Russell's Blog

Only a few day ago, I discovered that my wonderful Toyota Yaris probably outranks my mother's (also pretty neat) Toyota Prius in terms of lowest carbon footprint. It appears the Yaris has the smallest carbon footprint of any car available in the United States.

Unfortunately, when it comes to fuel economy standards, what Toyota gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Thomas Friedman expounds in his op-ed today :

What I don’t get is empty-barrel politics — Michigan lawmakers year after year shielding Detroit from pressure to innovate on higher mileage standards, even though Detroit’s failure to sell more energy-efficient vehicles has clearly contributed to its brush with bankruptcy, its loss of market share to Toyota and Honda — whose fleets beat all U.S. automakers in fuel economy in 2007 — and its loss of jobs. G.M. today has 73,000 working U.A.W. members, compared with 225,000 a decade ago. Last year, Toyota overtook G.M. as the world’s biggest automaker.

Thank you, Michigan delegation! The people of Japan thank you as well.

But assisting Detroit’s suicide seems to be contagious. Everyone wants to get in on it, including Toyota. Toyota, which pioneered the industry-leading, 50-miles-per-gallon Prius hybrid, has joined with the Big Three U.S. automakers in lobbying against the tougher mileage standards in the Senate version of the draft energy bill.

This is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to allow so few companies to dominate such an important market. It virtually guarantees that even the "good guys" to get mixed up in bad business, and no approach actually taken will stand out as clearly the right one. If there were more car companies each with a smaller market share, it would be more likely that at least one of them would hit on the right mix of innovation, marketing and public policy.

Remember, Toyota also makes the unfortunately-named Tundra. Imagine yourself a future history textbook author in a time when there isn't any actual tundra left in the world. Would you pass up the opportunity to bash a company for naming a product after the ecosystem it helped erase from the Earth?

While I listened to Petraeus and Crocker tiptoe clumsily around perjury, I couldn't help but wonder how many people will take them at their word that the level of violence is declining. I find it difficult to understand how the level of violence is decreasing when the rate of killing has been increasing. I guess it must depend on how you count the bodies. Evidently, ordinary muggers shoot people in the face, and death squads shoot people in the back of the head. Accepting, for a moment, this ridiculous criterion for distinguishing muggings from sectarian killings as reasonable, it seems very weird that we don't count muggings as violence.

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, repeated the assertion that Iran is supplying the insurgency with sophisticated weapons, particularly explosively formed penetrators. If you will direct your attention to the photograph below, from Wikipedia :

This is a sophisticated weapon that exploits some very tricky hydrodynamics. It is also improvised from an ordinary copper pipe. The penetrator (the bowl shaped part) looks like it was turned out on a lathe, and that the machinist was either not very skillful or not very concerned with quality. Note the disk-shaped depression in the center where the lathe spindle was attached. The penetrator appears to be soldered to the pipe with plumbing solder.

I don't think the insurgency needs anyone's help to build these. The hardest part would be obtaining the explosive material. Who is supplying the insurgency with explosives? The simplest explanation is that they helped themselves to the weapons caches we left unguarded at the beginning of the war. How many improvised explosively formed penetrators could you make with 377 tons of high explosives?

Maybe Iran isn't being very helpful when it comes to American interests in Iraq. After all, why should they? I have no doubt that Iran's leadership would be delighted to see things go as badly for America as possible in Iraq and elsewhere. However, it's not as if Iran actually has to do anything to make Iraq a disaster for America. The fact that they don't like us is not in itself a very good reason for them to arm the insurgents. Practically any government in Iraq is likely to be friendly with Iran. Iran actually has a lot of good reasons to want the insurgency to stop.

If I were Mr. Ahmadinejad, I would just sit on my hands. At most, I would give some political support to Iraqis who might be friendly to Iran should they gain or keep power. But weapons? Why bother when the insurgents have already looted all the weapons they could ever want? It would be redundant and unnecessary.

Like most Americans, Mr. Crocker knows that we've either lost or that we're loosing. What sets him apart from the rest of us is that Americans are grown up enough to accept responsibility for the bad outcome of this conflict, and Mr. Crocker would rather blame it on someone else.