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This story about garbage and recycling in San Francisco is really, really cool. Their motto? "You can recycle almost anything." And its true! Apparently you really can!

Thomas Friedman is back from a 5+ month book writing sabbatical, and damn if he isn't a man on fire:

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents' generation -- work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means -- have given way to subprime values: "You can have the American dream -- a house -- with no money down and no payments for two years."

That's why Donald Rumsfeld's infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: "You go to war with the army you have." Hey, you march into the future with the country you have -- not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York's Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.'s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore's ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children's play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin's luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it's because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world's best talent -- including Americans.

And us? Harvard's president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in "downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions." Today, she added, "China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere."

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is "toughening up" Barack Obama so he'll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don't need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I'm voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV -- at 8 p.m. -- from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don't know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn't matter is dead wrong. "Of course, hope alone is not enough," says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, "but it's not trivial. It's not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else."

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted -- enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity -- big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, "no one can touch us."

I'm closing in on the end of my 4th year at Boston University, and it really is striking to me just how much a shift there has been in the attitudes of the kids coming into school now versus when I first arrived. Friedman is absolutely right: they desperately want to get to work on our country, and they cannot even begin to understand why the "adults" are so obsessed with so many irrelevant issues. The political will is there. What's been missing is the leadership. These kids want the truth about our problems, not poll tested spin and focus group crafted policies.

UPDATE: As if on cue, the next item in my RSS reader was James Surowiecki's latest effort for the New Yorker. An excerpt:

n the current atmosphere of economic tumult, the announcement that Toyota sold a hundred and sixty thousand more cars than General Motors in the first three months of this year might seem like a minor news item. But it may very well signal the end of one of the most remarkable runs in business history. For seventy-seven years, in good times and bad, G.M. has sold more cars annually than any other company in the world. But Toyota has long been the auto industry's most profitable and innovative firm. And this year it appears likely to become, finally, the industry's sales leader, too.

Calling Toyota an innovative company may, at first glance, seem a bit odd. Its vehicles are more liked than loved, and it is often attacked for being better at imitation than at invention. Fortune, which typically praises the company effusively, has labelled it "stodgy and bureaucratic." But if Toyota doesn't look like an innovative company it's only because our definition of innovation--cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries--is far too narrow. Toyota's innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn't made them any less powerful.

At the core of the company's success is the Toyota Production System, which took shape in the years after the Second World War, when Japan was literally rebuilding itself, and capital and equipment were hard to come by. A Toyota engineer named Taiichi Ohno turned necessity into virtue, coming up with a system to get as much as possible out of every part, every machine, and every worker. The principles were simple, even obvious--do away with waste, have parts arrive precisely when workers need them, fix problems as soon as they arise. And they weren't even entirely new--Ohno himself cited Henry Ford and American supermarkets as inspirations. But what Toyota has done, better than any other manufacturing company, is turn principle into practice. In some cases, it has done so with inventions, like the andon cord, which any worker can pull to stop the assembly line if he notices a problem, or kanban, a card system that allows workers to signal when new parts are needed. In other cases, it has done so by reorganizing factory floors and workspaces in order to allow for a freer and easier flow of parts and products. Most innovation focusses on what gets made. Toyota reinvented how things got made, which enabled it to build cars faster and with less labor than American companies.

But there's an enigma to the Toyota Production System: although the system has been widely copied, Toyota has kept its edge over its competitors. Toyota opens its facilities to tours, and even embarked on a joint venture with G.M. designed, in part, to help G.M. improve its own production system. Over the years, more than three thousand books and articles have analyzed how the company works, and things like andon systems are now common sights on factory floors. The diffusion of Toyota's concepts has had a real effect; the auto industry as a whole is far more productive than it used to be. So how has Toyota stayed ahead of the pack?

The answer has a lot to do with another distinctive element of Toyota's approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. (The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen--continuous improvement.) Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it's taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called "The Elegant Solution," Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small--making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say--and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.

The system doesn't necessarily preclude missteps--in 2006, Toyota ran into a series of quality problems--and it's possible that the focus on incremental innovation would be less well suited to businesses driven by large technological leaps. But, on the whole, the results are hard to argue with. They're also phenomenally difficult to duplicate. In part, this is because most companies are still organized in a very top-down manner, and have a hard time handing responsibility to front-line workers. But it's also because the fundamental ethos of kaizen--slow and steady improvement--runs counter to the way that most companies think about change. Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life. The Toyota approach is more like a regular, sustained diet--less immediately dramatic but, as everyone knows, much harder to sustain. In the nineteen-nineties, a McKinsey study of companies that had put quality-improvement programs in place found that two-thirds abandoned them as failures. Toyota's innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That's why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: it knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow.

A topic this complex really deserves a much longer post, but I'm pressed for time today so this will have to do.

Basic political economy says that there are a few different types of capitalist systems in the world today. Our model is the liberal markets model, an uncoordinated free for all that uses creative destruction to foster radical product innovation. In much of Europe and Asia the corporatist model prevails, a system that structures the rules of the game such that cooperation and coordination are much more prevalent throughout the economy. In corporatist systems, process innovation is the process by which most companies change and grow, a basic fact that Surowiecki's article does a fantastic job of highlighting.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most political economists had concluded that the liberal market model was superior, and the academic literature was filled with predictions that the Asian and European systems would gradually adapt to look more like us. By the early 2000s, however, many were beginning to doubt those predictions, all the radical innovation of the dot.com bubble notwithstanding. The cooperation produced by corporatist systems has some very real long-term advantages, many of which the liberal model cannot emulate, no matter how hard it tries.

What are the long term implications of all this? To be honest, no on really knows. One thing is clear, however: the superiority of the US model cannot and should not be assumed. It may be real, or it may have been an artifact of the unique historical circumstances of post-WWII twentieth century geopolitics. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

David Freddoso, over at NRO, writes:

I've been linked by some conservative bloggers on this topic, and I've gotten a lot of emails that blame liberals for ethanol. I have to say, that's not exactly right. The Left is partly to blame just because they labor under the illusion that state planning can bring about better economic results. If ethanol is bad, then they might say we're just not subsidizing the right thing.

But today, liberal environmentalists are not the ones pushing ethanol. It's Agribusiness, all the way. Most reputable liberals believe ethanol to be a big joke -- an enormous corporate welfare subsidy with no real benefits and many downsides.

On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left -- to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol -- to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar -- and once you've started giving a handout, it never ends.

I'm so tired of this. "The left" is not what it once was. This isn't 1975, for god's sake. When will these people wake up?

I can only speak for myself, but as a member of the left I have no interest in using "state planning" to "bring about better economic results," nor do I know anyone on the left that does. Those ideas died many, many decades ago. Not that the people on the right bothered to notice.

Do I believe that government has a role to play in setting energy and environmental policies? Yes, of course. But that makes me no different than Milton Friedman, a man no one would ever describe as anywhere near the left. Both modern liberals and more traditional conservatives agree on this: the question is not if government will get involved, but how.

Markets cannot do everything on their own. Some problem are failures of collective action beyond the reach of the magic of markets to solve. This is why governments exist: to provide us with the institutions and structures necessary to solve problems that we could never solve on our own.

Here is but one hypothetical example. Imagine that tomorrow all of the world's car manufacturers simultaneously announced that they had created a low cost, zero emission, hydrogen powered vehicle. Imagine too that they announced these vehicles were ready to put into immediate production, and that by the end of the decade tens of millions of cars would be ready to be sold.

Sounds great, right? A simple, easy, and quite significant step that would simultaneously reduce our dependence on oil and drastically reduce our carbon footprint. It would be something close to a miracle, right? Yes, but....

All of our infrastructure is based around gasoline. There are hundreds of thousands of gas stations in the United States, and not one of them sells hydrogen. Without gas stations, no one will buy the cars. But unless someone will buy the cars, there is no reason for them to be produced. Chicken, meet egg; egg, meet chicken.

This would be a classic collective action problem. Over time - decades perhaps - it is possible that the market might solve this on its own. But we don't have decades to wait. We need the cars now.

The only solution in this instance would be for government to get directly involved in converting the nation's infrastructure from carbon to hydrogen. There quite literally is no other solution. Would it be inefficient? Yes. Would there be waste, fraud, and abuse? Of course. Might it be immense? Yes. Might there be sensible things we could do to minimize it? Yes. Businesses are inefficient, too, and they are often full of waste, fraud, and abuse. The world is not perfect, but we live our lives nonetheless. We muddle through. It is often the best and only thing we can do.

Government isn't always the solution, but it isn't always the problem, either. It is just like everything else we humans create: imperfect. We over here on the left already know that. We aren't the problem. It is conservatives that are the problem.

They are the ones who create offices of faith based initiatives. They are the ones who ignore and suppress science when its findings are inconvenient. They are the ones who launch wars and depose regimes in the belief that entire societies can be transformed through the actions of the state. They are the ones "laboring under illusions," not us.

Were conservatives to come to their senses, then perhaps we might be able to work with them. But so long as they are convinced that we on the left are either secret socialists and/or terrorists sympathizers, I have no interest in even trying to find common ground. They and their misguided ideas are a danger to our nation, and so long as that is true, we must continue to fight to marginalize them. Reconciliation can and must come eventually, but not yet. Not even nearly yet...

[H/T: Andrew Sullivan]

UPDATE: As if on cue...

Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush's government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered "commercial" in nature.

The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said.

"Tensions are at an all-time high," he said. "We have to cut ourselves to the bone to win these bids. . . . And morale is just destroyed afterward."

The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the "competitive sourcing" initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.

But as Bush's presidency winds down, the program's critics say it has had disappointing results and shaken morale among the federal government's 1.8 million civil servants.

Private contractors have grown increasingly reluctant to participate in the competitions, which federal employees have won 83 percent of the time.

The program fell short of the president's goals in scope and in cost savings. Between 2003 and 2006, agencies completed competitions for fewer than 50,000 jobs, a fraction of what Bush envisioned.

Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration has overstated the savings from some competitions by undercounting the costs of running them. Collectively, they cost $225 million, or about $4,800 per job, according to White House figures.

"The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all," said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Their ideology told them that markets were magical, and magic is good! Magic must be spread everywhere and always! Never mind the decades worth of data and theory that have been developed by political scientists and policy analysts. Fact, who needs them? If we just believe in the magic of markets, all of those theories and analyses will just disappear!

Or not.

From an excellent Atlantic piece on energy use and misuse:

The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of inefficiency, that figure hasn't changed much in recent decades

Why hasn't the market solved this problem? It's a combination of market failures and regulatory failures. On the government side of the equation, past efforts to improve air quality have had a series of unintended negative consequences, and it appears a major reworking of some of our laws is in order. As is so often the case, one eras successes crete the next era's failures, leading to a never ending process of incremental change. Progress is a messy business!

A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste energy--including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure--to reduce the country's fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth. A 2007 study by the Mc Kinsey Global Institute sounded largely the same note; it concluded that domestic industry could use 19 percent less energy than it does today--and make more money as a result.

Economists like to say that rational markets don't "leave $100 bills on the ground," but according to McKinsey's figures, more than $50 billion floats into the air each year, unclaimed by American businesses. What's more, the technologies required to save that money are, for the most part, not new or unproven or even particularly expensive. By and large, they've been around since the 19th century. The question is: Why aren't we using them?

... The first barrier is obvious from a trip through ArcelorMittal's four miles of interconnected pipes, wires, and buildings. Steel mills are noisy, hot, and smelly--all signs of enormous inter­dependent energy systems at work. In many cases, putting waste energy to use requires mixing the exhaust of one process with the intake of another, demanding coordination. But engineers have largely been trained to focus only on their own processes; many tend to resist changes that make those processes more complex. Whereas European and Japanese corporate cultures emphasize energy-saving as a strategy that enhances their competitiveness, U.S. companies generally do not. (DuPont and Dow, which have saved billions on energy costs in the past decade, are notable exceptions. Arcelor Mittal's ownership is European.)

In some industries, investments in energy efficiency also suffer because of the nature of the business cycle. When demand is strong, managers tend to invest first in new capacity; but when demand is weak, they withhold investment for fear that plants will be closed. The timing just never seems to work out. McKinsey found that three-quarters of American companies will not invest in efficiency upgrades that take just two years to pay for themselves. "You have to be humbled," Matt Rogers, a director at McKinsey, told me, "that with a creative market economy, we aren't getting there," even with high oil prices.

Some of these problems may fade if energy costs remain high. But industry's inertia is reinforced by regulation. The Clean Air Act has succeeded spectacularly in reducing some forms of air pollution, but perversely, it has chilled efforts to reuse energy: because many of these efforts involve tinkering with industrial exhaust systems, they can trigger a federal or local review of the plant, opening a can of worms some plant managers would rather keep closed.

Much more problematic are the regu lations surrounding utilities. Several waves of deregulation have resulted in a hodgepodge of rules without providing full competition among power generators. Though it's cheaper and cleaner to produce power at Casten's proj ects than to build new coal-fired capacity, many industrial plants cannot themselves use all the electricity they could produce: they can't profit from aggressive energy recycling unless they can sell the electricity to other consumers. Yet by zan tine regulations make that difficult, stifling many independent energy recyclers. Some of these competitive disadvantages have been addressed in the latest energy bill, but many remain.

Ultimately, making better use of energy will require revamping our operation of the electrical grid itself, an undertaking considerably more complicated than, say, creating a carbon tax. For the better part of a century, we've gotten electricity from large, central generators, which waste nearly 70 percent of the energy they burn. They face little competition and are allowed to simply pass energy costs on to their customers. Distributing generators across the grid would reduce waste, improve reliability, and provide at least some competition.

Opening the grid to competition is one of the more important steps to take if we're serious about reducing fossil- fuel use and carbon emissions, yet no one's talking about doing that. Democratic legislators are nervous about creating incentives for cleaner, cheaper generation that may also benefit nuclear power. Neither party wants to do the dirty work of shutting down old, wasteful generators. And of course the Enron debacle looms over everything.

Technocratic changes to the grid and to industrial plants don't easily capture the imagination. Recycling industrial energy is a solution that looks, well, gray, not green. Steel plants, coated with rust, grime, and a century's worth of effluvia, do not make for inspiring photos. Yet Casten, pointing to the 16 heat-recycling contraptions that sit on top of the coke ovens at the East Chicago steel plant, notes that in 2004 they produced as much clean energy as all the grid-connected solar panels in the world. Green power may pay great dividends years from now. Gray power, if we would embrace it, is a realistic goal for today.

Today's entry comes from the Governator:

We have to go and make decisions today. Time is running out there's an urgency there. This is the important thing here. For him to say we should start really reducing greenhouse gases by the year 2025, by that time we'll have no more glacier left. By that time, our sea level will be rising. We will be in a dangerous situation. I think it is somewhat irresponsible. I think the action is now.

In honor of Bush's meaningless speech today, I thought I'd post this news story from early last week. The headline? Climate target is not radical enough:

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed". A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the arXiv.org website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth's history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow C02 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.

"If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster," Hansen told the Guardian.

At levels as high as 550ppm, the world would warm by 6C, the paper finds. Previous estimates had suggested warming would be just 3C at that point.

Hansen has long been a prominent figure in climate change science. He was one of the first to bring the crisis to the world's attention in testimony to Congress in the 1980s.

But his relationship with the Bush administration has been frosty. In 2005 he accused the White House and Nasa of trying to censor him. He has steadily revised his analysis of the scale of the global warming and was himself one of the architects of a 450ppm target. But he told the Guardian: "I realise that was too high."

The fundamental reason for his reassessment was what he calls "slow feedback" mechanisms which are only now becoming fully understood. They amplify the rise in temperature caused by increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

As ice sheets recede, the warming effect is compounded. Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

Hansen said that he now regards as "implausible" the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century."

The revised target is likely to prompt criticism that he is setting the bar unrealistically high. With the US administration still acting as a drag on international efforts, climate campaigners are struggling even to get a 450ppm target to stick.

Hansen said his findings were not a recipe for despair. The good news, he said, is that reserves of fossil fuels have been exaggerated, so an alternative source of energy will have to be rapidly put in place in any case. Other measure could include a moratorium on coal power stations which would bring the C02 levels to below 400ppm.

Hansen's revised position will pile yet further pressure on Britain over plans to build a new generation of coal power stations. Last year he wrote to Gordon Brown urging him to block the first such power station; the Royal Society has made similar suggestions to the government.

As is always the case with science, the models used to make predictions are always undergoing a constant process of revision. What's striking about the climate change models, however, is that all of the revisions are in the same direction. All of our past predictions have seriously underestimated the long-term impact of our actions.

Yes, there are problems with our models. Yes, we will make mistakes. Yes, the future will not be precisely the same as today's predictions. That's science. That's how it works. Our knowledge is never perfect and it is never complete. The point isn't perfection, nor should it be.

We need to act, and we need to act now. Bush thinks we can wait until 2025 to act, but that is insane. Slowing the growth of emissions would have worked in 1990, but conservatives have successfully blocked action for long enough that we can no longer be so cautious. Half measures are no longer enough. We need to do something.

And this time, apparently climate legislation will be the cause. Down with Yankee taxes!

Is it just me, or is the conservative movement rapidly descending into self-parody?