 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
May 2007 | Main | July 2007
Yes, some speeches are worth $160,000, but Kofi Annan has never given one and neither has anyone else on the overpriced, bigtime lecture circuit.
If the University of Colorado student government has so much money that that it can squander a speaker’s fee of that size on the vapid musings of the former United Nations secretary-general, as it did in April, maybe that’s a sign that it is grossly overfunded.
Yes, some speeches are worth $160,000, but Kofi Annan has never given one and neither has anyone else on the overpriced, bigtime lecture circuit.
If the University of Colorado student government has so much money that that it can squander a speaker’s fee of that size on the vapid musings of the former United Nations secretary-general, as it did in April, maybe that’s a sign that it is grossly overfunded.
Have you ever tried to keep your eyelids at attention during a sonorous lecture by Annan on international affairs? Only someone addicted to hearing the word “multilateral” repeated like a mantra could walk away feeling enlightened or energized.
Unfortunately for those resolved to purchase inspiring oratory, almost all of the genuine article occurs without a set schedule. And it is generally delivered once, not on cue every time a civic or business group, or well-heeled student government, plops down a fat check.
The British prime minister might appear, for example, before the British House of Commons to report on the miraculous evacuation of troops from Dunkirk, and from his mouth will pour phrases that leave listeners pounding on their benches and weeping without control.
Some people might pay $160,000 per minute to witness in real time Winston Churchill give his original “We will fight on the beaches” speech, and never regret a dime. And I wouldn't blame them.
But at least the CU students learned something from their experience with Annan — namely, the absurd extent to which world figures are often pampered and protected. A Rocky report explained that $60,000 of the fee was for “transportation, lodging, food and security.” Meaning the U.N.’s reputation for living large carries on.
A lot of leeway
A majority of Supreme Court justices still believe, despite their rejection Thursday of two school districts’ racial assignment plans, that discrimination is fine so long as it’s “narrowly tailored” to achieve a “compelling government interest.”
A “compelling government interest” is fancy legal jargon meaning “whatever five justices think is a very important social cause” — such as “the interest of diversity in higher education” that the court endorsed a few years ago in a case involving the University of Michigan.
The trouble with this formulation is that when government discriminates by race, it always thinks it has a compelling interest for doing so. It always can cite what it considers a very important social goal.
Southern states used to think they had a compelling government interest in segregating the races in public facilities. Opinions changed and now no one would buy their arguments.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the discrimination practiced by Seattle and Louisville on behalf of racially “balanced” schools, which the court just struck down, and the vicious segregation that was uprooted half a century ago. My point is that a “compelling government interest” is such a mushy standard that it could justify just about any discriminatory policy in the hands of the right judges.
Chief Justice John Roberts is right: You stop racial discrimination by not discriminating. Period.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
‘Blood money: 1. money paid to a hired killer. 2. money paid as compensation to the next of kin of a murdered person. 3. money gotten ruthlessly at the expense of others’ lives or suffering.”
— Webster’s New World Dictionary
“The blood money [from Xcel Energy] is to prevent the expense and delay of the additional procedures, and to get the new line live this summer.”
— Denver Councilwoman Kathleen MacKenzie
‘Blood money: 1. money paid to a hired killer. 2. money paid as compensation to the next of kin of a murdered person. 3. money gotten ruthlessly at the expense of others’ lives or suffering.”
— Webster’s New World Dictionary
“The blood money [from Xcel Energy] is to prevent the expense and delay of the additional procedures, and to get the new line live this summer.”
— Denver Councilwoman Kathleen MacKenzie
Now that’s political hardball.
Here comes Xcel, offering to spend $125,000 for improvements at Ruby Hill Park in order to curry neighborhood support for its proposal to replace transmission towers there with new but slightly taller ones, and the money is denounced as equivalent to gangland booty.
I’d actually thought electricity saved lives and made them more comfortable, not snuffed them out. Have I failed to notice something sinister about selling it?
Xcel isn’t even one of those swashbuckling companies whose aggressive style so horrifies the typical critic of corporate culture; it’s a highly regulated utility whose every major move must be approved by state regulators (in whose laps this case might yet land).
MacKenzie wants the transmission lines buried, as does the Denver Planning Board charged with protecting the city’s view plane ordinances. Xcel opposes burial because it would cost $5 million, as opposed to $600,000 for the alternative, and would be charged to all ratepayers. For that matter, its lines were there two decades before the view ordinance went into effect.
With good arguments on both sides and no villain in sight, why invoke the specter of Murder Inc.? It’s offensive, plain and simple.
Not much of a bargain
One of the arguments for comprehensive immigration reform goes like this: Most liberals will never let a strong enforcement measure get through Congress without an accompanying path to citizenship for illegals already here; meanwhile, most conservatives will never buy into such a path without a bigtime enforcement crackdown.
(I realize some opponents of legal status will never buy into it under any circumstances; I’m talking about the grand bargain as touted by proponents.)
Well, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 obviously includes a path to citizenship — no one seems to doubt that. But what about the other half of the deal?
As the Senate voted on amendments Wednesday to the latest rewrite of the bill, I thumbed through the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the last version and found this arresting phrase: “CBO estimates that implementing those requirements” — the requirements involving enforcement and verification — “would reduce the net annual flow of illegal immigrants by one-quarter . . . .
So that’s it? A 25 percent reduction in illegal immigration is all that enforcement advocates can expect?
Granted, even if this country erected a wall across the southern border we couldn’t stamp out illegal immigration. There are too many other points of possible entry and the fact that foreigners often overstay their visas.
But you’d think those touting the enforcement provisions would demand a higher standard of success. Is it really outlandish to expect, for example, that the flow of illegals be cut at least in half?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
University presidents can turn on a dime when given the chance to polish their social or environmental credentials. But ask them to curb the galloping cost of higher education, and you’d think they’d been told to defy the laws of physics.
Boosting productivity can be such a contentious process. How much more exciting to trot off into other initiatives, such as the “Presidents Climate Commitment” that promises to transform their campuses into “climate neutral” oases.
University presidents can turn on a dime when given the chance to polish their social or environmental credentials. But ask them to curb the galloping cost of higher education, and you’d think they’d been told to defy the laws of physics.
Boosting productivity can be such a contentious process. How much more exciting to trot off into other initiatives, such as the “Presidents Climate Commitment” that promises to transform their campuses into “climate neutral” oases.
This green commitment was crafted just six months ago, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, but it is already garnering “10 to 15 signatures a week.”
At a recent ceremony, the Chronicle recounts, “70 college presidents and chancellors signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, joining 284 presidents, representing institutions with a total enrollment of 2 million students in 45 states.”
Once these institutions sign on, they’ll have one year to complete an inventory of all greenhouse gas emissions on campus and two years to finish an “action plan” for reducing or offsetting them.
The campaign’s “Leadership Circle” even includes four Coloradans: Chancellor Bud Peterson of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Chancellor Pamela Shockley-Zalabak of CU-Colorado Springs, Chancellor M. Roy Wilson of CU’s Denver campuses, and President Stephen Jordan of Metro State.
If higher ed has this much time and resources to invest in holding the line on greenhouse emissions, maybe it’s time for a similar effort concerning tuition. After all, “even when adjusted for inflation, tuition and fees have risen 24 percent at four-year public universities, 11 percent at private four-year colleges, and 17 percent at public two-year institutions over the past five years . . . .” notes a recent report called Making Opportunity Affordable, funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education. “Meanwhile, the amount of money that colleges and universities spend to provide education to their students also is rising faster than consumer prices and health-care costs.”
Turbocharged higher-ed inflation has been the norm, as it happens, for many years, not just the past five.
So how about a national campaign among university presidents to create “tuition neutral” campuses — defined as places where the cost for students will rise no faster than the consumer price index?
If college honchos can save the planet, surely they can spare a little solicitude for the American middle class.
Dropping the other shoe
University of Colorado students are clearly not going to see tuition-neutral campuses any time soon, given the details of a resolution that the regents will consider Thursday.
The resolution eases into the subject of tuition by noting, among other things, the relatively low level of “support per student” that the university receives; it predicts that “40 percent of the resident undergraduate student population at the University of Colorado at Boulder will pay no more than a 5 percent increase in tuition”; and it talks about the importance of “competitive compensation packages” for faculty.
Eventually, of course, the resolution does get down to business: “The largest segment of the resident undergraduate student population [at CU-Boulder] shall experience a 14.6 percent increase in tuition costs.”
In case you’re wondering, that figure is more than four times last year’s inflation rate for the Denver, Boulder and Greeley region.
But at least the quest for climate neutrality is coming along nicely!
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
My colleague Rob Reuteman — business editor here at the Rocky — is understandably irritated by the U.S. auto industry’s doomsday predictions regarding the fuel economy standards the Senate passed last week (“Detroit, get on board with fuel standards,” June 23, Wall Street West). Yes, automakers will doubtless cope with a car and light truck average standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 (up from approximately 25 mpg today) — even if some SUVs have to go on a diet.
But you can’t blame the industry for resenting a costly mandate that the public supposedly supports. If the public really wanted higher fuel standards, after all, the proof would be sitting in their driveways.
My colleague Rob Reuteman — business editor here at the Rocky — is understandably irritated by the U.S. auto industry’s doomsday predictions regarding the fuel economy standards the Senate passed last week (“Detroit, get on board with fuel standards,” June 23, Wall Street West). Yes, automakers will doubtless cope with a car and light truck average standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 (up from approximately 25 mpg today) — even if some SUVs have to go on a diet.
But you can’t blame the industry for resenting a costly mandate that the public supposedly supports. If the public really wanted higher fuel standards, after all, the proof would be sitting in their driveways.
On the one hand people tell pollsters it’s high time to pursue energy independence and attack high gasoline prices. But many of these same folk are the first to embrace larger vehicles and more horsepower. They’re all for cars that burn less gas so long as someone else drives them.
Or maybe they’re complacent about America’s techno-prowess. Maybe they think a 35 mph standard can be achieved without touching price, performance or vehicle size. If so, they could be in for a jolt. And automakers will be blamed for any resulting consumer resistance.
What irritates me about what happened in the Senate last week is not the automakers’ self-interested lobbying but our politicians’ almost total indifference to increasing domestic energy production outside of the renewable end of the spectrum — say, by opening up more of the vast deposits of oil and natural gas on the outer continental shelf to exploration. Based only on the evidence of this legislation, you’d think our economy were well on its way to phasing out fossil fuels; in fact, that transition, while picking up steam, has only begun.
Senators’ headlong embrace of a larger ethanol mandate is equally maddening given the likelihood that it will save little energy while boosting the price of a variety of food products and livestock feed.
Now the energy bill moves on to the House, where still more principles of economics can no doubt be ignored.
That’s a lot of starch
Roy Pearson obviously overplayed his hand in suing the owners of Custom Cleaners in Washington, D.C., for $65 million (later lowered to $54 million) over a pair of pants they allegedly lost. The case became such a symbol of litigation abuse that even the tort bar distanced itself from Pearson’s unhinged greed.
Now that Pearson has lost his case — a judge declared that he was “not entitled to any relief whatsoever” — apologists for America’s litigation mania will no doubt announce that “the system worked.”
No, it didn’t. The Chung family, which owns the cleaners, is still saddled with huge legal fees. Even if the court eventually decides Pearson should pay them, it will amount to a relatively rare victory for a prevailing defendant, prompted in part by publicity.
More telling, however, is that the Chungs say they offered to settle the case three times, most recently for $12,000, but that Pearson turned them down. A man of greater self-discipline would have completed the shakedown — as far too many authors of frivolous lawsuits do.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
So now we know what the Federal Trade Commission apparently considers the smoking gun in its blockheaded attempt to bar the purchase of Wild Oats by Whole Foods. It’s the words of chatty Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who told his board of directors that buying Wild Oats would avert “nasty price wars” in a few markets such as Boulder as well as “eliminate forever the possibility of Kroger, SuperValu or Safeway using their brand equity to launch a competing national natural/organic food chain to rival us.”
So now we know what the Federal Trade Commission apparently considers the smoking gun in its blockheaded attempt to bar the purchase of Wild Oats by Whole Foods. It’s the words of chatty Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who told his board of directors that buying Wild Oats would avert “nasty price wars” in a few markets such as Boulder as well as “eliminate forever the possibility of Kroger, SuperValu or Safeway using their brand equity to launch a competing national natural/organic food chain to rival us.”
Doesn’t the FTC, with its vast public resources, employ any economists on its staff? Didn’t they bother to warn that the larger meaning of Mackey’s claim, which is solemnly recounted in the agency’s lawsuit, is starry-eyed nonsense whether he believes it or not?
Whole Foods can no more “forever” eliminate the prospect of a rival “natural/organic food chain” than it can corner the market on CEO braggadocio, however much it tries. Successful business models are always imitated and Whole Foods won’t be the exception if customers keep migrating its way.
On the one hand, an FTC official argues that “if Whole Foods is allowed to devour Wild Oats” — notice the obnoxious use of “devour” to describe such a transaction — “it will mean higher prices, reduced quality, and fewer choices for consumers.” Not content with this dire forecast, the agency goes on to suggest that such a reckless “exercise of unilateral market power” by Whole Foods will essentially be immune to consumer backlash or effective competition, citing Mackey’s grandstanding rhetoric as evidence.
Yes, the purchase of Wild Oats will leave Whole Foods in a stronger position. As Mackey himself points out on his blog, “it is a simple truism to say that if we merge together that we will no longer compete against each other. However .
Although Whole Foods is “the largest operator of premium natural and organic supermarkets in the United States,” as the federal lawsuit repeatedly points out, it still isn’t close to dominating the market for organic/natural foods. And it is barely a blip on the screen of the total retail grocery market.
The notion that its customers will be left helplessly hostage to “higher prices” and “reduced quality,” if those indeed are Whole Foods’ sinister goals, is something only a dedicated regulator could fall for.
Gird yourselves
Other than congressman Doug Lamborn and an Army general or two, is there anyone in Colorado who actually favors the Army’s proposed expansion of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site by 418,000 acres?
Let’s see: The legislature and governor oppose any condemnation of private property on the project’s behalf. Local opposition to the land grab appears all but universal. And two U.S. House members, Republican Marilyn Musgrave and Democrat John Salazar, have become so energized on this issue that last week they persuaded their colleagues to vote 383-34 to withhold funding from any such scheme.
Any other project — public or private — that faced such comprehensive hostility would be considered dead already. But of course the Piñon Canyon plans are still very much alive. The Army is patient, persistent and in for the long haul — and it has many powerful friends. Colorado opponents should steel themselves to push it back again and again.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
The University of Colorado just let Donald Stevens retire with full benefits. It promised the professor and former head of its Institute for International Business that it wouldn’t “pursue additional legal actions in any forum.” It allowed him to deny, in a settlement agreement, that “his actions were in any way improper.”
It did everything but plant a kiss on Stevens’ cheek as he sauntered out the door — after he’d reimbursed the university for $269,000 that he allegedly misappropriated over the years.
Do these guys ever actually fire anyone?
The University of Colorado just let Donald Stevens retire with full benefits. It promised the professor and former head of its Institute for International Business that it wouldn’t “pursue additional legal actions in any forum.” It allowed him to deny, in a settlement agreement, that “his actions were in any way improper.”
It did everything but plant a kiss on Stevens’ cheek as he sauntered out the door — after he’d reimbursed the university for $269,000 that he allegedly misappropriated over the years.
Do these guys ever actually fire anyone?
Now admittedly, any attempt to give Stevens the boot would have been messy, expensive and a protracted PR nightmare (check the encyclopedia under “Ward Churchill, employment history”). So you can see why university officials would want to square accounts with Stevens and let him move on.
But what if you’d pulled some of Stevens’ stunts? Would your boss have let you skate?
Let’s say you’d told your employer that you planned — and here we quote from one of Stevens’ travel authorization requests, as recounted in a university audit — “to attend the Annual Intnl Trade & Finance Assns Conference in Vaasa, Finland, on May 28-June 1, 2003,” where “Global trade issues and entrepreneurship in Europe will be addressed .. . ."
Suppose you duly showed up in Vaasa on the afternoon of the 28th, hobnobbed that evening at the opening reception, but bailed out the next morning to return to Norway (where you’d already spent several days) for an excursion to the town of Longyearbyen on an island in the Arctic Ocean.
Once back in the States, suppose you wrote your boss confirming that “I just returned from a trip to Finland and Norway to attend the International Trade and Finance Association annual meetings. .. . . This year there were special sessions on entrepreneurship in Europe and a number of sessions on the impact of globalization.”
Wouldn’t such language suggest that you’d attended the meetings? And wouldn’t that have been a fabrication?
In that particular trip’s post-mortem, Stevens also did mention he’d traveled to Norway, “to look at a developed relatively wealthy economy and society” — which is pretty much what every other tourist there does, too. As if sensing the banal nature of his claim, he quickly added that he’d also “met with people in various segments of society to discuss the EU, global economy, U.S.-EU relations, etc.” No doubt the shopkeepers in Longyearbyen were especially helpful with insights into these issues.
How would your employer react to the revelation it had shelled out $8,011.87 for such a trip?
Precisely.
The Koreans get it
During a recent visit to South Korea, an acquaintance noticed an editorial in The Korean Times beating the drum for higher quality English instruction — which from the looks of things, appears to be pretty good already. In fact, South Korea takes the study of English so seriously that it builds “English immersion villages” so students don’t have to travel abroad to learn at an accelerated rate.
“Korea understands the importance of English, even if Sen. (Sue) Windels doesn’t,” my correspondent wryly noted.
He was referring to the fact that the Arvada Democrat was the sole state senator to vote this year against a bill mandating English competency for Colorado high school graduates.
Unfortunately, Windels was not alone with her head in the sand. Senate Bill 73 died in a House committee after the education establishment picked up its club and entered the fray.
Common sense will have to wait at least one more year.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Pointless harassment. What else is it when police arrest and prosecutors charge someone for growing pot even though the fellow possesses a Colorado medical marijuana registry card?
Why bother squandering supposedly scarce public resources on such an effort — even if the marijuana user has exceeded the official six-plant limit?
Pointless harassment. What else is it when police arrest and prosecutors charge someone for growing pot even though the fellow possesses a Colorado medical marijuana registry card?
Why bother squandering supposedly scarce public resources on such an effort — even if the marijuana user has exceeded the official six-plant limit?
When police stormed into the home of 38-year-old Kevin Dickes a month ago in response to a tip, they apparently weren’t aware of the Auroran’s registry card. Or at least that fact wasn’t mentioned on the warrant, his attorney tells me. But prosecutors obviously knew about the card when they charged him with cultivating marijuana — an unfortunate waste of their time and your money.
Yes, police say they found 71 plants, although attorney Robert Corry insists most were inch-high starters hardly worthy of the name. You need to grow more than six in order to get the right number of plants to root and bloom, he insists.
But even if he’s wrong, voters didn’t lay down a hard-and-fast limit of six plants when they approved the use of medicinal marijuana in 2000. They also created the following exemption: “For quantities of marijuana in excess of these amounts, a patient or his or her primary care-giver may raise as an affirmative defense to charges of violation of state law that such greater amounts were medically necessary to address the patient’s debilitating medical condition.”
If this case goes to trial, in other words, Dickes will argue — or, better yet for this Desert Storm veteran, perhaps his doctor will argue — that he needs to cultivate more than six plants to manage the pain of injuries he suffered from an exploding grenade. What kind of hard-hearted jury will want to call him a liar?
By the way, the authors of Colorado’s medical marijuana amendment were so incompetent — or maybe so downright devious — that they basically gave a card-carrying patient like Dickes only two ways to obtain enough of the stuff: Exceed the six-plant growing limit and hope to persuade a court that he had no choice, or head to the black market to buy from a pusher.
Now that Dickes’ basement farm has largely been seized as evidence, where do you suppose he’s likely to get his pain reliever of choice these days?
Some victory for law enforcement.
The cereal cops
“Examples of products that do not meet Kellogg’s new standard for advertising to kids include .. . . Rice Krispies (too high in sodium).”
— press release, Center for Science in the Public Interest
Kids have been eating Rice Krispies for three-quarters of a century, and for all but a few of those years they’ve been targeted by the supposedly sinister advertising spells of the gnomes Snap, Crackle and Pop. It is a wonder any of us survived to tell the tale.
Thanks to the tireless efforts (and threatened lawsuit) of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, however, future generations will be spared such scarring experiences. Kellogg’s will stop advertising Rice Krispies, as well as a number of other products, in any medium in which children under 12 make up “50 percent or more of the audience.”
You can tell that a civilization is in decline when such a deal is hailed as a great victory for children’s health.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him atCarrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
In the late 1980s, the Denver Police Department was infected with a loosey goosey culture regarding disabilities. This week we learned, thanks to the attorney general’s office, just how far one officer allegedly took this relaxed attitude.
In the late 1980s, the Denver Police Department was infected with a loosey goosey culture regarding disabilities. This week we learned, thanks to the attorney general’s office, just how far one officer allegedly took this relaxed attitude.
If former officer David Holt is the scam artist portrayed in the state’s indictment, he is of course a remarkable scoundrel. While collecting more than $667,000 in workers compensation and disability benefits, the indictment claims, he led bow-hunting expeditions in Africa, gave lessons in how to hunt, wrote and published books, and generally behaved as a resourceful entrepreneur.
If Holt is guilty, he’s as bad as any of the thieves he might have collared if he’d stuck with the force.
But here’s something we should also recall about the era when Holt first claimed to be disabled: A shocking percentage of his fellow officers at the time were making similar claims, although not until they were ready to retire.
Until 1992, when the Internal Revenue Service finally objected, an incredible 70 percent of all Denver police and firefighters retired on disability pensions. The vast majority didn’t depart early, like Holt; indeed, they faithfully served the required time. And they didn’t concoct elaborate, phony stories, as Holt is alleged to have done. But they did manage to get tax-free disability benefits despite having worked, in most cases, for many years after the injuries supposedly occurred.
During one period, six of seven retiring police chiefs were granted a disability pension. One of them, Ari Zavaras, has served in two governor’s cabinets, including the current one.
Holt’s indictment says he presented himself to one doctor as “a frightened 3-year-old child clinging to his mother’s skirt for protection against a hostile world.” If convicted, he’ll soon learn what a hostile world really looks like.
Notebaert’s payoff
So Richard Notebaert, all-around good guy and first-rate executive, will walk away from the top job at Qwest after five years with total compensation and benefits eventually likely to top $100 million.
By all accounts, he worked like a dervish — but does a man with Notebaert’s talents idle down when the potential payoff is only half as much? Would he have spent the afternoons in a hammock if he’d been granted, say, somewhat fewer stock options or a less extravagant pension?
The obvious retort from Notebaert’s defenders is that he wouldn’t have taken the job under such terms, leaving Qwest to the mercy of some lesser mortal. It’s not a bad argument, either — especially as we’ll never know if it is true.
Achilles’ heel
Everyone knows American manufacturing jobs are sometimes outsourced because of lower foreign wages. What fewer people realize, however, is that they are also outsourced because of lower foreign energy costs.
A case in point — particularly relevant at this moment of debate over whether to open the Roan Plateau’s vast deposits of natural gas to development — is the petrochemical industry.
The CEO of Dow Chemical, Andrew Liveris, is an Australian whose respect and affection for the United States was palpable in a recent interview. But Dow nevertheless has reduced employment in this country by more than 7,000 jobs in the past five years.
Why? “America’s lack of competitiveness in natural gas, particularly,” Liveris told The American magazine. “Our industry used to be the second-largest exporter of American goods outside aviation and aerospace. But that disappeared, and U.S. petrochemistry as an export sector will not exist again .. . . ”
There are more than 80 multibillion-dollar petrochemical facilities “under construction around the world right now,” he points out, “and only one, and maybe not even that one — it is not a sure thing — is being built in the U.S.”
Vincent Carroll can be reached at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
If Frontier Airlines proceeds with plans to let customers purchase “carbon offsets” along with their tickets, you can bet that its sales pitch will be all green and no yellow — all environmental upside and no buyer beware.
If Frontier Airlines proceeds with plans to let customers purchase “carbon offsets” along with their tickets, you can bet that its sales pitch will be all green and no yellow — all environmental upside and no buyer beware.
You can be sure that customers who purchase the offsets — “more than $30 for a round-trip domestic flight,” the Rocky reported — will do so assuming they are about to neutralize the environmental effects of their flight and that the climate gods are smiling from the clouds.
What those customers aren’t likely to see at the Frontier counter, in other words, is the following headline: “Offsetting your carbon footprint takes decades.”
That headline appeared a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, and what a story it told.
“Schemes used by environmentally conscious consumers to cut their ‘carbon footprint’ could take up to a century to deliver the promised benefits, a study has suggested,” according to the British newspaper’s environment editor, Jonathan Leake.
“ . . . The new research, carried out by scientists at the Tyndall Centre, based at the University of East Anglia, and Sweden’s Lund University, suggests that such schemes may, in fact, do little more than salve the consciences of those paying for them.”
It turns out that a number of carbon offset programs fund energy-saving programs in developing countries that can take many years to achieve promised savings — and that’s assuming they work out as planned. A big assumption, by the way.
Some have involved forestry projects that take decades to mature, if the trees don’t succumb in the meantime to fire or disease.
Frontier hasn’t finalized its carbon offset plans, but they’re likely to involve a partnership with Sustainable Travel International in Boulder, whose Web site lists its various carbon offset programs around the globe. They include solar energy projects in India, Eritrea and Costa Rica, wind power in Madagascar and biomass energy in India, with estimated savings (in tons of carbon dioxide equivalents) over a period of years.
Will the projects fully pan out? Buying a small piece of a development project in a Third World country is always dicey — and perhaps especially so when you know little or nothing about the people who’ll manage it or the company that hired them. Personally, I prefer to spend my philanthropic dollars — let’s face it, that’s what they are — on something with a greater chance of payoff.
Not that I blame an airline for offering conscience-stricken flyers a relatively cheap cure for their lifestyle guilt. Maybe that’s what it takes these days to fill those cabins to Mazatlan, Cancun and Acapulco. And after all, say what you like about the effectiveness of carbon offsets, they’ve got to be better than self-flagellation.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
‘Knowing everything you know right now, was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?”
For most Americans — myself included — this question is hardly a head-scratcher. Everything we “know right now” includes no weapons of mass destruction and a four-year slog without a happy ending in sight. Absent a dramatic shift in fortune, of course the invasion was a mistake.
But the question seemed to fluster Mitt Romney last week at a candidates’ debate. And so he refused to answer it, twice.
‘Knowing everything you know right now, was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?”
For most Americans — myself included — this question is hardly a head-scratcher. Everything we “know right now” includes no weapons of mass destruction and a four-year slog without a happy ending in sight. Absent a dramatic shift in fortune, of course the invasion was a mistake.
But the question seemed to fluster Mitt Romney last week at a candidates’ debate. And so he refused to answer it, twice.
“Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what I mean by that — or a null set,” Romney said. “ . . . I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time. I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.”
Asked again, he once more mentioned non sequiturs and null sets as he clumsily stepped out of the way.
Is Romney worried about offending some voters with a forthright answer? Apparently so, since it’s inconceivable he doesn’t have an opinion one way or the other. Someone should tell him that it’s far more dangerous to insult voters’ intelligence than to merely say something with which they disagree.
To their credit, both of the other leading GOP presidential candidates responded directly, without prodding.
Rudy Giuliani said that even in hindsight, invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.”
John McCain also said yes, but offered a more subtle explanation. “The fact is that the [international community’s economic] sanctions were breaking down” before the war, he said. “The sanctions were not going to hold. We had a multibillion-dollar scandal in the form of oil-for-food. The fact is that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction before on his own people and on his enemies, and if he’d gotten them again, he’d have used them again.”
McCain is right to recall the weakening sanctions and what Saddam would have tried to do if they’d collapsed. But toppling an aggressive dictator because he intends to develop weapons of mass destruction is far more difficult to justify than toppling him because he’s got them in his arsenal and might be disposed to assist a terrorist group.
Been up so long . . .
What would good times in Colorado actually look like? You’ve got to wonder after last week’s news from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that this state’s economy grew at a nearly torrid 4.9 percent in 2006 — which followed an also healthy 4.3 percent in 2005 and a respectable 2.9 percent in 2004.
Meanwhile, the jobless rate is at a five-year low and employers created more than 45,000 new positions last year. And yet some people still talk about Colorado’s economy as if it were struggling to shake off the tech-bubble bust.
When a state economist addressed a south metro economic development breakfast a few months ago, for example, she was anything but upbeat. According to a Rocky report, her concerns included “a sluggish jobs recovery in the past few years, a housing slump, worries about a drop in consumer confidence, a further slowdown in 2007.”
If the definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, what should we call three consecutive years of solid growth? Perhaps an opportunity to ignore the obvious.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
The phrase “live and let live” might as well be Greek for all the respect it gets from Boulder County planners.
The phrase “live and let live” might as well be Greek for all the respect it gets from Boulder County planners.
“It’s clear in our view that this ever upward trend in consumption, consumption, consumption is not sustainable, and we don’t think it’s unreasonable to put some checks and balances in place,” says Peter Fogg, a county land-use planner, as quoted by the Boulder Daily Camera.
Fogg was explaining the rationale for a proposal to limit home size in unincorporated Boulder County: no more than 4,000 square feet on the plains or 2,600 in the mountains.
Unless you’re very rich. Then you could build a larger house by way of what amounts to an officially sanctioned bribe: the purchase of hugely expensive development “rights.”
At a hearing Tuesday, county commissioners tried to reassure critics that the proposal was still in flux — meaning, apparently, that it may not be quite so oppressive when a final version is likely to be approved in the fall.
We hear many complaints these days about “McMansions” — a sneering term meant to suggest, among other things, that those who dwell in them share an aesthetic taste as undistinguished as a cheeseburger. “Why do those people need all of that space,” the critics wonder.
The answer, of course, is that they don’t need the space, any more than many of the critics “need” every room in their more modest dwellings. Most Americans, including most McMansion opponents, live in homes of extravagant size in comparison even with the average of a half-century ago. But why should they feel bad about that?
According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average new single-family house in 1950 was 983 square feet. It is now closing in on 2,400 square feet. At one point in the 1960s I shared a single bedroom — hardly unusual then — with three brothers. Today, naturally, each of my kids has a separate room.
And don’t forget: The 1950s and ’60s were a time of growth and prosperity. Living arrangements were often a good deal more cramped in earlier eras.
In medieval England, the historian Christopher Hibbert tells us, “the cottages of the villagers were squat and dark. They had no chimneys, the smoke from the fire being allowed to escape as best it could through the partially open door or the small window apertures . . . The interiors were commonly divided into two rooms, one for sleeping, the other for eating, animals frequently grunting or clucking in both. . . . Light when required for some essential task was provided by flickering rush-lights that momentarily dispelled the gloom. Furniture was rarely to be seen. . . . ”
Now there’s sustainability for you and a carbon footprint to match the greenest dream — minus the smoky fires, of course.
If Fogg is so worried about “consumption, consumption, consumption” and the “price to everyone of land impacts, energy use and construction materials,” as he went on to say, he and his fellow planners really might consider mandating the two-room cottage of the English peasant for all future construction. It might sound extreme at first blush, but in proper historical perspective it would be no more arbitrary than the limits that have actually been proposed.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Unburdened by anything so trivial as facts, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly wrapped up his on-air sparring with Dave Kopel on Monday night by dubbing our Rocky media critic a “secular progressive.”
He didn’t mean it as a compliment, needless to say.
Unburdened by anything so trivial as facts, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly wrapped up his on-air sparring with Dave Kopel on Monday night by dubbing our Rocky media critic a “secular progressive.”
He didn’t mean it as a compliment, needless to say.
O’Reilly’s book Culture Warrior chronicles, in his own words, “the intense war between my side (traditionalists) and the secular-progressive corps.” And O’Reilly can spot an S-P almost before the fellow opens his mouth. It’s a clairvoyant gift of some kind. Or so he seems to believe.
Which brings us to the point of this little tale: Even a psychic like O’Reilly really should try to learn more than a single fact about a man before announcing to the nation that he’s in league with the enemy.
The single fact O’Reilly knows about Kopel is that he has defended a panel at Boulder High School that condoned teen sex and drug use — hence the reason for Kopel’s appearance on O’Reilly’s show.
To tell the truth, I can’t fathom why Kopel defends that panel, either. I’ve read his column on the topic (“Talk-show hosts amok,” June 2), discussed it with him in private, and watched him butt heads with O’Reilly. But I’ve also listened to a tape of the panel and read the transcript. It was beyond the pale, no matter what Kopel says.
But since when does one opinion qualify anyone for a comprehensive label? As I watched O’Reilly pull out the S-P tag, it occurred to me that even I didn’t know to what extent it fit Kopel — and I’ve known him for years. “Progressive”? On a few issues, absolutely, but clearly not on others. Secular? I had no idea.
Turns out Kopel is a “Catholic fellow traveler,” he says, who attends church with his Catholic wife and children. What might shock O’Reilly even more, Kopel is responsible for the Web page marylinks.org, a compilation of what he describes as the world’s best links about the Virgin Mary.
“I hope this page helps you consider, create or strengthen your own spiritual or intellectual links with Mary,” Kopel states in his introduction.
Can you imagine an ardent secularist spending his time on such a labor of love? O’Reilly may have succeeded in slipping in his culture warrior sound bite, but it was, in this instance, recklessly, boorishly wrong.
Bill Gates’ enduring legacy
More than 200 years after Adam Smith, some people still can’t concede that commerce qualifies as one of life’s noble pursuits. So they ask questions like this one recently put to Bill Gates:
“Bill, even your harshest critics would have to admit that your philanthropy work is planet-shaking, incredible and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft. If you had to choose a legacy, what would it be?”
Some business icons might take the bait and wax fatuously about how their true passion was finding worthy subjects for charity — but not Gates, fortunately.
“The most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do,” he said, “is the personal computer. That’s what I grew up with, in my teens, my 20s, my 30s. I even knew not to get married until later because I was so obsessed with it. That’s my life’s work.”
Yes, that’s his life’s work: Being one of the major players in a technological revolution that helped transform the economy while improving the lives of untold millions. How could Gates’ philanthropy, as marvelous as it may turn out to be, possibly “dwarf” that?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
In his current political trajectory, John Edwards will soon be declaring that George Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. It took the Democratic presidential candidate only four years, after all, to evolve from a senator who voted for the war in Iraq to someone who dismisses the entire war on terror, as the president conceives it, as a “political slogan, that’s all it is.”
In his current political trajectory, John Edwards will soon be declaring that George Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. It took the Democratic presidential candidate only four years, after all, to evolve from a senator who voted for the war in Iraq to someone who dismisses the entire war on terror, as the president conceives it, as a “political slogan, that’s all it is.”
Edwards is now just a few steps removed from the inner sanctum of Conspiracy Central, that humid bunker where Bush is suspected of welcoming 9/11 or even somehow aiding the plotters in pulling it off. If the former North Carolina senator really believes the war on terror is a cynical slogan and nothing more, as he insisted in Sunday’s debate in Manchester, N.H., he might as well finish his remarkable ideological trek.
According to Edwards, “What this global war on terror bumper sticker — political slogan, that’s all it is, it’s all it’s ever been — was intended to do was for George Bush to use it to justify everything he does.”
These words were spoken one day after the revelation that four men had plotted to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport on behalf of “the war for Islam,” and just weeks after the arrests of six men planning to massacre soldiers at Fort Dix. Maybe Edwards should start reading the newspapers during haircuts.
It was up to Hillary Clinton, playing the role of an adult, to point out that she had “seen firsthand the terrible damage that can be inflicted on our country by a small band of terrorists who are intent upon foisting their way of life and using suicide bombers and suicidal people to carry out their agenda.” Clinton was even willing to concede that the war on terror, although conducted by a man she deems shockingly incompetent, had in fact made us “safer than we were.”
The origins of a myth
It was 40 years ago today that Israeli warplanes inflicted an annihilating blow on the Egyptian air force, igniting the Six-Day War and laying the groundwork for a now-enduring myth: that the main source of Mideast tension is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip.
To believe this, however, you must overlook the fact that the 1967 war was the third that Israel had fought with its neighbors — before the Occupied Territories were under Israeli control. You must ignore the escalating forays by Palestinian fedayeen into Israeli territory in years before the war, the unrelenting hostility of Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, his closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the massing of Egypt’s troops in the Sinai, and the shelling of Israeli villages by Syria.
If Israel didn’t have a case for pre-emptive attack, it’s hard to imagine what one would look like.
Four days before the fighting began, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Ahmed Shukairy, described the fate of Israelis should conflict erupt: “Those who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that none of them will survive.”
Israel has made its share of blunders since that war, but the primary source of conflict today remains what it was when a flotilla of warplanes swooped under Egyptian radar on a fateful morning exactly four decades ago: the refusal of too many Arabs to accept a Jewish state in their midst.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
For the past six years,” Hillary Clinton proclaimed this week while promising to raise taxes on the wealthy, “it’s been like going back to the era of the robber barons.”
Sen. Clinton is a very busy woman and probably has little time to dig below outdated historical cliches. In fact, the era of the “robber barons” was characterized, for the most part, by dynamic growth that propelled the United States into the front ranks of worldwide industrial powers while pushing millions of its citizens out of poverty
For the past six years,” Hillary Clinton proclaimed this week while promising to raise taxes on the wealthy, “it’s been like going back to the era of the robber barons.”
Sen. Clinton is a very busy woman and probably has little time to dig below outdated historical cliches. In fact, the era of the “robber barons” was characterized, for the most part, by dynamic growth that propelled the United States into the front ranks of worldwide industrial powers while pushing millions of its citizens out of poverty.
Sure, some of the notorious businessmen of the time were greedy scoundrels, not unlike Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers and others who thrived, Clinton might usefully be reminded, under the presidency of The Man from Hope. But many others, during both eras, were anything but “robbers.”
As economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo has written, “Men like James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt were heroes who improved the lives of millions of consumers; employed thousands . . . created entire cities because of the success of their enterprises (for example, Scranton, Pa.); pioneered efficient management techniques that are still employed today; and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charities and nonprofit organizations of all kinds, from libraries to hospitals to symphonies, public parks and zoos.”
Congested thinking
Nearly every day — OK, maybe more like every week — the Rocky Mountain News or The Denver Post publishes an article quoting some expert who laments traffic congestion allegedly caused by urban “sprawl,” or advocates more density as the path to “livable communities.”
Also every week, those same papers report on some neighborhood’s opposition to high-density development based, in part, on fears of .
Are those local homeowners uniformly stupid or uniformed in their fears? Or do they know intuitively something that eludes too many experts who can’t put down their ideological blinders?
Clearly the latter is the case.
The most recent example of misleading rhetoric on sprawl occurred in Saturday’s excellent Rocky article on population growth along the Interstate 25 corridor from Northglenn to Greeley. “My biggest concern is that a sound planning and development process is compromised by shortsighted goals, with congestion-promoting sprawl the result,” one consultant was quoted as saying.
Naturally sprawl promotes congestion if the alternative is freezing growth altogether. But if the alternative is packing more people into higher density developments, as almost always is the case, then sprawl does nothing of the kind. Naturally sprawl promotes congestion if the alternative is prohibiting growth altogether. But in the real world, the alternative to sprawl is to pack more people into higher-density developments, which aggravates congestion even more.
If you think higher densities relieve congestion, you need to visit Manhattan, San Francisco, Paris or Rome and rent a car. Yes, the average number of miles per motorist declines as densities rise, but the decline is relatively modest — not nearly enough to offset the fact that more cars must be crowded onto the same streets.
There may be plenty of decent arguments to marshal on behalf of higher densities, but curing congestion isn’t one of them. Density isn’t the cure; it’s a cause.
Welcome to Colorado
Thanks to Supermax, Colorado is home to some of the most unsavory criminals on the planet — everyone from 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Now, thanks to the peerless lung specialists at National Jewish Medical Center, our state is becoming a destination for those afflicted with a rare and perilous form of tuberculosis, too.
Who says Coloradans are reluctant to embrace diversity?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.