A long time ago Parker asked me if I had opinions on the Bush administration's policy with regard to not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, since I'm an environmental engineer. I'm a water treatment person, and I haven't really done much with outdoor air, let alone global climate science. So I don't have any 'expert' opinions in terms of the science.
A few years ago we had a seminar in our department by Gerry Schwarz. (Video link).
The whole thing is pretty long (1:30), but the part about global warming is from about minute 14 to minute 23. It's covered by just two slides (3 and 4). It's worth 10 minutes of watching if you are interested. The point of his lecture is that dealing with politics and engineering is a complex issue. His conclusion about Kyoto is that it's a 'badly flawed political solution to an extraordinary complex problem.' He says that Kyoto puts an unfair burden on the United States to reduce its emissions. Regulation in the 70s and 80s brought CO2 emissions down in the US and many of those policies were ahead of other countries. The wording of the Kyoto Treaty says that each nation has to reduce it's CO2 emission to a certain fraction of its 1990 levels. The problem from the US's point of view is that it already spent resources lowering CO2 levels prior to 1990, and it is even more expensive to reduce emissions further. Other nations that had large emissions at the time have to make simpler, cheaper improvements to see the same reduction, which is economically unfair to the US.
There's another viewpoint from Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth in which he says that he would have pushed to ratify the treaty had he been elected president. One of the ideas Gore tries to get across in the movie is that we need to make serious efforts to reduce worldwide CO2 or the effects of global warming will be significant very soon. He says those effects (and subsequent environmental and economic losses) will be so severe that it is worth the cost to make emissions reductions now. It's reasonable considering that the US produces a large fraction of the CO2 emitted in the world, and has an extremely high per capita emission rate.
So where do I stand? I'm not completely sure, but I do believe that global warming is a problem, and some effort needs to be taken to slow down whats happening at the moment. I don't know that the Kyoto Protocol is a great answer, but I can't imagine it's a horrible one. We'll have to pay the cost to reduce emissions at some point, and if we put that money into research now it'll pay off in the future.
With the crazy results of the 2000 Presidential Election a lot of people, including myself, wondered about the usefulness of the electoral college, especially when the elected President didn't have a plurality of the votes. I thought it should be removed and the Presidency should be given to the candidate with the most votes (plurality). That would eliminate the 'meaningless' Democratic Texas vote or Republican Massachusetts vote. I finally did some reading on the matter and found out there was a lot more to the matter.
I drew most of my information from a single website, The Center for Voting and Democracy, which is bad, but it was well written and not slanted in any direction, so I figured it was ok. A bunch of the other websites I read from were really arguing for a specific proposal, even if they presented a wide range of information.
First there are problems with the current electoral college system:
So those are good reasons for reforming the election process in some way, but there are several problems. First any big changes will require a constitutional amendment, which means approval by 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states. The 3-electoral vote states are unlikely to give up the disproportionate representation advantage. It seems to be a reasonable way to do things, because otherwise people in rural areas would have little to no representation. e.g. New York would have the same voting power as a several states. That might seem like it's fair, but the combination of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota would have less say than the city of New York, even though they'd have a signifcant percentage of the nation's land and natural resources. So any proposal which removes the disproportionate representation that small states have now will almost surely never make it past congress and less likely the states.
So what are some options? Read about these at this link.
Even after reading I don't know which option seems best to me, but some of them are really interesting. Instant Runoff Voting could solve the problem of expensive runoff elections. Another option is to give the winner of the popular vote an electoral bonus (say 25 additional votes), and seems kind of neat, but deciding on the actual number would be difficult. Proportionally distributing the current electoral votes seems reasonable, but there's a rounding issue, and if it gets partially adopted (state by state) one party could have a big advantage. (e.g. if Texas started splitting it's electoral votes the Democrats would gain, so the Republicans would try to block the change) I don't have a lot of hope that any of the options will be implemented any time soon.
If you have any opinions or more info on the matter, feel free to leave a comment.
At some point before I redid my website with a MovableType blog I was hoping to have some sort of discussion theme to the site, because as many of you know, I like to debate things, however mundane or serious they might be. One reason I never got it started is that to have a good discussion you need a decent number of people for a variety of opinions and a good knowledge base, but more importantly you need people willing to put in the time to write a good argument. I think it takes more effort to write an argument, because you have time to review your argument and make it more consistent, coherent, and ordered than you would if you had a discussion in person. If you don't take that time, then your argument seems sloppy.
So where am I going with this? I'm going to try to start a new category for discussion of things. Not really for open debate, but just for information. I'll go out and try to find some info on both sides of issue and post it. Hopefully I'll learn something I don't know and you will too.
So my next post will be about the electoral college...