Blog

Today we post part three of our three-part Q&A session with famed short-seller Jim Chanos.

Perhaps Chanos’ most famous trade of all time is his shorting of Enron before the company collapsed. That is what we focus on today.

Click here to read part one of the interview. Click here for part two.

———————–

Business Insider: Let’s talk Enron. It’s known as your biggest trade. I heard that early in the 1990s, around ’93 or so, is when you first started to look into the company.

Jim Chanos: We had looked at it a few times because it was a rapid acquirer of companies but never saw anything well before our involvement that made us pull the trigger. It wasn’t until the 2000 time frame that we really got intrigued by this thing.

BI: Was there any catalyst in the 2000 time frame?

JC: Sure. A catalyst for our involvement was simply a phone call I got from a friend in Dallas who ran a hedge fund who asked if I had seen Jonathan Weil of the Texas Wall Street Journal’s Heard On The Street column if I had heard the accounting of the energy merchant banks. And I had not seen it.

So he faxed it to me – email was still not ubiquitous at that point – and it was a really interesting column about how the energy merchant banks had lobbied the SEC successfully for getting mark-to-model and mark-to-market accounting for their long term investing in energy derivatives. To take the present value of all the future profits that were written into the derivatives were sold as opposed to adjusting it pro-rata over the life of the contract. And they were celebrating.

The article if I can recall went on to say that there were a number of academics and accountants who were worried about this practice. That anytime you could front-load profits you’d really suspect that company of corporate abuse. We had experience with this in a number of areas in the first subprime fiasco in the mid-90s and then way way back going back to the annuity issuers – Baldwin United and others – back in the early-80s. They were selling insurance policies and cooking up all their future assumed income up front.

BI: Just to step in here for a second, when you refer to the subprime crisis in the 90s, are you referring to the late 1990s with second-tier mortgages?

JC: It was the time of the money store, so I’m going to say this was 1996 to ’98 as I recall.

BI: Kyle Bass mentioned this stuff to me around the same time.

JC: Yes. That was the Spanish Civil War to the subprime World War II that hit 2006 and 2007.

So immediately we got a little interested because over and over we’ve seen at the hands of unscrupulous management that kind of ability to in effect create instant profits by doing what were ultimately bad business deals, you know, was just too lucrative to give up. So we basically started analyzing Enron right then and there, which was the October-November 2000 time-frame. We pulled the 1999 10-K and 10-Qs and immediately there was red flags all over the place. There was the odd disclosure about the offshore entities that were set to do business with Enron.

BI: Like JLM?

JC: Yeah like with the Raptors and some of the others that where a senior executive of Enron was also the managing partner of the entities.

BI: A huge conflict of interest.

JC: Yes. There are other odd things that didn’t get as much subsequent press. For example: we saw a violation of the matching policy under GAAP, which is that in the merchant banking operations, they would sell assets  for a gain and it would be above the line as merchant banking income. But when they sold something at a reasonable loss they moved it into discontinued operations and then when they sold it they put a loss on sale of discontinued operations. So, as opposed to booking both their profits AND their losses, they were putting that below the line so the analyst was disregarding that.

BI: Nice.

JC: Yes! So that was another thing that caught our eye. The next thing that caught our eye was even with what looked to be some pretty aggressive accounting, we calculated the company’s pre-tax return on capital including their derivatives book to be somewhere a little north of 6% but below 7%. And based on what Enron bonds were trading at and the equity risk premium, we realize this company wasn’t earning its cost of capital.

So it was a giant leveraged hedge fund as my partner Doug Mellon said at the time that was earning 6% a year if you would, on a leveraged balance sheet and you were gonna pay six to ten times book for it. It made no sense.

Then finally, there were the more interesting secondary issues like the insider selling through 2000. A lot of executive departures in 2000. So all these things for us were enough for us to start initiating a position in November of 2000.

BI: More red flags came up?

JC: Yes and then the more work we did and the more disclosure that started coming out, the more it became apparent that…

BI: Time was up?

JC: Yes. Well, we actually never thought it was a fraud. The “A-Ha!” moment for me that I suddenly knew that something was not in the grey area but the black area was when Skilling resigned. That’s when I knew.

BI: I see.

JC: When Skilling resigned abruptly at that point I knew that something was very very wrong that we couldn’t see. And what we couldn’t see of course was the gua ranted payments that they had made to the offshore entities should they sell them assets were suddenly loss-making.  So in order to get these toxic assets off their books, they agreed to issue Enron shares as a “make-good” to the offshore entities. And they didn’t disclose that.

That was the hidden troll, in terms of an equity analyst.

BI: What about the Skilling analyst call in 2000, 2001?

JC: That was in 2001 with the analyst who asked him ‘Why no balance sheet? You’re a financial institution!’ and that was just another sort of qualitative red flag; this is a management team under a little bit of stress.

BI: Could you just give as briefly as possible, a description of mark-to-model accounting?

JC: Yes, there’s nothing wrong with mark-to-market accounting if there’s a liquid market in instruments. The problem really for Enron, and then as we found out later for the banking industry in the latest financial crisis, was really mark-to-model accounting. Mark-to-market for lots of derivatives is really, for the vast majority of them, looks towards something that’s liquidly traded, say something like a Treasury bond or IBM stock. And if it’s an option on IBM stock, or say it;s a simple mortgage-backed bond that trades off of Treasuries, it’s fairly easy to get a reasonable set of assumptions as  to what your derivative  might be worth by looking at the price of the “underlying” as they say.

But for Enron, and as we found out in some of the CDOs later in the current financial crisis, mark-to-model became much more problematic because if Enron has contracted with Intel to provide electricity to some Intel plant over a 15-year period based on certain weather factors or whatever….I mean there were so many moving parts that no one could simply point to an underlying and say ‘Well, a reasonable person would say this is the range of this security. There were 4 or 5 or 6 variables in some of these contracts, some with  huge volatility in inputs.

BI: Similar to, say, weather derivatives?

JC: Yes. What is it worth? I don’t know. Can an auditor come in and disprove you? Doubtful.

BI: Right.

JC: So where was the incentive? The incentive of course was to ere on the optimistic side because that was in instant income and therefore instant bonus.

BI: So you think it was motivated by profits for the upper echelon of [Enron] management?

JC: Oh absolutely. It was an agency. They were gaming the shareholders.

Join the conversation about this story »

Artists are taking to the streets.

As part of the Emerging America festival — a new collaboration by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), Huntington Theatre Company (HTC), and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) — artists will create a “moving party” leading from the A.R.T. theatrical club space Oberon to Harvard Square on May 2 during the Harvard Square Business Association’s annual MayFair. Once there, the artists will perform in sideshows and dance parties throughout the day.

Conceived by A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus ’88, the idea for Emerging America took shape last year when Paulus arrived in Cambridge to begin her new role. Eager to celebrate new American artists and art forms happening locally, as well as around the country, Paulus sought to connect with the HTC and ICA, two of the most vibrant performance institutions in the area.

The inaugural festival is a weekend blast of live entertainment and socializing that runs May 14-16, but the May 2 weekend will kick things into high gear with MayFair celebrations, as well as new media ventures, such as podcasts and narrated walking tours, all downloadable from the Emerging America Web site.

Podcasts include stories about or sparked by famous personalities who lived, loved, or worked in Boston and Cambridge, original “radio plays” created by the HTC’s playwriting fellows, and walking tours that celebrate the neighborhoods and artists of each organization’s community, past and present.

The festival’s opening night sets off a smorgasbord of dramatic productions and late-night entertainment.

The ICA takes center stage with “Disfarmer,” a haunting and original work of puppet theater by award-winning director Dan Hurlin that explores the world of eccentric and reclusive photographer Mike Disfarmer. The festival kickoff party follows with music, performance, dancing, and poetry on the American experience.

Saturday’s daylong events include comedy. “Mrs. Smith Presents … A Benefit for the Carlyle Foundation Empowerment School for People and Cats with Persistent and Severe Challenges” introduces a wealthy, eccentric socialite who channels her grief and rage over the disappearance of her cat Carlyle into a laugh-out-loud theater happening that teeters on the edge of comedy and pathos. There’s also a bar and live music. There are other plays to choose from, including “Live from the Edge” and “Particularly in the Heartland,” and the night is capped with a midnight showing of the A.R.T.’s critically acclaimed “The Donkey Show,” and a subsequent celebration.

Sunday promises a brunch at the Boston Center for the Arts, with more plays to ensue. The festival ends with a party at Oberon.

“Theater is more than simply a play on the stage: It’s a ritual, a social occasion for people to come together and experience community,” said Paulus. “My hope for Emerging America is that the audience will be able to give feedback to the artists through conversations provoked by the social gatherings that will be at the heart of the festival.”

For a complete schedule, podcast information, and ticketing, visit www.emergingamericafestival.org.

While the Earth warms, Harvard has warmed to the idea making a difference in climate change.

For years, and in increasing measure, the University’s research in science, policy, business, design, and even divinity involves thinking globally. Meanwhile, Harvard’s students, faculty, and staff are acting locally.

In the last decade, Harvard has upgraded heating and cooling systems, changed the fuel it burns, improved construction guidelines, eased green commuting, reordered purchasing standards, rethought food systems, and encouraged energy conservation on both an institutional and personal scale.

All of this is designed to reduce the University’s output of Earth-warming greenhouse gases (GHG).

In 2008, Harvard’s ethic of energy reduction was memorialized in an ambitious goal articulated by President Drew Faust, to reduce GHG emissions at Harvard 30 percent by 2016, with 2006 as a baseline year. The goal is inclusive of growth in the University’s physical size.

Late last year, each of Harvard’s 12 Schools and divisions, with oversight from an executive committee and the Office for Sustainability, submitted a detailed emissions reduction plan. A University master plan is in the works and will appear later this year.

The results so far are making a difference. From Fiscal Year 2006 to FY 2009, Harvard has reduced its GHG emissions by 7 percent (14 percent if growth is left out of the equation). In some cases, individual progress is remarkable. Harvard Business School, for instance, has already cut its emissions by 29 percent. Reductions at Harvard Kennedy School come in at 16 percent.

On the eve of the 40th Earth Day, here is a timeline of how Harvard has acted locally in the last decade:

2000

• Commuter Choice Program founded. At the time, 27.4 percent of faculty and staff drove to work; now just 14 percent do. (The national average is 75 percent.) The original T-pass discount, set at 10 percent, was later increased to 40 percent, then to the current 50 percent.

2001

• Green Campus Initiative founded, giving structure and support to campus sustainability efforts.
• Green Campus Loan Fund established – capital to Schools for cost-saving resource conservation projects.
• The University’s first LEED-certified project, the renovation of Landmark Center offices at the Harvard School of Public Health. Harvard now has 23 certified LEED projects, the most of any university. An additional 48 LEED projects are registered.

2002

• The Resource Efficiency Program is founded at Harvard College, the University’s first peer-to-peer education program.

2003

• First solar array installed at Harvard, atop Shad Hall at Harvard Business School.

2004

• Harvard adopts University-wide sustainability principles.

2005

• First Green Team started, at Harvard Business School. Current total University-wide: 28.
• The Green Campus Loan Fund doubles, to $12 million. An increasing number of sustainability projects have a payback of less than five years.
• The first “shut the sash” program, at Harvard Medical School. Left open for a year, the typical laboratory fume hood will consume as much energy as the average New England house.

2006

• Almost 90 percent of Harvard College students vote “yes” on an Undergraduate Council Ballot referendum asking the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to commit to a GHG reduction goal.
• Harvard achieves its first Platinum LEED rating — the highest possible – for renovations of 46 Blackstone South.

2007

• Green building guidelines adopted, required for capital projects of $100,000 or more.
• Green Building Resource launched online to document Harvard’s green building projects. Partners include the Office for Sustainability, the Schools, and Harvard’s Capital Project Services office.

2008

• Over 4,500 students University-wide sign a petition, asking Harvard to set a GHG reduction goal.
• Faust appoints a GHG reduction task force.
• In July, Harvard adopts its GHG goal for 2016.
• Office for Sustainability created, using the Green Campus Initiative as a foundation.
• On Oct. 22, former vice president and environmental leader Al Gore ’69 speaks to a crowd of 15,000 in Harvard Yard. Total trash generated: one bag.
• Green Office Certification Program launched. Number of certified offices to date: 38.

2009

• Five GHG working groups – more than 200 students, faculty, and staff – meet throughout the year to develop tools and policies to meet the GHG reduction goal. Topics include energy supply, green building, financial analysis, and community outreach.
• Harvard’s largest solar array is installed on University-owned property on Arsenal Street in Watertown. With a capacity of 500 kW of power, it is one of the largest solar arrays in the Northeast.
• University-wide temperature policy adopted. Establishes energy-saving set points for heating and cooling.

2010

• Harvard Community Garden launched in April, a student-organized initiative in partnership with the University.
• First annual Green Carpet Awards ceremony scheduled for April 23, a recognition event for student, faculty, and staff contributions to sustainability.
• While Harvard has adopted broad measures as an institution, separate Schools and divisions have taken their own steps to reduce energy usage, and GHG emissions. Here are a few examples:
• University Operations upgraded equipment and switched to natural gas at the Blackstone steam operation, which led to the largest cut in GHG emissions so far. It also agreed to purchase more than 10 percent of Harvard’s electricity needs in Cambridge and Allston from a wind farm in Maine. The deal makes the University the largest institutional buyer of wind power in New England.
• Harvard Medical School’s DePace Lab in the Systems Biology Department is the first University “wet” lab to achieve a LEED Gold ranking. (Wet labs are facilities that use chemicals or biological material.)
• Harvard Kennedy School upgrades the chiller system in its Littauer Building, eliminating the equivalent of 135 metric tons of greenhouse gases, measured in CDE (carbon dioxide equivalent). The savings are more than $35,000 a year, and are an example of how green standards keep the bottom line black.
• At Harvard Business School, a cogeneration project at Shad Hall offsets close to 500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

Earth Day was the inspiration of Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.). He chose Denis Hayes, a 25-year-old Wisconsinite who grew up in rural Washington, to organize the event. At the time, Hayes — a onetime Vietnam War protester at Stanford University — was a student at the Harvard Kennedy School.

On the first Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — HBS held an “environmental teach-in,” an event featured two days later on the front page of the Harvard University Gazette. “Scores of groups” across campus discussed pollution and other topics, the 10-line story said. Joining them in similar teach-ins across the country that day were an estimated 20 million people, including participants on 2,000 college campuses.

Siobhan Phillips, a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, revisits those well-known poetic masters — Stevens, Frost, Bishop, and Merrill — and analyzes how they transformed quotidian rituals into lyrical fodder.

It is fondly referred to as God’s motel.

And the two-story building on Francis Avenue, with its apartment-style residences and idyllic courtyard, has long hosted religious scholars from near and far.

This year marks the golden anniversary of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), which through its diverse programming, faculty appointments, visiting scholars, and research initiatives has broadened and shaped Harvard’s work in religious and spiritual traditions.

Plans for the center were cemented with a gift to HDS from a group of anonymous donors in 1957, and the building was completed in 1960. The bequest was intended to “help Harvard University maintain graduate and undergraduate courses in the religions of the world, to train teachers in this field, to give ministers a sympathetic appreciation of other religions, and to stimulate undergraduate interest in the religions of the world.”

And since then it has done just that, expanding the vision of the Harvard Divinity School from a largely Christian seminary to one that has embraced and expanded the study and exploration of religions.

Take, for example, the center’s faculty grants program. Recent recipients have studied everything from the ways that New Zealand Maori experience biotechnological interventions, to the curricula of madrasas in Pakistan, to the influence of African-American televangelists on the African diaspora.

The center’s directors have left a legacy of religious diversity. Early directors helped to establish an undergraduate honors concentration in the comparative study of religion, as well as a Ph.D. program that incorporates comparative perspectives.

Lawrence E. Sullivan, an authority on the religions of South America and central Africa who directed the center from 1990 to 2003, initiated research programs that brought scholars from around the world to the center to explore the intersection of religion and the sciences, politics, art, law, and economics.

Current director Donald Swearer took over in 2004. A scholar of Buddhism, Swearer has helped to shape the center’s programming around local and global community building.

His efforts include the World Religions Café, where CSWR residents can discuss their research and work with their peers. He has also worked to develop programming with other Harvard departments, such as the thematic lecture series “The Ecologies of Human Flourishing,” created in conjunction with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Swearer helped to develop the center’s International Research Associate/Visiting Faculty program, which brings an international scholar to the CSWR to collaborate with a Harvard faculty member on research and teaching, and has fostered collaboration with other institutions.

“I truly see the center here at the center of a mandala that networks out, and involves people from across the University and the globe in the exploration of the world’s religions,” said Swearer, HDS Distinguished Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies.

Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology, will take leadership of the CSWR in July. Clooney, who joined HDS in 2005, sees his role as continuing the work of his predecessors, and helping the center to expand the work involving different faiths and scholarly endeavors.

He hopes to use his early months as a “thinking year” during which he can explore ways to expand faculty grant programs, involve students more in the work of the center, and continue to broaden its interreligious ties elsewhere.

“By developing quality connections among ourselves and closer to home, we open the way to fresh explorations into the territory of our increasingly interreligious world,” said Clooney.

Two-day symposium
In honor of the CSWR’s anniversary, the center is hosting a two-day symposium, April 15-16, focused on the future of the study of religion. The event will include the creation of a Tibetan sand mandala by scholar and former Buddhist monk Losang Samten. For more information, visit the Center for the Study of World Religions web site.

The next time the Arctic’s mud season rolls around, Harvard scientists will be there, testing the air to record what the ground is releasing, searching for evidence of a climate change wild card that could spring a nasty worldwide surprise.

The wild card consists of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — and carbon dioxide, perhaps the best-known climate-changer. The gases would be released, possibly in enormous quantities, by rotting organic material that for centuries was inert, frozen year-round in the subterranean permafrost.

When it comes to climate change, Jim Anderson is stalking surprises. Harvard’s Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Anderson has turned his lab’s focus toward the complex Earth-ice-atmosphere interactions of climate change that remain poorly understood despite the efforts of thousands of scientists worldwide.

To find out what’s going on in the Arctic, Anderson is outfitting a recently developed, robotic, fuel-efficient plane with a new instrument created in his lab by research associates Mark Witinski and David Sayres. Next spring, they plan to fly it remotely at low altitudes over the Arctic, sniffing away and seeing what gases are in the air over these melting regions, and in what quantities. The results will inform not only our understanding of the planetary forces at work, but also will influence estimates of the changes going on around us and our responses to them.

From pole to pole

Anderson isn’t the only one working on climate change at Harvard. In fact, he’s not even the only one flying a gas-sniffing plane to better understand the atmosphere. Colleague Steven Wofsy, Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science, is flying another from pole to pole to reveal the atmosphere’s makeup in more detail. Wofsy has been working on climate change for years. One of his experimental towers has been standing among the trees in the 3,000-acre Harvard Forest in Petersham for nearly two decades, providing a mountain of data on temperature, atmospheric water vapor, and carbon dioxide flow from the atmosphere to the trees. The forest is one of the oldest and most extensively studied on the continent.

Climate change is one of the most complex and pressing problems of the age, and faculty members across the University are bringing the tools of their disciplines to bear on its many facets.

Atmospheric and Earth scientists are examining the global-scale processes involved, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge on how the planet functions. Biologists are examining feedback concerning life, cataloging tropical trees’ growth to assess their capacity to store excess carbon, and even tracking changes at venerable Walden Pond, where Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau spent two years in the 1840s living simply, albeit surrounded by somewhat different plant life.

Climate change, of course, is not just a scientific problem. Caused by human industry and exploitation of the natural world, its solutions are entwined in everyone’s daily activities and in the larger values that regulate how people live. As such, climate change touches governments that struggle to divine effective, politically possible solutions; it touches businesses that ponder their responsibilities beyond making a product, providing a service, and turning a profit; it affects health and medicine, as physicians and public health officials face the potential for shifting disease patterns and changes in drinking water availability; it affects those who conceive and design structures and plan cities.

Harvard’s faculty members are addressing these problems and many more. Government, business, public health, design, religion, and even literature are represented.

“Climate change is a global problem and one of the great challenges of our time,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “Harvard’s great strength lies not just in the depth of its scholarship, but also in the breadth of the expertise found across our campus. Our faculty members are deeply engaged in this issue, helping us to better understand the complexities of our natural environment, the forces driving climate change, and the ways in which we can move toward a more sustainable future.”

Spanning the spectrum

Harvard’s climate-change efforts span the spectrum, from sober academic teaching to environment-themed cartoon contests, and the campus fairly buzzes with climate change-related activity. Research and teaching on the subject are augmented by a host of centers, programs, and student groups. Lectures abound and draw not just prominent authorities from around the world, but also capacity crowds eager to better understand the planet and others’ points of view.

The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), for example, sponsors a long-running series examining a key issue driving climate change: the energy used to power diverse activities. HUCE’s “Future of Energy” lecture series has hosted oil company executives, government officials, and proponents of alternative energy, enriching the climate change discussion through diverse points of view.

“There are so many climate-related events that it’s hard to get through the week and get my work done,” said Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, professor of environmental science and engineering, and HUCE director.

As the major University-wide center for environmental issues, HUCE provides a coordinating, collaborative clearinghouse where researchers in far-flung fields can gather and discuss climate change. Among its many activities, the center provides a home for fellows researching environmental issues, fosters a community of doctoral students interested in energy and the environment through a graduate consortium, and provides seed grants to spur early-stage research.

The center also promotes less-formal discussions between faculty members working on environment-related issues, through regular breakfasts and dinner discussions. Faculty members working on climate science attend weekly ClimaTea talks with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, fostering a collegial atmosphere and an exchange of ideas. Several other Schools also have their own centers, programs, classes, and courses of study on the environment, climate change, and related issues.

Grace Brown, a junior environmental science and public policy concentrator, said her classes in economics, policy, and science provide a broad background for understanding these complex issues. During her time at Harvard, Brown has designed a study on organic foods at Harvard Dining Services and works with the Harvard College Environmental Action Committee. She intends to continue working on environmental issues and plans to intern this summer with the U.S. Department of Energy. Eventually, she hopes to attend law school and work in government.

“I came to Harvard as a crunchy environmentalist, wanting to save the forests,” Brown said. “I understand now how climate change impacts not just the forests, but our lives, my life. It makes climate change bigger and scarier when you understand its impact on people. It’s not just saving trees.”

The University itself has made becoming a sustainable institution a high priority in recent years, taking an array of steps to lessen its impact on the environment, from switching to energy-efficient lighting to purchasing renewable energy to running shuttle buses on biodiesel. (See the related story on Harvard’s internal efforts.)

Unraveling complexity

In many ways, the problems of climate change have highlighted how little we know about Earth. Climate change affects the most fundamental natural processes, some of which are well understood, and some not.

Just as important as understanding the processes is discerning the ways they affect each other. Even slightly warmed ocean waters affect the tongues of Greenland’s glaciers sticking into the sea, causing earth-shaking calving that can be detected at Harvard; drinking water for millions is affected by melting Asian glaciers, being studied by Peter Huybers, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, and Armin Schwartzman, assistant professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Researchers such as Schrag study the dramatic swings of past climates, including such extremes as “snowball Earth,” for clues to processes and feedbacks that affect the planet’s behavior and look to the future as well, providing a foundation for climate change mitigation efforts, such as carbon capture and sequestration.

Global political leaders look to the scientific community to inform their actions. But, given the pressing nature of the climate problem, leaders can’t wait to act until all the answers are known. Harvard’s authorities on governance are examining the knotty problem of how to forge a planetwide consensus on what actions are needed. At the Harvard Kennedy School, faculty members such as Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth, and Robert Stavins, the Pratt Professor of Business and Government who heads the Harvard Project on International Climate Change Agreements, are working to identify and advance policy options based on sound scientific and economic reasoning.

In the wake of December’s failed Copenhagen climate summit, Stavins’ project is examining options for moving forward. It plans to bring together authorities to discuss alternatives with an eye toward the next chance at forging international consensus, a December meeting planned for Cancun, Mexico. The group’s activities have already resulted in two books, and Stavins expects upcoming discussions to be published and available to representatives at the Cancun meetings.

The spiritual side

Outside scientific and policy circles, Harvard’s specialists in the humanities are addressing climate change in their own way. For instance, James Engell, chair of the English and American Literature and Language Department, examines the intersection of the environment and literature, and professor of history Emma Rothschild has written on the decline of the auto industry and the need for increased use of public transportation and other alternatives.

Donald Swearer, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, said it’s important for religion and the humanities to play a role because they get to the heart of what makes us human, what our values are, and how we define our relationship with the natural world. In a recent conversation, Swearer talked about “enoughness,” and how people should live thoughtfully in concert with their lifestyle’s impact on the natural world.

Swearer, who edited a recent book called “Ecology and the Environment: Perspectives from the Humanities,” said climate change stems from millions of choices made by individuals over many years. Once the science is known and the policies passed, success will still depend on influencing individual behavior.

Though society’s inertia on these issues may seem impossible to overcome, Swearer pointed out that we got here through many changes over the years, so change can lead us to a new future.

“What we need to be able to do is create a positive vision of what those changes can be,” Swearer said.

Government and happiness? Not so strange bedfellows, says Derek Bok, former president of Harvard and professor at Harvard Law School, who investigates how happiness research could affect policy.

Spring is here and the sidewalk cafés are bustling. It is so tempting to eat lunch outside everyday and occasionally indulge in a glass of wine.

Read Full Post

Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It’s time to deal with it.

That’s the final line of a terrific editorial from the country’s oil capital:

Of late U.S. public opinion has turned very chilly for the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists whose data demonstrates that human-generated emissions are heating the globe with potentially catastrophic results. Thanks to a confluence of events, some significant and others bogus, polls show Americans are increasingly confused about the reality of global warming.

After the election of President Barack Obama, the expectation was that the U.S. government would end the foot dragging of the George W. Bush administration and aggressively move to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. While the Environmental Protection Agency did classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the House of Representatives passed an ambitious energy bill with cap-and-trade measures to reduce emissions, the bipartisan version in the Senate sponsored by John Kerry, D-Mass, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., faces tough sledding.

The Copenhagen climate summit that was supposed to design a global climate treaty to succeed Kyoto instead produced little more than platitudes about future action. The worldwide economic recession made the costs of combating global warming less acceptable to both industrialized nations and their developing counterparts.

In the midst of that gloomy outlook came a pair of highly publicized incidents that were used to cast doubt on the validity of climate change theory.

First, hackers raided the computer system at the climate research unit of Britain’s East Anglia University and published thousands of scientists’ private e-mails. Global warming skeptics portrayed the communications as proof that devious researchers were cooking data to support a global warming hoax. That charge was decisively rejected by a British government commission that examined the e-mails. Although it faulted the scientists for petty and sometimes vindictive comments about their detractors, the commission found no grounds to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity.

In a second flap, global warming disbelievers seized on a single misstated claim in a 900-page report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers will melt by the year 2035 as proof the massive body of science authenticating global warming was suspect. Although the evidence of retreating glaciers around the world is incontrovertible, a single error on a timeline was used to cast doubt on the U.N. panel’s work. is cooling rather than heating up. Brushed aside was the fact that globally 2009 was the second warmest ever recorded, and the past decade was the warmest ever measured by man. An analysis compiled by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies projects that this year may be the hottest yet.

As writer Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the current issue of the New Yorker, “The message from scientists at this point couldn’t be clearer: the world’s emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories — these are all a distraction from what’s really happening.”

For those of us living in hurricane-vulnerable areas, keep in mind this ominous measurement: Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic main development area for tropical storms last month were the warmest ever recorded for March, already reaching levels typical of late June. The conjunction of several climate patterns combined with ongoing overall warming of the world’s oceans is thought to be the cause.

Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It’s time to deal with it.

More on the hurricane season ahead later.

Filed under: Etc., Marketing/Advertising, Vauxhall, UK

The new Vauxhall Astra – or something or someone claiming to be the new Vauxhall Astra – has co-written a book on driving manners. The other co-writer is Debrett’s, an English version of Miss Manners except that Debrett’s has been dispensing etiquette advice for more than 200 years, long before Miss Manners’ was even a zygote.

And that ancient lineage – at least, by American standards – could explain the quaint tone of Thoroughly Modern Motoring Manners, a 48-page work that would put a little more chivalry back on the roads. Advice includes “It’s good manners to remove your hat in the car, just as you would when entering a building,” and “A chivalrous man will ensure that his female passenger is comfortable before the journey begins. He should offer to take her coat, check that her seat is adjusted and be sure that the temperature is to her liking.”

Well, then. Men of honor, you have your orders. To find out what you need to know regarding everything else mannered and motored, just £5.99 ($9.22 U.S.) placed with Debrett’s or Amazon UK will get a volume shipped speedily to you. And you know all the Astra boys will be doing it, so don’t be shy. More words of etiquette wisdom are available in the press release after the jump.

[Source: Vauxhall]

Continue reading Vauxhall’s Thoroughly Modern Motoring Manners aims to teach you how to drive

Vauxhall’s Thoroughly Modern Motoring Manners aims to teach you how to drive originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Here are the videos of the new Touran, which has undergone a significant style update to bring it in line with the rest of the ‘family feeling’ of the Volkswagen range. The Touran front has been redesigned, and more structural changes have been completed down the sides of the vehicle, too. This aerodynamic touch-up has reduced the overall fuel consumption of the model even further, with BlueMotion options in the engine range running on 5.9 litres of fuel per 100 km. See the videos for a closer look, including a tour of the Touran interior after the jump.

Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen, recently spoke to Fox Business about the launch of Adobe CS5 and Apple’s resistance to putting Flash on the iPhone OS and banning of Flash-compiled apps. That’s all good and fun, but what we care about is this quote:

We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year.

The first release date Adobe gave us: October 2009. Sigh.

This does line up with what PreCentral Forum member deesugar heard from Adobe employee Antonio Flores: "As Mark indicated, we’re holding Palm to strict ship criteria but they are close. We expect that a public beta should occur in a similar timeframe to that of Android – May/June. At this time, we’re not doing a wider pre-release program."

[via: Business Insider]

Thanks to coasterer for the tip! Also: the irony of having to post a Flash-only video on this story is not lost on us.

After Consumer Reports warned readers earlier this week that the 2010 Lexus GX 460 could flip over in hard turns, Toyota suspended sales of the model. The automaker announced today that it will be testing all of its SUVs and will suspend sales of the GX 460 on a worldwide scale.

Just a couple hours after Consumer Reports issued a “Do not buy” warning, Toyota announced it was suspending sales of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 in the U.S. and Canada. Toyota spokeswoman Mieko Iwasaki said Thursday that the company is expanding the suspension to the Middle East and Russia, the only other markets where the SUV is sold.

Asked when Toyota will resume sales of the GX 460, Iwasaki said: “We have no specific target in mind when to resume the sales. We are now investigating the case by trying to replicate the situation that Consumer Reports pointed out.”

Consumer Reports said that buying the model is a safety risk because of problem that popped up during standard emergency-handling tests.

“When pushed to its limits on our track’s handling course, the rear of the GX we bought slid out until the vehicle was almost sideways before the electronic stability control system was able to regain control,” the magazine said. “We believe that in real-world driving, that situation could lead to a rollover accident, which could cause serious injury or death. We are not aware, however, of any such reports.”

– By: Omar Rana

Source: CNNMoney

As many of you probably know, Bryan Caplan, Will Wilkinson, and others have been debating whether there was a libertarian golden age, ca. 1880, to which libertarians would return if they could.  The “pro Golden Age” side notes low taxes and regulation; the “anti” side notes Jim Crow, anti-sodomy laws, and the substantially reduced rights of women.  For whatever reason, the debate has settled around the coverture laws of the period.

Interestingly, this debate seems mostly to be taking place among libertarian men, probably because there aren’t that many libertarian women.  But as one of the elusive creatures whose preferences are being discussed, I thought perhaps I’d weigh in.  Straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

First, let’s point out that 1880 simply wasn’t a libertarian
paradise–and neither was any other era in American history.  Yes,
commercial taxes and regulation were lower.  On the other hand–even
leaving aside the special rules for various minority groups and
women–we’re talking about an era of school prayer, blue laws, various
gross infringements of economic liberty by state legislatures
cutting special deals for their friends, criminal punishment for union
organizers, high tariffs, and so on.  We’re not arguing about whether
we want to be in libertarian paradise, or not.  We’re arguing about
whether the departures from the ideal in 1880 were better, or worse,
than the departures today.

If you are a white male,
probably–not definitely, but probably.  If you are black, the question
is ludicrous–you’re talking about an era of legalized public
discrimination.  Likewise if you’re gay, which was, as far as I know,
an actual criminal offense.  But what about white women?

I think
part of the disconnect between Caplan and his interlocutors is that
Caplan is simply discounting all non-government forms of coercion.  So
the fact that in 1880 my life choices would have been marriage,
sponging off of relatives, or teaching, does not interest him.  Nor
does what that implies for the balance of power in marriages.  It is
not for nothing that so many passages written by women of the time
describe their husbands as “tyrants.”

Obviously, I find this a
tad more interesting than he does.  But it’s a valid point:  to what
extent can you count social discrimination against the legal system? 
For liberals, the answer is “quite a lot”–if something is wrong with
the social system, the government should fix it!  But this is not the
default libertarian position.

And in fact, we have to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of women in 1880 would be positively horrified by the prospect of living my life.  Not only is it flagrantly immoral, it violates much of what they themselves thought of as the core of womanhood.  Should we get excited about women being denied the right to go to medical school, who did not want to go to medical school?  I mean, I suppose in some sense I’m being “denied the right” to move to Saudi Arabia, but I don’t think we can count this as a meaningful infringement of liberty.

But in the case of the laws of 1880, I believe that yes, we can count them as serious infringements. As Tyler Cowen has pointed
out, the laws of the time reinforced that social structure in many,
many ways.  Take divorce, which could only be obtained for cause.  Now,
as I understand it, if both parties wanted one, a “correspondent” could
be hired who would be caught with the man in a compromising position. 
But if he didn’t want a divorce, well, what was she to do?  Divorce was
shameful–but a woman caught in adultery was a moral outrage.

There
are also ripple effect.  If no one you know gets divorced, then it
becomes that much more unthinkable for you–especially since the social
system to deal with divorce won’t exist.  There was no place in
American society of 1880 for a divorced woman, and that matters.

Or
take the laws banning women from entering various professions.  Sure,
this only affected a small minority of the population . . . but ain’t I
a woman?

You cannot simply snip the legal system neatly out of
its social context.  Moreover, those laws would be harmful in any social context.  Would I agree to bring back the laws of 1880
concerning women, in exchange for lower taxes and looser business
regulation?  No. 

First of all, as imperfect as they are, many
of those laws are good libertarian laws, like the laws forbidding
people to dump any random chemical into the water commons. 

Second
of all, even though the laws about emancipation, property and divorce
would have much less impact upon women living in the social structure
of 2010 than that of 1880, they would clearly and obviously change the
balance of power in my marriage and social life.  Not even a man as
unimpeachably committed to equality, in theory and action, as Peter
should be trusted with that kind of power over his wife. 

And
third of all, the social system of today does not exist independent of
our laws.  If it were not illegal to pay married men more than women,
to discriminate against women in hiring, and so on, most of us might
still be stuck as secretaries . . . which would probably mean most
women still stayed home after they had children, and that the social
and economic networks supporting female independence would be
considerably weaker.  This is why I can’t get all worked up about the
injustice of affirmative action.  Maybe it doesn’t work . . . but even
so, it’s still pretty low on my priority list of things to repeal.

Wondering what’s behind those recent jobless recovery numbers?

1. Fortune 500 companies tripled their profits to $391 billion in 2009.

2. They also slashed their payrolls by more than 800,000 jobs.

If you’ve wanted to capture the HDMI signal from set top boxes or your camcorder straight to you computer, the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle is an inexpensive breakout box that can do just that…providing your computer has USB 3.0. More »

[JURIST] A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on Wednesday ordered the release of a 91-page government proffer outlining evidence in the government’s case against former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. According to the proffer, Blagojevich and his staff engaged in several schemes by which they hoped to personally gain from Blagojevich’s role as governor. Specifically, prosecutors describe how Blagojevich tried to sell the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama, made appointments based on anticipated campaign contributions, and took kickbacks from a number of companies. The prosecution argues in the proffer that the evidence presented in the proffer is admissible in court against the former governor. The document was sought by several news organizations.
Last month, Blagojevich pleaded not guilty to eight amended corruption charges. Last year, Blagojevich pleaded not guilty to 16 felony counts, including wire fraud, attempted extortion, racketeering conspiracy, extortion conspiracy, and making false statements. In January 2009, the Illinois State Senate voted unanimously to convict Blagojevich of abuse of power and remove him from office. Blagojevich is the first Illinois governor to be impeached and removed from office. Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were initially arrested in December 2008 on allegations that they had conspired to sell the Senate seat left vacant by Obama.

Online search keeps getting better and better, but it’s starting to become clear that search as we know and understand it today has some big, inherent limitations. In the first decade of this millennium, the web was defined by search and it still is one of the biggest things online. Google search is the most visited site in the world… (read more)

On Wednesday, the music video for Lady Gaga’s 2009 charttopper “Bad Romance” officially surpassed the viral hit “Charlie Bit My Finger” to become YouTube’s most viewed video ever. “Bad Romance” managed to edge out Charlie by just over 400,000 views, taking in almost 180 million total plays since its debut in November.