Regional Energy and Sustainability Conference in Wichita

I just returned from attending Wichita's Regional Energy and Sustainability Conference. There were several simultaneous sessions throughout the day, so there was no way I could have even come close to witnessing all the speakers. There were some cold and hard pragmatists that were admittedly bounded by regulation, and there were some idealists speaking of what could be. However, for me, the highlight of the day was former Assistant Secretary of Energy, Andy Karsner. I have included some notable paraphrases from sessions in which he spoke:

-Rather than pursue interest-driven policy to reform the energy industry, movement needs to come from states and communities themselves, as an attribute-driven policy platform. That is, those areas should leverage what natural and human attributes they possess in order to form energy policy and industry.

-Rather than dismiss the incumbent large energy industries as being irrationally attached to petroleum, understand that they are primarily motivated by a return on investment. In order to truly move to a diversified energy industry, the available resources (sun, wind) must fit into a conventional economic and financial model. If they can be formed into a more profitable product than petroleum, then the decision has subtracted politics and interests, and has taken on a purely financial standpoint.

-The ability to transform the energy industry into one that includes a larger share of new technologies is analogous to the aerospace industry. It will require exploiting a common geographic and knowledge base in order to pool those resources. As in Wichita, how aerospace companies and related industries have colocated in order to dip into the pool of shared knowledge and resources, so must new energy technology industries. It is the task of the energy companies to either find similar industrial centers or to create them.

-Solar and wind energy will have little impact on energy independence (in the context of American independence from volatile oil). Oil does not comprise enough of the American electrical grid power source. Since the majority of our oil consumption is used to fuel our massive transportation needs, that is where a fuel shift must occur in order to become detached from the volatility intrinsic to oil supply. Any alternative to petroleum-fueled vehicles must, however, be of a practical nature in order for the public to accept it.

-The federal government has a role to play in restructuring policy and industry when scale and time constraints necessitate it. However, it is a process that is marked by partisanship, and may only be called into play during crises. One situation where federal leadership could be beneficial and time- and effort-saving is the streamlining of the electrical grid. The fractured nature of the electrical grid, passing through multiple jurisdictions, makes it very difficult to enact any sort of broad changes to electrical infrastructure. An analog to what kind of action could be effected is Eisenhower's building of the interstate system.

-With the growing petroleum demand in developing markets, the United States no longer has the overwhelming leverage it once did in that commodity's demand. This exposes us to increased volatility from a more diversified set of petroleum consumers importing petroleum from often already volatile suppliers.

-Businesses require the knowledge of which direction energy policy is moving in order to feel comfortable enough to invest. Government has a role in signaling, through regulation, to businesses in order to catalyze investment.

-The only kind of policy that really matters is bipartisan policy. Anything otherwise is only wishful and will not become realized.

-The concept of efficiency must be divorced from that of deprivation. Rather, it must be viewed as being able to do more for less.

Federal Reserve Profit?

Interesting opinion on the Federal Reserve's "profit" on purchased financial instruments, and the concept of profit in terms of the Federal Reserve.

From the Wichita Eagle, January 21, 2010.

Ruff Love

Sarah and I have decided to start volunteering at the Kansas Humane Society, located here in Wichita. We've gone through our respective orientations and animal handling classes, and we've just recently completed our one-on-one interviews so that we may start doing something other than only dog walking.

Sarah has started helping with adoption counseling. I'm not really sure what that entails, but I'm sure it's not as interesting as what I'm going to do. Sorry, Sarah. This week I will shadow the staff as they test dogs' behavior to see how adoptable they are. From there, if I'm comfortable with the task, I will learn how to help modify their behavior if they don't quite meet the standards.

I'm excited about doing this, because I have my own dog which would never have passed the behavioral tests. It makes me wonder how many dogs out there would be great pets but are nervous wrecks under the entire adoption process. So, I hope I can handle working with these harder cases. I will just keep myself in the mentality of Captain Hadley in his reformation of Bogs in Shawshank Redemption.

Pepper Drying Operation

The pepper drying operation has been completed. I have dried peppers once before this. This is the method I use:



The peppers are cleaned (to help combat any rotting), and strung up on a thread in a sunlit and well-ventilated area. The thread is just ran through the body of the pepper. The peppers require spacing, because direct contact between any two peppers, or any pepper and another object, can lead to rotting at that point. I would check them every few days for any soft, mushy peppers or any that are obviously rotting. If one is very suspect or explicitly going bad, I just cut that one down to prevent it from damaging others. The larger peppers are much more prone to rotting than the smaller ones, so watch them carefully.



The hanging to the finished product took approximately 7 weeks. Now, I can keep them dry and whole until I want to use them, or crush them up so they may be sprinkled.

By the way, these peppers were grown in the backyard--which makes them that much more awesome.

Vinod Khosla on Purely Economics-Driven Insurance Against Climate Change

I was listening to some Bloomberg on the Economy podcasts today at work, and I came across an interview of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla (mp3 here). (Via Wikipedia I just found out he was one of the original founders of Sun Microsystems.) He had an interesting take on how to deal with global warming (or the controversy as to whether it is caused by humans).

He sees global warming as just another financial risk. The analogy was used of house insurance. Let's say one out of 500 houses will catch fire. This is enough risk to convince most homeowners to purchase insurance to protect their homes. This relates to 0.2% risk of any one house catching fire. Now, to view this in respect to global warming, some scientists see the chance of global warming being caused by humans to be over 80%. More conservative views may be as low as 10% or less. Even at this lower range, it is still far above the one-in-500 or 0.2% risk we used in the house fire analogy. (These were his figures, not mine. I haven't checked the 1/500 house fire statistic or scientists' estimates of human-caused climate change likeliness--but the point is pretty simple.) So, as any normal financial safeguard when there is moderate risk, it would be in one's best interest to hedge against that risk, or insure against it.

His position was that if the human-caused global warming hypothesis is correct, the potential societal damage and perceived risk is enough justification to take precautionary measures. I think this is an interesting way to look at this. Rather than get up-in-arms politically--or even scientifically for that matter!--look at it in a detached, investment-driven view.