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Climate change, or “global warming”, is now an accepted fact by virtually everyone. But what does that mean for Michigan – and what decisions do we need to make? Michigan State University will be looking for some answers at a conference on “Global Warming and the Great Lakes” that starts tomorrow. Thomas Dietz is director of the Environmental Science and Policy program at MSU. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
I would like to read you what David Halberstam, possibly the best journalist of our time, had to say about Detroit’s response to the Toyota challenge. “All too many native sons and daughters had taken their standard of living for granted. The other respect in which America was ill prepared for the new world economy was in terms of expectations.
But, he added, “there seemed little awareness of this, let alone concern about it. Few were discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably.”
Halberstam wrote this in his book The Reckoning, published . . . twenty-one years ago, When I read it way back when, I felt like I had received a revelation. What The Reckoning made crystal clear -- without ever explicitly saying so --- was that Detroit, unless it got its act together in a hurry, was not going to be competitive in the long run.
The men running the Big Three come across in Halberstam as complacent, arrogant, and provincial. Toyota, though not without flaws, seemed far more willing to reinvent the wheel when needed.
Well, now it is a generation later. Nobody has fixed those leaky pipes, and everyone in Detroit is shocked, shocked that our basement has finally filled with water. Yes, there are signs that Detroit’s automakers are now trying, and they have vastly improved.
But Toyotas are still seen as better by the professionals who study quality issues. Their vehicles cost less to maintain, and, perhaps more importantly, hold more of their value when they are resold.
This didn’t happen overnight. Everyone talks about labor and health care and legacy costs, All those are important. But I think a big part of the reason why Toyota has been winning is this.
Toyota thinks in terms of the long haul. General Motors has tended to think in terms of the next quarterly earnings report. That’s the kind of thinking that caused General Motors to cancel its electric car, the EV-1, which was briefly on the road a decade ago.
That’s the kind of thinking that caused GM not to invest heavily in hybrid vehicles when it was clear they would lose money for awhile. Toyota, on the other hand, put a lot of money into its hybrid, the Prius.
Now the Prius is making a profit for Toyota. General Motors, on the other hand, is still making Hummers. They are, however, excited about the new hybrid they are working on called the Volt.
I will be excited too, once they manage to invent the batteries to run it. In the Newsweek article, Bob Lutz, GM’s vice-chairman, candidly puts it this way. “We made a bad decision. Being known as the technology laggard is not conducive to selling automobiles.”
Nice sentiments. But what took them so long to get it?
Shock waves were felt in Detroit earlier this year when the experts predicted that Toyota would soon pass General Motors and become the world’s biggest car company. Keith Naughton is Newsweek’s Midwest bureau chief. He recently analyzed why Toyota has become such a threat to GM. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
I was at Walter Reed Medical Center for a few hours in late December. I wasn’t visiting wounded veterans; I went there because they have a fascinating medical museum I had wanted to see.
Afterwards, waiting for a cab on Walter Reed’s well-manicured grounds, I spent some time talking to a soldier who was there for outpatient treatment. His back had been badly injured in the 1991 Iraq War, and the teeth on one side of his mouth had all been knocked out. I said my understanding was that Walter Reed provided really first-class medical care. I recalled that President Eisenhower spent a lot of time there, and Senator Strom Thurmond virtually lived there his last year or so in office. The veteran looked at me. “It is what it is,” he said.
I have thought about that a lot since then. I don’t know what the commission will conclude about who is responsible for the mistreatment and neglect some of our wounded veterans have had to suffer.
But I do know this. We are all responsible. Both the media and the general public. As a society, we are very good at refusing to face certain unpleasant parts of reality, especially if they have no easy resolution.
While the media constantly updates us on the number of soldiers killed in Iraq – now about 3,200 – they seldom mention the number of wounded. That figure, by the way, is more than 23,000. Many of those have suffered amputations or closed-head injuries or other wounds that will alter their lives forever. But until the scandal at Walter Reed, they have by and large been invisible. And that I think is the real scandal, far deeper than moldy walls at a building on the grounds of Walter Reed.
A military funeral is an emotionally moving thing, but when it is over, it is over. For men and women who have lost arms or legs or, worse yet, have suffered major closed head injuries, it is never over. Nor will it ever be over for their loved ones.
And it is disturbing and upsetting to think about these veterans and to see pictures of them. Until the scandal at Walter Reed, the media mainly avoided the injured of Iraq.
Nor did we get very much coverage of the way in which the Bush Administration was cutting Veterans’ Administrations’ benefits right when it was creating a new group of wounded veterans.
That may be changing now. Few veterans have suffered as terribly as Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who spent years in military hospitals after World War II, most of it in the former Percy Jones hospital in Battle Creek. Now, he is co-chairing a separate panel to look into conditions in military and Veterans Administrations hospitals.
If this nation’s media give both commissions’ findings half as much attention as they did the dead body of Anna Nicole Smith, there just might be hope for us. But don’t hold your breath.
The nation has been shocked by reports of wounded veterans living in squalor and getting substandard medical care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Former Michigan Congressman Joe Schwarz is a physician and a Navy veteran of Vietnam. He’s a member of a independent bipartisan panel appointed to investigate the problems at Walter Reed. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Daylight Saving Time has something in common with Communism, Nazism, and virtually the entire catalogue of 20th century ills. They, and it, all came out of World War I.
If you guessed from this that I am not a fan of daylight time, much less of starting it in the dead of winter, you are right.
Everyone is entitled to be a barnacled old reactionary on some topic, and Daylight Saving Time is mine.
Daylight time was originally the idea of an Englishman named William Willett, who started lobbying for it exactly a century ago. He gave all sorts of high-falutin’ reasons, but the real one seemed to be that he was a builder, and thought he would get more out of his construction workers. That was a compelling argument, but the Edwardians who ran the empire had more sense than that.
But a decade later, Kaiser Wilhelm adopted daylight time in 1916, during the Battle of Verdun. That inspired the British, who adopted it three weeks later. After all, it wouldn’t do to kill a man when you thought it was two o’ clock and he thought it three o’ clock. America soon followed Europe into the war and onto Daylight Saving Time. But Americans, especially farmers, didn’t like Daylight Time, and Congress got rid of it in 1919.
But the widespread use of electricity gradually made it more attractive. Michigan brought Daylight Time back after a close statewide vote in 1968, and concerns about energy conservation soon made the idea more popular.
The main rationale for Daylight Time always has been that people will have more sunlight later in the evening, and will hence use less electricity and do more things outdoors.
That makes some sense. Perhaps the best argument I have heard for Daylight Time is that studies show that fewer people watch prime-time TV when it is in effect. But there are a lot of negatives. People’s sleep schedules are disrupted. Light sleepers may take weeks to recover their equilibrium. Children have to go to school in the dark. In Grand Rapids, it will now remain dark until 8:30 in the morning in late October and November, thanks to extended Daylight Time. By the way, they tried to extend daylight time in parts of Australia in the winter of 2000.
Electricity consumption did not drop at all, and peak consumption actually increased in the morning. I think that is exactly what will happen here. Look: I could legally change my name to Leonardo DiCaprio, but that wouldn’t make supermodels chase me.
A thing is what it is. Six o clock is six o clock. It is supposed to be dark at six in January and light at six in June. It is not kind to tamper with Mother Nature; we do too much of that as it is.
The law is a law, and I will be moving my analog clocks ahead Sunday. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
This Sunday, Daylight Saving Time kicks in three weeks earlier than before. Supporters of the extension say that it will save the nation billions in energy costs. But there may also be a Y2-K like downside -- many computers may not be prepared for the switch. This could mean chaos in everything from travel schedules to the stock market. Sixth District Michigan Congressman Fred Upton was the author of the Amendment changing when daylight saving time starts. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Imagine that there was a sudden outbreak of smallpox in Connecticut and New Jersey, and then a case in Pennsylvania.
Smallpox has been eradicated for so long that children are no longer routinely vaccinated against it. So what would you think if there were a sudden outbreak and one of our congressmen responded by introducing a bill to start vaccinating children again in, oh, 2010? And one of our senators then countered with his own bill, which would have us start giving them shots in 2012. Of course a few million would be dead by then, but you wouldn’t want to rush the legislative process.
Yes, I know that sounds sarcastic and my example sounds insane. But if the Great Lakes are in peril from invasive species, as they clearly are, why wait three to five years to do anything about it?
This is not a problem discovered yesterday. Last summer I talked to a bunch of fishermen on a dock on northern Lake Michigan. They were cursing because almost every time they hooked something, it turned out to be a little inedible goby.
These are fish that aren’t native to this country at all, but got here in the 1980, you guessed it, in the ballast water of trans-Atlantic vessels. They eat the eggs and hatchlings of other fish, like perch and walleye, and speedily drive out native species.
Then, there are the zebra mussels, which clog pipes and drains and motors, and which can accumulate dangerous concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in their bodies.
And now we have viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a disease that causes fish to internally bleed to death. Last year it was reported in Lakes St. Clair and Ontario, and in Lake Erie, where there was a large die-off of yellow perch due to the disease.
Environmentalists are now desperately trying to find a way to keep VHS from infecting the upper Great Lakes, but no one is very optimistic that they will be able to do it. And the last thing the Great Lakes needs while we try to solve that is a new set of horrors.
The Pacific Coast states have been fighting similar problems, and are doing a better job. They have tough rules on what ships can do with ballast water, and they are enforcing them.
Washington, Oregon and California also sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in federal court, and won a ruling in 2005 that said the EPA had to regulate ballast water discharges.
What I don’t understand is why Michigan didn’t join that lawsuit. Nor do I understand why keeping our waters safe from foreign parasites isn’t the EPA’s job in the first place.
What I do understand is that this is a problem every level of government owes it to us to fix. And unless lakes filled with parasites and bloody dead fish are what you want, you ought to pressure every elected lawmaker you can to deal with it, right now.
There is increasing concern about foreign species, from zebra mussels to fish-killing viruses, invading the Great Lakes. Most or all of them arrive in the ballast water carried by ocean-going vessels. US Representative Candice Miller has introduced two bills designed to fight this. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.
I am always amused by how many adults still seem to retain a six-year-old’s fascination with bathroom humor. Anything that relates to the subject of our own plumbing may well produce giggles and eye-rolling in the best of circles. But waste products are a fact of life.
And it may be one we would rather not think about. Except that we have to. To borrow a euphemism, our nation produces billions of gallons of what we’ll call “wastewater” every day.
Many of us think it is magically transported to some immaculate facility where it is speedily transformed back into clean drinking water. But that isn’t quite true. More often than you think, the treatment plants get backed up, sometimes just as a result of a thunderstorm.
That means they have to release raw sewage somewhere, and sometimes, somewhere is the Great Lakes. That happens way too often. According to the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, twenty of this region’s large cities dump enough untreated raw sewage into the Great Lakes to fill 3,650 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
All of a sudden, my annual summer swim in Charlevoix looks a lot less tempting.
Thirty years ago, I did a story on a wastewater plant in Tiffin, Ohio that may have been the first in the country to use the methane to generate power for itself. In the Seattle suburb of Renton, Washington, a huge treatment plant uses sewage methane to supply all its energy needs. But now there's an even better idea to move beyond using methane and use all the sewage to power not only the plants themselves, but thousands of homes. The key to doing that is a machine called a “digester” which sounds, I know, like something out of a low-budget horror flick.
But evidently, a digester can take all that stuff we don’t like to think about, and convert it to both energy, and benign compost.
In the short run, the electricity generated by that method would probably cost a little more than electricity generated by conventional means. But Greg Mulder, a power specialist in Grand Rapids, thinks that in the long run, it would save both money and energy.
He thinks that if we buy a fleet of digesters and convert all of Michigan‘s sewage into electricity, they could produce enough to power more than 25,000 households every year.
That‘s not a total answer.
But it would put a dent in the more than $18 billion Michigan spends every year to import energy from out-of-state sources. Plus, it would presumably stop all those Olympic swimming pools of waste from being dumped into the Great Lakes. And that alone ought to be worth whatever the price of whole lot of digesters might be.
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