Conferences

Part of my plan for pursuing my interest in environmental issues while working in healthcare has been to attend relevant conferences. *Finding and identifying* relevant conferences is much harder than it sounds. I was searching for months with little success. But today, googling has brought me a much better solution (note, I think this must be a new site. Google was previously tried).

There are several interesting conferences I’ve culled from http://www.allconferences.com/ A week from tomorrow there’s a conference in DC on policy and science. In late november/early december, there’s a conference on industrial ecology in Lusanne Switzerland. At the end of January, there’s a conference on planning an the environment in Mumbai, India. And starting July 8th, of 2007, there’s a week long meeting on greenhouse gases in Kingston, Ontario.

Then there’s this enormous list of sustainable development themed conferences all over the world: http://www.conferencealerts.com/sustain.htm The day after I’m scheduled to leave NYC, there’s a conference on corporate response to climate change. November 4th, there’s a conference on starting environmental enterprises and organizations, also held in NYC. A year from now, there’s a green building conference in LA (it also happens to be in denver one week after I’m out there for GAO training, this year in november)

Of course there’s the US’s energy policy conference (themed around fossil fuels, how shocking). There’s also a European Renewable Energy Policy conference at the end of january (same time as the Mumbai urban environmental issues conference).

So much to choose from… I will have to budget my financial resources, as well as my time for these. I could easily blow all of one or both going to half the stuff that interests me. And sadly, since I’m on the healthcare team, I can’t put any of these down for GAO time or money.

I’m not even sure where to start on the potential journals I could get. I don’t know how much time I’m willing to spend reading them. And my interests are not well enough formed to know which ones I’d want to get. But this is a definite starting point.

Blinded by the Right

I just finished reading blinded by the right. It’s David Brock’s memoir of his days as a conservative attack journalist, and his subsequent repentence. It was interesting, though offputting in many ways. He was certainly genuine in it, but that didn’t make it a pleasant read. It was definitely thought provoking though.

It got me thinking alot about the blind loyalty to political parties, and the treatment of these loyalties as far more serious than any actual policy considerations. It is very distressing to me how little our politics has to do with policy. Most of America shares my policy values, according to surveys. But their political values are based, by and large, in rooting for the political party they grew up with like its their local sports team.

His portrait of seeking approval through politics, trashing people for profit, and never thinking twice about his actions disturbed me. That he could live his life for nearly two decades working towards ends he found undesirable chilled me. He is a conflict hungry drama queen, and in that way I think he’d irritate me. He’s a gay man who has experienced profound guilt and a complete loss of his world framework related to that guilt, with his sexuality tied in for good measure. That I can relate to, but it’s not the best part of either of us.

Ultimately, his soaring and hugely lucrative career is brought to a close as much by his conscience as anything. And he tells of his apologies, his process of ending his former ways, and then trying to mend his former ways. He talks about the mutual use society of the mainstream of the regressive movement, which accepts loyal gays, while talking trash about all gays.

He talked about being out in his Berkeley undergrad days, and progressing thoroughly into the back of the closet thereafter. Oddly, I can relate to this.

<total aside>When I first came out, I overdid it. And I retreated somewhat from introducing myself with my sexuality. At work I’ve been in the closet, totally out (non-issue), comfortable talking about it in whispers, and, oddly, in my current position, feeling a little like I went back in to the closet. As you may recall, last summer, I invited the entire office to join me at “the Chicago pride parade.” I kinda thought the “gay” was implied, but based on some of the responses it wasn’t immediately clear to many people. And yet, when the highest up in the office made some comment about me getting married some day, I made some sort of too-clever deflection saying it wasn’t likely soon. She didn’t get it right away, but with a couple giggles around the table she had a little epiphany. It felt a little ridiculous, like I’m back in the land of wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Bleh! I talk openly with the (few) fellow homos in the office. Of course, part of what my performance is evaluated on is my ability to work well with others. And I fear trumpeting my sexuality (or even just speaking openly about it sometimes) will make others uncomfortable with me. Tada, I’m back in the closet, sort of. And the thing is, I don’t really like pride parades. Or gay bars. Maybe it’s the hedonism, maybe it’s the vapidity. Maybe it’s the pretense that we are all one, when we have less in common with one another than the minorities gay rights advocacy groups.

But even more so, I detest the hypocrisy or self-loathing of the “straight acters” and closet cases. </total aside>

New York Times and the environment.

In browsing the NYT website today, I came across 3 environmentally related articles (2 of which require the browser to pay).

One was an overview opinion piece on obtaining oil independence and reducing CO2, and thus global warming. That article was pollyannaish, with ginormous techno-optimism, and no discussion of lifestyle factors which contribute to the problems, or possible economic consequences of adopting different standards. Nor did any of them provide any perspective by saying like “x/y/z% of energy is used for industrial/residential/commercial purposes. Plans 1, 2, and 3, will reduce emissions by a, b, or c%”. In broad strokes, it’s technically correct, but if I had a few free hours, I’d nitpick it out to at least 2 or three times its original length.

When urban dwelling apartment/condo residents with roommates who commute by train and recycle (how I wish chicago’s head were not up its ass on this one) are not differentiated from SUV commuting suburban residents with 2 to 3 times the floor space, and the enormous energy consumption that results, it irks me. I don’t think people are aware enough of those issues. Not nearly.

John Tierney wrote a piece in his column denying that population growth was a problem. And suggesting that efforts to control population growth (like China’s draconian regulations) created more problems than they solved. I’m iffy on population growth as a problem. It has caused serious problems in the past (e.g. Rwanda). And more people do consume more, leading to the increased side effects of such. Many of which have serious externalities.

The story on population problems is tricky. Malthus predicted that since nobody was making more land, agriculture, and thus productivity had a natural limit. And as people approached that limit, no one would have an individual incentive to breed less, so people would have less land, and thus less food. The US as a whole is nowhere near a Malathusian crisis at this moment. Fortunately, Manhattan is able to justify its existence to the parts of the world that export food. The world as a whole is closer than the US, but not quite there. Parts of the world (like Rwanda, as Jared Diamond convincingly argues in Collapse) have already experienced Malthusian crises.Others have existed for a very long time at stable population levels, without continual geographic expansion. I’d prefer not to push the envelope on this one. It’s very tricky.

I don’t equate continual population growth with happiness. Stabilizing the population seems like a good idea to me. Sooner or later, birth control, abortion, infanticide, famine, drought, plague, war, or genocide will get the job done. Imho, the earlier on that list, the better.

The final article was not from the opinion section, unlike the other two, and didn’t demonstrate the same techno-optimism, even if it did demonstrate a woefully inadequate understanding of economics. They talk about how demand will outstrip supply, and the headline, “A Power-Grid Report Suggests Some Dark Days Ahead”, doesn’t talk about rising prices, it talks about decreasing supply. That’s not the goddamn same as rising demand. I’m deeply skeptical of the alarmist claims that we’ll have a shortfall on energy. Distribution difficulties, perhaps. But if the aforementioned suburbanites, requiring 10 times as much wire per person to get their electricity, are not charged based on the distribution costs (I really don’t know whether they are at present, but I kinda doubt it) then maybe we will have some dark days.

2 amusing travel anecdotes

On my flight from hawaii to LA, someone finally noticed my tiny bottle of eyedrops and two mini lube packets. They’ve been in there since before I left for europe. That means I’ve flown to & from baltimore, as well as to oakland and hawaii with those in there and TSA never noticed. I mean, they’re small and all, but still I was breaking the rules (I honestly hadn’t remembered). 4 flights. But as the TSA guy was putting them in a ziploc baggie he made some inane comment about how they were all eye care products, and I responded that 1 of them was. To which he verbally plugged his ears and said “nyah, nyah, I’m not listening”: “Yup, they were all eye care products.”

You know, if you’re going to be digging through people’s bags for a living, a couple lube packets seems like something you should get used to real fast.

Also, on the supershuttle from ken’s place, I happened to share a ride to LAX with the CTO for the ubuntu linux people. He gave me a promo cd and encouraged me to check it out. I may just. I’ll have to get an lcd screen first, though…

PS, I left before the earthquake, and none of my family got hurt in the earthquake. Just in case anyone was worried.