The real story about oil

On the Media is one of the best shows on NPR (and you can listen to it on a podcast if you can't catch it on the radio). The show asks tough questions about the media and shows how we often get played for suckers by politicians and big business.

On last week's show David Fiderer, a writer for the Huffington Post and a banker in the energy industry for 20 years, was the subject of a segment. Fiderer is ticked that reporters are so easily taken in by the energy industry and that they lack a basic understanding of how it works. Will drilling offshore lower gas prices? Nope, says Fiderer. Nuclear power as a way to energy independence and lower gas prices? It won't make a difference at the pump, he says.

Bob Garfield, reporter for the segment, asks about the possibility of energy independence:

GARFIELD: Like given the way petroleum deposits are distributed on Earth, is it reasonable to imagine the U.S. being fully independent of foreign oil, ever?

FIDERER: Not if we consume oil at anything close to the rate we have for the last 50 years. If we consumed oil at the rate we did in 1965, we would still be importing 40 percent of our oil.

Reporters shouldn't let politicians and energy industry leaders control the debate, Fiderer says. Amen.

Check it out. You can listen to the segment here:

Databases in the news

The New York Times has two interesting articles about online databases being used to track campaign financing and Iraq war casualties. The web has made it possible to access information like this with a depth not possible before.

The first item, pictured above, is a graphical and interactive map of how the presidential candidates are doing in the campaign fund-raising race. Click on a candidate's name in the list and the map is redrawn to show where their money support is coming from (the bigger the circle, the more money raised). You can also see who donated and how much they gave from individual zip codes. For instance, my zip code has no Clinton donors but several for Obama.

Turning data into a graphical format like this reminds me of the work of Hans Rosling (see a previous blog entry here) who mines U.N. data in a similar way. Rosling's work shows how our notions of the world are frequently wrong.

The second item is a story about how people are using databases and web sites to track military deaths in the Iraq war and honor the dead. There are links to the sites in the story. Several of the sites attempt to connect a photo and a story to each military death in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York Times stories are typically available free for only a week so look fast).

The use of these types of databases was a big topic at the Society of News Design's annual conference last summer. Offering access to databases like these allows readers to dig up information that is most interesting and relevant to them. The question is whether people will take the time to dig through these sites and whether they will be able to make sense of the data once they've found it.

Amazing stuff.

Farewell, Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins died Wednesday. She is gone too soon.

Ivins was one of the sharpest political observers in the country and she was funny as hell. She wasn't funny just to make herself popular. Her goal was to expose the stupidity, greed and ignorance she saw in politics both in her native Texas and nationally.

Did she ever.

It was Ivins who nicknamed George W. Bush "Shrub." It was Ivins who once told her readers, as the Texas legislature was convening, that “every village is about to lose its idiot.” And it was Ivins who wrote, of a Texas congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”

In her last column, published as she was gravely ill with cancer, she urged readers to "raise hell" against the Iraq war. "We are the people who run this country," she wrote. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war."

When someone I greatly admire dies, I'm reminded of the story of a friend of George Gershwin who, when told of the composer's untimely death, is supposed to have responded: "I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

I don't have to believe it about Molly Ivins, either.

Molly Ivins links:

• The New York Times obit.
• Her syndicate has the last year's columns online here, plus a tribute.
• NPR's Fresh Air did a retrospective of interviews with Ivins on Thursday.
• The Texas Observer has a tribute here.
• Ken Bunting of the Seattle P-I recalls Ivins.