Left In Lowell

It’s hard not to think about what this result means. However, I’ll congratulate the winners and just say one thing - I hope everyone can all act like real adults. If this race was indeed about a sense of revenge, put it aside and do the work of the city.

This is too funny. Kucinich brought a resolution to impeach Dick Cheney to the House floor. Pelosi has (stupidly) refused to even talk about entertaining the idea of impeachment, so it was expected this would die quickly (but at least the articles in the resolution would be read into House record which was the point).

But 164 Republicans thought it would be nice and humiliating, for the Dem leadership, to force some sort of limited debate regarding the impeachment…so they voted against tabling the resolution. I have to say, wrong motivation, but correct outcome…Pelosi needs to realize that with a president who is now less popular than pre-resignation Nixon needs to be held 100% accountable - and impeachment should not be off the table.

No wonder the Bush administration still walks all over the Democrats - they know they aren’t a real threat. I can’t wait to see how Niki Tsongas voted.

It never ceases to amaze me what I find when I go into my server stats for this site.

For instance, it looks like an average of over a thousand people listened or at least accessed each podcast interview. The first day each audio candidate interview was posted, I saw the number of hits for that sound file go into the hundreds, and each file as of yesterday midnight averages around 1200 total hits each since they were posted. Now, I’m pretty sure that the MP3 file is not accessed until someone hits play, so I think that’s pretty accurate.

We are, on this blog, comfortably hitting between 1300-1500 hits a weekday on a regular basis. That’s “unique hosts served,” which is misleading, as a lot of people access the internet via one big proxy server. For example, ten people with Comcast in our area might be using the same proxy server, which only counts as one unique hit even if the hits come from different households. The “hit” number also counts hits from web crawlers of search engines (who are not humans), though. So that 1500 mark is probably about right, given that we’re undercounting unique hits via proxy servers, but overcounting hits from search engines.

On top of that, I like to look at the search terms that bring people to the blog. It tickles me that a search for “lowell city council election” brings up this blog in the number one spot, while you don’t see one Lowell Sun article until the second Google page. And Richardhowe.com is right behind LiL. Blogs are the Google Rulerz.

But other ones puzzle me. How did anyone find us using the very generic search terms “computers internet blog”? Or the odd one, “charming billy” (which appears to a novel, not one we’ve mentioned ever)? What the heck was someone looking for when searching for “villages without religion”?

Ah, well, it’s not how you find us, it’s being found that counts. I hope that people considered LiL useful this election cycle, and that you continue to help us foment discussion on politics and beyond in the next. Oh and…GO VOTE!! You have until 8pm.

The big state news yesterday was a proposal (the first of its kind nationwide) by Patrick and lawmakers to require a certain amount of home heating fuel to be made up of biofuels in Massachusetts.

I’m of two minds regarding biofuels…after all, petrochemicals are used in farming, for fertilizer and pesticides, as well as to power the mechanical farm and harvesting vehicles. And it’s still unclear whether or not biofuels is a net gain or a net loss of energy (given all that it takes to produce the biomass from soup to nuts). And it’s certainly taking a toll on our farming habits - with a rise in corn prices from the rush to ethanol, we now see beef and other meat prices rising, and other crops we need (veggies, rice, whatever) are getting incentivized right out of the market.

And will this proposal, looking to go to 2% by 2010 and 5% by 2013, really make much more than a dent in our carbon emissions? My biggest problem with our leadership on this issue is that our incremental steps are only marginally better than no steps at all - we’re rapidly running out of time. (Estimates are that in less than 10 years, we’re past the tipping point. Now, with things heating up faster than expected, it could be sooner.)

I also think that in the rush to look at these energy producers, we are missing some very low-hanging fruit in energy saving and efficiencies which we, with current technology, could easily achieve. If our energy consumption goes down, so does carbon emissions - and it makes it so effortless to meet carbon-neutral goals as well. I hope that our leaders can tackle energy efficiency even harder than they are regarding renewable energy production.

However, Patrick’s proposal is looking to increase the use of cellulosic ethanol, specifically. If there’s a biofuel that might work, it’s this - which can use the waste products of corn production - the stalks and leaves - and other lower-maintenance crops like switchgrass. And biomass-based energy is carbon-neutral. In one season, you lock up the carbon from the atmosphere (CO2) in the biomass, and the next, you might be burning and releasing it to produce the same amount of carbon dioxide as what you took out. There is no net gain of CO2, like there is when we burn the eons-locked carbon in petrochemicals or coal.

And to boot, you’re creating an incentive to produce more of this carbon-neutral fuel. They admit there might be a slight increase to the cost of home heating oil, but to my mind, this is tinky-winks compared to the sacrifice we ought to be willing to shoulder to save ourselves, and I hope that our leaders (especially in the legislature) are willing to ask us to make those sacrifices.

I have to combat the point that the opposition makes, as well:

Samuel Krasnow, spokesman for Environment Northeast, said the bill is a disappointment because there’s no standards to reduce pollution.

“There should be a requirement that there be a net reduction of greenhouse gases,” he said. “If we’re really caring about both global warming and energy independence, it should have greater than zero reduction in greenhouse gases.”

This is the silliest argument I’ve ever heard. No energy system is going to be carbon-negative. Neutral’s as good as it gets, and anyone who says otherwise misunderstands everything about chemical processes. Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biomass…they are all at best carbon neutral. There’s no such thing as carbon-negative energy producers so far as I have ever seen. In fact, in order to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, we would have to spend energy. Let’s say we decide to lock carbon back in the ground. Breaking the carbon dioxide bond takes energy (say, from solar panels, or wind farms, or biomass). So carbon-negative is also energy-negative. We might wind up having to do it, but it doesn’t mean we can have our cake and eat it too.

So on net balance, I like this proposal. It doesn’t go far enough…they never go far enough…but if we can really put incentives in place to ramp up cellulosic ethanol, and use up our scrap wasted corn leaves for energy, at least it’ll be something. Now, I’d love to see us surpass this goal by 2013. I’d like to see 50% carbon-neutral energy use by 2018. But we can start here.

Have at it…what’s going on? What are you seeing out there?

(Just in case you can’t find it, Left in Lowell’s endorsement thread is here.)

Update: The Lowell Sun is reporting that the turnout is picking up a bit. With the expected break in weather we might see even more. I imagine many seniors are waiting for the cold rain to cease before setting out, as many of them walk to their polling places.