I love how it can run on tea. Can it run on Milwaukee's Best too?

With the Berkeley tree-sitting fiasco coming back to light in recent weeks, and considering its parallels with similar events in recent years at Cornell, my alma mater, I wrote a column on the subject. Enjoy!

Berkeley protesters have spent 18 months at the top of trees to "protect" an oak grove from planned construction work.

"They're very well-trained tree climbers. They're very experienced, and I have trust in them that they're going to keep themselves safe and they're going to keep defending the grove," said a ground supporter who would give her name only as Citizyn.

Wait, you train for these things? Oh Citizyn, did you not make it out of tree-climbing boot camp yourself? It's ok, I bet you're the best bra-burner out there.

The situation is quite ridiculous generally, but in the past couple of weeks, it has gotten quite, err, gross:

Protesters howled, flung excrement and shook tree branches as campus-hired arborists cut supply lines and removed gear.

But by late this week, campus police were conducting delicate negotiations with tree-sitters, offering to provide food and water if protesters would lower their waste on a daily basis in the interest of hygiene.

Campus officials ended up giving up the water without concessions; protesters declined to yield their urine.

Ok, whatever, they're animals. What I don't get is, why is the administration negotiating with them? It should do one of two things: Have the police get them down, or leave them up there starved and climbing in their own poop.

These monkeys might have gotten their inspiration from an incident a few years back at Cornell, where I went to college. The university was planning to make a much-needed parking lot out of a hideous collection of brush and bushes severely mislabeled as "Redbud Woods." The "Redbuddies," from students to professors, chained themselves to the woods and climbed up trees in order to stop the construction work. Of course, instead of getting them for trespassing, the university administration set up a tent in the woods, and had the university president sit under that tent next to a young, smelly tree-climber to sign an "agreement" whereby the school made several concessions in exchange for the Redbuddies leaving the woods. It was a very classy sight, worthy of an Ivy League institution.

Today, the Redbud Woods have become the Redbud parking lot. I understand that a memorial to the woods has been set up there, but for some reason I have become immune to being surprised by idiocy. A year after the protests, my friend Jamie Weinstein wrote a nice piece reminiscing about the events. Excerpt:

It is difficult to imagine anything could be that magnificently beautiful and serene. I write this having just come from lying down in a parking lot. Not just any parking lot. Redbud Parking Lot.

As my skin touched the dark black asphalt of the Redbud Parking Lot, I was filled with a happy spirit... 

Of course, the Redbuddies only monkeyed around for a few weeks, and were far outdone by the professionally trained Berkeley tree-climbers.  Here's how the CNN article puts it:

Since [the protest began], Democrats have chosen their first black presidential candidate, the housing market has taken a dive, and gasoline prices have boomed.

I would say that since the protest began, Democrats have chosen yet another white male presidential candidate, we have won Iraq back from Al Qaeda and other terrorists,  and the Supreme Court finally confirmed that Americans have an individual right to own guns.

I would love to know how this is gonna be enforced.

The article, however, has a useful little factoid:

For the driver, reducing idling saves money in fuel. On average, a car will burn more than half a gallon of fuel for every hour spent idling. In general, 10 seconds of idling uses more fuel than restarting the car, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Deroy Murdock makes a good case for more oil drilling, and suggests a number of ways to deal with energy costs:

• Approve new Alaskan oil drilling already. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s pertinent parcel covers just 2,000 acres — a veritable raindrop in the Olympic swimming pool that is Alaska’s 365-million-acre territory. ANWR’s estimated 10.4 billion barrels could match or replace for 19 years the 1.5 million barrels of Saudi oil that America imports daily...
• Deregulate the construction of new oil refineries, something not seen since 1976.
• Halve the gas tax, making the average gallon 9.2 cents cheaper. Congress would have less to spend, but they should tighten their belts anyway.
• To encourage new atomic-power plants, stop debating and start storing radioactive waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility. In return, give Silver State residents free electricity.
• If it’s too much to drill more offshore oil, at least withdraw more natural gas. At worst, natural gas leaks do not blanket beaches or smother seagulls.

I just noticed this truly astounding excerpt from the New York Times piece on the food crisis:

Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he had come to realize that Congress made a mistake in backing biofuels, not anticipating the impact on food costs. He said Congress needed to reconsider its policy, though he acknowledged that would be difficult.

“If there was a secret vote, there is a pretty large number of people who would like to reassess what we are doing,” he said.

They made a mistake in not "anticipating" the impact on food prices? They would fix it only in a "secret vote?" Is this for real?

What does it tell us?

First, it tells us that Congressmen must take a mandatory economics class before being inaugurated. He didn't anticipate the rising food costs? What did he think would happen when you take land away from food production? This is a classic - just classic - example of Congressmen's complete disregard for the concept of unintended consequences, and for the fact that government meddling can only help something by hurting something else even more.

Second, the fact that Congressmen would behave differently if there was a "secret vote" is purely a demonstration of how corrupt and nauseating some of these people are.

Third, it reflects poorly on us, the American people, who keep putting these people in office year after year. 

It was bound to happen. The man-made-global-warming types have gotten so out of control in the past few years that they have invited the diversion of significant crops and farm land toward the creation of biofuels. Now, due to reduced output of food, people around the world are starving to death, and rioting about it.

And finally, the mainstream media has begun paying attention.

It takes 232kg of corn to fill up a car's gas tank with ethanol. But the same amount could feed a child for an entire year. Al Gore and friends have managed to arouse enough paranoia to forge an alliance with the ethanol industry and the Congressmen who subsidize that industry, to encourage more farm land to go toward the creation of highly inefficient ethanol, and away from food production.

Now Al Gore and those same people who have called everyone else immoral for not jumping on their bandwagon are prime culprits in the world-wide famines. And so far, they seem to be OK with that.

The Boston Globe agrees:

 CORN should be used for food, not motor fuel, and yet the United States is committed to a policy that encourages farmers to turn an increasing amount of their crop into ethanol. This may save the nation a bit of the cost of imported oil, but it increases global-warming gases and contributes to higher food prices.

...

And it's not as though ethanol improves the environment. When emissions inherent in the production process are included, ethanol consumption generates more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline, according to a recent report in Science magazine. Conversion of other cultivated biomass, such as sugarcane or soy, presents the same problem. The only biofuel that produces a net benefit is agricultural waste, an uncertain source. The best way for American motorists to use less gasoline is to drive fewer miles in lighter vehicles, rather than rely on the false promise of biofuels.

You may have heard of the recent riots around the world protesting sky-rocketing food prices. Of course, three of the top reasons for these unnecessarily high prices are agricultural subsidies, trade barriers, and the ethanol scam.

Paul Krugman writes a less than impressive column on the subject, but one passage is definitely worth highlighting:

The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”

This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.

And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.

Astounding. But sadly true. 

Aah civilization...

Disapproving of the international "Earth Hour" held yesterday (which entailed having cities around the world turn off their lights for an hour), Don Boudreaux points out that the environmentalists' favorite country should be North Korea, which, as this picture demonstrates, has been embracing the environment like nobody's business. Don't we all wish to live there?

So apparently people and cities around the world will go dark at 8PM tonight for "Earth Hour" in order to lower carbon emissions. It's a cute idea, but I wonder how effective it really will be in achieving that goal. The article said that people will be going to green-powered outdoor movies (to which they will drive many gas-powered cars), and having candle-light dinners (the pre-8 o'clock preparation for which will require the operation of ovens, stoves, mixers, etc.)

Kind of reminds me of how experts calculated that 100,000 trees would need to be planted to counteract Al Gore's "Live Earth."