Energy Sources 2

I'd like to update the calculations I did earlier, and include a few handy conversion rules of thumb for anyone thinking about electric vehicles. These calculators are handy:
EIA Kids page
Convert-Me

100 hp = 74.6 kW = ~75 kW
155 lb-ft = ~210 N-m (the torque in a VW TDI 1.9 l engine)

The energy content of a gallon of gasoline is 130.88 MJ. The energy content of a 15 gallon tank of gasoline is 1963.2 MJ. That's also 545.3 kW-h. At $0.098/kW-h for electricity, that "tank" will cost about $53 from the Electric Company (makes gasoline look pretty cheap, eh?).

If you tried to use marine batteries with a 12 V charge and 255 A-h capacity (20 hour discharge rating), you would have to carry 178 such batteries with you. Um, well, actually, using a 1.4:1 charge efficiency (you have to put 40% more in than you get out), you have to carry 250 batteries with you. At 60 pounds apiece, they weigh about 15,000 pounds (6800 kg). It might take up some space, too. And, you're probably going to have to fill it daily with $53 worth of electricity.

If you fill it in 5 minutes, you're going to need 202 A per branch (28 of them, each with 9 batteries in series to drive a 108 V system). That's going to require 5600 A total! What if you take 8 hours to fill it, like at home or work? You still need 32 A per branch, or about 59 household circuits of 15 A each. You better leave for work a little early in the morning, because that's going to take some time to plug in! Of course, this is assuming that you want to fill all the way up the same way you do in a gas station. Electricity is different: the transmission grid is much more widely distributed than the gasoline "distribution" grid, so you can fill up a little at work, a little at home, and so on, rather than making one trip a week.

People running those electric vehicles are a little smug about it, acting as if they are getting something for nothing. The guy in Canada running a Prius on solar - maybe he is onto something. $0.21/kW-h for solar as opposed to $0.05/kW-h for gasoline, but still, at least it's clean (I don't know what the lifecycle costs for the solar panels are, offhand, but I think they pay for themselves within 7 years ... in places farther south than Canada). But the Californian who powers his off the grid? He is getting his energy from petrofuel-powered electricity. Only about 9% of the energy in the coal actually gets into his motor, so all he has discovered is an expensive way to shift the costs and pollution around. And a way to get a lot of attention.

I found one source who claimed that you need about 80 kW of power to accelerate an average car to 60 in 10 s or less. If I use a constant acceleration (2.58 m/s^2), I get 45 kW for a 4000 pound (1363 kg) car. 80 kW seems reasonable if you introduce some inefficiencies.

It is tough to compare internal combustion engines (ICE) and dc motors. A 100 hp (75 kW) gas burner probably gets 100 ft-lb of torque, and a 90 hp turbodiesel gets 155 ft-lb of torque, but a 18 kW (continuous) motor might get more like 100 ft-lb of torque, and it will start generating it at very low speeds. Still, a 75 kW dc motor is tough to find. Here is an example of an integrated electric motor conversion kit for a VW rabbit (the Voltsrabbit), and here is a dc "wheelmotor". The conversion kit includes the 20 kW motor, while the largest wheelmotor is 14.4 kW. So you just install 4, right?

Okay, so the thing is going to be underpowered, and the batteries are going to weigh a ton. Well, more like 7 tons. So isn't there a better way to power the system? I see that the average price you can expect for a PEM fuel cell stack is about $6000-$11,000 for a 1 kW stack. Given that the average engine is said to cost $3000 for a 100 kW engine, that says prices need to be in the $30/kW range for fuel cells to be competitive (I've seen the figure $40/kW in several places 'round the net). I'll be generous and assume the current $7/W is double the manufacturing cost, so they only need a 10 x improvement in cost performance. That's one reason for the skepticism about hydrogen power.

The other reason is the hydrogen itself - where is it going to come from? From what I can tell, even from reading Winning the Oil Endgame, it's going to come from oil or other fossil fuels. So, uh, what is the benefit?

I think this only emphasizes the point that if we want to see more efficient vehicles, we need them to be a lot lighter. With a car that weighs half the one you have now, you can have a motor half as large to get the same performance. That 4 x 14 kW wheelmotor setup (56 kW) becomes feasible.

Energy Sources

I remember coming across an exchange a long time ago in a blog or newsgroup in which one poster was pointing out that consumers received less energy than was available in the amount of coal burned, and that this was proof that we are losing energy. A respondent pointed out that energy must always be lost when transforming from one form to another. That's true, but the problem is that the forms of energy we currently use to "create" electricity (yes, I know, I know) aren't sources of energy, but rather stores of energy. This outline might help students to the energy debates place energy sources conceptually:

Sources:

• Solar
• Nuclear
• Gravitational

Storage:

• Petrochemicals (oil, coal, natural gas)
• Chemical
• Natural
• Biomass
• Manmade
• Batteries
• Fuel (gasoline)
• Non-chemical
• Wind
• Tide
• Capacitors
  

Transmission

• Electricity (the "grid")
  
• Fuel
• Natural gas pipeline
• Gasoline and diesel distribution system
  

Ultimately, we should probably try to get all of our energy from sources, since the stored energy in petrochemicals is probably going to get more expensive to extract. Those sources are what people refer to as "renewable".

For use in transportation systems, we can either hook the system to the grid (electric trains) or carry energy in some sort of transportable form (fuel or batteries). Fuel happens to be a very good way to both distribute and carry stored energy because it is very compact. Batteries and electricity are not as efficient. I recall reading one time that if you tried to fill up electric cars at the same rate as you add energy into standard gasoline powered cars, the grid would only support a few cars at a time (few as in only 5-10 cars in NYC at one time).

[Update: I did the calculations using the energy content of gasoline and the assumption that the average consumer pumps 15 gallons of gas in 5 minutes. That's 1,963 MJ in 300 seconds, approximately 6.54 MW. The Indian Point Nuclear Plant has two generators capable of 971 and 984 MW capacity. Less than three hundred cars could fuel up at any given time. Since they already run at 98% and 88% capacity, the real number of cars that could fuel would be much less at peak hours. You could fill about 570 cars off the Palo Verde plant's three generators. Also, to replace a 100 hp engine (not very large), you would need a 75 kW motor. That's pretty large for a dc motor, especially running about 1681 rpm or so (that's what it would take to go 120 mph in a direct drive vehicle with a 2' total diameter). I think the real problem with dumping that much energy into a vehicle in 5 minutes is going to be the current required; most people won't be able to lift the cable(s).]

That's a problem, but it doesn't completely negate the idea of electric vehicles. After all, you could plug in and trickle charge both at work and at home (and at the supermarket, the fuel station, etc.). Furthermore, people have suggested other means of getting electricity into the car, including solar, fuel cells, and trading batteries at the future version of a gas station. In fact, it has been widely suggested that you could fill a fuel cell car with hydrogen from a filling station, and then plug the vehicle in at your destination and use it to power the grid. Pretty cool, if you can pull it off!

Sweatshop Definitions

Should beautiful, single women be required to conceal their appearance?
Should wealthy, old, single men be required to hide their wealth?

In my previous post, I stated my frustration with the dearth of a good definition of "sweatshop". From what I can glean from the web, sweatshop seems to have the following definitions, based on the context, and depending greatly on the author:

• Any apparel or footwear factory
• Any apparel or footwear factory in a developing country, especially if they make products for export to the West
• Any apparel or footwear factory in a developing country that does contract work for a well-known person or company (Nike, Reebok, Gap, Kathie Lee Gifford)
• Any apparel or footwear factory in the US that hires immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants
  
• Any place of work that the author finds to be undesirable
• A manufacturing workplace that treats its workers inhumanely, paying low wages, imposing harsh and unsafe working conditions, and demanding levels of performance that are harmful to the workers. (www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/s.html)
• factory where workers do piecework for poor pay and are prevented from forming unions; common in the clothing industry (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Some of these are just plain silly on their faces, and the others are simply too vague. I don't accept the accusation that I am cherry-picking these definitions, just being obtuse, or denying the existence of actual sweatshops. I believe that people have overused the term to the point that they have watered it down and, as usual, have divided into two camps that talk past one-another in an attempt to score rhetorical points.

Here is what I am prepared to accept as a definition of a sweatshop worthy of protest:

• Any factory where the workers are legally prevented from quitting, striking, or organizing, and/or where the employers have perpetrated a fraud upon the workers by successfully misrepresenting the conditions of work.

If a country has laws that allow prisoners to be used as quasi-slave labor, I am uncomfortable with products from those factories. China reportedly has such factories, but I don't know how to determine which Chinese-made products are made at those and which are made at other types of factories. The US has prison-staffed factories, and while I am sympathetic to the idea of victim compensation, I am uncomfortable with factory prisons as I know them because of the potential rent-seeking that may go on.

Many foreign countries have laws that prevent union or other organization. I am as opposed to those as I am to laws which allow closed shop contracts or which require employers to recognize unions. In the US, closed shop contracts are illegal (Taft-Hartley), but there is a loophole which unions routinely exploit: you can't compel employees to join the union, but you can compel them to pay dues. You can't require them to pay for non-bargaining activities (Beck), but the burden is on the employees to get their money back from the Union. Everyone should be allowed to talk and to coordinate their activities with everyone else who agrees to do so, but should not be required to coordinate with someone they don't want.

I read about shops where women may be compelled to have sex as a condition of employment, but it isn't clear how common this is. If this was not an explicit part of the arrangement, I believe that this is a fraudulent arrangement perpetrated by the management. If it's one rogue manager, fire him, but if it's a pattern of behavior, then I agree that the place is worthy of protest. Likewise a factory where other side deals are made as a condition of employment, or where corporal punishment is used.

If the factory shows one face to the employee before they agree to work (which means quitting other jobs and leaving other commitments), and then another when they actually start working, that's fraud. If they make claims about safety or working conditions (1) that they know to be untrue and (2) that they make for the purpose of deceiving the employees, that is fraud. On the other hand, if the employees know about these things from other sources (friends and family), and agree to them anyhow, I don't see the problem with that. Many factories in developing countries probably keep up fronts for ill-informed, busybody activists, and the workers are probably well aware of the reality behind the facade, so I qualified "misrepresenting" with "successfully" in my definition.

Finally, I am assuming that we are talking about people who are capable of rational decision-making. That may or may not be the case for everyone. Caveats apply for the mentally handicapped and for children. However, the relevant difference between children and adults is not age, but maturity and understanding. Unfortunately, we don't have a good test for maturity, so we choose a bright line rule and say that everyone under 18 years of age is not an adult. We let children as young as 14 work in non-farm settings, though they still don't enjoy the other privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. We don't let anyone under 21 drink, but we do let them enlist, so these rules are not necessarily logical. I think it is perfectly reasonable for every culture to make their own decisions about the appropriate adulthood rule, since in many societies children are more self-reliant than they are in our own culture. Even in our own society, we make concessions to farming, where children learn work habits much younger because they actually participate in it. As cultures become more complex, it takes longer to learn all of the rules (anyone remember the comparison in The Gods Must Be Crazy?), and I think that we made a mistake by banning children from work. After all, it means that we sit them in warehouses schools where they learn nonsense instead of participating in meaningful apprenticeship programs such as they still have in Germany.

Kathleen suggests a good test for determining if a factory meets all of my requirements for not being a sweatshop: if they are willing to let you come in and visit or inspect, they are not a sweatshop. A sweatshop is likely to be an illegal operation, hiding from the public in more ways than one. The El Monte sweatshop discovered in 1995 was staffed by (mostly) girls who had immigrated illegally from Thailand and were kept in involuntary servitude to an organized crime ring which saw alien smuggling to be a profitable adjunct to drug smuggling.

The definitions of sweatshop that seem to be a little serious also seem to me to be vague. It used to be claimed that software companies treated their workers "inhumanely", forcing them to work long hours. Since the dot-com implosion, those same workers' biggest complaint is unemployment, which they increasingly blame on offshore software development from India. Guess what they call those factories full of professionials that trained in foreign universities? (Be sure to check out the "selected occupations" highlighted in Figure 1 on the link)

NFL linemen have a lifetime expectancy of about 55 years old, so it would seem that the NFL is a sweatshop if you use "demanding levels of performance that are harmful to the workers" as a criteria. The same is largely true of professional cyclists, yet I saw very few protestors along the route or the Tour de France.

Here is what I am not going to accept as a definition of a sweatshop (can we come up with another word?):

• A factory in a developing country where the employees know about the work conditions and pay and freely choose those over their other options despite the fact that, in comparison to the West, the pay is much lower and the conditions much worse than those to which we are accustomed.
  

There are thousands of factories and jobs that would be too dangerous, harsh, harmful, or low-paying for me, but that doesn't mean that everyone agrees or that nobody should work there. The real test is whether the employees find the tradeoff between the known unpleasantness or risk on one hand, and the known pay on the other, to be acceptable to them given their other options. Roofing is a dangerous and highly regulated job. Installing flooring is supposed to be really bad on your knees and shoulders. Where are the protestors?

And "poor pay"? This is probably the least well defined phrase on the internet. It's so bad that I'm going to leave it to another post.

I like my definition of "sweatshop" much better than anything I could find on the internet, but I might be biased. Most writers on the subject are so poorly informed that you cannot believe they are serious. Applying their vague formulations to the apparel industry is insulting to the people who actually enjoy working in the industry. People who write about this seem to forget that while pay in other countries is much lower than what they would accept, it is not as bad when you consider their cost of living, and almost always better than their other options. These activists think they are doing those workers a favor when in fact they are attempting to take away their only competitive advantage.

Those activists would put bags on the heads of beautiful women and chains around the wallets of old men and then send us all out to find a mate on the claim that this would "force" beautiful women to develop a personality and rich old men to develop a sense of youth. But what if rich old men just want beautiful women and women just want rich, old men? Nobody is going to be happy under the bag-and-chain scheme, but at least everyone will be equal in their misery.

Vows by Trackback

Kathleen;

I promise to love, honor, and obey cherish you, in sickness and in health, in poverty and wealth, in times of sorrow and times of joy. I will be your friend, your lover, your confidant. I promise to never stop trying to become the patient, understanding man you deserve.

Love,
Your husband
Eric

[What is this? See Kathleen's comment here on her response here]

[To answer a question that keeps popping up - LOL - yes, we have met!]

[BTW - This website is just a hobby ... go see Kathleen's website, it's her business (she writes about entrepreneurship in the apparel industry, much more interesting, even MR has linked to it!!)]

[*Hello* wszelki (wszyscy) od Polski! Kurtuazja *poltran*]

Sweatshops

Yes, I am the Eric mentioned in this post. I first picked the news about the Christian Science Monitor Op-Ed up from Cafe Hayek (where orders emerge). I have three main things I'd like to say about it, but not before pointing out that this is a topic about which Kathleen is passionate, exceptionally well-informed (and experienced), and surprisingly not very PC (at least, not in a conventionally PC way). Surprising to PC people, that is, not surprising to me any longer.

The four points I'd like to address will take a while to get through, but here's an outline:

• What is a sweatshop, anyhow?
• Rothstein raises some interesting points, but his main argument is seriously flawed
• Despite this flaw, he and Kathleen raise an interesting angle to the subject of worker education
• I have a potential solution to the problem

Next time: what is a sweatshop?

Meanwhile, this Haitian website picked up on Kathleen's post.

The E-Prize

Q1) Do you think that the Constitution is a good thing or bad thing?

Q2) Are you for or against corporate welfare?

Q3) If people aren't doing something that you think they should - replacing appliances and vehicles with more energy efficient devices, for example - what should the government do about it?

Q4) If people were doing those things that you think they should, what should the government do about it?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A1) Most people think that the Constitution is a good thing. All the bits about free speech, not establishing a religion, equal protection, freedom from search and seizure, no slavery, and women get the vote. Oh, yeah, and the other stuff.

A2) Most people are against corporate welfare. The obvious exceptions are corporations. And politicians who rely on them for campaign contributions. And people who work for them. Okay, most people are against welfare for other corporations.

A3) If you were the average enviro-policy wonk, you would subsidize the activity. Nevermind the fact that there isn't any authorization in the Constitution. So, maybe relax on 1 if you answered subsidize on this. And so what if corporations get a little extra money - it's worth it for my pet issue, and besides, this is a capitalist country isn't it? I mean, so what if it isn't really capitalism when we use the tax code to distort fix the economy? So, um, yeah, subsidies are good. And free, too, right?

A4) Oh, people are already doing it? And corporations would capture most of the surplus? And there isn't really a Constitutional authorization for it? In that case, nah, let's not have subsidies. What's the point?

Well, unless you're the US Congress and President George W. Bush. In that case, nevermind these facts:

• Carrier Corp is getting ready to release new heat exchanger systems which cost $250 million to develop - money they spent without needing to be subsidized
• High end appliance maker Viking Range is shipping a new energy efficient refrigerator at about $5000 a pop
  
• Growth rates in appliance sales have been between 2.8% and 5.8% for the past 3 years
  
• 25% of all clothes washers were Energy Star compliant, vs 1% in 1997
• 33% of all refrigerators were Energy Star compliant, vs 0% in 1997
• 86% of all clothes washers were Energy Star compliant, vs 6% in 1997
• Honda has two hybrid models (Insight and Civic HX), Toyota's Prius is all the rage, and even Ford is getting in on the act. Sales are booming, Toyota can't keep up with demand, the cars are presold for months, used Prii from rental fleets are selling for more than the new price, etc., etc., etc.
  

Strangely, the efficient appliance sales growth is expected to fall to 1% this year despite predictions of a growing economy and rising energy costs (all non-automotive figures thanks to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's informative but not-free "New Incentives for Being Green" article in today's WSJ - this is my slant on the story, not hers). Anyone suspect that the industry group (Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers) making this prediction was gaming the numbers to influence politicians?

Also, experts think that there may be a markup for the energy efficient appliances - just wait until you see the markup after this Energy Bill becomes the Energy Act of 2005! The intent of the subsidy is to make the appliances more affordable to consumers, but the effect of the bill will be to transfer more money from taxpayers to the manufacturers. Why? Because they know that consumers - who were already willing to buy these items - will have more money to spend on them. They will try to capture the consumer surplus for themselves. I've written about this somewhat more extensively here (more extensively, though not necessarily any more clearly). I've also written more sarcastically about Energy Bills here.

My two things about economics:
1) Incentives and outcomes matter more than intentions.
2) The second thing doesn't matter (I actually think TANSTAAFL is a restatement of (1)).

If there was a government idea I could almost accept in this subject area, it is the idea of an X-prize for energy (hence, E-prize). Another term for it is the Golden Carrot. The federal government actually used to use incentive prizes like that for their defense procurements (back when the Constitution meant something, and the Department of Defense actually defended the homeland so that we didn't also need a Homeland Defense department). Fort McHenry and several others like it were built with money granted to states and earmarked for use on a design which was selected as the best for port defense. I recall a story about cargo ships in WWI that were built with a grant given to the best design (I think the story was in Burton Folsom's Myth of the Robber Barons). There's still a Constitutional issue, though, so lacking an amendment authorizing Congress to spend money on renewable energy, the privately funded X-Prize precedent is more instructive. If you had to have government involvement, 8 gallons of fuel are required to transport every gallon used for warfighting capability, according to Winning the Oil Endgame. The Army and Air Force have a lot to gain from an efficient transportation system.

In any case, the idea would be to reward a large sum of money to the first entrepreneur who could demonstrate a transportation system that ran on renewable energy and could be purchased, operated, and maintained for a lifetime cost within, say, 10% of the average vehicle today. Or that ran on clean energy (e.g. hydrogen). Or an electrical generation system instead of a transportation system. In any case, because of the political as well as the environmental externalities of oil trade, I believe more good would be accomplished by jump starting the transition to renewables than by making non-renewables less expensive by decreasing the demand for them.

Coase In Action

I first heard about Ronald Coase in college in an economics class. A few years later, the so-called Coase Theorem was put into action in the 1990 Clean Air Act. The law called for cap and trade "regulation" of sulfur emissions to address acid rain. In effect, anyone should be able to buy and sell sulfur dioxide emissions. If you are a manufacturer (probably an electric utility) who emits sulfur dioxide, you would then have to purchase emission credits if you wanted to emit SO2. It would be up to you to determine the cheapest way to comply with the law - you could purchase emissions credits, scrub your exhaust to remove the sulfur, switch to a cleaner fuel, or shut down.

Coase was seen as a better way to address pollution than the older methods. One of those was a Pigouvian (or Pigovian) tax, which is essentially what people are calling for when they say that we should tax fuel to address global warming. The Pigouvian tax "internalizes" the pollution externality, so the polluter is motivated reduce the pollution in order to reduce his costs. The problems with Pigou are that it is hard to figure out how much to tax and the victims of the pollution are (usually) not compensated. Another method for addressing pollution is command and control: decide how much pollution or what method of removing it is acceptable, then dictate that to the polluter. One problem with this is that it is subject to politics: politicians may pick the wrong technology, or they may pick a solution for the wrong reasons. For example, the 1977 Clean Air Act "grandfathered in" older boilers, and scrubbers were preferred to cleaner fuel because the scrubber solution favored dirtier, brown, Eastern coal over western coal. Eastern coal mines were more unionized than western mines, and the unions had a definite preference. Thus, to mollify regulated utilities and unions, a less efficient, dirtier, more expensive solution was preferred to a cleaner solution (and you can bet that the companies that made scrubbers weren't too sad about it).

The best (most readable) explanation I have ever read of the Coase theorem is in David Friedman's Law's Order, Chapter 4. I'm not even going to attempt it here, go read the link (the entire book is online). The bottom line, though, is that application of Coase's ideas (calling it a "theorem" was not his idea, nor did he suggest these applications in the original paper, "The Problem of Social Cost") internalizes pollution by assigning property rights and allowing the actors to trade their way to an efficient outcome (caveats, yadda, yadda - see Friedman link above). The 1990 Clean Air Act also allowed the rights to be traded in open auction, which means that people who aren't necessarily polluters or victims can buy and sell emissions permits. One of the parties buying tradeable permits in the last few auctions has been the Acid Rain Retirement Fund, a non-profit group that buys emissions permits and then refuses to exercise them. Since the number of permits is capped by law, that means that the total amount of pollution is reduced below what the law allows.

That is just one example of free market environmentalism; other similar examples would be outright land purchases, conservation easement purchases, or unused grazing or water right purchases by conservationists. Groups such as Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, and The Nature Conservancy have used these methods to protect and even to recover land, rivers, and wetlands. It doesn't involve endless and divisive litigation, it doesn't involve command and control regulation, and it relies on rather than undermines property rights. This is just the kind of thing you might have hoped for when Terry Anderson showed up in the 2000 campaign as a Bush advisor. So why, oh why, does the Bush Administration oppose free market environmentalism?

Because of the divisive tactics they use, groups like the Sierra Club drive wedges between environmentalists and landowners. Ranchers who might otherwise be in favor of conservation (such as the Quivira Coalition) suddenly find themselves fighting for control of their land and therefore against environmentalists and bureaucrats run amuck. Consider the Malpais Borderlands Group, ranchers along the New Mexico/Arizona border who arranged a grassbank (essentially a grazing coop that allows some areas to recover without putting the rancher out of business). One of the conservation methods they decided to use was to let wild fires run their course ("controlled burns" were pioneered by TNC, not the BLM). Unfortunately, the BLM decided that they would oppose them and put fires out even on private property. Or consider the case of Dayton Hyde in his attempt to build a refuge for sandhill cranes. Suddenly, he lost control of his property as it fell under federal control because it was a wetland, even though it was his action that created the habitat! But some environmental groups are finally realizing that blanket opposition to ranching is a bad idea because the alternative for the ranchers is to subdivide for development.

Yes, according to this John Tierney article (The Sagebrush Solution ($$) in the New York Times (via The Agitator), free version here), the Bush Administration has demonstrated once again that they oppose such classical liberal principles as free markets and small government. The Grand Canyon Trust is a nonprofit group that buys land just like The Nature Conservancy; it is headed by Bill Hedden and concentrates on conserving land in northern Arizona. Dell LeFevre is a 5th generation rancher who fought the Clinton Administration's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument land grab. LeFevre and Hedden made a deal to sell rights to the grazing permits LeFevre leases from the BLM. It was a win-win-win situation in which some areas will be preserved, the ranchers will be able to move their cattle to less valuable (and safer) land, and taxpayers get more conservation at no extra cost. Makes sense, right? Apparently not to Bush appointees at the Interior Department, who have decided to stop the deal from going through. They apparently base their reasoning on local politicians' claims that this will destroy their "ranching way of life" (but it helps a rancher!?) and on a reading of the law that allows them to determine for what the land is "chiefly valuable" (but the rancher and the conservationist have done that through trade?!).

So apparently, the Bush Administration may trust you with your own money, but they don't trust you to figure out the best use of your own land. And the difference is ... ?

Oh well, no time to waste. I've got a permit to emit several hundred pounds of sulfur (that's the certificate at the top), and I figure I better get busy emitting it before some bureaucrat decides that I don't know what the best use is.