the crater rim. I’m sorry sir, but we won’t have any coverage in the Hellas Basin until August 2009.”

Why? Probably because it includes the narration,

So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.

Instead, ABC aired Chevron commercials during the debate.

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Call it confirmation bias, but I take this as a bad sign for the enviroment.

Are we completely powerless here? Probably not. One could take a moment to digg the story, and perhaps also to add your name to the letter that the We Campaign is sending to ABC. They’re hoping to get 100,000 signatures, which seems a very reasonable number. I wonder if they’re going to print them all out and hand deliver that stack of paper… and then smack someone with it. Sadly, this would probably not help them in their actual goal, which is to get the ad aired during next debate.

This may be difficult, because Chevron no doubt has an even bigger stack of paper.

Water shipped from Fiji is being advertised as environmentally friendly. Wow.

One sustainability blogger estimates that the total amount of water used to produce and deliver a single one liter bottle of imported water is 6.74 liters, and 250 grams of greenhouse gases are released.

The company claims that it intends to become carbon neutral, but not actually: they’re buying carbon offsets, which don’t actually reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere (This is because there is no international framework to incrementally reduce the total number of credits available.)

There’s really no way around the fact that shipping water across the ocean in small plastic bottles is just a much dumber idea than getting it locally through pipes.

I mean, c’mon people.

Most people don’t even know that the world’s academic journals exist, but this is the master record, the huge source that all those science blogs and mis-representative popular articles draw from. These research journals are the collective output of every professional researcher in the world, in all subjects — only you’re not allowed to read them.

If you don’t believe me, go to scholar.google.com and type the name of your favorite object of curiosity. Then click through. Chances are you’ll get an abstract, but not more, not for free. The international university community has access to the full text, but if you as a member of the public wish to read an article in the latest issue of Science, Nature, The Physical Review or The Journal of Conflict Resolution, or thousands of others, you have to actually physically go to the nearest major university library and hope that they have an access policy for the general public, then look through the paper stacks… wow.

The foremost discoveries of our age, in every field, are locked up by a small number of scientific publishers, latched fast by copyright.

Basically, this is because it is the business model of academic publishers to charge for access. This made sense, way back when. Handling the time-consuming, detail-oriented process of peer review, then printing up those thick journals on archival paper and distributing them world-wide is an expensive process. In the era of physical libraries, it seemed reasonable to ask interested parties to journey to their nearest university to find a copy. Because each university serves a large community, these subscriptions are expensive — tens of thousands of dollars per year, for each of thousands of journal titles. When academic publishers started moving their journals online, instead of changing their business model they chose to artificially limit access.

At a biology conference last week I attended a discussion mediated by a woman from the journal Nature. She wished to explore the concept of copyright in science. She wanted to have a discussion about whether it would make more sense for the paper author, the university, or the journal to retain copyright. She was looking for a new business model. Bravo.

Except she missed the point. This is not the MP3 war all over again. You can make a really good case for rights management for artists on the assumption that they have to get paid at some point during the creation and distribution of their work. Even if musicians choose distribute their music for free, it’s still reasonable to consider it theirs in the sense that no one can use their song in a car commercial without permission. Copyright on a song still makes sense in the modern era, but academic and scientific research is not at all like music production. To begin with, it would be really, really hard to fund your research through sales of the resulting technical papers! All this research is also presumably performed for the benefit of all humanity, hence it actually becomes more valuable as it is redistributed.

My argument is that copyright as we understand it simply does not apply to communications of academic research. Copyright is a construction designed to forward the broader interests of society by providing incentives for creation, but it assumes that a) the creators can make some sort of living from selling their product and b) no real harm comes to humanity if those without money are denied access. Given that these assumptions are completely wrong for academic and scientific research, copyright is a total lose for scholarship.

This is the argument I made to the editor from Nature.

“It costs money to run a journal,” she pointed out. She’s right. It’s a lot of work to edit a peer-reviewed publication.

“The Public Library of Science manages to fund itself on page fees and philanthropic grants,” I replied. PLOS is a young open-access journal publisher, already well established with several high-profile bio and medical titles. They’re my heroes, an existence proof of the viability of open publishing. (I was handing out home-made “I heart PLOS” stickers at the conference. Nature Girl politely declined to wear one.)

“Yes, and we’re moving toward that model,” she said, “But who should control access to the redistribution rights? For example, if someone takes a paper and republishes it in a book and sells the book, should the author get a cut?”

“What do you think would be best for science?” I asked.

“Well, I think that we at Nature have always been devoted to the scientific community…”

“No, really, what do you think is best?”

She seemed suddenly confused. “You mean me, as a person?”

“Yes. What do you think is actually best for humanity here?”

Pause.

“I don’t know.”

I encouraged her to think about it.

In his talk, and in his new book What Happened, McClellan describes a shift in Washington culture over the last few decades, where national interest has given way to “a game of who’s up and who’s down,” a culture of “permanent campaign,” where “governing becomes an offshoot of campaigning.” He describes Clinton and Bush Senior as sensitive to and constrained by the same pressure, and says that this culture of “permanent campaign” has gradually been getting worse over the past few decades, to the point where it is now a corrupting factor to all who work in Washington.

I don’t think any White House since Nixon has truly learned the lessons of Watergate. … It has become about which side can best manipulate the narrative to their advantage. … Deliberation and compromise get pushed further and further down on the list. People like Karl Rove didn’t create the permanent campaign. The permanent campaign created people like Karl Rove.

I’m not convinced that the “permanent campaign” is in any way a new feature of politics, given that the people in power seem to have been trying to stay that way throughout history. A 2007 Washington Post article takes the same position with respect to American politics specifically. However, these are surely strong words coming from someone whose job it was to shape our political narratives. Perhaps more illuminating were McClellan’s comments regarding the process of going to war in Iraq. Although it is by now clear that the administration was committed to an invasion long before there was any evidence to support the notion that Iraq had WMDs, McClellan’s description of the process of actually bringing the nation to war is the first direct testimony I’ve ever heard from someone who would know.

Was it deliberate to mislead? I don’t think the president’s top advisers were sitting in a room saying, ‘how do we mislead the American people?’ … But there was an effort to sell the war to the American people. It was sold like our education campaign, like tax cuts, like social security reform. It was ‘how do we make the strongest possible case?’ Forget about ‘how do we communicate the truth?’ … We took the nation to war by making it sound more urgent, more serious than it actually was. … It was all about shading.

He went on to describe President Bush’s role in the process,

The president is an instinctive leader. In some ways that’s admirable, in some ways that causes a lot of problems. … After the decision is made, he expects everyone else to follow in lock-step. … He had this belief, this idealistic and ambitious vision that we could go coercively into Iraw and create democracy and it would be the lynch-pin that would transform the Middle East … If he’d had a crystal ball, I don’t think he would have made that decision.

These are words from a man who publicly defended the administration’s decisions time and time again, a man who was formerly fiercely loyal to the president. McClellan’s own story is equally interesting. He says that people now forget that

Bush was a bipartisan and popular governor in Texas, who worked ‘across-the-aisle.’ This is why I was drawn to him. … [When I arrived in Washington] I got caught up in this destructive culture just like many others did. I am not saying this to remove blame from my doorstep. … Eventually I could no longer stand up and speak for the president because I kept getting undermined. … I trusted the administration. It was not until I began researching the book that I realized how misplaced my trust was. … It was hard to separate personal closeness with the president from his policy.

I find these remarks on power fascinating, and perhaps a valuable lesson in reality all on their own: the Bush administration is not stupid or evil. The problems appear to be ones of ideology, and a pronounced lack of commitment to candor and honesty. He finished by offering some suggestions, and his hopes for the future.

[The next press secretary] needs to have access to any meeting, any time. … I actually welcome a liberal media, if they’re fair, because they will be more skeptical of the government. And if they’re not fair, in this day and age it will be known. …I really want to see Washington change the way it governs forthe better. I want to see loyalty to the ideas of candor, transparency, and openness. Too often people think that loyalty to an individual office-holder overrides loyalty to the people. … We need to move beyond the philosophy that politics should be viewed as war.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s insane that the energy companies are still trying to convince us that using more fossil fuels is a good idea?

I suppose I first need to convince you that I’m not insane either. I give you the International Panel on Climate Change 4^th Assessment Report. Scientists and from over 100 countries got together to review the data, and they decided last summer that global warming is real, caused by humans, and will have major sucky consequences. I tend to believe their conclusions not only because of the enormous international agreement on this point, but because their entire review process is open, rigorous, and meticulously public. On the other hand, I feel that the oil companies have — how do I put this delicately? — the largest conflict of interest in human history, when it comes to climate change reporting.

I bet they’re going to tell us that cigarettes are good for us too. Marlboros go great with an SUV.

The oil may be more or less running out, but unfortunately there are still an awful lot of carbon-spewing fossil fuels left in the world. Estimating the exact amounts of natural gas and coal remaining are tricky, partially because the question is complex and partially because — surprise! — oil companies and governments are sitting on much of the required data, but an estimate based on US Energy Information Administration figures says that while there may be only 45 years of oil left, there are 72 years of natural gas and 252 years of coal still in the ground. And then there are the methyl hydrates, methane trapped in ice just under the sea floor, which may provide a few hundred more years of carbon emissions, if test drillings off of Japan validate the extraction technology.

Unfortunately, it’s fairly obvious that simply switching to new types of fossil fuels will be completely disastrous to the global climate. Yet it is clear, from current “energy” industry propaganda, that this is exactly what the oil companies intend to do.

Personally, I don’t get it. The oil is running out; massive new infrastructure and new technologies must be unavoidably developed in order to solve this problem. Why not do the right thing and use this as an opporunity to go sustainable? It might even be a winning move. The great thing about an unsustainable policy is that it can’t last forever — everyone has to go sustainable eventually, and someone is going to get there first.

Probably the reason is simple economics: these companies and governments already own the rights to huge reserves of natural gas (which normally comes with oil) and coal fields. There’s a lot of money to be made there. So I end up agreeing with my friend Sam’s conclusion: the energy companies are going to dig up and help us burn every last kilogram of fossil fuels and dump it all into the atmosphere while Fiji sinks, unless they are actually, decisively, perhaps physically stopped. My money says it’s going to take an all-out, international legislative assault to get them to do so. Requiring them to pay for carbon sequestration equivalent to every kilogram of fuel sold might also be an effective market-based solution.

Obviously, we can’t just instantly stop using fossil fuels. Equally obviously, we the worried but disenfranchised citizens of Earth are only too happy to buy, buy, and keep buying petroleum products. However, that can’t stop until we have alternatives. Judging by their PR campaigns, it seems painfully clear that the big Energy companies are actually just Oil companies, and that they are not going to give us any real options. Worse, the artificially low price of fossil fuel energy (no one is currently paying the externalities, remember) makes it difficult for the fledgling renewable energy sector to develop and compete.

But something has to be done, because I can’t see any reason for this industry to do the right thing all by itself. Put simply, the oil companies have never been your friends, and now they are less your friends than ever. To quote Wayne’s World, if they were an ice cream flavor, they’d be pralines and dick.