It's about water

Final installment of my rant about global warming, for now, is to raise the issues I heard raised by Larry Dale, most recently as mentioned a couple of posts ago in a visit he and his co-researchers at the Climate Change Center made to a group of us at PG&E. The relationships of gasoline, coal and natural gas to global warming are obvious -- they're all fossil fuels (refined or unrefined), and the fact that they're in some ways substitutable for each other raises complicated and interesting questions about trying to limit their use. But water?

Well, from my perspective working at PG&E, water is a renewable generation source, again substitutable for other energy sources such as fossil fuels. But what Larry Dale's research has been about, the changes in how water will be "delivered" to the state of California by our friendly neighborhood climate, affects the use of water for consumption as much as it does the use of water for electricity production. What we think we know so far is that:

1) Global warming will reduce California's ability to store its annual water supply in the Sierra snow pack, effectively eliminating a huge state reservoir of all the man-made ones.

2) California may get almost the same amount of rain, on average per year, fifty or a hundred years from now as it does now. But the characteristics of the rainfall patterns may be drastically different: the general picture is of rains starting earlier and ending earlier, on average, making the storage of water to serve the period of its greatest demand, the dry summer, more difficult. Also, weather may be more volatile and more rain may come in the form of "extreme" events like larger storms.

3) Because of the still enormous supplies of water underground in the state, California is blessed or cursed with the possibility of almost directly substituting energy use for natural weather patterns in maintaining its water supplies. This doesn't mean our droughts haven't been real, as I take it, but that at a high enough cost in energy our essential needs could be met even under future scenarios that deliver a lot less water from the mountains to the farms and cities.

It's about coal

Continuing on with the subject of climate change, one of the presentations at the Rutgers forum I mentioned in my first blog post that really stuck with me cast doubt not only on emissions trading but on a carbon tax as a way of constraining greenhouse emissions. The point of this presentation was a simple one: both coal and natural gas produce greenhouse emissions, but coal is a much, much cheaper way of producing electricity (when it can be produced close to the source, that is -- otherwise transportation costs can change the relative economics). So in areas where coal is economic, a carbon tax is actually going to have the perverse effect of knocking the cleaner natural gas power plants (cleaner in considering all the other pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide that power plants produce, like sulfur and nitrogen oxides) out of the running before they do coal -- in other words, a carbon tax across the board will make coal more rather than less attractive as our major source of electric generation, unless a really massive amount of renewable or nuclear power is developed to knock coal out of the running as well as natural gas. And the latter development, in the proportions needed to have that effect, is probably a twenty year development project at least, so in the meantime (meaning most of the rest of my lifetime, at any rate) even with a carbon tax we're stuck with coal. And the corollary of this analysis is the equally grim point that if we choose to unilaterally abandon coal, we're probably back in the Laffer argument that the only way we can reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term by any substantial amount is by constraining economic activity... All of this thinking about coal is especially useful for those of us in California who don't use coal to generate electricity in the first place, and so tend to forget how important it is in the rest of the U.S.

It's about gasoline prices

I've been mulling a couple of issues related to global warming, the result of attending a forum on the subject here in the City a couple of weeks ago, and then having Larry Dale from the U.C. Berkeley Climate Change Center come to PG&E for an exchange of information just this week.

At Hanson Bridgett's forum on the state of renewable energy, the "least political" (actually maybe the most political) and most controversial speaker, as you might expect, was the academic, Severin Borenstein, the local media's favorite talking head on energy issues in the state of California. The main points I garnered from what he had to say were

1) Approaches based on decisions about how to reduce greenhouse emissions based on the current view and centralized incentive systems (renewable portfolio standards as well as cap and trade systems) are likely to have unforeseen effects and may not work. (I would note that Arthur Laffer has been campaigning recently against the cap and trade initiatives from the vantage of his pure free enterprise ideology, on what seems to me a pretty reasonable argument that caps may ultimately have to be implemented as pure constraints on our energy usage, if we can't find substitutes for fossil fuels like coal, so that there aren't enough carbon credits around to trade.)

2) The only approach that is really likely to work is a carbon tax, because the economic incentives aren't tied to any particular kind of technology (allowing new technologies or solutions to come into the mix on an equal footing with the current favorites), and because it's the best way to price externalities. Severin didn't go into the utter impossibility of proposing a tax that would be seen at the gas pump at a time when the Democrats, of all people, have made a huge issue of high gas prices...

3) The climate change deniers are mutating into climate change "adapters," meaning that the perspective of those who don't see a point to limiting greenhouse emissions is becoming that we can't do anything about reversing global warming, so let's make the best of it. Severin expressed his opposition to that perspective on the grounds that the "adapters" are thinking in terms of averages, whereas the catastrophic effects of extreme events are so drastic that we really need to be trying to change the trajectory rather than pretending that we can ride the wave. I'm actually not sure if that's the right approach to take: I don't want conservative ideologues controlling the debate on social adaptation to climate change, and ultimately I'm not convinced that science indicates we can do anything to change the trajectory (and that's not to deny the human role in climate change or the fact of its happening). But the moral part of his argument, which I take to be that those who have caused or exacerbated climate change bear moral responsibility when extreme events caused by that climate change affect others.

Sculpture versus the work

Lesley and Michael came over for potato pancakes last night, and we watched a DVD I've had out from Netflix since mid-July which turned out to be two distinct documentaries on Donald Judd and Tony Cragg. We've been talking about going to Marfa, Texas with Lesley and Michael for a couple of years, Michael having emigrated from Texas to California and still having family there, so the Judd documentary was like a vicarious version of our dreamed-of road trip. As for Tony Cragg, we bought an etching of his from Crown Point Press a few years ago without knowing anything about him, and all I had learned since was that he had won the Turner Prize back before that was the key to becoming a billionaire British artist. Watching the two documentaries in sequence was most interesting in terms of trying to get past the rhetorical devices that made Cragg "look bad" in the inevitable comparison between the two. It's clear, first of all, that Judd has a "theory" and displays work that has an attention to ongoing consistency and that these inherently play better when confronted with a video camera whose purpose, like Naughty Noo-Noo's, is to gobble up anything that moves. Tony Cragg's work, as viewed through a half-hour lens, looks like it's all over the place, the range being such that almost anyone is likely to wince at some piece of his even while considering a couple of others pretty interesting. Also, he's portrayed in the thick of managing his career as a sculptor as well as making art, whereas Judd is completely separated from either the creative or the physical processes that went into creating his works (which would have been great to see). It's Judd, by the way, who gets the chance before Cragg (the way this DVD is organized) to state that he never refers to his work as sculpture, a way of handily sweeping Cragg and his cohorts into the dustpan of history without ever even having a fair fight about it.

Ancient memories and spirits

Our friend David Miller has a really wonderful interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto on the subject of spirituality in his on-line SFGate column "Finding My Religion" this week. Sugimoto divulges some amazing information about the travails and costs of creating his "Sea of Buddha" photograph in the interview, and makes clear his sense of not being a Buddhist artist, at least not in the sense of what Buddhism means to him in Japan. I loved Sugimoto's comment that in the process of doing the conceptual investigations that are his art process, he "sometimes stirs up ancient memories and spirits" (hence the title of this installment). Given the overall tone of the interview, he could've stopped with the "ancient memories" and been a logically consistent skeptic -- but he added the "spirits," whatever those are, into the mix.

Back from New York

Jenny, Elena and I spent five days (actually, four full days and six nights, plus flight time) in New York City and got back yesterday. Traveling with a twenty-two month old was wonderful and frustrating. The opportunity to see the world again through utterly fresh eyes is one of the great privileges of parenthood, of course, but the counter to that is that one's own visions of how one is going to experience things tend not to work out as planned. The Museum of Natural History's dinosaur bones and dioramas were perfect places to point at things and ask Elena "What's that?" She's at a point where she has enough categories to place things in that she can come up with a plausible, and sometimes creative, answer to almost any question like that (so for example she tended to identify dioramas of antelope or deer as "cows," "goats," or "horses" even as she internalized the words I said to her, "antelope" or "deer" or better, "koodoo" or "okapi"). She's also a bit obsessed right now with sea creatures, and spent a lot of time looking at fish or the remains of fish in the museum as at the Central Park Zoo. In fact, she spent as much time looking for a sticker on the floor with a picture of a sea star (aka starfish) that happened to be repeated throughout the dinosaur exhibits to point toward a special exhibition, as she did on anything else, running excitedly to the next sticker and sitting down on the floor to look closely at it each time.

The other side of the coin was that I saw a lot of the paintings I was hoping to see, but for no more than five or ten seconds at a time. Matisse's Red Studio, Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon,
the huge Kandinsky paintings, the vast Pollock, all at the MOMA, and then the Van Eyck and Workshop Last Judgement at the Met, were all seen with half an eye. I was able to take a bit more time in the Neo Rauch exhibition, and looking at some of the twentieth century work at the Met -- maybe Elena was napping. Warhol's monumental Mao was one of my favorites.

A serious museum

Kenneth Baker delivered a balanced though slippery non-story about developments at the DeYoung Museum in the Chronicle yesterday. What it comes down to is that people are complaining about an apparent softening of content in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums, in spite of three very substantial shows either on now (Hiroshi Sugimoto at the DeYoung and a huge exhibition of works on paper from the Achenbach at the Legion of Honor) or coming soon (Louise Nevelson). The substantial shows have been counterweighted by a series of fashion and decorative art exhibitions, as well as a coming exhibition of glasswork by Dale Chihuly. I have to say that I don't think the criticism is very substantial, but it's a glass half full situation -- all a matter of how one interprets things through the prism of public relations. I really do think the Sugimoto show is one of the best presentations of contemporary art to have happened at the DeYoung, and in fact I think it holds its own against shows at SFMOMA because of the respect given to the Sugimoto's decisions about how to present his work. As a docent I've never seen audiences so engaged with contemporary work at the DeYoung, and it's been a great pleasure to tour the show with people willing to take time to respond to the work as well as ask questions and discuss their own responses to it. I don't remember any comparable exhibition being put on during the tenure of Harry Parker, so I give the new director the credit for bringing Sugimoto here and not doing it in a cursory way (i.e., re-hanging based on the previous venues).

As for the fashion shows, and likewise the decorative arts and craft art shows, I tend not to go through them myself (another example Baker could have highlighted was the exhibition of French jewelry recently at the Legion) even though in the back of my mind I think that as someone who wants to be an artist I should be looking at them as source material just as I do anything else that's in my world. But these shows are great favorites with my fellow docents, because of their personal tastes and also because they tend to be experiences that can be nicely augmented with information that can be communicated during a tour. I guess Monet in Normandy, the great "real art" crowd-pleaser of recent years at the Legion of Honor, was a more substantial program than the fashion shows -- but really, on the ground it all comes down to pleasure.