Coyote Blog

It is useful to have an algorithm for spending your travel (hotel, air) loyalty points.  Years ago I generally saved them for big vacation trips, usually to Europe or Hawaii.  These were the most expensive trips I took and it felt good to bring their cost down.

Two things have killed this algorithm for me.  One is that most major airlines don't have squat for points availability on popular Trans-Atlantic and Hawaiian routes (British Airways, I am looking at you).  The second change was that I started to read some of the web sites focused on travel points, for example the Points Guy.

There is good information on these sites, but a lot of the detailed strategies are way to arcane and time-consuming to bother with (e.g. Take your American Express points and convert them into gift certificates denominated in Ecuadorian currency, and then apply these for double credit... etc).  But the one takeaway I have had is to think of your points like a currency with a constantly varying exchange rate to dollars, and find the opportunities to spend the points at the best exchange rates.  TPG  maintains a monthly estimate of the value of each type of reward point.  Expected value is between 1 and 2 cents a point for most.

My new algorithm is to use my points when I am getting at least 2 cents for them, and hopefully more.   Take hotel points for example.  From time to time I will find that there is some squeeze in hotel rooms in a city I want to visit and the price of most hotels have risen 50-100% for these days.  This is a great time to use your points, particularly if you are locked into the dates and can't go on a cheaper date.  The reason for this is while the price in $ goes up, the price in points does not.  There may be some hotel chains that limit availability, but Starwood for example does not.  Let me give an example.

In several weeks I am taking my wife for a nice weekend to see her friends in Manhattan.  We are locked into the dates.  But it turns out that there is some UN event and all the hotel rates have skyrocketed even higher than usual NYC hotel rates.  It was just going to be too expensive to stay in a really special hotel.  Until I thought of the St. Regis.  It is not my first choice, but it is in Starwood and with the Starwood Amex card I have a zillion points.  Turns out for a basic room the nightly rate had gone all the way to $1500 (welcome to NY).  But the points cost for the same room was the same as it ever was, 35,000.  I was effectively getting 4.3 cents each for my points.  One could argue that since this was not my first choice, I should compare it to that alternative, but even with a cheaper rate at that hotel this was still 2.6 cents of savings for each point.

For American Airlines, I try to do the same thing.  Most transcontinental flights have no points availability, or have availability at really bad exchange rates (The one exception I have found is Cathay Pacific, which takes American points and tends to have a lot of award seats).  I increasingly use my points domestically.  When rates shoot up for a particular flight, there still may not be availability but sometimes the opportunities are there.

This comes to us from that bastion of freedom called Canada, where half of Americans wanted to run when Trump got elected.

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984**.

Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group.

The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate.

But it will re-open its investigation should it receive relevant new information from the public.

The complaint was filed by Ecojustice on behalf of six “prominent” Canadians, including former Ontario NDP leader and UN ambassador Stephen Lewis.

It accused three groups, Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute of making false and misleading claims about climate change, including that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

When it launched its complaint in December, 2015, Ecojustice told the National Observer it would press the Commissioner of Competition to refer the matter to the Attorney-General of Canada for “criminal charges against the denier groups”.

**I presume the author is referring to the general understanding of what 1984 was about, rather than Hillary Clinton's revisionist opinion that 1984 was a cautionary tale about the danger of not having enough respect for government authority figures.

Bizarre misreading: @HillaryClinton thinks the lesson of Orwell's 1984 is that you should trust experts, leaders and the press pic.twitter.com/7rPbrq11fV

— JamesHeartfield (@JamesHeartfield) September 12, 2017

Mickey Kaus wonders why the GOP elite is still "clinging to amnesty" for illegal immigrants.  I have the same thought every time I hear someone rail against "amensty":  What the f*ck else are we going to do?  Put 12 million people in jail for violating immigration laws?  Are we really talking about deporting 12 million people?  Do you have any idea how ugly this will be?  I don't want to commit a Godwin's Law violation, but rousting people -- whole families -- out of their homes at gunpoint and loading them up on trucks and trains to be shipped en mass somewhere else -- does this sound like any other 20th century event to you?  If you wanted to find some other precedent for this that was not the German shipping of Jews to Poland, what would even be close?

Looked at another way, the disastrous government and civil war in Syria has created, by UN estimates, 4 million refugees.  At a stroke, do Republicans really want to create 12 million refugees?  I get it that there is an ugly populist sentiment in a percentage of the Republican base to let Mexicans go hang, but the definition of responsible leadership in a Republic has got to include ignoring, or at least defusing, these sentiments.  But the current crop of Republican Presidential candidates seem no more willing to avoid this particular evil than Democratic candidates can seem to rise above ugly sentiments in their base to put the 1% richest people up against a wall.

I just finished reading Dan Brown's new novel Inferno.  Dan Brown novels tend to be love-it-or-hate-it things for me.  They are structured exactly like computer adventure games, with a series of quests and puzzles that lead to the next quest or puzzle which eventually reveal a larger story line and a final confrontation.  Just as this sort of adventure game can be engaging or tedious and repetitive, so too can be Dan Brown books.  The Da Vinci Code is excellent, the others are meh, just overly-convoluted snipe hunts.

So I had expected to either love or hate Inferno.  It turns out it was awful, but for an entirely unexpected reason:  for some insane reason, Dan Brown seems to have come under the spell of Paul Ehrlich doomsters, and has crafted a book with a deep fear of population growth that is right out of the 1970's.

Mild spoilers follow (mild meaning most of this is revealed in the first third of the book)

It is clear from almost the beginning of the book that Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, is on the trail of some sort of mad genius who is convinced that the Earth is headed for a horrible collapse due to human population growth.  This character is enamored of the medieval black death and believes that the best thing for modern man would be some sort of repetition of this kind of plague.

The exhausting part for any rational person trying to read this book is that it is clear that the author Brown mostly agrees with this character.  We know this because all of the arguments characters marshal against the villain are so lame and half-hearted.  In general, the tone of the response to this man is "yes, you are absolutely correct that human population growth will inevitably lead to a complete catastrophe but your idea of a plague is a bad solution."

By the end of the book, everyone formerly opposed to this scientist have come around to reluctantly agreeing with his point of view.  If you ever read Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6, where an environmental group tries to kill off most of the world's population, this is essentially the same plot written, incredibly, by an author that seems to agree with the basic idea.  If you are not convinced that Dan Brown himself agrees with the terrorist, I will also provide one more convincing piece of evidence -- though since it is a much bigger spoiler I will leave it for the end below the fold.  If you have read the book or don't intend to, skip below the fold and then come back.

This idea of catastrophic population growth is idiotic.  Accelerating population growth is a trend that is not a trend.

There is absolutely no trend towards out of control population growth.   In fact, the trends actually run in the opposite direction, with birth rates and population growth rates falling such that most demographers foresee an Earth stabilizing around 9-10 billion people and possibly falling in population after that.  Since Dan Brown uses senior UN officials in the book to agree that population growth will result in disaster, I will use UN figures.  These are from a 2005 UN population report.

First, population growth rates have been falling for decades and will continue to fall.  They are falling in every part of the world.

A cynic might argue that this is due to death and disease, but in fact birth rates are falling everywhere

This data is about 10 years old but Wikipedia summarizes the most recent UN data and shows this trend has continued (TFR is total fertility rate):

People focus on the amount the world population has increased over the last 60 years to produce shock numbers, but the real stunner is the drop in fertility rates -- nearly in half, which is really astounding.  I still have my treasured first edition of Ehrlich's Population Bomb.  It is hilarious reading, all the more so because he gets everything so wrong, yet the media still tends to take him seriously.

The recurring theme in Inferno is that man's greatest problem is that he has successfully tackled many diseases and thus increased life expectancy, and it is this longer life expectancy that will be the roots of mankind's Malthusian downfall.

However, exactly the opposite is true.  There is a ton of scientific work that says that longer life spans lead to lower fertility rates  (the other thing that most contributes to lower fertility rates is economic growth).  Here is a chart right out of the UN study linked above showing a clear inverse correlation between life expectancy and birth rates.   Correlation is not causation, but this is backed by a ton of other empirical evidence to support causation.

Wow.

There is no trend towards accelerating population growth -- the trend is in the opposite direction, to deceleration.  And folks who have underestimated man's ingenuity in feeding larger populations have always turned our to be wrong.  Ehrlich said there was no way --- absolutely no way -- India could feed an additional 200 million people by 1980.  Well, in 2013 it feeds an additional 800 million people to a better standard that the country was fed in Ehrlich's time.  Hell, we could probably feed an additional half billion more just by repealing laws that put a significant amount of America's food production into automotive fuels.

PostScript / Large spoiler and more discussion below the fold 

Continue reading ‘Trend That Is Not A Trend: Dan Brown is an Idiot Edition’ »

... was not the crisis management but Obama's throwing free speech under the bus.

I can live with poor crisis management.  I have been a part of enough to understand that things are different in real time than they look when monday-morning quarterbacking the events.  In particular, it can be very hard to get reliable data.  Sure, the correct data is all likely there, and when folks look back on events, that data will be very visible and folks will argue that better choices should have been made.

A great example of this is when historians sort through data to say that FDR missed (or purposely ignored, if you are of that revisionist school) clear evidence of the Japaneses surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.  Sure, the correct clues stand out like flashing lights to the historian, but to the contemporary they were buried in 10,000 ostensibly promising false leads.

In real time, good data is mixed in with a lot of bad data, and it takes some time -- or a unique individual -- to cut through the fog.  Clearly neither Obama nor Clinton were this individual, but we should not be surprised as our selection process for politicians is not really configured to find such a person, except by accident.

No, the problem I have with Benghazi is that when push came to political shove, the President threw free expression under the bus to protect himself.  I am a sort of city on the hill isolationist, who prefers as much as possible for the US to have influence overseas by setting a positive example spread through open communications and free trade.  In this model, there is nothing more important for a US President to do than to support and explain the values of individual liberty, such as free expression, to the world.

Instead, it is increasingly clear he blamed some Youtube video, an exercise in free expression, for the tragedy.  And not just in the first confused days, but five days later when he put Susan Rice on TV to parrot this narrative.  And when the Feds sent a team to arrest and imprison the video maker.  And days after the Rice interviews when Hillary parroted the same message at the funeral, and days after that when Obama spoke to the UN, mentioning the video 6 or 7 times.    Obama took to his bully pulpit and railed against free speech in front of a group of authoritarians who love to hear that message, and whose efforts to stifle speech have historically only been slowed by America's example and pressure.

I am increasingly convinced that the UN is really some kind of performance art rather than a serious attempt at global governance.  Why else would they select Robert Mugabe as ambassador of tourism?  Via Radley Balko

Good stuff from Roger Pilon at Cato:

It’s true that our Framers, unlike many others, especially more recently, did not focus their attention on rights. Instead, they focused on powers— and for good reason. Because we have an infinite number of rights, depending on how they’re defined, the Framers knew that they couldn’t possibly enumerate all of them. But they could enumerate the government’s powers, which they did. Thus, given that they wanted to create a limitedgovernment, leaving most of life to be lived freely in the private sector rather than through public programs of the kind we have today, the theory of the Constitution was simple and straightforward: where there is no power there is a right, belonging either to the states or to the people. The Tenth Amendment makes that crystal clear. Rights were thus implicit in the very idea of a government of limited powers. That’s the idea that’s altogether absent from the modern approach to constitutionalism—with its push for far reaching “active” government—about which more in a moment.

During the ratification debates in the states, however, opponents of the new Constitution, fearing that it gave the national government too much power, insisted that, as a condition of ratification, a bill of rights be added—for extra caution. But that raised a problem: by ordinary principles of legal reasoning, the failure to enumerate all of our rights, which again was impossible to do, would be construed as meaning that only those that were enumerated were meant to be protected. To address that problem, therefore, the Ninth Amendment was written, which reads: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Over the years, unfortunately, that amendment has been misunderstood  and largely ignored; but it was meant to make clear that the people “retained” a vast number of rights beyond those expressly enumerated in the document....

The idea, then, that our Constitution is terse and old and guarantees relatively few rights—a point Liptak draws from the authors of the article and the people he interviews—does not explain the decline in the document’s heuristic power abroad. Nor does “the commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century” explain its fall from favor. Rather, it’s the kindof rights our Constitution protects, and its strategy for protecting them, that distinguishes it from the constitutional trends of recent years. First, as Liptak notes, “we are an outlier in prohibiting government establishment of religion,” and we recognize the right to a speedy and public trial and the right to keep and bear arms. But second, and far more fundamentally, our Constitution is out of step in its failure to protect “entitlements” to governmentally “guaranteed” goods and services like education, housing, health care, and “periodic holidays with pay” (Article 24 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights). And right there, of course, is the great divide, and the heart of the matter.

here.

It's a wonder how, when over "97 percent to 98 percent" of scientific authorities accepted the Ptolomeic view of the solar system that we ever got past that.  Though I could certainly understand why in the current economy a die-hard Keynesian might be urging an appeal to authority rather than thinking for oneself.

When, by the way, did the children of the sixties not only lose, but reverse their anti-authoritarian streak?

Postscript:  I have always really hated the nose-counting approach to measuring the accuracy of a scientific hypothesis.  If we want to label something as anti-science, how about using straw polls of scientists as a substitute for fact-based arguments?

Yes indeed, the number of people in the newly made-up profession of "climate science" that are allowed by the UN control the content of the IPCC reports and whose funding is dependent on global warming being scary probably is very high.  The number of people in traditional scientific fields like physics, geology, chemistry, oceanography and meteorology who never-the-less study climate related topics that wholeheartedly are all-in for catastrophic man-made global warming theory would be very different

 Decide for yourself - see my video on global warming.  Am I anti-science?

Via JoNova:

Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.

“It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all”, said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. “It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration.”

Hmmm.  There is a big gap between thoughtful conservation and fetishism for the primitive.

Update:  By the way, the article says this is being driven by climate change already experienced in Bolivia.  I suppose it is possible that rainfall has changed, I don't have the numbers for Bolivia, but temperatures in the tropics have shown no trend up or down for decades.   Most of the warming the Earth has seen over the last 50 years (whatever the cause) has been in the Northern Hemisphere and in fact in the upper portions of the Northern Hemisphere.  Here are the temps for the tropics.   The spikes in 1998 and 2010 are El Ninos years.

From the WaPo

With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it's no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also "the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving.

The Mayans used to also cut the hearts out of living human beings as sacrifices to their gods, an apt metaphor for what the assembled UN delegates want to do to development and the world economy.

News from the United Nations:

Robert Orr, UN under secretary general for planning, said the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.

Hmm, that kind of confirms what critics have been saying for years, that the IPCC has nothing to do with science.  Because, you see, to my knowledge the scientists of the next IPCC have not even started their work, but the UN leadership has already determined what the report will say.  Which is consistent with their process in the last go around, where the UN political guys crafted the management summary first, and then circulated it to the scientific teams with instructions to adjust their sections of the report to fit the pre-existing conclusion.

In the same article, we get more of the "accelerating" nonsense:

He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun "that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers' siren call."

"The evidence shows us quite the opposite-- that we can't rest easy at all" as scientists agree that climate change "is happening in an accelerated way."

Its not even clear what the value of the first derivative is for climate change, or even if such a metric has any meaning in the complex climate system where regional trends can easily be going in opposite directions.  But anyone who can tell you that we know the second derivative, or even its sign, is totally full of crap.

Never (except perhaps with shark attack scares which come and go) have I seen such a classic case of observer bias.   Certain events occur in the tail ends of the normal distribution.  Suddenly everyone claims that these events are happening with more frequency, mainly because they get reported with more frequency. I reported on a great example of this from a supposedly scientific government report here, where researchers mistook improved measurement of certain events as a real underlying increase in the number of such events.  Another example here.

Of course, 95 percentile events can't be, by definition, happening more frequently.  The only thing that can happen is the normal distribution can have its standard deviation increase.  Similar to the second derivitive argument above, I am not a statistician, but my sense is that the odds that we could detect a standard deviation shift in the distribution of weather events using just a few years of highly imperfect data, even if such an underlying shift existed, is really  really low.

I make fun of homeopathy from time to time here, so I thought this was hilarious, via Megan McArdle.

Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.

'It was only a matter of time before these people got hold of the material that they needed to make these bombs,' said former UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, 'The world is a much more dangerous place with the advent of these Weapons of Mass Dilution.'

'A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,' said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, 'Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the 'walking suggestible'.'

The severity of the situation has already resulted in the New Age terror threat level being raised from 'lilac' to the more worrisome 'purple' aura. Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.

Speaking of making fun of homeopathy, I saw Penn and Teller in Phoenix on Friday.  Very enjoyable show.   I have a sense their Vegas show is more "adult," but their road show was appropriate for the whole family (unless you are really uptight and/or politically correct).

No, today's post is not on health care, but CO2 abatement.  Marlo Lewis looks at a new Harvard study, and concludes what I have been saying for years -- gas prices are going to have to be forced to $10 or more in this country before we even start making a dent in the Administrations or UN's CO2 abatement targets.   I obviously don't think it is justified based on my views on the climate sensitivity to CO2, but even if it were, let's not pretend it is somehow free.

From a BBC poll:

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.

International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

So everyone who ever lived before about 1990 were denied a fundamental human right.  I would rewrite this study either as "80% of people have a silly definition of human rights" or probably more correctly "100% of BBC poll authors do not know how to write a good poll question."

Via the Telegraph:

The American blogosphere is going increasingly "viral" about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a "driver's licence" should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The United Nations is showing similar interest in moving to eliminate free speech.

I called this one back in 2005.  This isn't the first attempt by the UN in particular to throttle free speech via licensing way back in 1985.

From a reader:

One contentious comma inserted two years ago into the United Nations road map for a new deal to fight global warming is again causing squabbles among delegates from the 193 nations in Copenhagen devising the pact.The comma was inserted on the first page, section 1 b (ii), of the so-called Bali Action Plan at the meeting on the Indonesian island in 2007 at the insistence of the U.S. It caused a debate that ran for two hours as the punctuation mark left open to interpretation the responsibilities of rich and poor nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions....

Delegates from the U.S. argued for the comma to be inserted so that "actions" by developing countries and not just support from industrialized nations, would be measurable, reportable and verifiable, or MRV in UN jargon.

"It took almost two hours to debate the comma," Quamrul Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi envoy who's negotiated climate issues since before the Rio Earth summit in 1992, said in an interview in Copenhagen. "One comma creates a lot of trouble."

Even with the comma, the clause is still argued over....

"The comma is a manifestation of a massive area of disagreement still among the parties," Havercamp of the Environmental Defense Fund said.

One of the great appeals of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in certain sectors is the fact that what it takes to fight the imagined threat  (reduced trade, reduced economic growth, government controls on the economy, populist hammering of energy companies, micro-controls on individual decision-making) are exactly the things the socialists wanted to do before their schtick became tired.  Global warming has become the back-door to state control, combining some exaggerated science with a lot of folks' uninformed desire to "do the right thing", to create a new vector for old objectives.

Today, 56 newspapers  are all allowing some global warming activist to take over their newspapers to run the same panicky plea.   Bruce McQuain picks up the story:

In reality, I've come to understand this isn't about "climate change", this is about the politics of income redistribution. I've spoken of it in the past. This has been a goal of the third-world debating club, also known as the UN, since it has come into existence. The IPCC is just a convenient vehicle on which to base their claims and put them forward to the industrialized countries for fulfillment. The underlying "science", like a wet paper box, is coming apart at the seams. And not a single mention in the editorial. But it becomes clear, the further you get into it, that it is about what I contend it is about:

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down "“ with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

If you were playing buzz word bingo with this paragraph you'd be at the prize table right now picking one out. It hits all of the favorite themes of income redistributionists. And its blatancy should scare you. This is about your wallet, your money and the rest of the world making a claim on it. This is the third world's dream come true.

I have to object somewhat to his last line.  This is the third world leader's dream come true, as I think most adults understand from past experience that aid like this gets siphoned off by the ruling regime.  What the Third World's people really need is what Southeast Asia and India and China have - real private investment making for real economic growth (to be fair, I think Bruce would accept this correction).

I thought this bit was hilarious:

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

Apparently we are supposed to be dazzled that 56 institutions that all, in unison, blindly cling to the same 150-year-old failed business model, hoping that some other group can be prevailed upon to bail them out, would actually think alike about some issue.  Amazing!

I just couldn't bear to post this at my climate site, which I really try to keep science-based.  Since this doesn't have even a sniff of science to it, I will post it here for your entertainment:  According to the UN, Global Warming Causes Prostitution

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

"Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

The Thin Green Line writes:

But other problems have such a straightforward solution the only question is, why haven't we implemented it already?So it is with the phone charger (H/T Mother Jones). How many old ones do you have kicking around in a drawer? If you're loyal to a particular phone, you may even have several identical chargers. Because they're electronic, you're also burdened with disposing of them properly lest they leach their toxins into some poor, unsuspecting landfill.

Not only that but chargers use a good bit more electricity than they need to and are vampires"”meaning they continue to draw power even when they're not, you know, charging.

Now imagine a world where not only did phone chargers use less energy, but they were universal, meaning any charger fit any phone. That would mean about 600 million fewer chargers each year stashed in drawers around the world and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 to 24 million tons a year"”not even to mention e-waste.

The UN's International Telecommunication Union has approved this universal dreamboat of a charger. It will use half as much energy on standby. Samsung, Nokia and Motorola have already agreed to use it. Of course, they're hemorrhaging business to BlackBerry and Apple...no word yet from those guys.

I wrote:

There are at least two problems with this.  The first is that consumers are all different.   A lot of cell phones (and other devices like my kindle) are standardizing on a mini-USB connection.  Should I use the UN's solution, which is likely inferior?  Why?  Most of the time I don't even travel with a charger, I plug the mini-USB into my computer to charge.  That way I only have 1 charger on the road, for my computer.  You want me to carry 2, in the name of having fewer chargers?   You might say, "well, I hadn't thought of this situation," and I would say, "that's the point - you can't, there are 6 billion of us individuals out there."

The second problem is innovation.  Who says that innovation won't demand a different type of connection in 2 years?  Do you really want your technology gated to some working group at the UN?  Go back in time and imagine the government locking in a standard on something.  We still would have 801.11a wireless only, or cars would still all have crank starts (but they would all turn the same direction!) or cars would all have the same size wheels.  If the UN had invented something 3 years ago, it would have been power only and not data.  Today, most cell phones have power connections and connectors that double as data ports.

There is always a technocratic urge in messy changing technology markets to swoop in and mandate a standard from above, even while the technology is still evolving.  The problem is that neither you nor anyone else knows everything.  Hayek described this information problem well but you make it abundantly clear on this site you have no familiarity with Hayek.  You extrapolate what seems to be a good solution from your narrow knowledge, but cause many of us to sub-optimize because you did not anticipate how I use my charger or what technology some cell phone manufacturer today may be developing that requires a different kind of charger standard.

This is a recurring post on Coyote Blog on Memorial Day, but I forgot this year so I will repost it on July 4.  Greetings this year from the Mother Country, from which I will be returning soon.  And let's give a big shout-out to the Dutch, who seldom get much love on this point, but the Dutch perhaps even more than the English really pioneered a lot of things that are important to us - e.g. capitalism, a republic, and tolerance.

Via TJIC:

Harvard plans to sharply reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in the
next eight years, Drew Faust, the university president, said.

The initial, short-term goal for the university will be to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from a 2006 baseline by
2016, Faust said yesterday in a statement.

In the winter of 1990, my Harvard-owned apartment had its heating fail.  I called the administration for weeks before anyone would show up to look at it.  By this time, I actually had ice on the inside of my window panes.  Walking into my freezing apartment, a maintenance guy placed a thermometer in the center of my room, and then just stood there staring at it for 5 minutes.  At this point he had not asked me about my problem, nor looked at anything remotely connected with the heating system.

He suddenly sprung into action, looked at the thermometer, and started to walk out of the room.  "Wait," I said.  "What is wrong?  Do you know how to fix it?"  The Harvard maintenance guy says "Your room is only 53 degrees -- by state law we don't have to do anything unless it is below 50.*"  And then he walked out, with me screaming at his back.  Only when I sent a letter to the University, copied to the fire marshal, explaining that all was well because I found the room stayed pretty warm if I kept the oven on "broil" 24 hours a day and left the oven door open all the time, did I get any action to fix my heating.

It is scary to think that a university so reluctant to spend any money on heating rooms even 20 years go now wants to reduce its energy use by 30%. 

Of course, we all know how these things work:  creative accounting.  The Enron guys were saints compared to the accounting games played in the carbon accounting and offset world.  Harvard will probably say that "Well, we were planning to build a massive coal-powered electricity plant right in the middle of Harvard Yard, and by cancelling the project, we have reduced our emissions 30% over what they would have been and therefore made our goal.  Don't laugh - the UN and EU are doing EXACTLY this every day.

* Note that I cannot remember the exact legal standard quoted to me, but I think it was 50.

Oh, those wacky guys on the UN "Human Rights" Council.  They are now looking to Saudi Arabia as a model for protection of individual rights:

The top U.N. rights body on Thursday passed a resolution proposed by
Islamic countries saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of
religions and urging governments to prohibit it.

The European Union said the text was one-sided because it primarily focused on Islam.

The U.N. Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Arab and other
Muslim countries, adopted the resolution on a 21-10 vote over the
opposition of Europe and Canada....

The resolution "urges states to take actions to prohibit the
dissemination ... of racist and xenophobic ideas" and material that
would incite to religious hatred. It also urges states to adopt laws
that would protect against hatred and discrimination stemming from
religious defamation.

Saudi Arabia said, "Maybe Islam is one of the most obvious victims of aggressions under the pretext of freedom of expression."

"It is regrettable that there are false translations and
interpretations of the freedom of expression," the Saudi delegation
told the council, adding that no culture should incite to religious
hatred by attacking sacred teachings.

Hat tip:  Yet another Weird SF Fan

Update:  I am kind of amazed the irony is lost on some folks, so I guess I need to be more explicit:  I found it depressing that the UN Human Rights Council is calling for limits on speech.

For quite a while, I have been arguing that cap-and-trade schemes are inferior to straight carbon taxes because of their susceptibility to rent-seeking and manipulation.  At the top of the list of problems is the carbon offset issue, the notion that someone can create and sell an offset to cap limits by reducing CO2 emissions in some novel way.  The offset products that exist to day are tremendously suspicious, as I wrote here and here.  In particular, the ability to resell the same emission reduction multiple times is a real danger.

The Guardian has an interesting look at the offsets being created by that bastion of good governance and management science, the United Nations.

The world's biggest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's clean
development mechanism (CDM), is run by the UN, administered by the
World Bank, and is intended to reduce emissions by rewarding developing
countries that invest in clean technologies. In fact, evidence is
accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the
guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is
handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations
and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects
they would have built anyway.

According to David Victor, a
leading carbon trading analyst at Stanford University in the US, as
many as two-thirds of the supposed "emission reduction" credits being
produced by the CDM from projects in developing countries are not
backed by real reductions in pollution. Those pollution cuts that have
been generated by the CDM, he argues, have often been achieved at a
stunningly high cost: billions of pounds could have been saved by
cutting the emissions through international funds, rather than through
the CDM's supposedly efficient market mechanism.

The key problem, as I have pointed out before, is how do you know the reduction is truly incremental?  How do you know that it would not have occured anyway:

The world's biggest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's clean
development mechanism (CDM), is run by the UN, administered by the
World Bank, and is intended to reduce emissions by rewarding developing
countries that invest in clean technologies. In fact, evidence is
accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the
guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is
handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations
and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects
they would have built anyway.

According to David Victor, a
leading carbon trading analyst at Stanford University in the US, as
many as two-thirds of the supposed "emission reduction" credits being
produced by the CDM from projects in developing countries are not
backed by real reductions in pollution. Those pollution cuts that have
been generated by the CDM, he argues, have often been achieved at a
stunningly high cost: billions of pounds could have been saved by
cutting the emissions through international funds, rather than through
the CDM's supposedly efficient market mechanism....

One glaring signal that many of the projects being approved by the
CDM's executive board are non-additional is that almost three-quarters
of projects were already complete at the time of approval. It would
seem clear that a project that is already built cannot need extra
income in order to be built.

LOL, yes that might be a good indicator something is amiss.  The other problem, beyond the staggering amount of outright corruption one would expect from any UN-operated enterprise, is this oddity:

Any type of technology other than nuclear power can apply for credits.
Even new coal plants, if these can be shown to be even a marginal
improvement upon existing plants, can receive offset income. A massive
4,000MW coal plant on the coast of Gujarat, India, is expected soon to
apply for CERs. The plant will spew into the atmosphere 26m tonnes of
CO2 per year for at least 25 years. It will be India's third - and the
world's 16th - largest source of CO2 emissions.

So nuclear plants, the one proven economic and scalable power technology that is free of CO2 emissions is the one technology that is excluded from the program?  But 4,000MW coal plants that can proves they are marginally more efficient than they might have been are A-OK?

The UN remains a caricature of itself.  I hadn't known this, but am not surprised:

In the 17 months since [the UN Human Rights Council's] inception, the body has passed 13 condemnations, 12 of them against Israel.

LOL.  I'm not a huge Israel fan (its socialist to a stupid degree and maintains what are effectively two-tiers of individual rights, for its Jewish and Arab residents) but this is absurd.  Apparently the Council has the same problems as the human rights commission it replaced:

The problems begin with the council's composition. Only 25 of its 47
members are classified as "free democracies," according to Freedom
House's ranking of civil liberties. Nine are classified as "not free."
Four -- China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- are ranked as the
"worst of the worst." These nations are responsible for repeated
violations of the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet
it is they who dominate the council, leading a powerful bloc of
predominantly Arab and African nations that consistently vote as a unit.

Its predecessor human rights commission played a central role in my guide to "how to spot a dictatorship."

Update: More here

These are the guys trying to take over the world economy in the name of environmentalism:

...But after a full week of attending plenary sessions and contact
groups I can see why the process can be frustrating. I sat in a session
about Carbon Capture and Storage last Thursday that exemplified the
kind of frustration I think they were referring to. After 45 minutes of discussing how the discussion should take place, the facilitator noted that time was up and dismissed the meeting.
Seriously? I was reasonably appalled at the productivity with which
such an important part of the global conference was conducted.