Friday, July 18, 2008

HYDROGEN CARS: Hydrogen cars could rule road by 2050, slash oil need. A government-backed study says America could nearly eliminate its need for gasoline for cars, pickup trucks and SUVs by 2050 if the government helps build a market for hydrogen fuel cells and other technologies. McClatchy Newspapers. 18 July 2008.

IMPACTS: Antarctic icebergs scouring seabed are new threat to marine life. Antarctic marine life is coming under increasing threat from icebergs that are scouring the seabed and destroying their habitat, a new study by the British Antarctic Survey has found. London Daily Telegraph, England. 18 July 2008

EPA STUDY - IMPACTS: Climate change puts U.S. way of life at risk: EPA. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under fire for apparently discounting the impact of climate change, on Thursday said global warming poses real risk to human health and the American way of life. Reuters. 18 July 2008.

Scanning the news for stories on climate change can be depressing. For example, I read this week about a report put out by the Green New Deal Group that says that humanity has only 100 months or less to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before we hit a potential point of no return. According to a BBC report the group says that rising greenhouse gas emissions, combined with escalating food and energy costs, mean the globe is facing one of its biggest crises since the 1930s.  When I saw the headline it made me pause. 100 months - that's a little over eight years.  Not much time in my opinion.

Then I read another article (actually several) - that the G8 leaders had agreed to back a 50% cut in GHG emissions by 2050 without identifying any specific or binding medium-term targets. Yikes.  After all, it is widely agreed that we must reduce GHG emissions by at least 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 if we are to have any chance of beating back the worst of climate change. Based on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this consensus holds that preventing global mean temperature from rising above the critical threshold of 2 degrees centigrade in the 21st century will require radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of 80-90% by 2050. The 25-40% below 1990 levels reductions is an intermediate target on the path to achieving this goal. The G8 "commitment" of about half of this 2050 target is, quite frankly, a joke.  

The economic Paul Romer said, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." And Gov. Schwarzenegger, after a bit of drift, has taken that wisdom to heart, focusing again on his budget reform proposal, which includes a revenue stabilization or rainy day fund.

He told the AP in an interview Tuesday: "I will not sign a budget that doesn't have budget reform in it, because otherwise I could not keep the promise to the people of California. I told them in 2003 that we are going to become more fiscally responsible and that we are going to go and to start living within our means."

He's right about what he promised, and about his need to keep his promise. And it's good that he's demanding budget reform in this process. Whether or not all elements of his plan make sense, he's the only one with a real plan. I, for one, wish he had dreamed bigger and looked at a total, top-to-bottom reform of the state's tax system, and then matched that to a rainy day fund. But it's good that he's pushing for some kind of reform at a time of crisis. This is his last, best chance to get anything done.

Voters need to pay close attention to news of the budget. If there is a reform that includes changes to the state constitution, they'll have to vote to ratify them in November.

I don't often agree with Richard Whitmire*, but I do enjoy reading his new-ish blog, "Why Boys Fail?" Richard is smarter, more honest, and more data-driven than most other proponents of the current "boy crisis" storyline, and to the extent that the boy crisis has a kernel of truth to it--and it does, particularly for poor and minority boys--he's one of the more thoughtful people investigating that.

But this post he recently ran, by University of Alaska-Fairbanks Professor (and noted boy crisis hysteric) Judith Kleinfeld, makes no sense whatsoever. Like many "boy crisis" promoters, Kleinfeld believes many boys are not developmentally ready to enter school or begin learning to read at age five, and that this is one reason boys tend to lag girls in reading achievement. Kleinfeld has proposed delaying boys' entry into kindergarten as one potential strategy to address the literacy gap. She notes that the practice, known as "kindergarten redshirting," is common among affluent, white parents, and suggests that poor and minority boys, whose parents are much less likely to redshirt, would do better if they were held back from kindergarten too.

Then she does something really wierd.

Is the U.S. Department of Education deliberately trying to undermine a new program created by Congress to encourage students to pursue careers in the public service?

That question came to mind as we reviewed the Education Department's proposed regulations for enacting the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that Congress created in September as part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRA).

Under the program, the federal government will forgive the remaining debt of Direct Student Loan borrowers if they make 120 payments on their loans while holding a low-paying, full-time public service-oriented job. Borrowers with loans through the competing Federal Family Education Loan program can take advantage of this benefit by consolidating their debt into Direct Lending.

The program is a reaction to reports that student loan borrowers are increasingly shying away from pursuing public-service careers, such as teaching and social work, and is designed to provide incentives to get college graduates to enter these fields and reward them for their service.

Assessing the latest round of talks with Iran, it's clear that the old strategy of "surrender first, then we negotiate," has failed. In ASP's latest video op-ed, Senior Fellow Flynt Leverett says now it is up to Undersecretary William Burns to see if "pre-negotiations" or talks about talks, can sketch out a viable, durable and comprehensive platform for a new U.S.-Iran relationship.

It is a sad reality that many colleges do not treat their athletes as students, but rather as semi-professionals, for four years before dropping them into the real world without a meaningful degree or workforce-ready skills. Particularly at Division I basketball and football schools, colleges use their athletes to win championships and gain national prominence but too often leave them woefully unprepared for life away from the gridiron and hoops.

As I argued last week, the commercialization of college sports has gone too far. In this post, I will lay out the steps that I believe the NCAA and Congress should take to make sure that colleges aren’t allowed to lose touch with what really matters in higher education: graduating students with meaningful degrees.The first step toward reforming college sports is requiring greater transparency about the academic outcomes of athletes. Without better information, neither the NCAA nor Congress will be able to isolate and target academic abuses. The NCAA must also step up to the plate and fix flaws with its current academic monitoring and penalty system, as well as with its eligibility rules.

You hear a lot of talk in policy circles about disease management of chronic conditions, and we're all for new models of effective, coordinated care. But even if we figured out the perfect way to treat chronic diseases, it won't do much for uninsured people who can't get this wonderful new care. As a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, there are a lot of people who fall into that category. The number of working age adults with major chronic conditions grew by 25 percent during the ten years from 1997 through 2006.

The study by Catherine Hoffman and Karyn Schwartz, on the Health Affairs website, found that this group experienced access problems both based on their insurance status, and because of cost.

Last week, we reported that both the House and Senate committee versions of the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill cut all funding for Reading First, a program that supports research-based literacy programs in kindergarten through third grade. Both committees said they based this decision on a recent study, which found no evidence that the program improved reading comprehension scores of students in participating schools. A closer look at the bills, however, reveals that the committees did not apply the same standard to other programs: They continue to fund, and even provide increases for, programs with equally scant evidence of effectiveness.

Indie rocker Feist appears in Sesame Street's first episode this season, performing an altered version of her hit song, "1234" to teach preschoolers (and monsters!) how to count to four.