Being a responsible citizen, the News Guy went to Town Meeting, and initially planned to write no new post for today. But events, minor though they were, intruded, requiring a few observations and clarifications.

At about 5PM, the phone rang.

Nobody on the other end.

“Hello, hello,” and finally came that delightful metallic tone of a recorded voice explaining that this was a political poll, and asking the respondent whether he had a favorable (press 1) or unfavorable (press 2) opinion about Sen. Patrick Leahy.

At which point, the respondent, being a politically sophisticated type, assumed the poll had been commissioned by a Leahy opponent.

A conclusion confirmed by the next question: Would you vote for Pat Leahy no matter who ran against him? (Or words to that effect. Notes were not being taken. It could have been something like, “regardless of who runs against him”).

Now, aside from Pat Leahy, his wife, his children, and a few devoted, down-the-line Democrats, who on earth is going to answer that question in the affirmative? Suppose Jonathan Papelbon were to quit the Red Sox, or Tom Brady were to retire from the Patriots, move to Vermont, and run for the Senate? What if Oprah moved here and wanted the job? They’d get lots of votes. Rare is the voter who would commit to a candidate without taking even a quick look at the opposition.

“That’s a pretty typical hard re-elect question used in polling,” said Dan Riley, the spokesman for Len Britton, the Republican running against Leahy, who was indeed the power behind the poll.

Well, not really. More typical would be something like, “do you think Pat Leahy has done a good enough job as senator to deserve re-election, or is it time to give somebody else a chance?”

But just because the question was unusual did not make it pointless. Britton can try to trumpet the likely result (look for a press release headlined, “80 percent might vote against Leahy”) to convince contributors that his is not a lost cause.

Which of course it is not. Eight months before the election, nobody’s cause is lost. Improbable, perhaps, but not lost.

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Outside some polling places Tuesday health care activists were handing out little slips of paper with their motto, a phrase commonly heard but rarely examined in Vermont these days: “Health care is a human right.”

It is? Who says? And more broadly, who decides what is and is not a human right?

The questions bring up the recently quoted remarks of John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, that “it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have a right to health care.”

Mackey is right, of course. But then it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have the right of free speech, freedom of religion, security against unreasonable search and seizure, or the power to choose the folks who will govern them.

These are all artificial inventions, or what the folks in parts of academia would call social constructs. They come neither from nature nor heaven, but from people in particular cultures, notably ours.

Intrinsic or not, it’s up to human beings to decide what rights they and their society should have. In America we have in effect (because we’ve never spelled it out) decided that health care is a human right for those old enough, poor enough, or, needless to say, rich enough.

For everybody else it isn’t. Yet.

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Some clarifications of recent items are in order here, including a clarification of a clarification. Monday, the News Guy corrected the previous Monday’s post that said the recent statewide poll taken by Research 2000 for WCAX-TV had a four percent margin of error.

Actually five percent, said the correction.

Actually five percentage points, which the numerate among you will understand is not the same thing. This is one of those stupid errors which is stupider than most stupid errors, being an error the News Guy has often corrected when committed by others, making it especially foolish of him to commit it himself.

Almost as embarrassing was the typo in Monday’s other correction. Why the spell check did not catch “secondary sourc” remains a mystery (but not an excuse; we can’t rely on spell check). Perhaps there is such a word is “sourc”? Whichever, this was supposed to be a” secondary source.”

More substantively, Monday’s post reported that the spent nuclear fuel stored at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant site in Vernon could remain dangerous for 24,000 years.

Worse than that, emailed Margaret Gundersen of Fairewinds consulting, which deals with nuclear power issues. That 24,000 years “is the half-life of the nastiest radioactive isotopes,” she said, “but it takes roughly 10-half lives for the radioactivity to decay completely and for the radioactivity to be equal to what is natural background.  So, mathematically, 10-half lives of 24,000 years means 240,000…years.

This becomes a question of personal responsibility. The News Guy wants to make sure that his error has lulled no one into thinking he or she can wander around the grounds of the abandoned Vermont Yankee plant as early as the year 26,010. That could still be dangerous. Unless the waste has first been removed to Yucca Mountain, Nevada (but don’t hold your breath for that one) or elsewhere, do NOT, under any circumstances, walk around that area until the year 242,010.

Assuming, of course, that human beings then are still counting years under the same system. Assuming that is, that human beings have not either (a) evolved into a possibly more rational species; or (b) completely destroyed themselves and their surroundings.

Yogi Berra, where are you?

Without mentioning the great man’s name, Vermont’s dwindling collection of Vermont Yankee supporters have been invoking the wisdom of one of this more admirable Yankee’s most famous utterances (and one he apparently uttered, which is not true of all of them): “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Indeed it ain’t. It might not be over for 24,000 years, roughly how long the spent nuclear fuel stored on site will remain dangerous, unless by then it is moved elsewhere.

But last week’s overwhelming vote by the State Senate against allowing the Public Service Board to relicense the nuclear power plant for another 20 years, was a powerful – if not quite fatal – blow to the plant.

To employ a metaphor the aforementioned Mr. Berra would appreciate, a baseball team that has fallen behind 26-4 (the Senate vote) at the end of eight innings can still win. It rarely does.

Today’s post is particularly designed to fulfill one of the purposes of this web site, as expounded at its outset – to compensate for the flaws in mainstream news coverage stemming not from lack of ability but from the rise of “opinions on the shape of the earth differ” journalism, in which quoting each side accurately is considered doing the job even if the words quoted are absurd.

The premise seems to be that if a reporter points out the absurdity he or she will be considered biased. It’s a foolish premise. There is no bias here on the issue; the News Guy is neither an opponent nor a booster of nuclear power. The only “bias” is for evidence and against nonsense.

Start with the oft-quoted dismissal of the Senate vote by Yankee’s most important backer, Gov. Jim Douglas.

“There was a lot of theater here yesterday, but from a legal standpoint, nothing’s changed,” Douglas told WPTZ-TV (Channel 5) News. “The law says absent an affirmative vote from the Legislature, the Public Service Board can’t move forward with relicensure. So I expect there’ll be more chapters in this drama to play out.”

Could be. As the Governor and other Yankee advocates pointed out, by next year, Yankee’s image, battered by news of tritium leaks and official misstatements,  might have recovered. Besides, there are elections this November, and the lawmakers who take office next year could be less hostile to Yankee and its owner, Entergy Company.

But that would require a far greater turnover of Senate seats than seems likely. And on the basis of recent development, it’s just as likely that another misstep or another revelation would drive Yankee’s reputation even lower. Right now, the Senate’s decision appears likely to stand.

As to the consequences of shutting down the power plant in two years, actual evidence (as opposed to rhetoric) supports not taking either side one hundred percent seriously.

The gloom and doom projections are certainly overblown. There is a power surplus throughout the Northeastern United States. Your lights will go on with or without Vermont Yankee.

Might your electric bill be higher? Yes, but it was going to be higher either way. Yankee may now provide some 35 percent of Vermont’s electricity at a low price. But under its most recent contract offer, it would provide less power at a higher price. Interestingly, the utilities that buy Yankee’s power have been relatively quiet during the recent tumult. That’s because they’ve figured out how to replace the power they get from Yankee at an acceptable price.

Besides, if people are serious about controlling global warming (as to be sure many are not, though all evidence indicates that most Vermonters are) everybody is going to have to pay more for all kinds of energy so that everybody uses less. Markets work; the easiest way to reduce consumption of any commodity is to raise its price.

None of this proves that electricity might not be slightly more expensive without Yankee than with it. But “might” and “slightly” are the key words here. Either way, the increase is hardly likely to eliminate Vermont’s status as the cheapest-power state in the region. So those warning about how shutting down Yankee will chase away businesses because of high utility rates need not be taken seriously.

So what should be taken seriously? In ascending order, the following:

1—Without a nuclear power plant, more greenhouse-gas-creating fossil fuel will be burned so Vermonters can turn on their lights, run their computers, and the like. Most of that fuel will probably be natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal and oil, but not as clean as nuclear, (at least once the nuclear fuel is refined from its ore, a process that burns a great deal of fossil fuel). Eventually, wind, solar, and other “sustainable” sources will provide more power, probably at a higher cost. But (see above) higher costs are both inevitable and desirable.

2—Closing the plant will have some economic impact in and around its home base of Vernon. Even Arnold Gundersen, the consultant who has been critical of Vermont Yankee, acknowledged that if the plant stops producing power when its license expires in 2012, it will lay off some 200 nuclear engineers.

Yankee critics point out that most of those engineers live in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. True, but they come to Vernon five days a week (or more) and spend money there. Losing them will be noticeable.

But not catastrophic. Businesses and policy makers have at least two years to prepare. Furthermore, shutting down a nuclear power plant is a major undertaking, requiring hundreds of highly skilled workers for a decade or more. Vernon can prosper for the foreseeable future if it keeps its head.

3—And here’s the only real reason the Vermont Yankee matter is not really closed (all that other stuff is just why people will still jabber about it). Entergy could challenge the state’s power to block its relicensing in federal court.
The company might win. Federal law trumps state law if they conflict (See Article VI, US Constitution). But it’s complicated. Elsewhere, state regulatory agencies play a role in licensing nuclear plants, which seems not to have been challenged.

Besides, companies are often wary about using raw power to impose themselves where they are not wanted. Nobody is going to boycott electricity. Still, fighting the state in federal court could turn out to be what Yogi Berra (maybe) once called “a wrong mistake.”

Correction: Last Monday’s post said the recent Vermont poll taken by Research 2000 had a margin of error of plus-or-minus four percent. That was a typographical error of the mind. It’s five percent (as the computations in the next paragraph correctly indicated).

Correction 2: A reader noted that the picture used to illustrate Friday’s post did not seem to come directly from the US. Agriculture Department’s Food Environmental Atlas, but via a “secondary sourc.” Said reader is right. The map should be credited to the always-helpful Rural Blog from the University of Kentucky.

Real Vermonters eat their fruits and vegetables, do their exercises and don’t care much for Big Macs.

At least in comparison with most other Americans.

It isn’t that plenty of people in Vermont don’t swill sugared sodas, eat in fast food restaurants, or chow down on platefuls of fried foods while sitting in front of the TV. But either they do it less, or fewer of them do it, or both, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collected in the Food Environmental Atlas.

Available for free on line, the Atlas contains detailed county-by-county information about where and what people eat, how much they spend on food, how extensively poverty affects their diet, whether they get much exercise, and the extent to which they have diet-related health problems.

On almost all counts, Vermont emerges as one of the healthier states, in part because Vermonters seem to try harder than most other Americans to eat a healthier diet and get some exercise.

The Atlas does not provide exact national or statewide statistics, at least not as could be discovered by your less-than-brilliant on-line operative, who also failed to reach an Agriculture Department spokesperson.

But the maps, with color-coordinated rankings by county, added to the county-by-county statistics, leave little doubt that Vermonters have relatively healthy eating habits.

Take fast-food restaurants.(Please!). In Lamoille County there are (or were in 2008) 21 of them, or 0.855 per thousand residents. That’s on the high side for Vermont. There were 0.738 per thousand in Chittenden County, 0.793 in Windsor, and only 0.393 per thousand residents of Caledonia County.

Most of the rest of the country seems to need a lot more. Far and away the champ fast-food county is San Juan County, Colorado (Silverton is the County seat), where there are 7.117 fast food restaurants for every thousand people. That’s twice the ratio of the runner-up, Norton County, Virginia (yup, the county seat is Norton, too; nope, I don’t know where it is, either) where there are a “mere” (compared with San Juan County) 3.235 fast food joints per thousand folks.

Perhaps because there weren’t that many fast food places, Vermonters spent relatively little in them, less than $400 per person per year, a level of restraint matched only by their fellow-Americans in Idaho, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. The big fast-food spenders. Shelling out more than $500 a head, were in California, the Southwest, the Midwest, the deep South, and – go figure – Massachusetts.

Along with Maine, Wisconsin, and several states in the northern Rockies, Vermont has the highest percentage of adults (more than 70 percent)  deemed to be “exercising enough,” though it was not clear what constituted “enough” or who determined what constituted it.

At any rate, exercise is one of those areas in which Vermont might look good only in relation to the rest of the country. Statewide (because the number was the same for every county) 48 percent of Vermont high school students are physically active. That put Vermont in the top rank, along with North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, and Iowa.

But less than half of high school students are physically active?

That’s scary. Throw away their computers, or at least their computer games.

There is too much information in too many categories in every county to deal with it all here. Anyone who is interested can find the Atlas, either at the Agriculture Department site through usa.gov, or just by Googling Food Environment Atlas, and find out all sorts of stuff about his or her county and its eating/spending/exercise habits.

Suffice to say that Vermont comes across as the state whose residents drink less soda, eat less meat and more vegetables, buy food directly from a local farm, and take care of themselves than most other Americans.

Raising some troubling questions: Do Vermonters enjoy themselves? Of are they a bunch of eat-your-spinach, life-is-serious, let’s-find-only-the-nutrition-and-not-the-flavor-in-our-food wimps? Do they spend so much time at the gym (remember, the adults seem to exercise more than the teenagers) that they’ve forgotten the joy of sitting around a fine dinner table covered with a touch of wretched excess (in moderation, to be sure)?

The Food Environment Atlas does not directly answer that question. But the Atlas does contain one hint, and it’s a hopeful one. Vermonters may spend less money than most Americans at fast food joints, but it ranks high in full service restaurants per thousand people, and is one of only 21 states where folks pay more than $500 a year per capita in restaurants.

Where they might actually be enjoying themselves over good food and drink.

Before state boosters get what the late, great boxing trainer Whitey Bimstein used to call “a swelled head,” the Atlas shows that while Vermonters may be less likely to be obese or diabetic than most other Americans, neither are they all that unlikely to be obese and diabetic.

In Windsor County, 7.1 percent of adults are diabetic, according to the Atlas, and 22.8 percent obese. Almost ten percent of low-income pre-schoolers are obese. Those numbers are higher in Caledonia County.

And however low Vermont’s obesity and diabetes rates may be compared to other states, they are higher than they used to be, according to figures released last week by the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Health.

There’s nothing peculiar to Vermont about these increases, and according to Kelly Brownell of Yale University’s Rudd Center, who was in Montpelier last week, one reason is that more people are eating more fatty, sugary, processed foods, and for good reason. They’re cheaper.

Between 1985 and 2000, Brownell said, the price of fruits and vegetables rose 117 percent, compared to 46 percent for sugars and sweets and only 20 percent for soft drinks. Markets work. When a commodity’s price goes up, consumption of it goes down. When the price goes down (relative to inflation and alternative prices) consumption goes up.

Markets, but not free markets. Soda is cheap because of government subsidies to agriculture. Having, so to speak, sown, Americans now reap, even Vermonters, if a little less so.