The Folly of Greenlandia

Aerial view of Fordlândia, photo by the Ford Motor Company, 1934.

Last month when I was writing about Rubber, I learned about Fordlândia, a rubber plantation/utopia that Henry Ford built in the Brazilian jungle. My word count for that post was too high, so I left out the story. But it’s been rattling around in my head ever since, pinballing to the top every time I read another story about this administration’s obsession with Greenland. Plus, that Santayana quote, the mantra of historians, constantly reminds me to study the lessons of the past. Anybody remember maps which referred to the Belgian Congo? Ever hear of Minimata disease?

Corporations and governments–that is, corporations whose security adopts uniforms and carries a flag–often get the bright idea to get resources cheaply from places where the scrutiny is lax. Of course, corporations and governments aren’t entities unto themselves. It’s the leaders who come up with cockamamie schemes of exploration and exploitation, schemes which lead to environmental devastation, mutilations, genocide. Often, costs vastly outweigh the benefits.

I realize that the moral reprehensibility of those first three evils ought to sway the argument against exploitation, but there’s no moral reasoning, sometimes, with corporations, which suddenly become faceless when there is wrongdoing. I was nurtured at a tender age on cost-benefit analysis, and I sometimes find it makes a persuasive argument when other arguments won’t do. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a few examples from history as reason to pause before we start invading and strip-mining Greenland.

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Go to College, If Only Because It Makes Looking at Data More Fun

Higher Education, photo of the Campanile at CAL by kajmeister.

If you had studied Economics, you would know why giving substantial tax breaks beginning in the 1990s for 4-year undergraduate degrees ultimately raised the prices of 4-year undergraduate degrees. If you had studied Communication Studies, you’d be able to spot the rhetorical fallacies of Ivy League graduates who now grouse about the decline of education. You’d know that the Wall Street Journal’s college ranking system based on ROIs uses circular logic. If you’d studied Statistics, you’d wonder why journalists only refer to data showing the last five years, and you’d quickly learn that “public confidence” is not the cause of the decline in enrollment. English major? you’d see how different motivations drive people’s choices. Gender or Multilcultural studies? You’d notice the change in who graces the mastheads of universities today. College is useful for a lot of reasons.

There has been a bunch of — academics might say a “plethora” — of articles recently whining about how people have decided college is a bad idea, how careerism is ruining college, and how it’s just no good (or fun) anymore. I beg to differ.

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The Murky View of Cloud Brightening

Ocean ships create cloud trails, stillshot from NASA video offered by geoengineering.global.

We are in a serious pickle. We can’t even agree whether we should test equipment to run experiments to make climate change better because … well… climate change affects everybody. We don’t know what we don’t know and can’t find out because we can’t even talk about it without surfacing hysteria. This is the conundrum I surmised last week, reading about a story on environmental research. The Alameda City Council, the decision-makers for a nearby local town, voted last Wednesday against allowing the continuation of an experiment to spray sea water into the ocean air to measure its effectiveness as a strategy that might lessen the effects of climate change. It made me curious.

Why was this experiment so “controversial,” as many of the headlines said? Why did Alameda “overrule its staff,” as the New York Times described it? I dug into the weeds a little and found that there’s a lot of weeds here. I did end up a bit more optimistic about the transparency of city governments, but more pessimistic about our ability to solve climate change. It’s a mess! And it’s going to get messier before it gets better, if this is any indication.

Do You Have a Permit?

The bare bones of what happened is as follows. Scientists from the University of Washington wanted to study the usefulness of a machine that would spray seawater into the air. The goal of the spraying would be to create an effect called Marine Cloud Brightening, which I’ll explain shortly. They had arranged to put their sprayer on to the deck of an old naval carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet, which is now docked and used as a tourist museum. It’s docked in Alameda, a peninsula connected to Oakland that sits in the San Francisco Bay. Alameda used to have a naval base, hence the Hornet, hence the docking facilities.

Someone needs to tell Hotels.com that the USS Hornet museum is not in San Francisco.
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