Politics and Economics of Carbon Strategies

Summer vacation done, my first post since June and back on the war path...

An esteemed professor from my Business School (Ross Michigan (Ann Arbor)) gave the Chicago alumni a nice presentation recently. Andrew J. Hoffman summarized his new book entitled Carbon Strategies. He made it clear that some companies are way ahead of the Bush administration on the issue of climate change.

And a good thing it is, for all concerned. From his summary I gather that the big Fortune 500 companies are all or mostly addressing the issue of carbon consumption. That they know some type of carbon tax is coming. The Bushies contribution is to delay, delay, delay the day that companies will have to face this. The F500 have plenty of money to face it, and products to protect (like Exxon, GE, etc.). The mid to small companies will follow the leaders in time. His book lays out strategies to deal with the issue for those who are not ahead of the curve. So it is not concerned with whether carbon is an issue, but how to address it and deal with it as a risk management issue - and when companies do we will all be better off.

As a country we'll need the national government, possibly following the lead of far ahead states, to address the overall issue of who and how much companies must pay to comply with carbon limits. It should be interesting to see how fast this all happens once we get a leader with a clue...

Tax Equity

So the rubber meets the road, or the money meets the politicians. Can Schumer tax his private equity firms fairly, those who make obscene money (2% plus 20 standard), gave him over $50,000 in the 2003-4 election cycle. Probably not.

Can Michigan's senators (Carl are you there?) help the environment with higher levels of fuel economy up to 40% higher than now, or the car companies? Sorry, he said even though the senate past it, it's not over yet.

Testing the Dems here, money from the big guns, or stick with your regular folks who count on you to do the right thing for America. Looks like the money wins out again. Time to change the system, ya think??

Bubble behavior - the Sun, metals, and beer

So beer and the Sun are really more connected than we thought, eh? Seems the foam of beer behaves very much like the heat granules on the Sun (and the microstructure of metals) that heat our Earth, as described in this recent Nature article abstract (subscribe for the full article).

The article in summary states (with help from the NYTimes writer Kenneth Chang) that the authors have solved the mathematical equations for the time based behavior of 3 dimensional micro-structures. It is based on a theory that van Neumann solved for 2 dimensions more than 50 years ago.

Would this solution work for huge dimensions as well? The average size of a sun granule is equivalent to an Earth continent, but the described behavior sounds the same as for the beer bubbles or molten metal.

This is one of those solutions that sounds like a universal connection, and I hope these folks know about and are speaking with each other since math and astrophysics are very close. In any event you can decide.