Daily Archives: July 23, 2012

Bob Inglis and market-driven environmentalism

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Inglis blowing bubbles during his speech. Yes, he was making a point, but it would take too many words to explain it here. You had to be there.

Don’t know whether you read Bob Inglis’ op-ed piece in The State the other day or not. An excerpt:

There is important work to be done in order to realize the full potential of South Carolina’s advanced-energy sector. We need less government and more free enterprise. Some clean-energy technologies are more cost-effective than fossil fuels, and others are not there yet. But even the most cost-effective clean fuels still routinely lose out to more expensive fossil fuels. Why? Because the energy market is not a free market.

Speaking at the Clean Energy Summit is timely for me because, a few days ago, I launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a national public-engagement campaign to promote conservative solutions to America’s energy challenges. One of our first efforts will be to convene forums around the country, much like the summit, that bring together economists, national-security experts, climate scientists and interested citizens to explore the power of free enterprise to solve our nation’s energy challenges. We’re going to be saying that, given a “true cost” comparison, free enterprise can deliver muscular solutions to our energy and climate challenges — solutions far better than clumsy government mandates and fickle tax incentives…

The day that appeared, he was speaking to the South Carolina Clean Energy Summit at the convention center. I attended the event, which was sponsored, understandably enough, by the South Carolina Clean Energy Business Alliance.

In case you wonder how Inglis gets to being an environmentalist from the perch of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative (which shouldn’t be puzzling — conservatives should by their nature want to conserve the environment, if words have meaning), here’s an example of how it works for him: The problem now, he explained, is that different sources of energy don’t compete on an even, market-driven playing field. For instance, the true cost of gasoline is hidden. If the full costs of our military operations in the Mideast were attached directly to the price of gasoline (as we in the Energy Party think it should be), “we’d beat a path to the Prius dealership.”

Some views of the Moore School that is to be

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This is a story from the “drive-by” beat that I always wanted The State to create, but it never did. The idea would have been to satisfy people’s curiosity about things they drive by every day and wonder about. Today, we answer the question of, “What’s that thing coming out of that hole in the ground next to the Carolina Coliseum?”

That was the subject of Hildy Teegen’s talk today to the Columbia Rotary Club. (Disclosure, to the extent that it means anything: I invited Hildy to speak to the club, and introduced her.)

Speaking to Rotary. That's Club President J.T. Gandolfo in the foreground.

It’s the new Moore School of Business, of which Dr. Teegen is the dean. It’s intended, among other things, as the gateway to the Innovista, and should go a long way toward helping people understand that Innovista is NOT those two buildings everybody keeps obsessing over, but will constitute a transformation for that whole underdeveloped urban expanse from this location down to the river.

Innovista is conceived around the “live, work, play” concept, and the new Moore school has been designed to complement that. The key word Hildy keeps using to describe it is “permeable.” That goes from the literal sense of the rooftop garden, to the fact that it will be open to the whole community 24/7. In fact, she pointed out, it is architecturally impossible to close off the building.

One of the goals is for the building to achieve “net-zero” status, meaning its energy and carbon impact on the surrounding community will be nonexistent.

The building, which is to be completed in December 2013, will house the nation’s No. 1 international business master’s program and all of the school’s other business education programs — such as the night school that has just entered the top 25 in the U.S — except, of course the multiple distance-learning opportunities the school offers across SC and in Charlotte.

You can see the entire PowerPoint presentation here. And here are some pictures:

So did they win those games, or didn’t they?

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Photo by Melissa Dale from Meadville, USA

First, I’d like to know whether this Penn State thing is over yet. Oh, I know it will never be over in terms of what happened to the victims of that pervert coach. May God ease their pain. I just want to know whether, now that he has been duly convicted, the bulletins will stop coming on my iPhone, and interrupting me as though war had been declared, as though what happens or doesn’t happen to a college football program in a whole other part of the country from me were of earth-shattering importance. Which it isn’t. I think it reached the height of absurdity on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) when I was awakened (I like to sleep late on weekends) by bulletins telling me that this Joe Paterno person’s statue was being taken down. Really. A statue.

As of this moment, there are four recent bulletins still available on my phone from The New York Times reaching back nine days. Two of them are about Penn State (one is about the Colorado shootings, the other about the new Yahoo CEO). I still have five WLTX bulletins, going back about two days (WLTX has a low “bulletin” threshold) . Two are about Penn State, one of them being about said statue. Another is also about college football, telling me that former Gamecock coach Jim Carlen has died. The other two are actually about things that people in the community might need to know about urgently — the standoff in Five Points on Saturday.

Now, another question…

The most recent bulletins to pester me had to do with this morning’s decision by the NCAA as to how it would punish Penn State, in the wake of last week’s finding of a long-term coverup.

First, what the NCAA did not do: It did not close down the football program. If you want to say the program was rotten because of the cover-up, it seems that would be a logical thing to do. But they didn’t. Whatever.

But what grabbed my attention was among the steps taken against the program was that “all victories from 1998-2011 have been vacated,” to which I went, “Huh?”

Excuse me: Did those players win those games or didn’t they? If they won them, they won them. If they didn’t win them, they didn’t win them. Period.

I Tweeted that out early today, and one reader immediately responded to agree with me. But others started arguing. Beth Padgett, editorial page editor of The Greenville News, explained, “Games won Wins don’t count,” which may make sense to football fans, but not to me. I replied, “You’ve lost me. Probably because I’m not fan, don’t understand the mystique. Facts are facts. Wins are wins. Not that I care…”

Garrett Epps responded to my assertion that “they either WON those football games or DIDN’T, regardless of the unrelated, horrible things some coach did,” with a one-word question: “unrelated?”

Absolutely, said I. Over here, some coach did horrible things. Over there, some kids won some games. One fact is not dependent upon to the other. He responded, “Glad we cleared that up. Sanduskywas NOT defensive coordinator for a number of years? i was confused. Thought he was.”

OK, so… is the theory that without this guy, they wouldn’t have won the games? We know that? How? All we know is what happened.

And to me, whether some kids won some games they played in is a fact that has no moral content whatsoever, good or bad. I could not care less who won those games. But I do know absurdity when I see it. And saying they didn’t win games they did win, for whatever purpose, is an absurd lie. We don’t get to say that the North lost the Civil War because (in South Carolina’s estimation, anyway), William Tecumseh Sherman was a terrorist, and Ullyses S. Grant was a drunk. They either won or they didn’t. (And they did. So, you know, time to take down that flag, boys.)

Saying Penn State didn’t win games it did win is like the NCAA deciding to “punish” the program by declaring the players took the field in yellow uniforms instead of blue. It’s just not true.

I get a clue as to the thinking behind this denial of reality from this WashPost Tweet, “Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest football coach in college football history.”

OK, so, from what little I know about college football, I’m guessing that statement would really hurt Paterno where he lives. If, you know, he lived. But he’s dead. You can’t do anything to hurt him. And as an attempt to do so, this denial of what happened is pretty lame.

I mean, as long as we’re changing history, why not wave the same magic wand and declare that all those kids were not abused by Sandusky? I’ll tell you why not: Because it would be a cruel mockery. Of course they were abused, and that pain will never go away. And it seems extremely unlikely that it would be assuaged in any way by pretending that Paterno’s team didn’t win those games.