photo by Bidgee

On this wet and chilly Tuesday, the News Guy was tracking down several interesting stories but catching up with none.

Happens sometimes in the news biz, especially in the summer, when some of the folks who help the tracking process are on vacation.

Never fear, though. The News Guy is a saver of string, enabling him to achieve the goal of occasionally providing readers with information about stuff going on around the world that Vermont’s conventional news outfits tend to ignore though they might one day have some impact on – or at least relevance to – the state and its citizens.

Speaking of wet and chilly, whatever happened to Global Warming? This summer’s weather seems enough to make a person doubt the scientific consensus. But beware of confusing subjective impressions with reality.

John Hinderaker, the Global Warming-denying, Minneapolis-based proprietor of the conservative web site Power Line seems to have insufficiently bewared. The other day he said that, “2009 may go down in history, in some parts of the U.S. at least, as another year with barely any summer. Here in Minnesota and across the Midwest, temperatures are abnormally cold.”

Except that they aren’t. As liberal blogger Nate Silver (with perhaps a touch more glee than needed?) pointed out in his site, 538.com, Minneapolis temperatures this summer have been exactly average.

And in Vermont? Well, the evenings have been cooler than usual, but daytime high temperatures have been in the 70s and low 80s, just as a majority of them have been for decades.

Besides, at least around here, global warming doesn’t mean hotter summers as much as it means warmer winters. According to a 2008 study by the meteorology department at Lyndon State College Institute of Applied Meteorology, “The temperature in both summer and winter is shown to be increasing… This implies a general warming of Vermont throughout the year… winter temperatures are increasing faster than summer temperatures.”

Looking for a villain to blame for the slow pace of recovery from the recession? Maybe Vermont is to blame.

Not Vermont alone. Vermont and almost every other state, which cut their budgets and increased taxes. Just as the federal government was taxing less and spending more to stimulate the economy, Vermont and the other states did the opposite, diminishing the impact of the federal stimulus.

Vermont is of course a minor offender here; its combined tax increases and spending cuts amount to a few tens of millions. California just cut its budget by $26 billion. Not that any of the states had too much choice. With one exception, their constitutions require balanced budgets.

The one exception? Vermont. But for all practical (and political) purposes, it has to balance its budget, too. (Actually, they all cheat, but that’s a subject for another day).

Maybe the problem is that there are states to begin with. Such is the suggestion of James Surowiecki in this week’s New Yorker Magazine.

“Federalism, often described as one of the great strengths of the American system, has become a serious impediment to reversing the downturn,” Surowiecki wrote.

He has a point. With 50 (sort of) sovereign states, each controlling its own budget, there’s little to prevent them from raising taxes and cutting spending, “amplifying the effects of the downturn, instead of mitigating them.” As Surowiecki said.

He did not suggest that states be abolished. Every once in a while, though, somebody makes that suggestion, and from the purely rational perspective, the suggestion makes sense. It would be much more logical and efficient, for instance, if New York City, northern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut were part of one administrative division – perhaps a “department,” a la France – than for the city to have to depend on appropriations approved by lawmakers from Plattsburgh and Horseheads, as it now does.

But the purely rational, taken to its logical conclusion, becomes…irrational. Vermonters, it seems safe to say, would rather live in Vermont than in some subdivision drawn by experts without regard for the state’s history and culture. Tennesseeans and Montanans no doubt feel the same way about where they live. The states, for better and for worse, will survive.

On the other hand, it’s not likely that any state on its own (or even in cooperation with its neighbors) will ever give serious attention to this interesting idea from author Christopher Steiner, based on the research of economist Charles Courtemanche, which might help make America cleaner, safer, and healthier.

In a book called $20 a gallon, Steiner says that raising the price of gasoline would make Americans so much healthier that it would be worth paying the price.

No, not $20 a gallon, but maybe about six bucks. In an article in Forbes magazine, Steiner said Courtemanche, a professor at the University of North Carolina, “has produced a study suggesting that permanent hikes in gas prices may slash obesity rates. The amount is hardly nominal: A sustained $1 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline equals a 10% dip in the nation’s obesity rate–that’s about 9 million fewer obese people clogging up health care systems and costing society (and themselves) money. ‘The price of gas is a powerful lever when it comes to medical expenses and mortality rates,’ Courtemanche says. ‘There’s a savings in this for all of us.’”

The secret, according to Courtemanche, is that as gasoline prices rise, people will drive less, walk and bike more. They also won’t eat as many meals in restaurants, meaning they’ll eat less expensively and…well, just less. Considering that almost a third of the adult population is now overweight –which costs society some $117 billion a year in both public and private expenses — less would probably be enough.

To be sure, Vermont, which has little in the way of public transportation and lots of small towns sprinkled throughout the countryside, would be unlikely to welcome this proposal. Welcome or not, though, something like $5-a-gallon gas might be the way it is in the not too distant future. Maybe it’s time to start pondering the possibility.

And finally, the reader who calls himself BP asked a perfectly reasonable question based on the assertion here last Friday (scroll down to read it all again) that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz took something of a political risk by boasting of her fund-raising successes on the liberal web site Daily Kos. “The blogosphere’s vibes have their negative connotations,” was how that paragraph ended.

“Maybe you could expand on this?” said BP (perhaps too politely; “What on earth do you mean?” might have been more appropriate). “Is a Vermont Democrat vulnerable for posting something on Daily Kos?”

To expand, which is certainly in order, a Vermont Democrat might be giving his/her opponent some ammunition if he/she is seen as the favorite of the Daily Kos set. Somewhat inaccurately, the site is often thought of as very far left. It isn’t. Its publisher/founder, Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga, is a fierce partisan more than an ideologue. It was probably his fierce opposition to the Iraq war that led some (mostly Republicans) to label the site as extremist.

But Moulitsas also has a policy (similar to the one at this site) of not censoring the comments of his readers, some of whom do hold views outside the mainstream. So with just a little deficiency of intellectual honesty (not uncommon in politics) an opponent can try to paint the Kos-linked candidate as an extremist.

Granted, that’s a harder sell in Vermont than in, say, Alabama. But even here, it isn’t all that hard to get middle-of-the-road voters (and there are many) to wonder whether a candidate might have funny friends.

That’s the chance you take.