Plumbers vs Waterless Urinals

In many ways, life is better on this side of the Colorado. For example, however crazy we are about immigration--and wasn't that craziness imported from So. Cal?--the pollution in our air doesn't cause the sort of dementia that makes waterless urinals controversial.

Via Wired, we have a report that the plumbers' union in Southern California attempted to ban waterless urinals, and that it made some rather nutty claims to support this:

To buttress their health claims, plumbing unions in California hired Phyllis Fox, an environmental engineer and water quality specialist. She conducted her own analysis, which involved visiting men’s rooms to acquaint herself with the subject matter. Fox didn’t perform any tests, but by examining the designs of the Falcon and other waterless urinals, she concluded that hydrogen sulfide gases in the sewer lines could escape when the cartridges were replaced, resulting in “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis, and death.” In other words, the waterless urinal could kill.

Yes, janitors in the many Arizona public buildings with flushless urinals die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. All the time. That is, if they survive traffic: our gun laws mean that shootouts over lane changes and parking disputes happen everyday.

But seriously, this dispute shouldn't be happening. Other states can look to Arizona and conclude that flushless urinals are safe and effective.

Read the original article: it has quite a few Arizona connections, including a somewhat humorous account of a plumbing incident at Fort Huachuca, and some interesting facts. I had no idea how much electricity was used for water pumping, and didn't consider that flushing a urinal aerosolized bacteria, either.

On Earth Day, I recommended that more businesses install these urinals, and additionally that people just "lift a leg" from time to time. There's no sense in contaminating clean drinking water with human waste.

Lift a leg. (The obligatory Earth Day post.)

I'm a few hours late on this one, but will back-date it because I can. It was also going to include numbers, including the cost of Tucson-area water treatment. Instead, I'll give but two ranges and one number:

3-10 gallons per minute. 1.5 - 5 gallons per flush. 20 gallons.

Water is scarce in most of Arizona, and as readers of this 'blog probably understand, water rights out here don't make much sense. "Prior claim to all of the water" is incompatible with both the Nozickian "as much and as good for others" and sustainable use of aquifiers. Lowered water tables destroy streams and change vegetation patterns. If you're still one of those right-wing nutjob holdouts who think concern for such things has nothing to do with human welfare, read up on Ecological services and think more subtly.

We're already diverting a major continental river to do absurd things like grow cotton in the desert or wisteria trees and green lawns in Phoenix. (Water is something that everyone needs therefore its price shouldn't reflect scarcity, right?--that's the common logic, and what's good for health care is good for...) Waste water is filtered, centrifuged, and treated with chlorine or ozone to make it suitable to dump on food crops, and water treatment plants have to be upgraded just to meet those standards. Recycling water from tap-to-tap remains a costly far-off possibility.

The craziest waste--aside from the cotton and old men "watering the rocks" in their landscaping--is the use of good, clean drinking water to wash away refuse. Leaving the spigot on while shaving uses 20 gallons of potable water. Showering uses 3 gallons per minute with a low-flow showerhead and ten gallons per minute with the old-fashioned kind. Modern toilets use 1.5 gallons per flush, and older ones use 5. Up to five gallons of drinking water is contaminated with waste and has to be processed every time you flush the toilet.

My recommendations: If possible, install greywater systems, low-flow showerheads, modern toilets, and (in public buildings) flush-free urinals. Turn the tap off while shaving; swirl the razor in a glass. Shower with someone you love or at least someone with whom you're comfortable being nude. And, at least if you're male, for goodness's sake, stop wasting a gallon or more of water every time you have to take a leak. Find a suitable shrub (not a cholla), check for rattlesnakes, and piss outside every once in a while.

Arizona Senate declares sovereignty over things that do not exist.

From SCR 1050, a referendum which passed the AZ Senate on the 22nd of March:

7. The regulation of intrastate commerce, manufacturing and noneconomic activities, as it pertains to intrastate anthropogenic carbon dioxide or other greenhouse substances produced by biological, mechanical or chemical processes, including refuse and agricultural operations, is excluded from the meaning and understanding of the Enumerated Powers at the time the United States Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, and it is vested in the states under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

and

The harmless emission of anthropogenic carbon dioxide or other greenhouse substances produced by biological, mechanical or chemical processes, including refuse and agricultural operations, is a necessary incident of the Constitutional rights of Arizonans under the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as article II, sections 2 and 33, Constitution of Arizona.

and, while we're at it,

The intrastate emission of anthropogenic carbon dioxide or other greenhouse substances produced by biological, mechanical or chemical processes, including refuse and agricultural operations, is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, under the Enumerated Powers of the federal government. Accordingly, to the extent that such emissions can be regulated consistent with the principles of free republican government, such power is reserved to the State of Arizona or the people under the Tenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
C. Any effort by any governmental official to enforce within the borders of the state of Arizona federal laws or federal regulations purporting to restrict intrastate emissions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide or other greenhouse substances is herewith declared a violation of civil rights and unlawful under Arizona state law.

Emphasis mine all around.

"Harmless greenhouse substances" do not exist under today's conditions. Likewise "intrastate" emission of CO2, methane, and other light gases is unlikely; consider only that water vapor, of comparable molecular weight, blows into New Mexico and points beyond.

Perhaps unwittingly, the AZ Senate is trying to assert its right to regulate, without federal interference, things that do not exist. Is 10th Amendment sovereignty over the Tooth Fairy next?

Have a look at the measure's title. "Freedom to breathe act?" Something makes me think that the Goldwater Institute's scientifically illiterate, blustering fat slob Byron Schlomach is behind this. Oh, sorry, I mean "Byron Schlomach, PhD." We need a cartoon series with that title. Sort of a cross between Batman the Animated Series and Pee-Wee's Playhouse. The adventures of a fumbling propagandist hack, with especial insight into the "creative process".

The Goldwater Institute is promoting the measure; I learned about it via a Nick Dranias e-mail. More about my beef with Schlomach in a previous post. Check out the linked graph. I'm tempted to post the e-mail exchange I had with him, but that would be so...tacky. Safier is on the wrong side of very many things and probably read his econ texts upside down and backwards, but is usually on the right side of the truth, which is important. He's been taking the Goldwater Institute hacks to task for some time. Read the latest. And Ladner is a statesman compared to Schlomach!

Beat Back Buffelgrass

Now on to what I actually wanted to post about today:

The Buffelgrass Information Center and the Pima Association of Governments is holding a "Beat Back Buffelgrass Day" this Saturday from 8-11 AM. Attendees will learn how to identify buffelgrass and will be taken to sites in the area to remove it; the group also encourages neighborhood removal of the noxious weed. I support pulling it on sight.

Learn more on the event website.

Buffelgrass is an invasive weed and fire hazard wrongheadedly introduced to the area as forage a few decades ago. As the Sonoran Desert biome did not evolve as one that periodically burned, buffelgrass-fueled fires kill off native plants like saguaro and cholla and destroy the local ecosystem, leaving nothing but buffelgrass. I'd say that buffelgrass is to Arizona what kudzu is to the Deep South, but it's worse. It's more like rabbits in Australia.

In Mexico it is still planted as forage, illustrating yet again (as if we didn't have enough examples already) why there's need for an international convention on invasive species and noxious weeds.

Schlomach lies about climate--and includes Plimer in bibliography!

Right-wingers and libertarians of the "nutjob" variety have said a lot of stupid things about the "Cliamategate" black-hat hack of CRU's backup mailserver, most of it simply untrue. The Goldwater Institute's Byron Schlomach--there's no affiliation between the Institute and this 'blog--joined in today, a little "late to the party" following the death of most of the right-wing/right-wing-libertarian talking points.

In full:

Does "ClimateGate" expose weird science or political propaganda?
By Byron Schlomach, Ph.D.

Twenty years ago a biologist showed me a graph from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that showed an alarming increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Then I noticed the graph's scale was logarithmic and made even small increases look exaggerated. I've been skeptical of the science behind global warming ever since.

Weird ScienceNow there's ClimateGate. Somebody hacked the University of East Anglia's e-mail server in England and downloaded e-mails to and from scientists in the Climate Research Unit, perhaps the world's premier climate research center. The messages show scientists engaged in politics over science. One damaging e-mail includes this remark:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"Mike" is Michael Mann, made famous by the "hockey stick" temperature diagram Al Gore helped popularize. It first appeared in a UN report on global warming and purports to show that earth's recent temperature is the highest in a thousand years, using tree ring data to reconstruct past temperatures. Mann apparently grafted in data from unrelated modern sources to get the desired result when ring data didn't cooperate.

Add to this the recent confession that raw temperature data have long been destroyed. These data are the basis of the two main datasets used by the UN for its policy reports. Now nobody can actually check the methodology of the data that's being used to dictate international policy.

Given the lack of reliable, replicable, scientific evidence of global warming, it calls into question the wisdom behind the Arizona Corporation Commission renewable energy standards that will cost Arizona utility customers billions in the coming years. The Commission should rely on more than questionable science before they strike a multi-billion dollar blow to Arizona's already fragile economy. I've got plenty of raw data to back that up, by the way.

Byron Schlomach, Ph.D., is the director of the Goldwater Institute's Center for Economic Prosperity.

Learn More:

Goldwater Institute: Miller v. Arizona Corporation Commission

Power Line: Global Warming Bombshell

TimesOnline: Climate change data dumped

Ian Plimer: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

The more important remarks are in bold-face type; I give them from top to bottom:

1. Signing one's name "Given Surname, PhD" is a practice generally frowned upon as pretentious, and often as an attempt to establish a spurious credibility outside one's field of expertise. Schlomach's training is in economics; mine is in physics. Neither of us are climatologists but I gather from (unpleasant) personal communications with Schlomach that he doesn't read climatology papers and isn't familiar with even the basic science. It's perhaps too much to say that those who do not read the primary literature should not comment on recent science--even though I hold myself to that standard when it comes to both natural science and economics--but we should at least expect someone with the cojones to offer a strong opinion to not make mistakes that would earn college freshmen an "F" in their survey course exam. That should be the end of the story, and the comma PhD thing is thus in this case like putting icing on a turd.
   
2. The standard logarithmic scale doesn't exaggerate small changes--it does quite the opposite. But either way, Schlomach is acting as though there was a deceit involved. In physical and natural sciences we use logarithmic scales all the time--and it's nearly always obvious when one is being used from the axis labels, tick marks, and grid lines if present. And since he is trained in a technical field, Schlomach should be able to read a graph.
   
   This is really just another instance of something common from denialists (more on that term below): a tendency to make standard scientific practices out to be deceitful when they are not.
   
   
3. Schlomach calls himself a "skeptic". I don't see that manifested here; it appears he's caught up in a pitchfork-wielding mob. And no real skeptic would refer anyone to Plimer, nor would a real skeptic argue (as Schlomach did in previous public messages) that (carbon-neutral over relevant timescales) human breath is at issue.
   
   It's worse than what is in this e-mail alone. In what appeared to be seriousness, Schlomach once asked me to debunk a very bizarre graph without referring him to scientific literature. Don't think it takes much: there's no scale on the Y axis, no indication of what is plotted on the Y axis, no explanation of methodology on the source website, and the whole thing appears to be made up of clerverly arranged cubic splines. But it isn't clear what they're trying to argue in the first place. "Hey Kalafut, tell me what's wrong with this squiggle" is a Rorshach test.
   
   This is why I call Schlomach a "denialist". He doesn't consider--doesn't even bother to read--the solid evidence in favor of the mainstream scientific position, but he will hold up the weakest of evidence--including an unlabeled squiggle--in favor of his seemingly predetermined conclusion. "Skeptical", my ass. The scientists are, by and large, the skeptics. As libertarian commentators go, Bryan Caplan, Megan McArdle, and Tyler Cowen (for example) are acting like skeptics in the wake of "Climategate". Schlomach and co are credulous--that's the opposite of skeptical.
   
4. When proxy data and instrumental data disagree, which would you trust more? Michael Mann and co-authors plotted the instrumental record along with their proxy reconstruction, were honest and up-front about it in their paper, and it becomes an issue now for what reason? Objection to "shop talk" diction in private e-mails?
   
   If nothing else, the divergence problem--the mismatch with the instrumental record beginning in about 1960--means proxy reconstructions should be taken cum grano salis The case for anthropogenic global warming never depended on paleoclimatology, anyway, despite the emphasis put on it by right-winger, so if plotting two data sets on the same graph and being honest about it is an issue, it's really a sideshow. Schlomach isn't so much making a point about the scientific case here as he is trying to create an "aura" of doubt on science.
   
   
5. Schlomach's claim that raw temperature data were destroyed is an outright lie. A lie that has become "social truth", like the Emperor's clothes, on the Right, but a lie nonetheless. Representatives of CRU recently remarked that they deleted their copies of raw data and kept only their derived data sets. Each of these derived data sets was accompanied by a paper explaining methodologies and listing data sources. The only exception is CRU TS 3.0, the latest gridded time-series, for which the paper is "in preparation". As far as one can tell, the raw data are still available if one contact the original sources, who provided it to CRU. There have been no reports in the press or in the scientific community of these groups also deleting their data, consequently, we cannot even say here that Schlomach is understandably mistaken.
   
   
6. "Given the untimely death of Byron Schlomach, Kalafut's allegations cannot possibly be answered." See what I did there? Even supposing that Schlomach were right about CRU, there is plenty of other evidence for global warming. This begins with the spectral properties of gases and the application of modern physics to them, culminating in general circulation models (GCMs), although there are plenty of simpler treatments which give less precise results. In principle the case for global warming need not be founded on an historical record at all. If a cartridge is in the chamber and the gun is put to the temple, we can predict brain damage if the trigger is pulled; we do not need position and velocity measurements of the bullet in the barrel. Having temperature data helps us to refine models and do historical attribution studies, and there are other temperature measurements independent of CRU data sets, from GISS, from the raw data, from satellites, etc., and other evidence such as long-term decline of sea ice extent, moving of tree lines, and changes in seasonal behavior of animals and plants.
   
   So even if Schlomach were right about CRU, what he says is "given" is not so: lie number two. But he's not right about CRU: whatever evidence has emerged about misconduct pertaining to FOI requests, there has been no evidence that could lead to the retraction of a single scientific paper or that otherwise calls CRU science into question. That a few thousand bad-faith Internet ideologues are playing "let's pretend it does" and maybe tenfold more nincompoops and illiterates believe them doesn't change that. Science runs on reason, not on memes.
   
   
7. Schlomach's bibliograhy exposes him as someone who either can't tell the difference between good argument and bad, or doesn't care. Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth is the most discredited academic monograph since Bellesiles's Arming America, and its recommendation by Schlomach should be taken as nothing short of evidence that Schlomach's intent is to deceive. In the age of Internet search engines, it takes a downright creative selection of keywords to find information on Bellesiles or especially his book without finding an account of the deception contained therein. A naïve search will not do it. It is likewise for Plimer. Ian Enting's list is a good place to get started, but just search yourself if you want to know what I mean.
   

What Schlomach has yet to come to appreciate is just how much this matters. "Haha...I lied to boost popular support for our Corporation Commission lawsuit, so what?" The "so what" is that not only will being caught in a lie hurt support, but also that if I know I cannot trust him to be honest and competent (separate issues, but both are at work here) when it comes to topics I know about, how can I trust him to be honest and competent on topics where he is presumably the expert? There is no compartmentalizing of trust.

Let me decide whether or not to run over pedestrians, "by choice"

I'm a bit overdue for this one, but did you think I'd let it go?:

The old saying has democracy being three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. The common rejoinder is that it's the worst system we know, except all the others. Bryan Caplan has markets being the superior alternative. With reservations, I tend to agree.

One of those reservations: Markets give much more choice than democracy, for example, in certain market systems, wolves and sheep alike can purchase mutton at their choice of Super Wal-Mart, Albertson's, or Costco.

But seriously, markets are only as good as the regulations that define them. "Let the market do it" is never an adequate answer. Market failure in the technical sense does exist (and is probably inevitable, although progress is certainly possible), and negative externalities are not a myth conjured up by leftists as an excuse. A market can even be worse than command and control if it creates the illusion in the minds of the gullible (I'm looking at you, "libertarian" global warming denialists) that harm to others is either "natural" or an inevitable precondition for prosperity.

Case in point: Nick Dranias of the Goldwater Institute. Quoting a recent Monday Message:

By letting entrepreneurs sell electricity from renewable sources to environmentally-minded consumers, competition shifts the costs of green policies to green consumers, keeping rates lower for everyone else.

Dranias would take the ethical imperatives completely out of "going green", reducing it to a matter of fashion. Let consumers--special "green consumers" who care about the moral rights of others, about their welfare, their property, who treat both their neighbors and the distant unseen Kenyan or Bengali as ends in themselves--bear the full cost of this, while the restuvus get a discount for our craven willingness to continue to contribute to harm despite having the harm explained to us over and over and over again.

There are very good reasons for Arizona to not take too bold a unilateral action to lower CO2 emission associated with electricity generation, and less good ones for AZ to not do better at freshwater conservation, although it is important that this is done effectively and with the respect for individuals as having lives of their own that can only be provided by markets. Some of these are referenced, at least between the lines, in Dranias's message. But with his reduction of simple decency to fashion, Dranias is a better enemy of markets than the enemies of markets.

Maybe there's a reason to like cholla!

I've found that cholla make interesting photographic subjects, but have also have had to remove plenty from my legs while hiking, especially while off-trail. Ordinary hard-rubber men's combs seem to be the best implement for that purpose, although an afro pick might allow for more leverage.

Beyond their good looks, they're an annoyance, but an edible one, according to the Desert Leaf. Their September issue featured a recipe for cholla buds, supposedly similar to asparagus.

As readers have probably inferred from previous posts, I'm not only a conservationist, but also a native foods enthusiast. When we consider water usage and riparian restoration, the two positions become very complementary. Consider that the Hohokam at Casa Grande ate a lot of mesquite, look around the next time you're at the Casa Grande Ruin at the absence of live, healthy mesquites, and then recall that New Deal-era "progressive" farm policy is to blame. A few legal reforms would re-open foraging as a source of basic income for the poor of the state, too. Ever see how much mesquite flour costs at retail?

But back to the topic: we all know that saguaro and prickly pear fruit, prickly pear pad, and mesquite are edible. And both arugula and London rocket grow here as invasive weeds. But who'd have thought to eat cholla? Like the first person to eat cheese, probably somebody brave and hungry.

Daniel Baker of the Saguaro-Juniper Corporation (a northern Cochise County conservation group), has provided reasonably good notes on using cholla and a number of other Arizona desert plants as food.

Robb, in the Tucson Citizen, gets global warming right.

There are three or four reasonable policy responses to global warming and ocean acidification:

1. A straight Pigouvian tax: a fixed tax rate on carbon dioxide emissions. This establishes price certainty and allows the government to mitigate global warming in a revenue-neutral fashion, a sort of "Green Tax Shift" from taxing "goods" such as income to taxing "bads" such as CO2 emission.
   
2. Cap and auction. This is the "Cap and Trade" proposal favored by Barack Obama. It is essentially a tax scheme, wherein the quantity of emissions is fixed and the price is set by demand when a year's permits are sold at auction. It allows permits to be bought and traded, but doesn't incorporate many of the advantages, of an emissions market as it doesn't establish a persistent property right.
   
3. Cap and auction with allocation. This is the system used successfully to mitigate acid rain; permits for emission in or after a year are sold at auction, but some permits are allocated each year to emitters in business when the permit system was created. This thus doesn't so drastically shift taxes to a single activity as do the Pigouvian tax and cap-and-auction--it's less of a one-time shock. When emitters are largely fixed, large-scale operations, it makes sense, but in a situation we want to be dynamic, it establishes a permanently favored class of permit-receivers. Those who can make early cheap reductions in carbon emissions--probably cement makers and transoceanic shippers, and possibly the fertilizer industry--receive what amounts to a permanent subsidy. In practice this has resulted in some Coase-like bargaining, but since the best one can do is stop one-time emissions, buying and retiring permits is a Sisyphean means to reduction.
   
4. Cap and trade by establishment of a persistent "property right" to emit. Here the permits that are allocated are not the right to emit once but rather a right to emit a certain quantity per fiscal year. This has been implemented in some of the fisheries management tradeable permits schemes, but has been the subject of far less "straight economics" research than the other three. Its advantages are that it is less vulnerable to year-to-year government tampering, it allows for Coaseian bargaining, and that it makes almost obvious an "Epsteinesque" or "Kaldor-Hicks" framework for reduction of emissions by government: the government buys and retires permits. Unlike the first three, persistent emissions rights do not establish a revenue source for the government, but a small property tax on the permits could be established, to pay for program administration and emissions reductions through permit.
   

A savvy reader will note that the the first two are limiting cases of an infinite family of policies trading price and quantity certainty. Physicists and mathematicians, familiar with perturbation theory, will probably see this more readily than economists.

None of these could be effective if implemented by Arizona alone. All are intellectually respectable, and all are certainly better than the current state of affairs (unlimited dumping). I prefer the fourth option, which has not been given sufficient attention, but I understand and appreciate why others may prefer one of the other three.

Today in the Tucson Citizen, Robert Robb joins the many savvy libertarians--Greg Mankiw, Megan McArdle, Gary Becker, Brink Lindsey, Brian Holtz, and Richard Posner, to name a few--supporting a carbon tax. He appreciates the tradeoffs involved and is spot-on about the problem with Obama's proposal to use cap-and-auction revenues to offset price changes.

Many free-marketeers are (what should be embarrassingly) unfamiliar with the solutions to global warming that are actually on the table. Not all are as bad as the Goldwater Institute's Byron Scholmach, who, if he's still worried about his ability to breathe should try pulling his head out of his ass, but most nevertheless would rather put made-up tyrannical nonsense in the mouths of the constructive than put forth constructive solutions themselves. If you find yourself among the belatedly clueless, Robb's column is a good place to learn how market liberals (the sort with their heads in the right places) are thinking about global warming.

"Win-win" environmentally friendly home improvements for Arizonans (Earth Day post)

I don't know whether or not one can wish another "Happy Earth Day." It really isn't that sort of holiday. It's more like Patriots' Day (19 April), a time to reflect on ideas, facts, and responsibilities.

The Industrial Revolution yielded rapid and immense gains in human standard of living. In the rush to attain these gains, our legal institutions did not keep pace, did not adapt to take into account the spillover harms (negative externalities) associated with these novel activities. Man was surely more prosperous but was at the same time fouling his nest, to his immediate and long-term detriment.

Things have gotten quite a bit better since the first Earth Day. The U.S. and several other countries with acid rain problems have brought matters under control with cap-and-trade systems. Once-moribund waterways have come back to life. The U.S. passed a Clean Air Act and established an EPA--there is room for improvement of both, but they're a start. Common-law "Environmental Justice" continues to yield results in the courts. Ozone layer thinning and a southern-hemisphere "ozone hole" was found and we are well on our way to mitigation thanks to surprisingly effective international cooperation through the Montreal Protocol. I could go on.

But there is room for improvement. We have made no significant progress towards mitigation of two very serious global anthropogenic harms: warming and ocean acidification. (Readers who have genuine questions about either of these concerns, either due to denialist noise machine induced confusion or their own curiosity, who have sought out answers in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report should feel free to e-mail me their courteous queries. Your name, your city of residence, your query, and my response will be posted on a different 'blog.)

There's no sensible change Arizona, alone, could make to its policy to mitigate this harm. As was the case for ozone layer damage, Federal and international cooperation is necessary. There are small win-win improvements Arizonans can make, however, that can both lower home and business carbon footprints and save consumers money.

Arizona is rarely cloudy, and relatively close to the equator; solar irradiance is high. Solar water heating and solar electric generation can be cost-effective in many far cloudier places, but they make even more sense here. A properly installed system can pay for itself and more over its lifetime. Making the payoff even quicker are tax credits and incentives. An Arizona tax credit will pay for 25% of a residential solar hot water, heating, or photovoltaic system, up to $1000 per residence; the Federal tax credit, on which the cap was lifted, will pay for 30%.

Several of the state's electric companies also provide incentives. Tucson Electric Power provides up to $1,750 up front for residential solar hot water or space heating installations and $3 per watt up front for photovoltaics. The Salt River Project offers incentives for both, and a nifty web-based calculator of incentive levels and time to simple payback. Metro Phoenix's APS offers incentives at similar levels for solar hot water, solar space heating, and photovoltaics.

Other electric utilities elsewhere in the state might also provide incentives; check their websites. TEP and APS offer further incentives for geothermal and all are giving commercial incentives, as well. APS is now offering incentives for nonresidential installation of solar absorption cooling

Further governmental incentives are available for efficiency upgrades. See the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency for more information.

Ecology of Alta Sonora

From lunch last month with an undisclosed applied mathematician:

There are three people in town who feed the (non-native) pigeons, I mean, feed a lot of pigeons. If they were to stop, we'd have no pigeons at all in Tucson.

File this one in the "there ought to be a law" department. There are native species which occupy the same niche (give or take) and which must be adversely affected by the flying rats!