Art and Climate Change

 

artofmichaelwangblogspot.com

American artist Michael Wang feels that climate protests involving museum art are an effective way to get across the message that existential climate change is really and truly a problem. 

 "I see value in these acts. By hijacking the attention we pay these artworks, the activists’ gestures have triggered public conversations around fossil fuels and climate that would not have happened otherwise, redirecting attention where it is badly needed."

Is that actually true? Or do the non-committed or uninterested look at throwing ketchup on artworks and similar attention-getting antics as the action of loonies? If, indeed, their behavior does get the attention of others, has it been successful in raising the general  consciousness of climate change? Have a large number of people really discussed CAGW as a result of museum invasions? Paint my picture as skeptical. 

Green Colonialism

 Oregon fishermen and native American tribe members are skeptical about the latest US offshore wind project. Almost 200,000 acres ranging from 18 to 32 miles offshore have been selected by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for wind turbine installation. The government agency is headed by attorney Elizabeth Klein. It seems that in 21st century America senior positions and even less elevated managers in both public agencies and private business are all law school grads, rather than acknowledged experts in the scientific aspects of their fields. Or, in the case of Klein's predecessor at BOEM, Amanda Lefton, the architect of the Biden administration's effort to bring global warming to a halt, a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Albany. 

After accepting her position at BOEM Lefton said: "We know that climate change is the greatest crisis of our time, and we have to transition to clean renewable energy in order to fight climate change.” She was the director of BOEM from February 2021 to January 2023, and then left to take a position as Vice President of Offshore Development for RWE Offshore Wind GmbH, a German electric energy company. Positions in government "service" could also be called preparation for employment in the field they regulate.

 

Becoming A Research University

 

 University of Alaska Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Anupma Prakash wants a $20 million cash injection to the Fairbanks school that can be used to push it to the highest rating level of the Carnegie Classification, R1 a rank held by only 4% of US research institutions. She says that the money would enable the UAF to double its annual output of Phd. grads to the 70 that are required for R1 status. Graduate student fellowships would absorb $13 million of such a grant, $5 million would be used to compensate faculty whose work load would increase and $2 million would would be spent on technical improvements.

Evidently, the research characteristics and quality of a university are determined by the sheer numbers of graduate students rather than the nature or quality of their research.

In fact, Provost Prakash's request for funds raises some questions about the very concept of the research institution as it currently exists. The need for an increased number of Phd. candidates seems to indicate that much of research is actually done by students under the direction of faculty. Perhaps that has always been the case. But students are becoming scientists, not scientists in reality. The research they are doing and the papers that they produce that describe their research, if significant, result in advanced degrees that indicate their scientific credentials to the rest of the world. That is, if their research and publication is accepted by the arcane "peer group" review process. By definition the peer group would be others like themselves, scientists of the future.

That may be an unfair criticism. Much of scientific investigation has historically been performed by individual scientists without the benefit of institutional support or recognition. Academic support should make scientific research easier and more fruitful.

Certainly fellowship funding for grad students would encourage them to continue their studies but would these studies be worth the monetary investment? What would the R1 rating mean in the great scheme of things? If achieved, what benefits, other than financial, would flow to UAF?

Hydrogen Pig Iron

The North Dakota Industrial Commission and the North Dakota Development Fund are dropping a combined $10 million on a plan to ship Mesabi Range Minnesota iron ore mine waste, whatever that is, to the Coal Creek Power Station 50 miles north of Bismarck from a storage area near Calumet, MN, 434 miles to the east. The power house is fired by lignite and is the largest generator of electricity in the Flickertail State, its two generators producing almost 1.2 gigawatts. 

 willistonherald.com 

With a stack height of about 650 feet, the plant produces over 4 million tons of ash annually, 3rd most of any such facility in the country.

The project, planned by new owner Rainbow Energy, will use the plant's power to convert natural gas to hydrogen and CO2, fueling the furnaces that will produce pig iron for Scranton Holding/North American Iron. The CO2 produced in the process will be sequestered underground in the area.

The sequence of events in the pig iron story will mean the use of first the energy in lignite, then the electrical energy of the power plant itself, followed by raw material energy of natural gas, and then the energy of the hydrogen produced. Of course, as usual, a number of well-paid jobs will result. But a minimum of the dread CO2 molecules will be released and North Dakota and its neighbors will likely enjoy the Siberian climate of the area that has been the case since glacial Lake Agassiz drained 8200 years ago.

  

 

That Darned Climate Change

 

 

nypost  

Three modest homes in San Clemente, California are in a precarious position after the atmospheric river poured over the Golden State. This tragedy in-the-making probably would never have occurred if the CO2 in the atmosphere had been held to pre-industrial levels. 

 

 

Photo courtesy Tarek Jadeba/EYES IN THE SKY) 

But this is what happens when a society dares to drive gasoline-powered automobiles to the C-store for milk and potato chips. 

Perhaps in some by-gone time the evident cliffs visible beneath these homes were instead areas of solid ground that supported homes of the ancestors of some current Californians. Or maybe not. Those people may have had more sense than to build on a site likely to fall into the sea after a serious rainfall.

The homeowners insurance carriers of these properties may be very interested in the situation.   

 

 

 

 

 

The Position of the Harvard Crimson

A February 8th editorial in the Harvard Crimson authored by the Crimson Editorial Board looks at the plagiarism situation involving two black, female administrators, former University President Claudine Gay and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri A. Charleston.

While the editorial admits that plagiarism is a problem and that candidates for positions at Harvard must be vetted for it and other issues before hiring takes place, it states that in this case bringing up plagiarism is a method of attacking DEI itself, engaging in war against higher education and right-wing activists' campaign against the entire academic project.

For an alumnus, a diploma from a respected and expensive university is a huge investment in time and money. It is in the interest of the graduate that the reputation for excellence of the institution be upheld or increased by its future management and the failure to do so will naturally result in criticism. That was the case in the Gay argument, which was initiated by a Harvard alum and large financial donor. As a product of Harvard he has every right to defend the integrity of the school and hardly represents an anti-education right-wing campaign.

Harvard, and the other elite universities in the US and Canada, have problems of their own making. Perhaps they should look into them and attempt to represent and enlighten a bigger share of society.

 

 

Variable Rate Electricity

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You probably guessed that "smart" electricity meters weren't purchased and installed by utility companies to make life simpler and cheaper for the consumer. Midwest energy titan Xcel Energy, after announcing and substantially completing the installation of the new measuring devices, now tells home owners and businesses what the next step will be, variable rate pricing. 

During the 3pm-8pm period rates will be seven times those of midnight to 6am. The whole story can be found here. 

Stanford University and the Federal Government

You might come to the conclusion after examining the situation that Stanford University is actually an agency of the US government. Last year the highly-rated institution was the recipient of $1.98 billion in government funding for research. 

There are currently 7,500 externally-funded research projects at the school and about 2/3 of them are financed by the federal government. This article from The Stanford Daily explains how it works.  

The Newest Carbon Removal Technology

The 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is turning the earth into a pizza that's been forgotten in the oven while taking the dog for a walk. You can see the results all around you, rain, hail, heat, drought, somewhere, all over the world. 

Finding a remedy for this before it's too late is a crucial goal for mankind. Some remedies have been proposed and even adopted to some extent but they all have the same drawback, expense. The energy needed to isolate and dispose of carbon dioxide is prohibitively expensive. 

One company has developed a process that's significantly cheaper and very effective. The Graphyte Company plans to use "carbon casting" to isolate CO2 at its source, biomass. 

The dregs of the timber industry and agriculture are composed of carbon, which microbes and H20 convert into gaseous CO2. Graphyte plans to gather these substances, compress them into hard bricks, wrap them in an impervious layer and then bury them forever. They feel that's the cheapest and most effective way to remove the  5 to 10 billion tons of the carbon dioxide needed to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050.

 According to them the 5 step process goes like this: 

      1.We use by-products of the timber and agriculture industries, which would otherwise be burned or left to decompose.

     2.We dry this biomass, to eliminate microbes and the water they depend on, stopping decomposition.

     3. The inert biomass is condensed into dense blocks, enabling effective storage.

     4.  Carbon blocks are protected by an environmentally-safe, impermeable barrier to ensure that decomposition does not restart.

     5. Blocks are stored in state-of-the-art sites with sensors and tracers, enabling robust long-term monitoring. Storage sites can then be used as solar farms or working agricultural land.

An observation: Neutralizing biomass doesn't "remove" CO2 from anywhere, it could maybe prevent it from forming but any already existing CO2 would be unaffected. 

The questions: 

1.The by-products of timber and agriculture are scattered all over the world. How are they transported to the locations where they are to be processed? Isn't a serious amount of energy involved in that? And expensive human labor?

2.Drying the various forms of biomass will inevitably mean the use of heat, which is also an expense. Will non-CO2 producing heat be used to accomplish the drying. What's the economics of that?

3.Compressing the inert blocks of biomass into dense bricks requires expensive energy, too. Probably lots of it. Will the biomass in the bricks require some kind of binder additive to allow them to retain their shape?

4. What exactly is the impermeable product used to wrap the bricks and how much does it cost? The process will be heavily mechanized but humans will be involved. It won't be free.

5. The storage sites . . . state of what art? Where and how big. Won't they need to be excavated with big, expensive machinery? If this product is so dangerous that it needs to be sequestered in this way it brings to mind nuclear waste storage, a problem that hasn't been resolved in over 50 years. Bill Gates may be a certifiable genius but it's questionable that his enthusiasm for this project means anything for its practicality, even if massive federal subsidies will add to his fortune.

Update: They're soon going into actual operation! 

The Convergence Accelerator Program and DART

 The NSF Convergence Accelerator Program is a federally funded effort to solve societal problems through an interdisciplinary process by creating teams that operate, as their website says, "synergizing their work through innovative collaboration." No examples are given.

However, one of their efforts is DART: Deception Awareness and Resilience Training. Naturally the most suitable teams for this purpose would be created at prominent universities and such is the case here. The focus of this particular effort is the gullible senior and military veteran who falls for social media and internet misinformation. Since there can be controversy over the veracity of on-line information it must be assumed that whatever information the current federal administration releases or agrees with is genuine while deviant info is bogus misinformation.

At this point there seems to be simply training in misinformation recognition, not censorship of the product itself. A major difficulty might be measuring the success of the DART effort.

 

Huge Increase in Academic Fraud

According to the UK's Guardian, there's never been as much fakery in academia as has emerged currently. No one with even a casual perspective on higher education and research is surprised at this. The risk/reward factor is simply too skewed in favor of the fakes.

While there's the perpetual complaint about the injustice of the publish or perish situation in academia, at bottom it's really the same as everything else in Yankee land, MONEY. The rewards for plagiarism and other academic fraud simply outweigh the possible punishments. 

It's not just fraud and fakery either. University administrators and professors have become figures in the social sphere surrounding their student body and campus. The furor seems to have died down or been suppressed by other developments but the Oberlin College fiasco of 2016-2022, resulting in the college ultimately paying Gibson's Bakery $36 million in damages, is a sad case in point. 

 dalekang AP

Meredith Raimondo, Dean of Students at the time and a controversial figure during and after the event, left Oberlin for Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, GA,      where she is now vice president for student affairs.  The academic world sticks together.

 

Academic Democracy

Public universities are, by definition, agents of the public that finances them. They have a close financial  relationship with their state government, which represents the people also. In a "democracy" the state government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and logic would seem to dictate that the same would be the case for a public university. That isn't the way it works.

The public university ostensibly operates under a culture of academic freedom. Instruction and research don't follow diktats. Both are meant to dispense and determine the truth as it exists in the present. This may have been reality at some point but currently appears to be an historical oddity.

Political democracy as it's known now isn't about facts but reflects opinions about history, the present and the future. The facts about a candidate or officeholder are generally irrelevant and public opinion is divided according to preconceptions acquired through a person's cultural disposition.

The public university, like many other institutions, is meant to be apolitical. Though other creatures of elected regimes are selected through a process with a political character, they aren't expected or desired to bring politics to their role. While laws are created through a political process, their enforcement is supposed to be non-political. Sheriffs are elected but expected to enforce the law in the same way for everyone. Police chiefs and their patrolmen can't act as political enforcers. Judges make rulings based on the law, not personal preferences. We expect all public employees, from supreme court justices to snow plow drivers, to maintain an identical relationship with all citizens. We also expect any changes in that relationship to made through the democratic process.

If this relationship is extended to the public university it hasn't been realized. The public university is the least democratized of any public institution, unless the military is considered a public institution.

Once in operation a land-grant research university is an independent entity, more independent than any government agency or business. It determines who its instructors and employees will be and what the expectations are for the performance of their work. It decides what courses are to be offered and what research efforts will take place. In almost every way it acts like a large corporation, except that it pays no taxes. In fact, taxes on the citizens are a significant part of a university's budget. Unlike corporate stock holders, those citizens have little influence on any aspect of the university.

Not only is there zero public input on the operations of its university, there is zero transparency on those operations. The public that pays in large part for its existence has a limited idea of what it does with that money. In the original concept of the university initiated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1809 and generally adopted in the US, the university was an agent of the government rather than a completely independent institution. This view slowly faded as time went by.

A critical situation has developed not just in public universities but in all of higher education. The research and publication of results necessary for advancement in academia has been increasingly discovered to be founded on fraud. Plagiarism, statistical manipulation and fake analysis continue to be found and revealed publicly. Alarm bells should be ringing throughout academia over this but it might be the case that academic fraud is so prevalent that completely eradicating it might actually destroy the university system itself.