Medicare muddle
Medicare is not only available for the elderly (31 May, p 6).
You may also receive Medicare part A, or hospital insurance, ; if you are suffering from ; or immediately after (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). This in turn allows you to become entitled to . Parts C and D are administered by private companies subsidised by Medicare, with part D including the prescription drug insurance.
Though I can see the point of checking records of claims under part B to determine whether beneficiaries are being questioned about side effects, knowing which drugs are prescribed seems harder. It is possible to get Medicare data from some beneficiaries with disabilities as young as 20, and younger if they have end-stage renal disease.
Liming the oceans
Nick Dore proposes to dissolve limestone before putting it in the sea to absorb carbon dioxide. (21 June, p 27). Dissolve it in what? In pure water he will need about 70,000 tonnes of water per tonne of limestone.
More will dissolve if the water contains some CO2, but it will then be in the form of bicarbonate and therefore unable to absorb further CO2. Much more will dissolve if he adds hydrochloric acid, but the same objection applies. Only powdered limestone would be effective, and then only if it reacts with the ocean water before sinking to the depths.
Because it's there
Why take mice up Everest to study erythropoietin levels, Rolfe Bridson asks, when using a hypobaric chamber would be simpler (28 June, p 25). The answer is obvious: animal activists would attack the lab experiment as cruelty, but applaud taking mice up the mountain because it gives them a great adventure.
For the record
鈥� The portrait of linguist Steven Pinker (5 July, p 44) was by Richard Cannon of and not by Steve Cannon.
World without oil
Ian Sample quotes Gideon Samid of the Innovation Appraisal Group at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio as saying “Oil has shaped our civilisation. Without crude oil you’d have no cars, no shipping, no planes,” (28 June, p 32). But personal transport 鈥� the car 鈥� was not invented because a petroleum fuel was suddenly available, but to give people the seven-league boots that feature in many fairy tales. It was created because the industrial revolution made it possible. Initially, the means of propulsion was a choice between the established steam-power and the newer electricity 鈥� with a few eccentrics trying the messy and complicated internal combustion engine, burning ethyl or methyl alcohol or both.
In 1906 the electric car appeared to have won, being the first to achieve the magical 60 miles per hour. Batteries limited its range, and charging took some time. The steamer was quick to refuel, however, had a longer range and by 1913 had reached 100 mph. The internal combustion engine won the day by being quick to start and quick to refuel despite the complicated engine and the need for a gearbox. If modified it could run on petrol 鈥� a waste product of oil-refining which was problematic to dispose of safely.
Even with a modern steam generator, a whole minute is required to raise a full head of steam (say 100 pounds per square inch). From cold, even the most modern batteries would appear to require even longer to fully charge. However, since this is the day of the hybrid it would appear that a steam/electric hybrid could be the way of the future.
Cost of green virtue
The International Energy Agency that UK petrol consumption declined from 445,000 to 350,000 barrels per day as the price at the pump rose from 92.8 to 106.8 pence per litre. The government plans to hike fuel duty by 2 pence per litre later this year.
Fitting the reported decline to a power-law demand-elasticity curve, using current duty and tax rates, I find that if motorists cut their fuel consumption following this 2-pence increase in accordance with their previous behaviour, the total UK petrol tax revenue would actually decrease by 0.24 per cent.
The government could really claim green credentials if it were prepared to take an income loss to reduce carbon emissions in this way.
Cap and share carbon
Carbon trading can be counterproductive, as Fred Pearce notes (19 April, p 38). Taxes are also a poor way to control emissions effectively because they would have to vary so much between periods of boom and recession (17 May, p 22 and 7 June, p 22). A more realistic approach is being considered by Ireland for its transport sector.
Under , companies cannot sell fossil fuels without buying and surrendering permits that are distributed equally to all adults in the country. The quantity of permits distributed controls the amount of fuel sold 鈥� reducing annually to a sustainable level. People are compensated for the rise in the cost of living out of energy companies’ profits.
This scheme would require fossil fuel extractors to bid for permits from ordinary people. Some of their profits would be redistributed. Countries with a large poor population would benefit most. I am sceptical of top-down global schemes, but this approach can be tested in one sector of a small country and gradually work its way up.
Web of interest
You quote author Lee Siegel mentioning research done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and asserting that “eight of the 12 people who wrote the Pew’s report on the internet have some kind of financial interest in the internet” (28 June, p 48).
That is incorrect. None of the writers of the project’s reports, including the report mentioned by Siegel in his book, have financial interests in the internet. The staff of the project are compensated by a grant from an American foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the project is non-partisan.
Monstrous regiment
Mark van Vugt wrote “the predominance of male leaders [could be costly] in an interconnected world in which the emphasis is on interpersonal skills and network-building” (14 June, p 42). This hypothesis must be testable.
I recall the names of Golda Meir from Israel, Indira Gandhi from India, Sirimavo Bandaranaike from Sri Lanka, Margaret Thatcher from the UK and Megawati of Indonesia. All led their countries in savage civil or international conflicts.
Given the small number of female heads of state this is a remarkably high incidence.
On the basis of this sample, a nation’s citizens might reasonably expect that to elect a female leader guarantees going to war with someone.
But is it relevant that all were married? Was the temptation to trade up from kitchen utensils to uranium-enriched projectiles and ICBMs irresistible?
Maybe queenly virgins are what we need. History is unhelpful on this point, as Testosterone Tesses figure disproportionately on the historical landscape. That said, all gender generalisations are wrong 鈥� including this one.
There are alternatives
Sumit Paul-Choudhury suggests we should surrender our illusion of control over national or world finance and just go with the bubbles and busts (21 June, p 24).
This is predicated on the “banker’s view” that there is no alternative to our present speculative capitalism, and that therefore we should resign ourselves to looking on the bright side of the inevitable.
A more persuasive, and less published, view is that speculative capitalism is pillaging the world’s finite resources and taking humanity headlong into hell.
Instead of putting lipstick on the pig, you might do better to feature some of the many viable alternatives.
Survival of the nastiest
Nobody who reads history could ever be the least bit puzzled by the persistence in the human population of the behavioural traits of the so-called “dark triad” 鈥� narcissism, callous thrill-seeking and Machiavellianism (21 June, p 12).
Yes, most of the time they’re a nuisance, and in the past many of the people carrying these traits would have ended up shunned by their society 鈥� or executed. Only the love ’em-and-leave ’em mating habits of the males would have kept the genetic frequency up.
But every time a society goes through one of its periodic outbreaks of insanity known as war, the dark-triad men come into their own.
“Dark triad” traits neatly describe a successful wartime leader, especially if coupled with intelligence, strategic thinking and some capacity for impulse-control. Think of Alexander the Great, Napoleon and General George Patton.
From Paul Recher
The lack of understanding of the dynamics and frequency of pathological narcissism and how it affects all our lives is half the reason why such people get away with inflicting so much damage.
Who’d have voted for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney if they had known they were pathological narcissists?
Dorroughby, New South Wales, Australia
Define me not
As a person with Asperger’s syndrome I resent the fact that Rachel Officer feels the need to speak for me as to how my condition is described (14 June, p 20). While I must profess I’m unsure how I would react to it being called a mental illness, I have no issue with it being called a disorder.
It’s a deviation from the norm with mainly negative effects: why not call it what it is?
The trouble with trust
Maia Szalavitz suggests that oxytocin might be used as a therapy in autism, “which is characterised by difficulty understanding the minds of others, aversion to human contact, and repetitive behaviours like rocking” (17 May, p 34).
Most autistic people would admit to a deficiency in “mind-reading” ability, including, pertinently, a tendency to trust inappropriately. Many would dispute that they have an aversion to human contact, preferring to describe the quality of contact that they would like.
How would a treatment which could lead to indiscriminately increased trust improve the quality of contact for people who are already less able to recognise when mistrust is appropriate?
World with less oil
Ian Sample concludes that action needs to be taken now to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels (28 June, p 32). That’s true, but the reason for the current high oil price is worthy of a more balanced and less sensationalist argument.
In particular, it is wrong to state that “most geologists now accept that we have reached, or will imminently reach, peak oil”. I am a petroleum geologist with 25 years’ experience and I disagree, as do most of my colleagues.
There has been too little open scientific debate on this important issue among petroleum geologists. An exception was a at the Geological Society of London in April.
Differing predictions were presented by Colin Campbell, one of the very few petroleum geologists who actively support the imminent peak oil view, and two equally senior petroleum geologists from BP and British Gas. The latter two concluded that there is enough petroleum left in the world to cope with demand for the next few decades, and BP predicted that constraints induced by climate change would soon begin to reduce world demand.
Their view, common among industry experts, is that the current high oil price is mainly a reflection of surging demand from China and India, and nothing to do with peak oil.
If they are correct, then this is good news from an energy price perspective but potentially very bad news from the perspective of global warming.
Regardless of who is right on peak oil, the unpopular truth is that the current high oil price is by far the best way to effect a change from fossil fuels to sustainable energy technologies, and for our children’s sake we should all be grateful for it.
From Graham Hagens
Ian Sample assumes that today’s chemists cannot fabricate plastic bags and TV cases from anything other than crude oil, and dismisses hydrogen as a fuel because it has “storage and distribution problems”. Such challenges are quite manageable.
Had crude oil never existed, plastic bags would have been made from some other carbon source. Hydrogen requires careful handling, but is nowhere near as dangerous as, say, plutonium.
All that is needed for a worldwide hydrogen economy is energy, and as your “Our solar future” feature informed us, an array of solar panels “the size of Texas” could meet all our current hydrogen needs (8 December 2007, p 32). A smaller array near any sunny deep-water port could fill tankers to deliver hydrogen anywhere in the world. This technology would have zero carbon footprint and any excess energy from the solar cells could be used to convert carbon dioxide in the air into plastic bags.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
What price more food?
Globally, we all face potential shortages of food for humans and feed for animals (14 June, p 28) which have, as yet, not seriously affected most countries. It needs to be pointed out that wherever there is fighting there are food shortages, famines and malnutrition 鈥� as seen in large areas of Africa now.
It seems unlikely that superficial food aid, however well organised, will on its own be a satisfactory solution if fighting continues. Improved agricultural production requires control of parasites and infections such as foot and mouth disease and rinderpest, and fungal diseases in crops. These require, as you rightly say, research institutes and scientists, local education programmes and trained fieldworkers: none of these can operate in the midst of warfare.
From Emile Frison,
Your excellent article on the need for further investment in agricultural research and development in poor countries approvingly quotes Phil Pardey saying that “they stopped work on productivity and focused on environment or nutrition”. The 鈥� founded by economist Bj酶rn Lomborg to examine development priorities 鈥� recently claimed that the treatment of micronutrient deficiencies is the most effective investment to be made. Our work at Bioversity International has shown that greater dietary diversity is a sure and sustainable route to better health and productivity.
Of course it is important for hungry people to have access to sufficient calories, but the hidden hunger of missing micronutrients afflicts 2 billion people worldwide. Efforts to increase food supplies should keep the need for micronutrients in mind.
Rome, Italy