Matthew Yglesias » Endgame

Jul 31st, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Endgame

Friday!

— The way the world works, I bet climate change legislation would be having an easier time were the northeastern US not experiencing an unusually cool summer.

— A vibrant US train industry could employ more people than current work in cars.

— Dana Milbank is a very serious journalist not like that punk Nico Pitney.

— “Cash for Clunkers” is a total mess.

— World fisheries on the brink of collapse but it’s not too late to save ‘em.

Song of the day is “William” by LoveLikeFire; note that in addition to heartbreak the video offers important urbanist themes.

Comments
36

36 Responses to “Endgame”

Petey Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 6:22 pm
“A vibrant US train industry could employ more people than current work in cars.”

Look, I know homelessness is a real issue, but I still don’t think many people actually work in cars…
TRIATHLON Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 6:34 pm
AUGUST

(August According to Wikipedia)

Now, you can look up everything concerning August the month on (www.wikipedia.com), but the gist of it is it was named in honor of the Roman Emperor, Augustus in (8) BC, Eight year Before the Birth of Christ, because several of the most significant events in his rise to power, it’s the (8th) eight month of the Gregorian Calendar, yes there are other calendars, if you go by the Deist Good Book, Noah had at least two of everything, but to continue, August’s flower is the gladiolus or poppy, and its birthstone is the peridot. But the most important thing about August is that it has (31) Thirty-One Days of Annual Migration, Vacation and Party Time!!!

(OU-LA-LA)

Now Peter Lavelle of (WWW.RussiaToday.Com) Untimely Thoughts, will pack up his two dogs, bred unknown and names unknown to join the migration to Moscow by the Sea, (Black Sea), and Alexey Sazonov, “With Words We Govern Men” – Disraeli, will like all good Windy City Democrats, migrate across the Wisconsin line into Cheese Head County, to drink Blatz Milwaukee’s Finniest Beer, at the Dells or to Lake Luzerne, The Yiddish (NYC) New York City, Jews will be in Saratoga, the rest of (NYC) will be in the (50F/10C) Fifty-Degrees Fahrenheit/Ten-Degrees Celsius water of Lake George, or make Vermont very happy as New York Plates appear and traffic violations multiply, you thing of Jay Walking you got a ticket, for the British a ticket is a summons or a traffic violation report but it all adds up to the same thing revenue, coming in. Now the entire North of Europe Moves into the South of Europe, the well to do French vacation in the Seychelles Islands, which is a Sailors dream come true as those French OU-LA-LA, De la beauté des femmes de Paris (The Beautiful Women of Paris), sunbathe in their birthday suits, the one that their mothers gave them at birth, naked as a jay bird. The British, make a mad dash for Greece, or the beaches of Brazil, and then the (ZONERS), the entire state of Arizona, packs up and moves lock stock and barrel to the (DRY COUNTY BEACHS) of San Diego, and Oklahoma, will its OK! Well you can just head on over to Claremore, Oklahoma the hometown of Will Rodgers, and as old Will said, (We got a lake that a fish would be proud to call home, every fish gets a room and bath. We will take good care of “em, we won’t catch many of “em, most of our folks are too lazy to fish) and you know the Department of Commerce, Fisheries Department makes sure that lake has fish.

(Don’t Bother Me I’m Fishing)

Now about the only thing that ruins the Dog Days of August is the idea that the (DC/544) Congressional Criminals, will be showing up, in their so called Home State, with their usually well you know I am just one of you, and I feel your pain. Which is all fine and good but us people back here on Main St. are not getting paid by Lobbyist from Wall St., and it seems that more is getting done for the boys at the (NYSE/NYC) New York Stock Exchange, New York City than, and as Will Rodgers, said, (Congress), (Putting a lobbyist out of business is like a hired man trying to fire his boss), it seeks like all the Pork is going to Wall St., and (IOU’s) are going to Main St. Now, the boys in (DC) District of Clowns say were not in a depression, and you got to agree with them on that one were not depressed were as mad as Hell, nothing has changed in (8) eight decades, since Will Rogers wrote (80) eighty year ago, (The world ain’t going to be saved by nobody’s scheme. It’s fellows with schemes that gout us into this mess. Plans can get you into things, but you got to work your way out.) The problem with today is the (DC/544) were all born with silver spoons in their mouths, never did a lick a work in their entire life time, and have been living off the dole of Wall St., Lobbyist, they don’t know the value of an honest days work and nobody knows what the value of a dollar really is but more and more are being printed pretty soon there will be more dollar than nickels, and the question then will be which is the plug nickel. If the boys are going to just show up with a smile and a handshake with the usually pack of lies, about how hard their working for their beloved home state, and no pork out of the pork barrel, don’t bother me boy I’m Fishing!

RECOMMENDED READING

(1) The Wit & Wisdom of Will Rogers, edited by Bryan Sterling, Metro Books, New York.

(2) Will Rogers World, Bryan B. Sterling & Frances N. Sterling, M. Evans and Company, New York.

(3) The Quotable Will Rogers, Joseph H. Carter, Foreword by Larry Gatlin, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Salt Lake City

(4) Will Rodgers Greatest Hits: Wit & Wisdom of the Cowboy Philosopher (CD) Compact Disk, ($19.95/€14.11), Nineteen-ninety five Empire Dollars/Fourteen-Point-Eleven-Euros.

(5) David Mauk, (12) Twelve Months, August, (2008) (CD) Compact Disk

(6) (www.wikipedia.com)

TRIATHLON
tomj Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 6:38 pm
This is the second blog linking to the “Cash for Clunkers” article. The link text indicates that the program is messed up, but the article says it is a huge success.

What is up with that?
Carl Shulman Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
“A vibrant US train industry could employ more people than current work in cars.”
And this is a good thing? We should want more labor productivity, not less.
bobbo Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
OTOH, it is 105 in Seattle.
RTG Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Carl Shulman,
More employment doesn’t necessarily mean lower productivity if more benefits are being created (and/or lower external costs), and there’s plenty of reasons this would be the case in a “vibrant” train industry. I do agree that simply advertising that a switch would mean more jobs is unfortunate and sloppy thinking as, ceteris paribus, needing more people to produce the same good (functionally) is a bad thing.
DTM Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:24 pm
“Cash for Clunkers” is a total mess.

I’m amused to see Matt relying on The Economist for this proposition.

In fact, according to Pelosi, “the cars purchased under the program were much more fuel-efficient than what the bill requires.” Assuming that is true, that answers the primary environmental objection in that article (courtesy of Brad Plumer). The fact that the program also depleted its funding almost immediately demonstrates that it is a very quick form of stimulus. That is a win-win, and it deserves the extra funding the House approved (with the Senate likely to follow).
DTM Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:27 pm
At The Infrastructurist, I think it is taken as a background fact that increasing passenger rail traffic would result in large net economic gains.
Rob Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Shorter Economist:”Look at Keynesian economics working! Be Aghast! Think of the tax cuts this could have funded!”
Hector Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Re: World fisheries on the brink of collapse but it’s not too late to save ‘em.

Yup, this is a pretty major problem, and I am annoyed that President Obama has not given it more attention. If anyone wants to reduce their impact on global fisheries, these are some of the few species that can be sustainably harvested and/or sustainably farmed on a commercial scale. (It’s a pretty short list- and you should double check these yourself).

-squid
-tilapia
-catfish
-carp
-scallops
-oysters
-mussels

and some others too. Pollock is still doing OK I think, for the time being, although who’s to say for the future.
tinisoli Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Hector,
That list isn’t bad, but it’s not very specific. Those are all generic names that encompass anywhere from dozens to hundreds of distinct species. And that’s part of the problem that consumers face. As nice as it is to put together lists and wallet cards that people can consult when they’re at a fish market or restaurant, we rarely know enough or have enough proof that something really is what the waiter or the fishmonger says it is. And even if one can recognize the flesh of tuna, for example, it’s really hard to know that it’s bigeye rather than bluefin just by looking at the steaks. And even then, how do we know where it came from or how it was caught? That’s one good argument for going easy on wild-caught species for a while. With farmed seafoods, it’s much easier to trust that the package isn’t lying.
Just Karl Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 8:43 pm
With regard to fisheries, the big issue over the next year will involve the Federally Managed Snapper/Grouper complex. Fishing mortality rates of red snapper are extremely high for the undersized fish thrown back into the water. The South Atlantic Fisheries Management council has found that red snapper are being severely overfished and have been since the 1970s. This finding will lead to regulations that close the red snapper fishery for both commercial AND recreational fishermen and prohibit using any gear or fishing in any waters that may contain red snapper. These regulations will cover basically all offshore bottom fishing in the SE United States; a multi-billion industry in Florida alone. Both grouper and snapper are about to disappear from restaurant menus. It will be very interesting to see how it all works out.

Hector

Your list omits the two most important farmed species:
shrimp
salmon
tinisoli Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Yeah, the snapper thing is huge in the southeast. But snapper (whether L. campechanus or others) will come from elsewhere in the meantime. And as usual, restaurants will just serve tilapia and they’ll call it snapper or whatever they want to. It’s still way too easy to dupe people.
eric k Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I’m assuming that Matt’s total mess link title was sarcasm…
Diana Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:12 pm
There’s a iphone app that tells you what fishes are sustainable, from some foundation in California…..my own opinion is, the way the world works, if we were causing global cooling we’d get a lot more alarm. We are a tropical species, after all, and therefore everyone loves summer. If our carbon were bringing on a new ice age, you’d see a lot more fear.
Hector Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Re: Your list omits the two most important farmed species:
shrimp
salmon

I said ’sustainably farmed’. I don’t really want to get into this can of worms, but suffice it to say there is considerable controversy about the impact of shrimp and salmon farming on the environment. Salmon appear to be pretty bad- many people say the same about shrimp farming, although I did take a glance at the literature a few months ago and it appears to be something of an open question just how much the effluents from shrimp farming harm the environment.

Being that shrimp and salmon both tend to eat at high trophic level, they also place heavy demand on fisheries (particularly the South American anchovy fisheries) to supply fish meal for their feed. For that reason I don’t think they can be seen as much of a solution to the global fisheries crisis.
Hector Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Re: Hector,
That list isn’t bad, but it’s not very specific.

Tinisoli,

Yes, I’m not a fisheries biologist, just a concerned layman with some interest in fish raising. For details you should consult an actual fisheries biologist, or one of the organizations out there that does this sort of thing.

Personally when I’m at the grocery store I stick mostly to tilapia and pollock (those are inexpensive as well as supposedly fairly sustainable). Most mollusks are a good choice too- scallops, oysters, and I think mussels can be raised fairly sustainably, particularly since they’re filter feeders that eat largely algal and plant matter. Of course if they are wild caught then, as you point out, it’s much harder to tell.

I actually knew a guy once, in New England, who raised his own fish- catfish in 55 gallon barrels of water.
Mattyoung Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Somebody buy Yglesias a train set.
Sam M Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 10:56 pm
It’s stupid when people use cool weather to support their global warming denialism.

But it’s smart when they use a strong hurricane to support their global warming alarmism.
hum Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 12:33 am
It’s stupid when people use cool weather to support their global warming denialism.
But it’s smart when they use a strong hurricane to support their global warming alarmism.

You might have a cutting point there, if it weren’t for this thing called science, which overwhelmingly supports the thesis that global warming is real (and will result in, inter alia, stronger hurricanes).
Paludicola Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 12:46 am
The temperatures might be unusually cool, but it’s very damned humid. I demand a tax credit for power used to operate fans!
mim Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 12:58 am
And while the Northeast is having an unusually cool (and wet) summer, the Pacific Northwest is sweltering. Now if Seattle were were a metropolis on the scale of New York, what would people say?
Max424 Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 1:32 am
Good tune. Cool video. I checked out several other tunes. I liked the band’s sound. A lotta voice in that girl as well.

As for the little fishies in sea, I just wanna say one word, plastics. One word…plastics.

Ok. Two words. Pollution and overfishing. The whole I idea is to survive long enough for Global Warming to destroys us. At this unsustainable rate of ecological degradation, we are not going to see that day.
tomj Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 2:27 am
Relax everyone, Seattle is back to just slightly hotter than normal. On Wednesday the official temperature was 103. That is two degrees hotter than the previous all time high, set in 1941 and 1994. Hot weather is so rare in Seattle that almost nobody has air conditioning. I guess the benefit to that is that we never suffer brown-outs in hot weather, although Comcast was very flaky. Another feature of very hot weather in Seattle is that it requires very dry conditions. At the peak temperature, the relative humidity dropped to to about 25%.
biggity Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 4:38 am
In regards to the cash for clunkers…
Won’t the money spent on this program will keep dealerships alive? People employed? I thought Keysian economics called for money pumped into the economy during downtimes even if you had to pay people to dig ditches and fill them up again. We can still spend other money on mass transit
bob h Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 6:53 am
The NE Summer is unusually cool, but the climate change trend is manifesting itself in unusual wetness. But how you would communicate this in a nation where Birtherism is rampant and many people don’t know Medicare is a government program I don’t know.
tinisoli Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 8:26 am
Tinisoli,
Yes, I’m not a fisheries biologist, just a concerned layman with some interest in fish raising. For details you should consult an actual fisheries biologist, or one of the organizations out there that does this sort of thing.

Hector, I have 4-5 years of experience in fisheries biology, and my wife works for just such an organization. Hence my critical comments.
Don Williams Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 9:12 am
There has been some discussion among meterologists that the unusually cool weather on the East Coast was triggered by a volcano eruption in Siberia — a micro-nuclear winter caused by fine ash in the upper atmosphere. Of course, deceitful shitheads like Drudge will never mention that.

http://www.fox8.com/wjw-scott-sabol-weather-column7,0,4905013.story
Just Karl Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 10:39 am
Being that shrimp and salmon both tend to eat at high trophic level, they also place heavy demand on fisheries (particularly the South American anchovy fisheries) to supply fish meal for their feed. For that reason I don’t think they can be seen as much of a solution to the global fisheries crisis.

There’s lots of research being conducted on replacement of fish oil and fish meal in aquaculture feeds. Unfortunately, though it seems as if growth rate and survival both suffer with 100% soy meal and chicken meal replacements. Some interesting research with shrimp is being conducted in greenwater or bio-floc systems which use 100% replacement water with zero effluent.

In any case, anchovies and herring are very short lived fishes, therefore they can be sustainably harvested at much higher levels than long lived fish like snapper or grouper.
Hector Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 10:46 am
Tinisoli,

Wonderful- then I should be asking you for advice. Thanks for your critical comments. What can you tell me about sustainable fisheries, going down to species and country if possible?

Just Karl,

I agree that anchovies and herring can be harvested at high levels. It remains to be seeb though whether they can support the kind of harvest we are doing right now. And if we move to _more_ cultivation of shrimp and salmon then the pressure on anchovy fisheries will increase even further. Also, the anchovy fishery is affected by short-term climate fluctuations like El Nino. The Peruvian anchvy fishery collapsed temporarily once before, in the early 1970s, for uncertain reasons but possibly due to El Nino (Tinisoli, correct me if I’m wrong).

Believe me, I would be delighted if the Peruvian anchovy fishery turns out to be indestructible.

Apparently there is some debate about how bad the shrimp effluent really is for the environment- when I did a literature search earlier this year it seems like there is a lot of speculation but less hard data. Do you have any good papers I can look at?
Just Karl Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 11:05 am
Shrimp aquaculture was really bad in the 90s in places like Ecuador. 1,000s of acres of mangroves were destroyed to build shrimp ponds. Then, many different ponds were located along the same tributaries that fed the estuaries. Effluent from one pond was the inflow of the next pond. There were tremendous disease issues and cross contamination.

More recently, our imported shrimp comes from places like Vietnam and China. Who knows what kind of environmental damage they are doing? I have seen some reports of human rights violations in the processing plants and that sort of thing. I’ve also seen studies that show high levels of toxins in aquaculture species from Asia. The US definitely needs more robust testing of imported food items. Testing would not only help improve the quality of our food but could also be used to verify and label exactly which species we’re eating.

The Global Aquaculture Alliance is an organization dedicated to sustainable aquaculture. They might have the sort of info you are looking for.
tinisoli Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Wonderful- then I should be asking you for advice. Thanks for your critical comments. What can you tell me about sustainable fisheries, going down to species and country if possible?

Hector, there are more efficient ways of describing what’s going on in sustainable fisheries than getting into it here. Try a bookstore, or the library. In general, though, I think it would be good if we diversified and targeted lower trophic levels for a while, so that maybe the large pelagics that have been decimated (bluefin tuna, various sharks, marlin) might recover, not to mention groundfish like Atl. cod and monkfish. (Someone recently wrote a book on this very subject, though the title escapes me. “Bottom Feeders” might be it.) It’s true that the Peruvian anchovy fishery collapsed when an El Niño disrupted the merging currents that make that fishery so prolific, but Just Karl is right that short-lived species in lower trophic levels are much harder to wipe out and much quicker to recover. Herring, sardines, and anchovies should be with us forever, unless climate change or something other than overfishing wipes them out. That being said, there are places where fishing for herring is of great concern because of its impact on non-target species and its impact on species that are being deprived of the herring they need. This is a big concern of fishermen in New England, where the recovery of haddock (very promising) and cod (just starting) is very dependent on the presence of herring, a major prey species of those and other groundfish. Herring trawls can also suck up tons of juvenile haddock, meaning a great haddock year class might be decimated without anyone really knowing it. Midwater trawling also kills whales every once in a while, which really sucks. Personally, I think bottom trawling ought to be phased out. Too much destruction to the benthic habitat, and bottom trawl fisheries have been hammered for so long. Bottom longlining (a.k.a. tub trawling) is much more precise in terms of catching target species and avoiding non-target/protected species. Pelagic longlining needs to go away for a while. Way too much bycatch, and way too hard on long-lived pelagics that are slow to mature and slow to recover (various sharks, billfishes, tunas). Fisheries ought to be divvied up among organized sectors, which is how they’re doing it on Cape Cod now. The idea is, stop pretending that the pie is endless, and instead divvy up a known sustainable biomass and cap each slice for the year. That way guys can just go out and get what is “theirs”——more like harvesting than hunting——and there’s less pressure to go fishing when the weather is awful and less confusion over days-at-sea regulations. I’m all for aquaculture as long as the effluent issues are dealt with. Like Just Karl said, there are promising shrimp farm techniques that don’t rely on fish protein and don’t let shrimp poop flood out into natural systems. Meanwhile, there’s not much to complain about with catfish, barramundi, and trout farming. Salmon farming is pretty dirty, and I prefer to support wild salmon fisheries because salmon are so important to those ecosystems. For example, Pacific salmon species are huge contributors of nutrients to Pacific NW forests. They go upstream, spawn, and die, and the nutrients leach out into the surrounding land, especially when bears haul up the carcasses. Salmon fishing isn’t very dirty, in terms of bycatch, and with good regulations salmon stocks can be well managed. I must say, though, that I like the fattiness of farmed Atlantic salmon…
Hector Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Hi Tinisoli,

Yes, I have done some reading about this, so I’m familiar with most of the points you make above. It’s good to hear your opinion as a fisheries biologist though.

I think that ultimately fishing at lower trophic levels is going to be an important part of the solution.

Regarding the Atlantic cod, do they know yet why the recovery has stalled? I heard a talk a few months ago by someone (the name escapes me) who was speculating that some smaller fish that the cod used to feed on, capelin I think, have increased their numbers and prey on cod young and have suppressed their population.

I’ve also heard a talk on someone trying to study the effect of salmon on providing nutrients to the Pacific NW rivers and lakes. He was dumping salmon out of helicopters as part of his research, which was pretty amusing. If I recall correctly he was arguing that the major nutrient contribution is actually the salmon producing waste matter while they are alive, more than the dead bodies decaying.
tinisoli Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I think the cod recovery has been slow because they were still hitting them pretty hard, even with scaled back fishing. Capelin is part of their diet, yeah. In the early nineties, people thought the capelin were scarce, and thus the cod were suffering. It’s been interesting to see the cod evolving to reproduce at a smaller size, in response to the intense fishing pressure over the last couple of decades (if not centuries). Of course, creationists will probably just say this is God’s work, not any evidence of evolution. Because evolution is a hoax.

Yeah, I remember that footage of the salmon getting tossed from the helicopter. Pretty funny. I don’t think salmon would release very much waste on their migration upstream, since they’re not really eating anything, they’re just swimming like hell and using up stores of fat to power their final voyage. My understanding is that it’s the decomposing carcasses that are so essential to the forests.
tom Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
I fail to see how the clunkers program couldn’t be considered a success both environmentally and economically. Average car cost in the US is $28,400 (google it). With $2 billion funded and an average clunker rebate of $4000 that’s $14 billion generated. Considering you HAVE to trade up in MPG it’s a big environmental improvement as well.
Jeffrey Davis Says:
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
The first studies on the link between AGW and hurricanes looked mainly at sea surface temps and found a likely increase in hurricanes. The most recent I’ve seen said that the decline in temperature gradients would diminish the number of storms. Storms are dependent on contrasting weather systems. We’ve now got the highest recorded sea surface temps and no hurricanes. So, a time series on 1 says fewer storms.

Matt Yglesias

Endgame

36 Responses to “Endgame”

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