The Market Snow painting started in the last blog is going great, I couldn’t be happier.    It’s such a nice place from which to view the market, one wonders even if I should remove the snow and let the scene have year-round appeal. 

But the colors are working well as is, and why risk such an important serendipitous aspect of the painting?  That means there’ll be no need to ask the City Council for $20 million more in snow removal equipment that can begin rusting as soon as it warms up again.

I’m also working on the Rockfish painting and trying to give attention to all 40 fish individually to ensure accuracy as well as aestheticism in that poster.    I’m hoping to publish Rockfish offset litho 14 x 18 with the third edition of Salmonids in a couple months.

I may also bring out the Nighthawk poster in a so-called Giclee (that really means inkjet) version, so I’m tweaking that painting more.  Nighthawks are an American icon, and so is the great painting by Hopper  Nighthawks) that I truly enjoyed copying.

 I’ve embarked on my third Pike Place Market snow try.  I want to get that French Impressionist look so everyone will need to seriously wish me luck there.    I went down to the market during the height of the snow storm and realized how charming the view of the market is when you stand in the middle of Pike Street between 1^st and 2^nd  and look west.   Normally that will get you killed.

But making this scene work will mean more restraint than I normally apply.  Where there is a red Public Market sign,  it’ll have to be red washed with light gray.  Unless it’s a complete disaster, I’ll post up shots of the painting as it progresses.

I’ve failed to update this page in the month or so, so here are some of the other paintings I’ve been working on lately, some finished or nearly so.

This is a Peregrine Falcon portrait that is already for sale on the website in 8 x 10 mat and 11 x 14 mat size.  The model was over in Leavenworth working on the educational chain-gang and  I think they said she was not eligible for release ever. 

Here is a Wood Duck painting that’s at first-finish.  This is part of my handsome couple series.  Male and female look very different, but both are strikingly cute in their own way.  (Kestrels  and American Redstarts are in the series already.)

This is a Spotted Towhee in the snow painting.  I may have to fuss over this a bit more and get the peach background to back off a bit without turning white.  It’s based on a shot  I got in New Mexico and the bush was Apache Plume.

I’ve also been working hard on the Rockfish poster and Osprey at Deception Pass.  Will have shots soon of a Bridled Titmouse and will soon start a Cooper’s Hawk to round out a new raptor skinny.

Delia and I started the month off and running with our year- bird list (see last post) but immediately fell off of our last-year’s pace. 

We did however see this gorgeous Pileated Woodpecker at the Nisqually.  You should see the poses that got away, though—it was pretty dark in the woods that day.

The Market store was closed for Pike Place Market renovations for a week in Jan, then just as we were set to open up again we got dumped on.  

I was standing in the same place and turned 90 degrees to get this Black-capped Chickadee feeding at the Bird-Foodbank at 1^st and Virginia.

And this Bewick’s Wren was working the commercial District on Beacon Hill.  Spiders can be hard to find during snowstorms.

Although our US year list is languishing with only 16 added since last opst  for 118., we did pick up this poorly-named but very handsome Eurasian Wigeon at Magnuson Park.   One might think this bird is a non-native that has been introduced, like the Eurasian Starling, but that’s not true at all.  It’s just more common over there.

Since I have to wrap this up and get to bed, I’ll end it on a polemical note.  Here’s a reason never to rake your leaves:

The shot is out of focus, but there are two Varied Thrush foraging in the mercifully unraked leaves in Discovery Park.  Spotted Towhees, Golden-crowned Sparrows and Fox Sparrows also hate it when people rake leaves.

I'm pretty sure these were cheerleaders at the 2010 Men's Handball Tournament. Either that or reporters who had just turned in stories about biofuel to their respective news editors.

How did it become firmly implanted in reporters’ heads that whenever the subject of biofuels comes up, they are to set aside their reportorial training and don pom-poms and cheerleader outfits?

The long tiring list of biofuel cheer-packages was added to today by KUOW when Ashley Ahearn posted a story about a company that has developed a biological process to extract ethanol from “seaweed.”

The story began like an advertisement: “Those floating mats of brown seaweed you see along the coast might make up part of the ethanol in your gas tank someday,” and continued in the same vein.  “Scientists,” according to Ahearn, “believe seaweed could be an idea feedstock for biofuel. It grows faster and produces more biomass per square acre than corn – and it doesn’t compete with other food crops for water use or farm acreage. “

No mention was made of  the controversial aspects of all existing biofuels,  and there was no nod to the fact that fisheries and an ecosystem in the ocean are already dependant on “those floating mats of brown seaweed…”

I should be clear that I favor research and pilot projects to see if new technologies are any good, so I am interested and will have an open mind when these produce results.

But biofuels are not like other products of the market, like Hyundais, e-readaers, or tooth paste.  They are willed into existence by political action and survive on a foundation of a mandate that forces consumers who drive gasoline-powered cars to purchase them.   If we are going to rain favors on one industry, it’s fair to want to know if that industry will have unintended consequences on the world.  Ethanol has already been responsible for starvation, extinction, high food prices, groundwater depletion and the increase in the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s unconscionable for a reporter would not alert a drowsy morning listener to the possibility of a downside about a new source of biofuel when all the old sources have proven to be replete with them.

photo by Nicholas Heyward

Monica Newbold Shay

Jan. 10, 1953 -July 3, 2011

No brother ever had a better sister.

Monica, you were the greatest.  You taught me so much and I was in awe of you always.  I will love you and miss you until the day I die.

Happy Birthday Monica,

-Ed Newbold

PS.  My heart goes out to my brother-in-law Paul and the Shay family, who also lost Joe Four.  And Delia’s and my heart goes out to the family and friends of Park Ranger Margaret Anderson, hero of Paradise, and all those who have lost loved ones to violence.

Delia’s and my BigYear is off to a great start—We passed 100 species for the country in the quickest time ever for us.  On New Year’s Day we left Di Ann’s Mountain Valley Resort in Rodeo (We stayed there so we wouldn’t have to go back up the Canyon after the Portal Count) and drove to Animus, New Mexico and drove/walked into my parents-in-law’s land from the eastern slope of the Peloncillos for the Peloncillo Christmas Count.  We got Sandhill Crane and Ferruginous Hawk on the way over.  On the Count we picked up our most-cherished-target-bird, the Montezuma Quail.  Normally we see Montezuma when we almost step on them and they flush with explosive energy.  This time we spotted them in the open crossing bare rock.   As usual with these fancy-plumaged birds:  Sorry no Pics.

We also lucked onto a new bird ever for the Peloncillo Count, the Canvasback Duck, which was on a cattle pond on Animas Rancher Clint Dunagin’s land.  I always knew Canvasbacks were beautiful, but maybe it was something in the winter desert sun that made me ask myself, “Is this America’s most gorgeous bird?”    This less-than-mediocre photo I snapped for documentation doesn’t inspire that same question, so I’ll chalk it up to one of those magical moments that you can only get by going out in the field.

In Seattle, it took us two days to pick up American Robin, the bird in the cover shot for this blog-post is from Discovery Park where we also found a flock of Evening Grosbeaks.

Here’s our list so far:

Here’s a distant shot of a Mountain Bluebird wintering in the Peloncillos.  Two Cedar Waxwings were hanging with the Mountains.

This big male Coatimundi doesn’t count, but we also keep a Mammal list and it’s at something like 8.  Delia surprised a Desert Cottontail at one point and a Gray Fox took right off after it.  I asked Delia if it seemed like the rabbit would become dinner.  “No,” she said, “the Fox didn’t seem to have it’s heart in the chase.”  Indeed, there was Gray Fox scat everywhere and it was full of nothing but juniper berries. 

It’s a big Snowy-Owl invasion year so we have to make sure to see those before the next at-least 3 year Snowy-Owl drought begins.  The bird above, a presumed female in Nisqually, is from 2011.  What have you done for me lately?

And did I mention this?  Our final species totals for the State and Country will be miniscule compared to the serious birders who really are doing Big Years.

This time of year I always get it in my head that people want snow paintings.  That’s not for-sure, but this is:  I’d like to have snow paintings in case anyone asks.

This is my second attempt at snow in the Market, based on actual photos I took last time it snowed.  I walked the whole ten miles in the snow to the Market and back to take the shots.   Prints of this painting are at the store, but folks seem to be politely ignoring them so far.

Here’s a barn from near where I grew up in PA.  I started this a year ago or so, but have been working on it lately.  That’s a Black-capped Chickadee, which is also successful around Seattle.    The designs on the barn are Pennsylvania-Dutch.  I just learned that the Amish/Mennonite style of full-beard-with-no–moustache originated as a protest against militarism—The German military moustache was the symbolism being opposed.  I’m ¼ PA-Dutch.

Here’s the third try for a proposed series:  The” Handsome Couple” series.  It would include Amerian Redstarts and American Kestrels also.  These are all birds where both genders are handsome but with a different color scheme and look.  I have composition problems here and may have to ditch this though.  One of the birds needs to be coming at you at a steeper angle.  Wood Ducks are hard to paint sometimes.

Speaking of Handsome Couples I finally finished the Kestrels painting I began about 6 years ago.  This one’s done.

Am working furiously on this New Market Flowers painting.  As I blogged before, I don’t see too many problems with it.  But should I blast full speed ahead and offset- litho it before the new year? 

We live in the Age of Extinction.  It’s nothing to get depressed about or you’d be depressed all the time.  What’s exciting—the flip side of the coin–is that ordinary folks like you and me can actually make a huge difference in saving creatures and eco-systems that would otherwise simply march off to oblivion.

An organization that Delia found and we have come to really like is World Land Trust-US.  WLT-US raises money to help local people and organizations buy land in areas of the world that contain at-risk species and eco-systems. 

Much of the action is in the tropics, which are going through a transition of land-use similar to what the United States went through in the late 1800s.  I have seen photographs of the large areas of eastern Pennsylvania from the 1890’s and there isn’t a tree to be seen anywhere.  During this early cut-over of the forest, the United States lost 5 or 6 species of birds.  Had a World Land Trust been around to help them survive the first cut, they might well all still be here today and we could probably steward them into the future.

But there’s a difference.  The tropics are the Earth’s Garden of Eden.  They contain many more species of plants and animals per acre.  Small areas have endemics:  species found nowhere else.

Such is the case with a piece of land and the WLT-US’s efforts to help save it is the subject of my tiny ad that will run in the Seattle Times on Tuesday, December 6.  The ecosystem at risk is the Sierra Caral Rain Forest of Guatemala. 

http://www.worldlandtrust-us.org/

Please consider helping the World Land Trust-US in it’s race to raise the money to buy a remnant 5400 acre tract in this vanishing eden.

I am hoping to visit the printers before all the New Year’s parties, and I have room on the sheet for two new 14 x 18 posters.  I’ve been working hard on “Last Call for Anacortes,” shown above, and thinking that is finally completely done after 6 years.  That’s a candidate.   This one is not a runaway seller already, but it does show very steady sales.

Another candidate is Osprey at Deception Pass.  Alternative name here is Deception is a bad thing unless you’re a Pass.  The knock on this one is it lacks the primary colors, and the subject probably isn’t popular enough to trump any artistic weaknesses, whatever they might be.

Last candidate is New Pike Place Flowers, which would be our stock name.  I don’t know what we’d call it.  The rap on this one is that I just started it and haven’t had time to try to perfect it or test it.  I would only work on it for about one week more.  On the other hand, I don’t have a record of always improving the things I work on for years and years, and this is the same subject as my all time best seller.  I’ve lost count of what edition the original Pike Place Flowers is in right now.

Any advice is welcome, although it may be a while before your comment shows on the webpage due to my massive spam problem.  Thanks, Ed.

I’m running the tiny ad shown here opposing  the Keystone Pipeline in the Seattle Times this Tuesday the 15^th.  It will be in the A-section.  The ad is half the size of my normal ads as an experiment to see if less- is-more when it comes to text.  In case the jpg is unreadable, the text reads:

Keystone Pipeline is unpatriotic

Some would subject Americans to the heartbreak and loss of eminent domain for a Canadian pipeline that will enable the destruction of the boreal forest while subsidizing ocean acidification & climate-forcing. –Ed Newbold Wildlife Artist

I’m trying  to make a tiny contribution to changing the terms of the energy debate in this country to focus more on the issue of subsidy.  In the ad I characterize the gift of Eminent Domain to Keystone as a “subsidy,”—which it certainly is and a massive one at that.

Armed with Eminent Domain, a company can purchase land that it would never be able to buy in a free market, and it can essentially call the price.  The difference between what the property for the Keystone Pipeline would cost in a free market versus what it costs with eminent domain is the market value of the government subsidy we will be giving Keystone if the project is approved.

With new-route pipelines, unlike other business propositions, there is no middle ground.  The US can either grant Keystone eminent domain or it can refuse, which stops the project in its tracks.  When the only way to allow a project to proceed is to gift it with a subsidy, that in itself becomes a very strong argument for disallowing the project.

Eminent domain subsidy a common thread in ill-conceived projects & the destruction of ecosystems worldwide

 A few years back a blockbuster movie (I’m 60 & the name isn’t coming to me) told the tale of indigenous folks fighting a huge dam project in a foreign world, one that brought to mind the Brazilian rain forest where indigenous tribespeople were fighting the same battle but losing it.  In the movie the destructive project was stopped, quite implausibly, with violence.  In real life it prevailed armed as it was with the legal power of eminent domain.   

Whenever you see a cost-benefit analysis of a hydroelectric dam, you can mentally throw it in the trash.  The cost of expropriating and destroying the fertile river bottom land that will be flooded is always calculated on the basis of eminent domain (unless the land is already owned by the dam-building agency).  Obviously hydroelectric is here to stay: in the developed world the train has already left the station.  In the developing world expect corruption and eminent domain to couple with a poor accounting of external costs—the loss of the most productive land around the river, the value of the ecosystem and it’s services, and value of free-flowing river—to be understated in all official analyses.

The damming of rivers and the theft of their water will be the subject of future battles.  While the United States was involved with a major military project ostensibly about helping the country of Iraq get on its feet, it stood by with nary a peep as a US ally (Turkey) dammed and essentially stole the water from the rivers that are Iraq’s sole raison d’etre.  In China millions are being relocated—eminent domain is not a question there—for the world’s biggest dam, the operation of which will create problems and ecosystem impoverishment  for years to come.  Here in this country, we have de-watered the two big rivers—the Colorado and the Rio Grande—which used to bring verdant life to Northern Mexico.

 What’s wrong with Subsidy?

It’s disturbing to see the lack of alarm among the body politic over the issue of subsidy.  “Subsidies may distort markets…” Wikipedia tells us, “…and can impose large economic costs.”  People who see only the direct effects of a subsidy are missing the whole truth.  As economist Henry Hazlitt writes,” The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

America is a nation with corn on both sides of every road, thanks to one big subsidy, the ethanol mandate and other subsidies

When people assign credit to the US for its robust economic success of the past 200 years, they unfortunately only rarely ascribe that success to a basic integrity in the pricing system:  the United States has been a place where people knew more or less exactly what the cost of things were and therefore could act rationally in procuring (or not procuring) those things.  That’s why we grew as an economic power.

In the former Soviet Union, industrial technocrats were constantly frustrated because they didn’t know the real cost of anything.  Neither did anyone else.  Bread was subsidized to the point that loaves of bread were often used as a temporary ball in spontaneous pickup games of soccer.  Without a price system that carried cost-information with integrity, the Soviet Union crashed and burned.

Now in our attempts to achieve specific aims, in our generosity to so-called “job creators,” and sometimes with purely good intentions, we are slowly recreating the mess the Soviet Union lived under.

When we grant Keystone a huge subsidy to allow it to move oil-shale petroleum very cheaply to where large refineries and ports already exist, we turn that oil into a version of the Soviet loaf of bread.

Before this Canadian oil-shale oil ever gets to the pipeline, it is already vastly subsidized by another form of subsidy, the externalization of cost.  Externalities are costs not borne by the producer, i.e., they are shifted to others.  (Pollution is a classic externality.  I own a factory that pollutes.  I make all the money from the factory;  you and everyone else breathes the pollution my factory creates, therefore you pay my external costs.  Murder, Automobile crashes, and fracking that ruins a neighbor’s well-water are examples of externalities as the costs aren’t willingly born as part of a market transaction.)

 The Canadian land ownership system virtually guarantees that the forest which is being destroyed by oil-shale development is underpriced. The water used in the process is going to be underpriced, the lifestyle of neighboring landowners, the value of the ecosystem and even the energy used in mining oil shale is all underpriced as a result of a system that allows externalities to go unrecognized, and places subsidies, hidden and otherwise, everywhere throughout the system.

Externalized costs are the most difficult, controversial and probably ultimately the most damaging form of subsidy.  Sometimes nothing can be done about externalities, but an industry that is characterized by outsized and absurdly high external costs—such as Mountaintop Removal mining  and Oil-shale development–should be precisely the industries we should make a special effort to NOT gift with subsidies.

A particularly grotesque form of subsidy: the Mandate

In the recent discussion of abolishing the ethanol subsidy, it was occasionally noted that the subsidy was more or less irrelevant to the industry since they were already the proud beneficiaries of a government mandate.  Mandates disrupt the economy and force people to buy certain products regardless of their deisires.  If my art business were subsidized, people might get, say,  $5 off their taxes if they bought one of my prints.  If I had a mandate, however, I’d be set:   let’s say everyone who was remodeling their house would be required to buy one of my prints.  What’s the name of your yacht-broker?

You can see I wouldn’t need the subsidy if I had the mandate!  Ethanol has both, and both are hideous,  but the mandate does far more damage to the economy and the environment than the subsidy.  Anyone buying gas is required to buy a mixture of fuel including 10% ethanol.   It’s a national disgrace that this is not a topic of daily discussion.  Today 40% of our corn crop, which is by far our largest agricultural crop by acreage, is going to ethanol.  It displaces at most 10% of our motor transport needs while shockingly it probably increases our overall output of Carbon.  The increased Carbon pollution is caused by both the growing, processing and transporting of ethanol plus the massive displacement of food agriculture to other countries and particularly into the rain forest.  The very large water use of ethanol processors is another problem that is concealed both by the mandate and the fact that water itself is subsidized and underpriced for large users in most of America.

The result of our ethanol policy combined with the European Union’s similar biofuel policy is falling rain forests around the world coupled with exploding food and land prices as food-producing agriculture is displayed out of the most productive land into standing forest and marginal land.  This has resulted in loss of biodiversity and in the poorest countries of the world, direct starvation.

Sadly, environmental organizations have had and continue to have a checkered role in the continuing ethanol-mandate story.  At the time of the big successful push for new ethanol legislation, circa 2003, when the  Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and others launched their massive green-washing ad campaign “Think Green Go Yellow,” many environmental organizations including Environment Washington’s predecessor Washington Environmental Council were blandly pro-biofuel.  Most have retreated to some degree but many continue to send mixed signals by stating support for so-caloled  “cellulosic biofuels” which would do even more damage were they to be mandated.  (see Scientific American April 2011 “Biofuel s’ False Promise.)

Mandates & subsidies for wind and solar are failing to make a positive impact

A recent story in the New York Times (Nov 11, 2011) detailed the massive subsidies going to solar and wind-energy projects.   The story highlights a solar-project in California  that will reap subsidies  worth “almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project.”  The article noted that clean energy mandates removed almost all the risk from the project, making this similar to ethanol, where the mandate insures the job will get done and the subsidy just guarantees riches at the expense of the taxpayer for those who do it.

This style of solar project—solar panels spread over the desert—is reminiscent of ethanol it that it is land-hungry.  The free market would help to evaluate its true costs by factoring in just what those land costs are, and would help to tell us if this project is really as eco-friendly as folks thought it was. 

Indeed, this style of solar project may turn out to be a perfect example of what Todd Myers in his book of the same name calls “Eco-Fads.”  When government picks and chooses technologies and then anoints them with subsidies and mandates, problems are sure to follow.  Other technologies that may represent the real solution to the problem are starved of publicity and investment capital and must compete against subsidized product.

Similarly wind and biomass have been blessed and anointed.  Here in Washington, there is now too much energy production for the grid, and wind operators are being asked to shut down.   It’s unlikely we’d be in an overbuilt situation if wind investments had been responding to regular economic constraints and not been guaranteed all kinds of subsidies and taxpayer-supplied freebies.

Wind Farms have also sped the destruction of good unbroken sagebrush habitat and have speeded up the decline of birds like the Sage Grouse, Sage Sparrow, Sage Thrasher,  Pygmy Rabbit and others.

Here in Seattle subsidies have led to a very bad outcome when Seattle Steam recently  switched from burning relatively clean and very low-particulate-producing natural gas (I don’t love natural gas, but it sets the standard to beat, not the standard to fall short of) to waste wood which emits three times the CO2 and 1300 times the health-threatening small-particle particulate pollution.  Wood was always going to be more expensive to operate with than natural gas for Seattle Steam, so the reason for the change was solely to respond to subsidy-incentives and perhaps to ride the eco-fad bandwagon of biomass for fleeting good publicity.  Now the truth is coming out, however,  as activists such as Duff Badgley and Mike Smith of Seattle are warning of the potentially serious health dangers of the switch and at the same time –rumor has it—the source of waste wood is proving unreliable.

Some subsidies for energy use are hidden, some aren’t, all are damaging

Subsidies are sprinkled heavily throughout the energy sector, some hidden, some in plain sight, and some hidden in plain sight.  For example, according to the NYTimes article quoted, oil and gas producers got federal tax breaks of $2.7 billion in 2010.

It could be noted that subsidies for “locked-in” technologies, that is old and successful technologies that are already benefitting from billions of dollars of sunk investments, such as oil and gas, cars and roads, etc, are particularly harmful  to the innovation function of the free market as these technologies are already “locked in” by virtue of existing infrastructure and even culture.  Strengthening them makes it even harder for new innovative technologies to compete against them.

An example of that is a subsidy for a locked-in industry—trucking.  This industry gets many subsidies, but among the more hidden is the fact that this industry doesn’t pay property tax, while it’s logical competitor, the railway,  does.   Trucks generally use more energy than railroads, all else being equal.

 A similar hidden energy  subsidy for buying gas and driving cars, as opposed to engaging in other forms of commercial activity is that gasoline in the state of Washington is sales-tax-free while most other commodities are subject to our sales tax.  Many would be quick to point out that gasoline is taxed, and that Washington has among the highest gas taxes in the nation, but this point is irrelevant as the gas tax is a roadway user fee and gasoline is exempt from the sales tax.  This is not a pro-tax position as I am not advocating a change in these laws that would be revenue positive.   A level playing field coul be created by adding the sales tax to gasoline but lowering the sales tax rate, and this would promote efficiency in the overall economy.

If anyone is still reading thanks!     ENDING Coming  soon.  –Ed Newbold