| Tuesday, May
4, 2010
In a few minutes we leave to take Sable to the surgeon where we think
they'll do her knee operation today. I don't seem to be very good at getting
much else done just now. I think I'm slowing down.
We'll have something of substance here later today, but there's no time
this morning.
============
1145: Well, Sable gets her surgery today, and we don't get to pick her up
until tomorrow, assuming all goes well. She is getting her left hind knee
rebuilt to fix a torn ligament. Recovery is going to be difficult because we
have to keep her from running and jumping for weeks, and she's not going to
like that. This isn't going to be much fun, and that's assuming all goes
well. It's also more expensive than I would have imagined, but that's not
the primary concern.
We're back home and waiting.
I suppose I ought to remind you that this is
pledge drive week at Chaos Manor. Just a
reminder.
=====================
Oil Spills and Civil Defense
The oil spill crisis continues. Apparently not much was done in the early
times when containing it would have been easier. Hardly surprising. Counting
on Washington and FEMA to respond to everything, earthquakes, oil spills,
hurricanes, floods, tornados, flu outbreaks, wildfires, riots, and any other
disasters is not a reasonable policy: it's just too much for any single
agency. What's needed is local Civil Defense, and nearly anyone who thinks
about it knows that. Preparation for earthquake is different from
preparation from tornado which is different from preparation for flooding.
Preparation for oil spill is different depending on where the oil well is.
I remember when Herman Kahn used to say that his Hudson Institute had the
top three experts on how to end a nuclear exchange. He couldn't tell you
which one was the best: "We had three junior fellows spend a month thinking
about the problem. As far as I know that's more than anyone else has ever
spent on the problem."
My point being that if there are locals, even volunteers, in Fresno or
Bakersfield whose job is to think about disaster preparation, they will know
a lot more about the next disaster in their local area than a FEMA official
in the District of Columbia.
I've mentioned before that back when I was at Pepperdine and Reagan was
Governor I did a briefing on a number of topics. One topic was energy. I was
concerned back then with a coming energy crisis, and one of my proposals was
renewed offshore oil drilling. California needed the energy and the income
that an oil separation tax (state tax on oil pumped; Alaska does that) would
allow a lot lower California income and sales tax levels. Part of my
proposal was that some of the separation tax should be allocated to building
and maintaining a disaster containment force. Not being an expert on oil
spill containments I wasn't too specific about what that ought to be, but my
example was a fleet of ocean going tugs, at least one tanker, and lots of
containment booms kept in multiple places. It would not be cheap, but it
would be ready, and time is important; and "cheap" is a relative term. It's
a lot cheaper to apply something you have than to improvise after the
disaster. It's easier to contain an oil slick than to clean up after it gets
ashore.
What the "ocean disaster teams" should be doing other than training
when there was (we hope) no emergency could be worked out: there was plenty
of need for oceanography research, development of wildlife rescue
techniques, and the like. There would be something for them to do, but their
primary duty would be, like firemen, to be ready. The point was that some
kind of spill is inevitable: wrecked tanker, leaking platform, oil well
blowout, typhoon wrecking a platform -- something like that will eventually
happen. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill demonstrated what I had in mind (I
think my briefing was in 1967).
Today the looming energy crisis I have been writing about since the
1960's is still here. The need for more energy resources is still real. The
need for separation taxes -- as they have in Alaska -- is still here. The
probability of a disastrous event: shipwreck, platform blowout, typhoon or
earthquake at one of the ocean platforms, sabotage, terrorist act, stupid
operational error by a drilling team, etc., has not gone down by much and
the terrorist act threat may have increased. The potential for disaster is
still there and the need for a ready response team financed by separation
taxes is still real.
Of course Civil Defense needs to be prepared for a lot more than an oil
spill. Fortunately that doesn't cost as much as creating and keeping a fleet
of oil spill containment equipment. Earthquake, for example, requires a
local organization to educate, prepare, and assist local residents on what
they need to do (much as Fire Prevention Week used to be a big deal although
it doesn't seem to be so much so now). Same with hurricane and tornado,
flooding, and other such potential disasters. Los Angeles need not spend a
lot of resources preparing for twisters, just as Oklahoma doesn't have to
prepare for tsunamis. The point is to be prepared for what is likely to
happen to you, and FEMA isn't a useful way of doing that. Much of Civil
Defense can be accomplished by volunteers, retired military and civil
service workers, and so forth. We know that used to work: it needs to be
tried again.
Centralizing in FEMA was silly. We had Civil Defense. Liberal Democrats
didn't like Civil Defense. Civil Defense was attacked by liberals. One
reason was that the Soviet Union, which had a very large and very compulsory
Civil Defense organization throughout the USSR, pretended to believe that US
Civil Defense was primarily a preparation for American aggressive war
against communism, and made a big point of saying so often. CDO
communications and rescue training, and the general volunteer CDO disaster
preparation activities were ignored: the propaganda was that CDO was a Cold
War organization. The USSR strategy seems to have worked. To this day it is
hard to find accounts of CDO's efforts in local disaster preparation,
rescue, and recovery, although many of us remember those times. When I was
an Assistant Scoutmaster most Boy Scout troops had an Emergency Preparedness
plan and cooperated with local civil defense until Carter abolished all that
and created FEMA. CDO survived into the 1980's. I recall that when
COMDEX was in Atlanta, in the early eighties there was a large Civil Defense
headquarters in downtown Atlanta. The building, which resembled an
antebellum home, later became a private club.
There was an attempt to revive Civil Defense as an organization during
the Reagan era, but the opposition from those who claimed that it was
largely a needless and "provocative" Cold War activity was too great.
So: once again, let me emphasize that local disasters need local
preparation, and FEMA can never do all that from Washington. It's not
Washington's job to put out local fires in the Los Angeles forests. We can
appreciate federal help, but it would be stupid to rely on it. Relying on
the Feds to dig you out after a twister is not smart. Had there been a New
Orleans Civil Defense organization, you may be sure that there would have
been an official -- probably a volunteer Major or Colonel -- whose job was
to see that the local school bus fleet was ready to assist in evacuations,
rather than sit in a parking lot until inundated. I can give other examples,
but that one seems sufficient.
We need to revive Civil Defense. It should organize local volunteers:
people to keep the Internet working; to keep communications open; to
organize evacuations of homes for the disabled and elderly; to know that
Shirley down the street lives alone (with the assistance of a paid care
giver who doesn't live there) and will need to be taken care of if there's a
power failure or general failure of transportation; and so forth. It's not
simple, but it can be done, mostly with volunteers with a little
professional assistance.
The time to do preparation is before there's a disaster. Thus was it ever
until Jimmy Carter's people decided that could better be done from the
District of Columbia. Note that DC isn't particularly well organized either
-- the Congress doesn't even trust the Metropolitan Police and has its own
elite police force. Such is liberal democracy.
We need to revive Civil Defense
==============
On Arctic Ice and open water,
see MAIL. The Arctic has been open many times in both historical and
memorable times. One wonders about the modern concern.
There's a lot on this in
mail.
My conclusion remains: we don't know enough about climate
change or climate in general to justify enormous cost "solutions" to
problems we don't understand. We probably are not spending enough on climate
research, but we are probably spending too much on the consensus view: we
need to fund some "denier" studies by careful people. I'd recommend a
committee chaired by Freeman Dyson to allocate a few hundred million dollars
in research grants. If Freeman doesn't want to do it, I am sure we can put
together a committee of people committed to science, not to prejudged
policies. NSF can supply the oversight mechanism, but I would not want them
to direct the allocations of funds. They are too subject to political
pressures now.
This isn't rocket science. It's far more complex than that.
And harder. But we are up to it, once we shed the prejudices and look at
data and evidence.
===========
The Vet just called. Sable is fine, operation went well, her
knee is restored, and we can bring her home tomorrow some time. Deo Gratia.
Recovery is going to take weeks, and keeping an active dog like that
inactive for that long is not going to be easy, but she should have full use
of her leg by mid summer.
Maybe I can get to work now. I am astonished at how
draining all this is. She is of course the empty nest dog...
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