Happy Friday,
Here’s some stuff you might like.
Fires: causes and partial solutions
Because this is 2020, the moment of astonished mourning in the wake of deadly wildfires in Oregon and along the west coast lasted exactly a moment, before the important people started fighting about the cause of the fires and, more importantly, what that says about for whom we should vote for president. Kate Brown and Joe Biden blamed climate change; Donald Trump and other conservatives blamed forest management.
To be clear, what I’m really talking about is what caused the fires to become so big, deadly and destructive, not what actually started the fires. I’m not too interested in the “no fires were started by arson and it’s dangerous to think otherwise” vs. the “all fires were definitely started by arson” argument for now.
So, why were the fires so bad? As Nate Hochman, a man of Hood River, explains, two things can be true at once. Yes, the planet, which includes Oregon most of the time except the Oregon Country Fair, is marginally warmer than it was 100 years ago. Even marginally warmer weather can create dryer conditions, so climate change is probably contributing to what may be an increase in fire intensity.
But so is poor forest management, which basically boils down to a federal government that wants to own bunches of land (over 50% of Oregon is owned by the feds) but doesn’t really want to take care of it. And by “take care of it” I mean not allowing conditions in the property it owns to create an unreasonable risk of harm to nearby people and property. This is the standard we all are held to with regard to property we own, but the federal government has given itself a pass, more or less.
There are also other factors contributing to the particularly devastating nature of the fires, including more people building out into the forest, and Labor Day’s bizarre summer east winds that apparently only occur in Oregon, at scale, a few times every century.
Let’s assume all of these factors contributed to the fires. Then the question is, what can we do to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property in Oregon? Or, more depressingly, given the combination of increasing temperatures and overloaded forests, reduce the rate of increase of the risk of fire loss? This is where things get tricky. Rare winds are not subject to government policy. We can’t close down forest towns.
And, despite the rhetoric, the climate change policies pursued by Kate Brown et al. would have so close to zero an impact on temperatures, and thus fires, in Oregon as to not really count as a solution to the fire problem at all. And they are ghastly expensive. Even if the Governor swore off ever again flying in a private jet from the Willamette Valley to Sunriver, temperatures would continue to rise as they would have without her noble sacrifice.
Improving forest health is not easy or cheap, either (there are 150 million dead trees in California’s Sierra Nevada, for example), but there is good evidence that thinning and controlled burns actually do impede the progress of fire in some circumstances. As important, thinning and controlled burns within our forests can be undertaken without imposing significant additional costs on people and small businesses, unlike cap and trade and other economy-wide climate change policies. Finally, we can address forest health in Oregon without the cooperation of folks in China and India because, unlike atmospheric carbon, we don’t share our forests with every single other person on the planet.
We probably aren’t going to eradicate Covid-19
While we’re talking about big, deadly problems with expensive and painful partial solutions that pretty much take the edge off the problems, but don’t entirely solve them, let’s check in with the coronavirus. There’s been a resurgence of the disease in parts of Europe, most notably in France and Spain. Despite the increase, with more new cases per million population than these countries saw in the Spring, they’re rejecting a return to the widespread lockdowns (paywall) that hammered their economies worse than any time since Hitler’s armies marauded through the continent. Those countries are responding, instead, with more targeted and less costly measures, such as encouraging people to wear masks, etc.
There are some here in the U.S. who, explicitly or implicitly, demand that Covid-19 be eradicated before returning to some semblance of normal. Gov. Brown has threatened additional lockdowns if cases spike, and I’ve seen at least one legislative candidate in Oregon propose the goal of eradicating the disease.
I have taken precisely one science class since high school, physics my freshman year of college almost 30 years ago, and so take this for what it’s worth: it sure seems like Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere. We can tame it with masking and hopefully, soon, with a vaccine, but like the flu it’s gonna be around for a while. Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn, in the article linked above, thinks so: “The virus is here to stay and it is up to us to bring it under control and learn to live with it.”
In other words, we can’t go back to normal, because we need precautions to keep the virus under control, but we also can’t wait to resume critical economic and social activities, like in-person school, until the virus is gone because it’s not going to be gone. Like with the fires, we need to weigh the costs and benefits of various policies that help to avoid the worst effects of a problem that we’re stuck with. As our understanding of treatments, less-costly preventive measures like masking, and which portions of the population are more susceptible to the worst impacts of the disease have improved, the imperative should be to rely more upon masking, protecting the vulnerable, and other targeted efforts, and reduce the enormous human costs of partial lockdowns by gradually lifting them.
We’re going to have to live with the virus long-term, and the fact is people aren’t going to tolerate long-term lockdowns and the attendant material and long-lasting reduction of quality of life, education and financial security. Moreover, the federal government can print a lot of money but not enough to float a population out of work or out of some work in perpetuity, or even for long. Living with the virus means living with the virus in a manner closer to normal than where we are now.
Wherefore art thou egg meat?
Your life has now been forever changed. Once you read the term “egg meat,” you can’t unread it. It’s one of those terms that sounds off, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Eggs and meat are good, even, and perhaps especially, together (vegan and vegetarian subscribers, you assumed the risk of this kind of moral offense when you subscribed), but somehow “egg meat,” well, it just sounds wrong.
It turns out there’s a federal rule that prohibits, as identified by the Twitter account A Crime a Day, leaving broken shells or “egg meat” on the floor of a “breaking room” in an egg processing facility. Now, I don’t know exactly what a “breaking room” is but I remember Pulp Fiction and I assume a breaking room is like the gimp chamber except for eggs instead of Bruce Willis.
Back to egg meat. In addition to not being left on the floor of a breaking room, our federal government has decreed that egg meat shall be smelled. This according to the literary apex of the Code of Federal Regulations:
“(f) Each shell egg shall be broken in a satisfactory and sanitary manner and inspected for wholesomeness by smelling the shell or the egg meat and by visual examination at the time of breaking. All egg meat shall be reexamined by a person qualified to perform such functions before being emptied into the tank or churn, except as otherwise approved by the National Supervisor.”
So, these are the things that we know about egg meat: (1) it shall not be left on the floor of the breaking room; (2) it shall be smelled; (3) it shall be reexamined by a qualified person unless someone called the “National Supervisor” says otherwise.
I don’t know about you, but I want to know who the National Supervisor of Egg Meat is so I can shake his or her immaculately sanitized hand because the United States has some really excellent egg meat.
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Have a great weekend!
Jeff Eager
jeff@eagerlawpc.com
Read past Oregon Roundup editions
What I do:
EagerLaw PC – A business and real property law firm in Bend, Oregon.
Insite LGA Corp. – A campaign consulting, strategic communications and local government monitoring firm.
Waste Alert – Local government monitoring for the solid waste and recycling industry.