Nelson Protecting Electoral Process, Not Playing Politics

Secretary of State Chris Nelson evidently has more than half a brain. Instead of listening to the mewling of the anti-nanny-staters, Sec. Nelson tells KELO he's concerned that allowing the smoking ban vote to go forward may weaken the integrity of the elctoral process:

"The court found that there were a number of areas where we had determined there were errors with the petitions that the court has the authority to find substantial compliance and essentially overlook those types of errors," Nelson said.

..."If a court says these types of errors are okay, where does that land us on the next petitions? What other things are going to be okay then, and then we get to a point of is there integrity left in the petition process?" Nelson said [Ben Dunsmoor, "Smoking Ban Ruling May Impact Petition Process," KELOLand.com, 2009.11.17].

Unlike some Republicans, I don't see Nelson playing politics with this issue. Unlike the editorial board of that Sioux Falls paper, which appears to believe a public vote is the quickest way to put the issue to rest, the Secretary and I share a belief that rules are rules. Our rules for referenda and other petition processes exist to level the playing field and keep monkey business out of the electoral process. Secretary Nelson is right to take a hard look at the lower court's ruling and determine whether this judicial activism (that is what you call it when a judge says the law means something other than what it says, right?) sets a harmful precendent worthy of appeal.

p.s.: By the way, Republicans, don't forget that your Tea Party candidate for U.S. House, R. Blake Curd, voted for the smoking ban in the House last winter... twice.

Health Insurance Surprise: Republicans Pay for Abortions

Did you know the Republican National Committee offered its employees health insurance that covered abortions? Neither did the Republican National Committee. Their health policy had covered abortions since 1991... until last Friday, when Chairman Michael Steele realized the GOP needed a Stupak Amendment of its own. The RNC is thus opting out of coverage for a legal, Constitutionally protected medical procedure (or, as the RNC calls it, "a fundamental assault on innocent human life").

No word on whether the RNC plans to keep coverage for abortion in cases of health risk to the mother— the National Republican Congressional Committee insurance policy makes such exceptions—or in cases of rape or incest.

Apparently private insurance is so complicated that 18 years can pass before political experts realize that their health policy includes procedures that they find morally repugnant. I don't hold that against them: I take it as more evidence that the private health insurance is too arcane to operate according free-market rules.

And think about this: the Stupak Amendment seeks to keep abortion opponents from suffering the moral indignity of seeing their tax dollars pay for abortions... but if you pay health insurance premiums, your dollars are paying for abortions. Do you think your insurer puts your money in a separate pot so it only covers people and procedures you like? Think again.

The Republicans can grandstand dropping abortion coverage for their employees from their insurance policy, but as long as they keep buying insurance from Cigna, their money, good Republican money, will continue paying for abortions.

Primary Challenge for SHS? Vote Now in Madville Times Poll!

Hey, it's the last day to vote in the Madville Times poll on Stephanie Herseth Sandlin! Would you like to see a Democrat challenge our incumbent Congresswoman in the 2010 primary? Whether you're an SHS fan, a GOP saboteur, or just an independent looking for a reason to vote in our open primary next June, mark your vote here in the left sidebar before midnight tonight! I'll report and muse over the full results tomorrow morning.

Now That's Green Thinking: Treat Wastewater with Algae

An eager reader informs me that her click on one of the Google ads here led her to something interesting: Algaewheel, and Indianapolis company that has developed technology to treat wastewater with algae. They've licensed the technology to another Indiana company, Oldcastle Precast, which has successfully installed algae tech in commercial and residential applications.

The folks at Algaewheel cite the following benefits of their green wastewater treatment system:

1. Save energy: Wastewater treatment plants account for 3% of U.S. electrical demand. Algae run on solar power. Algaewheel tech could cut that energy demand by half or more.
2. Produce energy: The company touts the biomass produced in the treatment process as an excellent power source.
3. Save the planet: Algae treatment is carbon neutral. It also captures nitrous oxide, which conventional wastewater treatment systems emit and which is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
4. Save money: Algaewheel says their systems cost the same or less to build and save money long-term with less maintenance and fewer chemical inputs.

Hmm... if the Lake Herman Sanitary District can't afford to build a central sewer system, maybe we can build some neighborhood treatment greenhouses—one at Dirks Resort, one on Territorial Road, one on the golf course—charge 'em up with algae from Lake Herman, and burn the biomass to generate our own electricity. Wow—maybe we can use that budget reserve after all!

South Dakota Dairy Historical Trend: Get Big, or Get Out

Earl Butz lives, family farms die...

While reading up on cow poop over breakfast (and how's your morning so far?), I learned that South Dakota was first in the nation during Q3 2009 in percentage increase in number of cows and milk production. Last quarter we had 95,000 milk cows, which gets us back up to where we were in 2000, up from a low of 79,000 in 2004. We're still 19th nationally in volume of milk production and 13th in per-cow production.

Too bad more South Dakota dairies aren't able to share in this rebound. According to the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, South Dakota had 20,500 dairy operations in 1965. That's over 300 per county. One family running each operation—that's easily double the current population of Brookings, able to make some portion of their living milking cows.

Since then, the number of dairy operations has decreased at an annual rate of about 8%. In 2007, the number of dairy operations in South Dakota was 660.

click chart to enlarge

"Get big or get out" rules the industry now. The only size of operation showing any recent growth are operations with over 500 head. In 1998, 10 such big dairies accounted for 12% of South Dakota's dairy production. In 2007, 35 such operations accounted for 57% of that production.

click chart to enlarge

Part of this is ugly market reality, but part is also the big-ag mindset in Pierre, where our state government continues to hand out favors to the tiny minority of big operators and lets small family farms die.

Lemons to Lemonade, Poop to Power: Dairy Waste Makes Electricity

Stan gets me thinking a little more about bovine emissions. Senator Thune and the Farm Bureau have made a big issue out of pre-empting any regulation of livestock flatulence. So if we can't tax cattle waste, how about we plug it into the grid?

According to the EPA, there are currently 140 anaerobic digester facilities in the United States that capture biogas on commercial farms and turn it into electricity. South Dakota has one of these lemons-into-lemonade power plants: a dairy near Milbank can turn the waste from 2400 dairy cows into power for 250 homes.

Some quick math: South Dakota currently has 95,000 dairy cows. Pump their emissions into 40 anaerobic digesters the size of the one near Milbank, and we get power for just about 10,000 homes.

Of course, you could get more annual energy output from 40 1.25-megawatt wind turbines like those powering the city of Rock Port, Missouri. But as my friend Tony will point out, you need baseload power, always on. The wind doesn't blow all the time; cows do.

Now all this poop power isn't a lot: at most, all those dairy cows might produce enough waste to power 3% of South Dakota's households. That power would come at the cost of keeping all those critters confined in feedlots. I don't want to bring cattle in off the open range just to collect their solid and gaseous waste. But if we already have all these cattle and hog confinement operations, why not polish the turd and get some electricity out of them?

In the end, electricity from livestock emissions could be a win-win for everybody. We get renewable power, we reduce pollution, and feedlot operators get one more revenue stream. Can't beat that!

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Update 10:30 CST: Ah, but Grant County neighbor Joelie Hicks reminds me of some messy truths shown in these photos which I'm told show overflow from the Milbank manure digester in summer 2008 after a big rainstorm:

Daugaard in Madison Monday 6 p.m. at Nicky's

South Dakota Lieutenant Governor Dennis Daugaard will make his case for promotion here in Madison Monday (that's tomorrow!). He's coming to the windowless cavern that is Nicky's to shake hands and field questions from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. An insider says there may be soup and sandwiches... beer is probably on your own dime.

South Dakota Not to Blame for Greenhouse Emissions?

If the planet does get warmer, seas rise, civilizations fall, etc., take heart, fellow South Dakotans: they can't blame us! Well, not much. A new report from Environment America finds that South Dakota generated less fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 than all but two states (Rhode Island and Vermont) and the District of Columbia. Our 13.7 million metric tons of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in 2007 constituted just 0.23% of the United States' total emissions of almost six billion metric tons. Our percentage of emissions is even less than our meager 0.27% of the country's population, so surprise! you might argue South Dakota is even greener than our net emissions ranking might suggest.

South Dakota's per capita CO₂ emissions, 17.2 metric tons, are indeed below the national average, 19.9 metric tons. So we've got coal to burn before those hippies lay a pollution guilt trip on us, right?

Maybe not. According to the Energy Information Administration, South Dakota produces 144 trillion BTUs of energy. We consume 292 trillion BTUs. Over half of our energy is produced in other states. Looking at electricity alone, in 2007, we generated 6,137 gigawatthours of electricity, over half of that from those squeaky clean hydroelectric dams. But we consumed another 5,390 GWh generated in other states. Most of that juice comes from our neighbors, North Dakota and Wyoming... which lead the nation in per capita CO₂ emissions (WY: 124.2 metric tons; ND: 82.1 metric tons).

South Dakota's existing green power on the Missouri River (achieved, by the way, with money and foresight from the federal government) already makes us leaders in keeping our per capita pollution relatively low. Strong climate change legislation, plus the PUC's recommendations for better interconnect rules and other support for small wind and other sources of distributed generation, can help South Dakota get even further ahead of the curve, reeduce our dependence on fossil fuels from other states, and keep the planet cleaner.

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p.s.: If Palauans aren't treading water in ten years, thank the recession. The global economic downturn has us on track to see greenhouse gas emissions down 9%. A good 1930s-style depression would cut those emissions 23%. There's always a bright side....

pp.s.: The above study does not appear to assess the greenhouse impacts of bovine flatulence or Senator Thune's speeches... two strikingly similar gases.

Leslee Unruh Lie Update: Sure Sounds Like She Likes Federal Money

Last spring, Leslee Unruh lied to our faces in that Sioux Falls paper, telling us, "I've never liked federal money."

Unruh hums a different tune in a recent Newsweek article on the Obama Administration's plan to save a couple hundred million a year by cutting funding for an empirically proven failure:

"If the president's [budget] proposal is enacted similar to what he recommended, it will have a chilling effect on abstinence education across the country," says Leslee Unruh, director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a national association of abstinence-only organizations [Sarah Kliff, "The Future of Abstinence," Newsweek, 2009.10.27].

Sure doesn't sound like the cheery optimism of someone glad to see federal funds disappear.

Herseth Sandlin Apologist Hides Behind Elitism

Sam Hurst is not the typical blogospheric barroom brawler. His thoughtful prose generally floats above the combative, poke-in-the-eye polemics that Sibby and I goof around with. I thus hesitate to use words like hammers, skewers, or other such violent metaphors to describe his writing.

But Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin's Blue Doggery has provoked Mr. Hurst to come out swinging. Hurst offers a crushing critique of former state Dems chair Judy Olson Duhamel's open letter telling Dems to pipe down and defer to SHS on her GOP-enabling health care vote. Hurst dissects Duhamel's letter as elitist incumbent's lament.

Duhamel tells South Dakota Dems "to consider the fact that [SHS's] comprehension of the complexity of health care issues is far greater than the understanding that most of us have." Inherent in that claim, Hurst notes, is the position that SHS knows better than Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, "73% of American physicians, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, hundreds of physicians, nurses and health professionals in South Dakota, the AARP, health committees in the House, 65% of the American people and the Executive Board of the South Dakota Democratic Party."

On that same point, and perhaps most damningly, "Oddly enough Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin's level of comprehension is exactly the same as the Republican Party and private insurance companies." Ouch.

Hurst also challenges Duhamel's effort to defend SHS's Blue Dog record by arguing that the Democratic party is a big tent that imposes no litmus test and welcomes diverse points of view. Hurst smells an upside-down elitism here:

The value of diversity is to give voice to those who do not have power. You use the diversity argument to suggest that Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin, one of the most powerful politicians in the state, is the victim, and that the grassroots rebellion should be more accepting of her position even though it stands in direct opposition to the Democratic Party. The implication is that the grassroots of the Party (those who support the President and our senior Senator) should shut up! and accept whatever position the Congresswoman decides to take in the interest of her career [Sam Hurst, "Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin... Listen to the Butterfly Wings!" The Dakota Day, 2009.11.12.

Hurst offers much, much more worth reading in this article and in a preceding October critique in which he prefigured many of the arguments that have erupted into the open in the South Dakota Democratic Party following SHS's vote against health care reform last weekend. All the more reason to find a good South Dakota Dem to challenge SHS in the 2010 primary.

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p.s.: What does SHS think of primaries?

As someone who went through a primary campaign in 2002, I think primary election campaigns make candidates stronger.

On balance, the engagement of so many people has been not only overall good for the party, but ultimately good for the nominee [quoted by Denise Ross, "Herseth Sandlin: Primary Will Make Dems Stronger," Hog House Blog, 2008.05.21].

Death of a Pickup Truck: Wasson Shows Sensitive (and Sudsy?) Side

Pickup truck owners, a moment of silence, please, in sympathy and solidarity with GOP U.S. House candidate Thad Wasson, who makes public on his campaign blog his grief at the untimely passing of his 1982 Chevy pickup. Wasson heart-wrenchingly likens the death of his truck to losing the family dog.

Who says ex-Marines don't have a sensitive side?

On the down side, we should note one other telling passage in Mr. Wasson's lament:

This truck had only 90,000 miles on it and was a great pickup to throw hay in, drink a beer in, and over the 4th of July, watch fireworks in [Thad Wasson, "Me and My Chevy," campaign blog, 2009.11.13].

Beer in the truck? Hmmm... I'm trying to picture what would happen if our incumbent Congresswoman mentioned cracking open a cold one in the cab of Grandpa's Old Blue. Someone call the campaign manager!

But wait: maybe this isn't a case of message mismanagement. Maybe Wasson knows exactly what he's doing. He shows his sensitive side (and I'm 100% with him on the value of expressing one's grief and showing one's humanity), but at the same time, he makes a clever play for the hearts of the GOP anti-nanny-staters. Those red-meat Republicans read Wasson's lament and think, "Darn right! Why can't a man choose what to drink and eat and smoke in his own pickup truck? Government has no right to tell him what to do in his God-given property!"

Again, I extend sincere sympathies to candidate Wasson on his significant and expensive loss. But I recommend asking about beer-can holders in the replacement.

No Coal, No Oil by 2030? No Problem! Use Earth, Wind, and Fire

...and tides!

Think big: Ned Hodgman at Understanding Government points us toward a Nov. 2009 Scientific American article that lays out a plan to power the planet entirely with renewable energy and eliminate fossil fuels by 2030.

Authors Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi aren't talking about just meeting new energy demand with renewables and forestalling the construction of new coal plants. They're talking about replacing and shuttering every fossil-fuel plant on the planet and pumping out every erg the whole planet needs with 3.8 million big wind turbines, 90,000 solar plants, and all sorts of geothermal and tidal energy.

I don't have a SciAm subscription (trip to library today!), but Hodgman notes that this plan still focuses more on centralized power production rather than Dusty's and my favorite distributed power generation. But contrary to the grumbling of the power co-ops' propaganda campaign, Jacobson and Delucchi say that an all-renewable world energy supply would be not just affordable, but cheaper than "the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power." The real barriers are short supply of some specialty materials and political will.

Read more online:

• Rare Metal Blog notes the five main materials we might be short on for building worldwide renewable energy tech are neodymium, indium, lithium, silver, and platinum (invest now). RMB also notes Jacobson and Delucchi's projected cost: $100 trillion over 20 years. Let's see... $5 trillion a year... heck, that's less than 9% of annual global GDP. Small price to pay for investment in clean future energy... not to mention a heck of a lot of manufacturing and construction jobs.
• Some naysayers say, "Gee, that's a lot!" but advance no argument that it can't be done. Again, the issue is political will, not physics or technology.
• Ah, found a copy! Jacobson and Delucchi's plan includes no ethanol, no carbon sequestration, and no nukes. Why?
  
  

  ...when burned in vehicles, even the most ecologically acceptable sources of ethanol create air pollution that will cause the same mortality level as when gasoline is burned. Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered. Carbon capture and sequestration technology can reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants but will increase air pollutants and will extend all the other deleterious effects of coal mining, transport and processing, because more coal must be burned to power the capture and storage steps. Similarly, we consider only technologies that do not present significant waste disposal or terrorism risks [Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030," Scientific American, Nov. 2009, pp. 58–65].

If we don't think big, we won't get anywhere.