O Governor, where art thou?

Chris Steller of Minnesota Independent reminds us that South Carolina Governor Sanford is not the first governor to disappear.

He reminds us of Rudy Perpich disappearing in the early days of his first gubernatorial stint. It also brings up memories of the great power line protest which identified so much of the state politics that year and helped bring Paul Wellstone to the attention of many.

Of course, the reasons for Rudy’s disappearance are so much more acceptable.

How much is that latte in the window?

Many of us think of Seattle as a northern San Francisco, a place of leftist-leaning, politically-correct flakes, more likely than the average American to be vegetarian and bicycle-riding, who think of themselves as living as close to Nirvana as any Americans can.


But Seattle also gave us Starbucks, a large chain of coffee shops which has become synonymous with obsequiousness. [Well, they claim to sell coffee, but as far as I can tell they don’t sell much coffee. The sell beverages with a minimum of coffee, mixed with enough creams, mints, herbs, syrups, and oils to make one almost unaware of the coffee content.]

For most of its history, Starbucks has been very profitable and has expanded onto what seems every street corner of the country, at least in downtown, suburban, and affluent urban neighborhoods and downtowns. Fortunately their kind of business has made only minor inroads on our East Side and some of what has come has been more locally-based.

Accounting is a funny science. Not only does it require a knowledge of some really arcane mathematical techniques, but it only takes into account money. Everything has to come down to dollars and cents [or yen and sen or rubles and kopecks and euros or pounds or whatever system one is using.]

I suspect that many of the people who patronize these alleged coffee shops would agree that we do not [and probably cannot] properly factor environmental or social costs into how we evaluate costs and opportunities. Some probably hold great contempt for how Walmartized we have become and, whenever they see an article about the chain, maybe even snort contempt at the crackers and rubes whose patronage made Walmart big. They may be reading this on computers made by Chinese child slaves, but they do not connect the dots and understand that abusing labor makes some companies more profitable than can really be justified.

Well, Minnesota Independent writer Paul Demko [formerly of City Pages] has brought back to attention the ongoing case between the Starbucks Workers Union and Starbucks’ Minnesota operations. I wonder how many people sitting in one of those establishments reading about this on their wi-fi computers will notice this and just keep on clicking.

I am not trying to be especially hard on Starbucks or their clientele, even though the company offers a completely unnecessary product. We all have to make our own judgments on how we do our personal reconciliation between total accounting which includes all costs and benefits and money accounting and we all do it differently and some of us may even feel a bit regretful about some of our decisions.

For example, I would feel a lot better if I could write this on a computer which was not made in a third world sweatshop, but I don’t believe such a thing even exists. And my slave- or child- [or both-] made computer is running partly on energy derived from radioactive power plants and partly on energy made at other plants which operate on underpriced fossil fuel.

There is no law against adults drinking lattes [whatever they may be] and there shouldn’t be. After all, free people need to be free to make free decisions.

But maybe those who consume the stuff might want to open their eyes a bit.

The ban on more nuclear power is surviving

NOTE: Parts of this post are lifted from an earlier Capitol City Musings post from February 26, 2008.

Both houses of our legislature are under the control of people calling themselves DFLers. But they seem to differ on the matter of whether we should continue our ban on additional radioactive power plants [generally referred to in the media as “nuclear” power plants.

So you can choose your house and take your chances.

I side with the House of Representatives which has voted to continue the ban.

As I noted last year, electrical energy serves selfish users and nuclear energy in particular encourages deferring the actual paying of the true costs to generations well into the future. This, with modest modification for typos and style, is what I wrote then. And the link above will let you see the original post if you wish to see it.

One of the dirty secrets of electrical energy is that it is produced some distance from where it is used and we users tend to forget that there are environmental costs involved with its usage. This partly explains the popularity of hybrid cars which emit less pollution on the road, but increase whatever is going out of a power plant. In either case, there is an environmental cost, but with electricity we pass the problem on to somebody else.

Nuclear power appeals to this same selfishness. It may seem cleaner at the moment, but instead of sending the problem to a rural or exurban area, it sends the problem to future generations.

The half lives of these products are calculated to be in thousands of years. [And that just means that half of the radioactivity is gone then; the other half will take longer.] We may develop adequate secure places to hide the stuff which may survive our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, but can we be sure that we can make places secure much longer than that?

We don’t know what cataclysms may come up. And, of course, we never know what some crazy person or persons will for terroristic or mental health purposes do what.

We really need to find better ways to handle our energy needs. I don’t know if the sun and wind can ever be harnessed to do it all, but it doesn’t seem that we are even trying too hard to find out. I admit that if the sun stops shining that we would have a problem, but how we get our electricity would seem to be a minor problem under those circumstance.

We need better ways to limit use. Letting NSP or Xcel or other providers raise rates to encourage less usage will only make the providers wealthier, but somehow we need to adjust our accounting systems so that we factor in all the costs.

Maintaining a moratorium on nuclear power plants seems to be a minimal first step toward doing that.

I really don’t want to come across as an environmentalist. There are a lot of matters that "environmentalists” are getting wrong. But I do think we need to look at some of the things they raise and at things they don’t raise too.

Word choice is powerful. Just another matter to wonder about: How popular would nuclear power ever have become, had the name “radioactive power” been established instead of “nuclear power.”

Bus moving backwards -- in fares at least

The wonderful folks who give us [at great public expense] those magnificent busses and trains known as Metro Transit are looking at raising fares.

We all know the increases in the price of hydrocarbons so it is hard to oppose increasing the fares of an already-subsidized transportation medium.

But it would seem that the price of diesel must not really motivation for this increase since the proposal is not based on distance. Instead of increasing the fare so that more would be charged for longer runs, all users would pay the same increase whether they were going from West Seventh to downtown or from Stillwater to Hopkins. The poor person wishing to go to/from work in his/her own city would be soaked as much as the economic colonialist who goes from Woodbury to Minneapolis.

A more fair fare system would set the basic minimum fee and then charge more for the distance covered. I suspect that we will hear that Transit is not set up to collect fares this way. It would be a disingenuous argument for Transit to make since they have set up the present apparatus, but that won’t stop them from making it.

Another option is to establish a flat rate for each municipality covered. I don’t know the amount, but a more fair number can be figured out without unduly increasing the burden on local people who travel locally.

Taxpayers are subsidizing the whole thing anyhow, but doesn't it seem that they are subsidizing the longer rider more?

But fairness and Transit have seldom been connected, so why would we expect differently now?

Conventions to be powered by wind power

Xcel Energy [aka Northern States Power] says it will power both national conventions this year with wind power. [link]

That seems like too good a straight line to pass up. I will leave the punch lines to the readers’ imaginations.

Fuel for the Mill

Somebody wrote me a while back wondering why I had not written about the Rock Tenn [If you are over forty think Champion or Hoerner Waldorf or Waldorf] burner proposal. I guess that one reason is I just don’t know enough about the matter. [I know, I know, that doesn’t usually stop me.]

I guess that Mayor Coleman the Second did note at a recent meeting burning fuel oil there negated the improvements made by getting Xcel [NSP] to change from burning coal to natural gas by the high bridge.

Gee. What a surprise.

I can remember driving on the Short Line Road [what the yuppies and Dakota County trespassers now call “Ayd Mill Road”] a few years ago and seeing the steam pipes being installed along the Milwaukee Railroad [now Queen Elizabeth’s Canadian Pacific] line and reading articles [no, not while I was actually driving] whooping it up that this new energy source would allow whatever the paper plant was being called to stay in business for a long time.

And I remember our city leaders exulting while telling us that they had gotten NSP to switch from coal to gas. Since it never occurred to me that burning gas would not produce steam, I never made the connection.

But couldn’t somebody downtown?

Observations on the Override

So, everybody is all excited one way or the other because the legislature finally overturned one of Governor Plenty’s vetos.

Much of the attention is being given to the new gasoline tax increase. Somehow a few more cents on a gallon seems minimal when compared with the ups and downs [mainly ups] in gasoline prices brought on by other factors, but we will all notice it a bit, I guess. What we sometimes forget is that all of this increase goes to roads and after seeing a lot of our roads, it is hard begrudge additional funding there, although we may feel that the choice of projects is sometimes dubious. Of course, it would seem that the fact that various others who don’t pay their full load of gasoline taxes [bicyclists, pedestrians, drivers of hybrid cars] will use some of these roads needs to be examined, but that would have continued to be a problem even if this bill had not become law.

The bill should have been defeated because it increases metro sales tax for that old ripoff, transit. But that doesn’t seem to be what motivated the governor or the GOP legislators.

There are 85 members of the DFL in the House, 48 of the GOP, and one without a caucus to belong to. A caucus that wants to be a majority caucus needs to be more inclusive and not take on its own members unless they do something beyond whatever the party’s pale is. With several veteran members about to give up what are not really safe seats, the GOP cannot really afford to lose many more if it wants to make the net gain of 20 seats in November.

What I really cannot understand is that Marty Seifert and the Republican House leadership seem determined to punish the six of their number who voted for the override. All six have suffered a loss of committee or leadership assignments. [For a comprehensive list, see this from Minnesota Monitor.]

The GOP leadership is not taking this action against somebody who voted to support organized labor, family farms, progressive taxation, or even abortion rights. They’re taking this action against somebody who supported something being advocated by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Yes, read that again. They supported the Chamber of Commerce, the people whou usually are the supreme arbitrating oracle of right and wrong for their party and they are in trouble for that.

Go figure.

Radioactive Power for Minnesota?

An article by Dan Haugen in Minnesota Monitor suggests that some self-alleged environmentalists are suggesting revisiting nuclear power, that it might be a lesser evil as a means of electrical production than coal-powered plants.

Also, Pawlenty has suggesting lifting the state’s ban on building new nuclear plants.

One of the dirty secrets of electrical energy is that leads to selfish users. It is produced some distance from where it is used and we users tend to forget that there are environmental costs involved with its usage. This partly explains the popularity of hybrid cars which emit less pollution on the road, but increase whatever is going out of a power plant. In either case, there is an environmental cost, but with electricity we pass the problem on to somebody else.

Nuclear power appeals to this same selfishness. It may seem cleaner at the moment, but instead of sending the problem to a rural or exurban area, it sends the problem to future generations.

The half lives of these products are calculated to be in thousands of years. [And that just means that half of the radioactivity is gone then; the other half will take longer.] We may develop adequate secure places to hide the stuff which may survive our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, but can we be sure that we can make places secure much longer than that?

We don’t know what cataclysms may come up. And, of course, we never know what some crazy person or persons will for terroristic or mental health purposes do what.

We really need to find better ways to handle our energy needs. I don’t know if the sun and wind can ever be harnessed to do it all, but it doesn’t seem that we are even trying too hard to find out. I admit that if the sun stops shining that we would have a problem, but that would seem to be a minor problem under those circumstance.

We need better ways to limit use. Letting NSP or Excell or other providers raise rates to encourage less usage will only make the providers wealthier, but somehow we need to adjust our accounting systems so that we factor in all the costs.

Maintaining a moratorium on nuclear power plants seems to be a minimal first step toward doing that.

I really don’t want to come across as an environmentalist. That brings up a whole lot of other issues. But I do think we need to look at some of the things they raise and at things they don’t raise too.

Word choice is powerful. Just another matter to wonder about: How popular would nuclear power ever have become, had the name “radioactive power” been established in the first place.