Comments Russ has made

What will Peak Oil do?

Biod, what do you think of the Sail Transport Network, which I think is located in your neck of the woods?

Wolverine, do you hold hopes that Peak Oil and its accompanying economic and systemic corrections will soon bring about the end of "globalism"?

Well, it's already being "downsized", to use one of its own pet terms against it (and how sweet that feels).

Now it's just a matter of how the endgame plays out.

 On Former Washington Gov. Locke would bring a strong voice for oceans to Commerce posted 9 months ago 3 Responses

chicken and egg?

When it comes to carbon policy, most legislative bodies seem to favor option No. 2, in part because ideological purists on both sides of the aisle can't find middle ground in option No. 3. But real, lasting reform inevitably comes out of that fourth approach, finding ways not to penalize those who benefited from the old status quo, but rather to give everyone an incentive in a better future. (Think Mandela.)

Assuming I found much plausibility in this, I'd consider it at least as likely that "ideological purists" didn't start out that way, but became that way out of disgust at the corruption, cowardice, and paltriness you're sticking up for there.

But I don't think your construction is plausible. I hardly think most of these people need any encouragement from ideologues to go in for bribery, appeasement, laziness, and wretched smallness of vision. I think they do that just fine on their own.

As for this:

4.Change the rules so that everyone makes money from doing the right thing....

...But real, lasting reform inevitably comes out of that fourth approach.

"Inevitably"! So I guess all the history books I ever read (about Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, Elizabethan times, the English civil war, the Thirty years' war, the czars, the French Revolution, the whole 19th century revolutionary ferment....I could go on but you get the idea), where few of the attempters made much money, and few seemed to be particularly trying to, are all wrong.

I guess I could have saved myself alot of effort and just read one grist post.

Or maybe not:

(Think Mandela.)

It's certainly an odd view of reform which considers the complete betrayal of the Freedom Charter, the thoroughgoing privatization of the country while the vast masses remain just as impoverished as they were under apartheid (indeed in some ways they've been worse off), and the thuggish regime of Thabo Mkebi, to be a rip-roaring success.

But those who were rich under apartheid remained rich, and you did say that's important to you. "Don't seek to bring criminals to justice", and the rest of it.

After all, those of us who still believe in quaint things like justice are just "ideologues", "naive"*, poets. Especially because we have the temerity to not particularly care about your profit motive.

[*BTW, I stand by my assessment, which I've written about elsewhere here, that in these days of crisis and potential to dare great things in the name of great values is no more naive and no less politically practicable than the defeatism of picayune goals and conventional prejudices about what's politically "possible", which latter course has been going on for so long now with such meager results.

I don't say these things to gratuitously heckle anybody, but to defend and fight back against these increasingly nihilistic attacks on principled people and on the very concept of principle itself.]

 On South Carolina misses an opportunity for energy efficiency with Duke's Save-A-Watt program posted 9 months ago 18 Responses

Ragging on Kunstler

It's nothing against civilization, he just wants to be right for a change.

I wish I'd said that. In fact, someday soon, I will.

It seems we skeptics regarding the fossil fuel platform and exponential debt civilization are looking pretty good these days, and not because we got lucky, but because we correctly analyzed the situation a long time ago, and things are happening as we forecast.

As for the wonks of green cornucopianism and carbon policy arcana, I'll have to state the obvious: all that has existed of these on earth so far is talk, talk, talk, while emissions everywhere including among the most punctilious Kyoto signatories keep going up.

So although I still hope this may change in time (and according to your own luminaries like Pachauri you have less than four years left to REALLY get started), all the evidence is it won't, that man is simply going to burn fossil fuel and emit profligately for as long as supply fundamentals and economics allow, and that nothing short of a cap imposed by Peak Oil itself is going to set the final concentration maximum.

Sorry to get ornery, but these days I'm no longer willing to listen to Kunstler be the object of armpit noises when his record as a prophet, while imperfect, is vastly greater than that of almost anyone else, and his real-world accomplishment, while so far perhaps modest, is again greater than that of his critics, who have accomplished nothing but talk.

"Just wanting to be right for a change" - don't we all. You guys ought to know.
  On Why not medium-speed rail? posted 9 months ago 8 Responses

subsidies

Subsidies here should be looked at and reformed in the same way we seek with energy.

With energy we've long had a playing field heavily tipped in favor of fossil fuel gluttony, and it's still tipped that way. So what we need is to maintain the same (or an increased) incentive level for renewables, building efficiency, and mass transit, while stripping welfare payments from fossil fuels and the automobile.

So in the same way subsidies and incentives should be used to retip the agricultural playing field away from industrial monocropping and the globalist food distribution model, and toward
relocalization, organic farming, with a redistribution in favor of so-called "specialty" crops (i.e. real fruits and vegetables used for actual food - and while we're at it change that stupid terminology: "specialty", as if it's some prissy yuppie garnish), and in favor of environmentally sound farming practices, discouraging the production of unsuitable land, encouraging regional and local food distribution: CSAs, farmers' markets, community gardens, tool and seed distribution centers for a new Victory Garden campaign (and a public education campaign encouraging these individual gardens).

That last point leads us to the larger issue of America's public education curriculum in general. To be of any value, it needs to be radically refocused on every aspect of relocalization. I guess that's beyond the scope of the discussion here...

Then there's the issue of meat consumption subsidies. Offhand I'm not sure how to do away with CAFOs without directly attacking them politically. But done away with they must be.

Of course nothing - a food policy transformation, an energy policy transformation, a climate policy transformation - will work if they plow ahead with these agrofuel mandates.

One thing's for sure, no activist is going to be bored anytime soon.On Let's mend, not end, ag subsidies posted 9 months ago 3 Responses

Climate Crisis and Climate Core

Given that Obama has already sold out everyone who actually believed he represented "Change", and that the Dems in Congress are interested in nothing but setting records for fecklessness and cowardice, it's clear that anyone who was hoping to find there leadership amidst the climate crisis was mistaken.

Similarly, we've long known the people's commitment to environmental issues, at least in times of general crisis, and especially where no one rings a clarion call to real action, is skin deep.

So where there's no leadership, no vision to stir the soul, the people are going to respond with the same apathy. That's where the wretched cult of the "politically possible", of self-limited thought and self-limited goals, gets you.

That's exactly what we're seeing from this administration, which has the opportunity of a lifetime to turn the very radicalism of the circumstance into energy and will to take radical action.

Why not take the people at their word and challenge them to accomplish great things? The very crisis which conjures fear and trepidation, having summoned such emotional energy into being, can be harnessed and this energy be directed to a feeling of liberation - from all the old mental and policy ruts, all the old prejudices and hang-ups and crimes.

I don't know how people would respond if challenged to take world-changing action toward revitalizing the economy, healing the land, dealing with the energy and climate crisis.

But I do know how they'll respond if they're not so challenged: the same way they always have. They'll do nothing.

It seems Obama can't/won't do it. He's mired in the paucity of nope. He sleeps, and gets up to appease Republicans and pledge allegience to bankers, and rechecks his paltry ideology of continuity and the status quo, satisfies himself, and sleeps some more.

There isn't going to be any salvation from on high. This is true for the economy, and it's true for the climate. The only way these things are going to be tackled, if they're going to be tackled at all, is from a new movement, organized at first from the bottom up, which is free of all the old psychological and ideological debris.

If the climate core, as Ken calls them here, are to find the traction to engage a renewed public consciousness and political will to Change, and to maintain everlastingly their own personal resolve and inspiration, they'll have to find these things outside politics as usual.

There's no time left to engage in conventional political talk and enshrine incremental, anemic policy adjustment as the highest hope (let alone to still compromise with deniers and obstructionists, who are by now a kind of terrorist).

Either the groundswell comes over these next few years, or there'll be nothing left but to let the climate feedbacks unfold and hope Peak Oil forestalls the worst.    On Understanding polling in terms of core vs. general public posted 9 months, 1 week ago 13 Responses

seawater

Hmm, don't they say the same thing about the deuterium which is supposed to fuel fusion reactors?

I don't dogmatically say there will never come any techno-deus ex machina which will end all energy and carbon problems overnight, but all the evidence is that, to paraphrase Auden, "no glorious creature will rise from the water", and we're stuck with the stuff we have now. On Monbiot on nuclear posted 9 months, 1 week ago 6 Responses

monbiot's nukes

But I have not, as many people have suggested, gone nuclear. Instead, my position is that I will no longer oppose nuclear power if four conditions are met:

1. Its total emissions - from mine to dump - are taken into account

2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried

3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay

4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diveerted for military purposes.

I notice immediately that he doesn't care about the ravages of mining itself. This is characteristic of the many who are concerned about the climate crisis but don't seem to be environmentalists beyond that issue.

The same goes for his support of CCS and implicit lack of concern over coal mining itself.

Getting to his critieria, 2-4 are of course not guaranteeable. Once we've embarked upon the buildout, any such concessions and guarantees will then become negotiable, and negotiating them down will be the next order of business for industry and conservatives.

I don't see how you could know the cost, who will pay, or the waste disposal plan ahead of time. Costs in this industry are notoriously prone to bloat, and especially under current economic circumstances any massive capitalization plan which would take years to unfold is bound to be precarious.

Nuke bailouts, anyone?

As for waste disposal, America supposedly had a plan 30 years ago, yet here we are still trying to figure out whether it's acceptable. (And even if Yucca were a good plan, it wouldn't be sufficient to handle the waste from a significant expansion.)

The civilian guarantee would just be window dressing. If it was ever judged that there was a military necessity involved (a generally low bar to meet for decision-makers), they'd convert anything and everything to military use.

As for my own conditions, I doubt I could ever support it. But a prerequisite would be that any expansion was taking the place of decommissioned coal plants, and that it was doing so within the context of a general, rational deconsumption plan.

I'd never support anything, let alone nuke expansion, which was just going to feed the monster of energy gluttony.On Monbiot on nuclear posted 9 months, 1 week ago 6 Responses

Max

I didn't say a carbon tax would necessarily be well-enacted if it were enacted at all. I said the observed evidence is directly counter to the notion that any given c&t is likely to be well-enacted, and that therefore c&t advocates have less justification for ivory-tower projections than tax advocates do (not that tax advocates should religiously assume the best either).

Thanks for the tax examples, which I wasn't aware of. For obvious reasons I'm suspicious regarding whether or not anything done in Alberta, a hard-core petrostate, could have been done with any real mitigatory intent. I wonder if offering that as an example isn't like offering a company union as an example of unions in general.

Ah well, I'm getting sick of the whole "politically possible" mindset. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I wonder if maybe for once the people really are out ahead of all the elites.

All I know is, the people voted for "Change", and they seem to viscerally want it, but Obama and every elite clearly don't see things that way.

So all we see everywhere are paltry "reform" proposals. (I'm talking about alot more than just environmental issues.)

I wonder what would happen if someone who was president said, "You said you want real Change: Now let's go for it!", and set a goal for the ages.

I wonder if something revolutionary, by truly inspiring people and tapping into a real will to Change, wouldn't actually have better political prospects than mucking around in the same old picayune policies and procedural pits, which could never inspire anyone to do anything.

One thing's for sure: Everyone always says Bush missed a big chance following 9/11. But now we know he wasn't the only one capable of missing a big chance.  On Memo to tax sirens: Both a carbon cap and a tax can be implemented well posted 9 months, 1 week ago 20 Responses

BACT/MACT

I'm mostly familiar with this from mercury emissions policy.

Here's an example of the Bush admin's assaults upon it (from a newsletter I used to get,
BushGreenWatch.org, which was hyper-informative about all sorts of stuff):

The "delisting rule" rescinded a 2000 EPA finding that "it is necessary and appropriate" for all power plants to install "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) to reduce mercury and other hazardous emissions. A MACT standard under the existing Clean Air Act would have required power plants to reduce their mercury emissions by about 90 percent by 2008, a decade earlier than the administration's timetable.

So here the maximum/best technology was available, they just didn't want to pay for it.

As for what's basically an all-or-nothing control tech situation like we currently have with coal plants and carbon, I guess that's unprecedented.

I take it the CAA doesn't have language regarding this eventuality? I'm surprised the enemies of encompassing CO2 within CAA purview didn't bring that up. (Or at least they didn't so far as I heard.)

On the one hand, it seems logical that "best available" means if nothing is available, nothing applies, and they could continue with BAU.

But the SCOTUS ruling doesn't make much sense that way*. You will the end, you will the means.

So from that point of view, a "control technology" could include shutting them down completely.

Or, it could mean they have to deploy CCS with all deliberate speed, which of course they can't/won't do, in which case they'd be derelict, and subject to being shut down.

[*To be honest, little the Supreme Court does nowadays makes sense. You have 8 judges with more or less coherent ideologies, and this loose cannon Kennedy who seems to be capable of voting anywhichway for any reason or none.

(It's almost as bad as the fate of the world now lying in the hands of two Republicans from Maine, while everybody else can apparently go home.)

Kennedy's CO2 decision as well was hardly a model of tight, clear reasoning and direction. Still, I'm glad we have it, even if it left questions like this unanswered.]     On What is the 'best available control technology' for CO2 from coal plants? posted 9 months, 1 week ago 11 Responses

Kevin N

OK, I'll bite.

How does Easterbrook or Quaternary geology accomplish the following:

1. Explain observed climate change effects;
   
2. Explain why, even though these effects are occurring as predicted by AGW theory, they are not in fact the result of manmade greenhouse gases, and the concurrence of observation and theory here is just a coincidence;
   
3. Without grotesquely violating Occam's Razor?

Of course there have been several such climate events, which have had varying causes. And now we're having another such event. And in this case the cause is man's emissions. It's as simple as that.

(Deniers here are in the same position as those who concede that the earth has seen five mass extinction events and is now into the sixth, but who would try to argue that, because man didn't cause the first five, therefore he must not be causing the current one either.)  On Marc Morano's secret list of climate deniers posted 9 months, 1 week ago 19 Responses

Viva las Vegas!

I find it mind-boggling that there are people here who think Las Vegas can even exist much longer, let alone that there should be a supertrain built to it. Just handing out public money directly to bankers as bonuses would be more productive.

At most Vegas might hang on for a little while as an elite destination, and the rich don't want to ride trains.

As for yahoo weekend gamblers, if they really need their fix they'll build their own casinos. Already broke, how are they going to be able to even afford to drive there once gas prices resume their upward march?

Not to mention when they have to haul all their own water, since that Vegas tap will soon be running dry. On The stimulus bill provides serious money for high-speed rail posted 9 months, 1 week ago 13 Responses

earthsci and biod

You guys really think Will believes the things he says about this? I'm inclined to doubt that. If he does, he really is an idiot.

(For example, I think it's possible Inhofe really does believe AGW is both not true and a "hoax". He's certainly stupid enough.)

If I had to bet I'd say Will either knows exactly what he's doing (just like the professional mercenary deniers), or he doesn't care "what is truth", in which case he's willfully, aggressively ignorant, which still makes him a liar.

(If one remains willfully ignorant regarding a public issue yet still claims the "right to an opinion", one is certainly lying.) On Conservative columnist lies to millions of people, again, ho hum posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 36 Responses

NYT stories

This story was pretty good, if a little credulous regarding the CCS scam.

Also in today's NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/washington/15scotus.htm ...

A discussion of the case of West Virginia judicial corruption, Massey and Blankenship, now before the Supreme court.On Superb NYT story captures both coal's peril and the barriers to its elimination posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 38 Responses

jon says

Thom Hartmann of Air America calls for nationalizing the banks, and frankly, I think it is blindingly obvious.  While it might seem politically impossible -- maybe not.

It is blindingly obvious, both from the pov of sound policy and politically.

The people would certainly support this over more direct handouts and lemon socialism.

As for the decisively repudiated republicans, there's no real reason to accommodate them one bit.

There's only one problem, and it's name is "Obama".

It's becoming increasingly clear that

1. As a policy matter, he is determined to continue with the corporatist/neo-feudalist Bush agenda largely unchanged, both domestically and abroad;

2. By temperament he's committed to appeasement: of the Republicans, of corporate malefactors, of the stock market (whose "emotional" crashes and surges look more and more terroristic with every new iteration).

"Change" nobody should have believed in.On While Geithner's bailout flounders, it's time to explore other financial models posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 8 Responses

State of the Peak

So whereas the IEA was projecting the need for 6 Arabias by 2030 to culminate at 106mpd all-liquids (4 to replace depletion at existing fields and 2 to meet rising demand), Merrill has moved up the g6 figure to 12 years from now, 2021? Thatfs something.

It definitely looks like wefve been on the gbumpy plateauh since 2005, and that the all-time acute Peak for conventional crude was July of 08 at c. 75mpd (while the all-liquids Peak seems stalled at 86-87mpd).

The consensus seems to be that the result of the financial crisis will be that the plateau will bump along somewhat longer at a somewhat lower level than it would otherwise have, but that once descent sets in itfll be more precipitous.

The most unexpected thing about all this is that everyone expected that descent would set in first and provoke the big economic crisis. Instead the bubble burst first and dictated the Peak.

So it turned out to be an above-ground factor after all. Go figurec

Still, what was the proximate cause of the mortgage crisis? What started the defaults landsliding? To whatever extent it was a combination of higher fuel prices slamming commuters, higher food prices (driven by agrofuel mandates) hitting consumers, and higher interest rates (affected by these higher commodity prices) triggering ARM hikes, all three of these clobbering financially tenuous houseowners at once, to whatever extent that was it, it was in a way nervous energy markets which lie at the root of it.

Peak Oilfs ways can be sneaky.On Non-OPEC production has likely peaked, oil output could fall by 30 million bpd by 2015 posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 5 Responses

This does indeed..

..sound tailor-made for disaster capitalism, which is the one and only reason I fear that, as patently insane and reckless as it is, it might actually be tried even as all civilian infrastructure rots and famine reaches pandemic levels.

The core objections to this are the same as they've always been, and they are irrefutable.

First, the precautionary principle. Even though we are assured that "the less-favorable aspects are also fairly clear", and what's listed as these unfavorable aspects...

likely damage to the ozone layer (as happened after Mt. Pinatubo); the potential for health and ecological damage should the sulfate injections fail to reach the stratosphere; and a temperature "spike" if sulfate injections are stopped abruptly.

..are bad enough, we still have no idea that these wouldn't be just the tip of the iceberg.

Second, we are basically in a species civil war over two ways of conceiving and acting upon our gaiacidal rapacity. One is to repent, pull back from the brink, devolve consumption and the machine, and learn to seek happiness and love rather than gluttony and violence.

The other is to continue the onslaught for all it's worth. This includes all Tower of Babel technofixes which try to have it all, rampant consumption and "green"-friendliness.

Aggrofuels, GMOs, geo-engineering. Three (engineered) peas in a pod. I don't know which is the worst, but these are three absolute threats to the ecological and human future.

Just as with GMOs and aggrofuels the green and humanitarian talk is just talk, so it is with geo-engineering. The real projects will of course be so large and require so much capitalization that massive public monies will be needed to get them off the ground. (If sulphate injections or cloud-brightening really are cheap, they'll either be massively porked up, or else won't be the projects of choice. There's a reason Detroit favored SUVs over small sedans, and it wasn't because SUVs served any real purpose.)

And although the author disparaged his own speculation on military applications as "paranoid", he knows of course there's nothing paranoid about it. Wanting to use weather modification for military purposes has been the main driver of all government meteorological research funding since the fifties. Deep down all they've ever wanted to do is build a weather machine.

So here as elsewhere we see the carbon disaster shock taking shape: the crisis will be used as the pretext for a redistribution of wealth from the public to large private structures, and for the development of new weapons.

That's what geoengineering's all about.

Luckily, the idea's so top-heavy, so high-maintenance, requires such a large fossil fuel platform, would require such extravagant initial capital outlays, that with the steadily eroding world economy and Peak Oil at the door, I'm not too worried about any real attempt being made.On Geoengineering is risky but likely inevitable, so we better start thinking it through posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 10 Responses

Hmm,..

..yes, we didn't need no steenking "ugly political or public debate" to bring about agribusiness consolidation, fossil fuel dependent monoculture, the extermination of the family farm, soil-mining with synthetic fertilizer, the Tower of Babel of ever-more rapidly obsolescent pesticides, ever-increasing dependence on GMOs and the seed control ideology which drives them, the endless monstrous subsidies for commodity crops and complete neglect of all rational agricultural policy, the dead zones leading the parade of horrific externalities...

And all of this without any messy democracy! Yay!
Technocrats rule!

That's definitely the model I want to put up a poster of when I contemplate climate policy... On Dueling NPR stories illustrate surreal disconnect around climate discussion posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 9 Responses

billhook

Joe just put up an in-depth post this morning on the WAIS over at his blog Climate Progress (linked above).

(It'll probably be reposted here in a day or so.) On Rising sea salinates India's Ganges posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 6 Responses

Carbon Shock

 
If it's true that disaster capitalism is the practice of swooping in upon the victims of some catastrophe to impose through "shock treatment" (Milton Friedman's own term) the predatory corporatist and neo-feudalist regime they could never achieve by democratic means, then its most extreme and logical manifestation is where you artificially manufacture the disaster with the intent of using it to impose this regime.

Just as we've seen precisely that with resource imperialism, the "Green" revolution, petrodollar recycling, Cold War proxy wars, the drug war, and other gambits, so now we're starting to see the outlines of a carbon war.

The above post provides the basic outline:

1. The West has already emitted to the point that the climate crisis is upon us, and shows no signs of mitigation.

2. The globalization cabal, through programs like the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, claims to be seeking mitigation but is actually funding further carbon-intensive development, like the largest coal-fired plants on earth in India.

3. While the rich West (and other high-emission free riders) clearly has an moral obligation to pay for adaptation measures in the poor countries being hit by the climate crisis, it is instead seizing the opportunity for the standard globalist predatory lending, which loans are always intended to be the lever to indenture the country and loot its resources and labor.

4. Although we still have the old-style denier guttersnipes with us, clearly the sophisticated exploiter view of climate change is that propagated by Lomborg and others, that the best way to deal with it is to "help" the world adapt to it, while "helping" them to industrialize themselves. Once all that's achieved, only then, through some kind of invisible hand, the world will together mitigate emissions, and everything will be fine.

But until then, nothing special regarding emissions should be done. Just the adaptation/industrialization program, which sounds suspiciously like the latest repackaging of the same globalist offensive. You can see how well this dovetails with the World Bank program.

5. Similarly, there's an attempt among policy advocates to impose a top-down consensus that "offsets" must be an important part of any climate policy. Whether these are preached as intrinsically good (e.g. Mccain and some enviros) or as a necessary political evil (most enviros), the result is the same - a gambit which counteracts mitigation in the industrial countries while helping pry open the privatization door in the non-industrialized (and probably doing little or nothing to mitigate there either).

6. Finally, we can only speculate on how precisely the malefactors of finance will try to use carbon permit trading (where again, a top-down imposition of "consensus" is being sought) to inflate a new paper bubble.
   

[All government monetary and most fiscal policy at this point, as well as almost all commentary, is overwhelmingly focused on just one thing: how to inflate another bubble, since the debt/growth ponzi system cannot survive without it. It really should be called a "bubble economy", and indeed a bubble society.

Right now their preferred goal and conscious policy is to try to reinflate the housing bubble. Thus we have all the focus on trying to "stabilize" the still-inflated housing prices, and send them rising again, when clearly housing prices are seeking a reality-based level and still have a ways to go.

But they'll certainly happily grab hold of any opportunity that comes along. So we can expect permit trading to become a central part of the fray. But it won't work if a rigorous cap is truly enforced. So we can expect ever-more ramified trading, as caps become ever-more gossamer.]

Add this manifestation of the growth imperative to the globalist gambit outlined above, and we have the outlines of a carbon class war from above, at home and abroad, on the people and the earth.  
On The World Bank offers to loan developing countries the funds to pay for climate change adaptation posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

A few notes on this.

This article was typical. Given the theological premise, as expressed in the first section (I wrote down, "manifesto of insanity" and "theology of cancer", alot of the rest of it was relatively reasonable.

Of course, Peak Oil rules out much of this. Time is running out on their "stumulative" ideas from section 4, mass industrial education (section 6) also relies on a fossil fuel platform. But not a word about a sustainable relocalization of it (not to mention how the curriculum itself will have to be revolutionized).

As for health care (section 5) - forget it. This is going to be relocalized, deindustrialized and thus "reformed" whatever the big government/ big capitalist dreamers think.

As for some characteristic dogmas from section 1:

That last question may sound abstract, even technical, compared with the current crisis. Yet the consequences of a country's growth rate are not abstract at all. Slow growth makes almost all problems worse. Fast growth helps solve them. As Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford University, has said, the choices that determine a country's growth rate "dwarf all other economic-policy concerns."

This is funny. "Problems" are defined simply as anything that slows down, and "solutions" as anything that speeds up, with growth.

Speed and growth, worshipped for their own sakes - the theology of cancer.

Growth is the only way for a government to pay off its debts in a relatively quick and painless fashion

Yes, it is. That doesn't mean it's possible.

Yet there are real concerns that the United States' economy won't grow enough to pay off its debts easily and ensure rising living standards, as happened in the postwar decades. The fraternity of growth experts in the economics profession predicts that the economy, on its current path, will grow more slowly in the next couple of decades than over the past couple. They are concerned in part because two of the economy's most powerful recent engines have been exposed as a mirage: the explosion in consumer debt and spending, which lifted short-term growth at the expense of future growth, and the great Wall Street boom, which depended partly on activities that had very little real value.

"Two of" the engines? And what would be the other "powerful engines"? According to GDP: war. But is this really "growth"?  

Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that our bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by massive industrial output that ended up having little use. Ours was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.

Ours is a ponzi scheme, Harvard.

Where will new, real sources of growth come from? Wall Street is not likely to cure the nation's economic problems. Neither, obviously, is Detroit. Nor is Silicon Valley, at least not by itself. Well before the housing bubble burst, the big productivity gains brought about by the 1990s technology boom seemed to be petering out, which suggests that the Internet may not be able to fuel decades of economic growth in the way that the industrial inventions of the early 20th century did. Annual economic growth in the current decade, even excluding the dismal contributions that 2008 and 2009 will make to the average, has been the slowest of any decade since the 1930s.

Finance, nope...manufacturing, nope...infotech, nope...

So for the first time in more than 70 years, the epicenter of the American economy can be placed outside of California or New York or the industrial Midwest. It can be placed in Washington. Washington won't merely be given the task of pulling the economy out of the immediate crisis. It will also have to figure out how to put the American economy on a more sustainable path -- to help it achieve fast, broadly shared growth and do so without the benefit of a bubble. Obama said as much in his inauguration speech when he pledged to overhaul Washington's approach to education, health care, science and infrastructure, all in an effort to "lay a new foundation for growth."

This is ridiculous, and does not answer the question. If the question is, What will be the substantive basis for future growth, "Washington makework" is not even an answer, the alone a good answer. It's not even wrong.

Here's the crazy finale:

For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits -- that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy.

Where were so-called pessimists ever proven wrong, except on timetables? The "growth" pirates have only managed to extend their plunder grounds.

But now they reach the limits of the earth, and no spaceship delusion is going to take them further.On The economy needs to be green to be 'fixed' posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 9 Responses

jon says

This is why public works
or public investment or direct governmental construction or command and control or whatever you want to call it is the most constructive discussion on addressing global warming, in my humble opinion.  It's much more concrete, although i think environmental organizations shy away from it precisely because they're afraid of getting involved in theh details -- more wind, more solar, or what?  They probably want to avoid those kinds of debates, but those are exactly the kinds of debates we should be having, since it would educate various publics in the process.

Yes, it's part of the general timidity of mainstream environmentalism. They basically agree with the market imperative (they claim that's just political expediency, but this is false - they are actually true believers; that's how Geithner can openly avow that his loyalties are to private bankers and investors, not to the public, and provoke zero outrage among "progressives"; mainstream enviros are among these lemon socialists).

(Also, some of those involved in the debate stand to personally profit from c&t.)

That's why it's a cult mantra that the government must not "pick winners".

But we know by now, as an empirical fact, that the market will never pick anything but business as usual until it goes over the cliff. So to leave things to the market is de facto to pick that as the winner.

We also know what the winning ideas are, and they all involve decentralizing and ratcheting down the size and impact of all structures. Wall St has proven beyond any doubt that excessive size and interdependence are a clear and present danger to all health, stability, and resilience. This applies just as much to energy, environmental, social, and infrastructure issues.
No amount of tinkering within the framework of the monster is going to make a real difference to any real problem. That's why I fear much of this policy debate is scholastic. In theory either a carbon tax or c&t could significantly mitigate emissions. But my sense of "what's politically possible" tells me neither ever will in practice.

That's why I think, if we want real mitigation, then the best bet is the direct route of using the stimulus for investment in sustainability-seeking infrastructure and using existing law and regulatory structures to command emission reductions.

Is this politically difficult? Certainly no more so than seeking effective new legislation.

Maybe it would be less so. Why doesn't anyone even want to try and see if the people actually did give a new adminstration a mandate for real, rapid change?

As I asked elsewhere, why not find out if for once Shock and Awe can be used for a constructive purpose, against the parasites of disaster?

There's no longer any such thing as a disinterested, neutral position (if there ever was).

With apologies to Rush, "If you choose not to pick a winner you still have picked a winner."

   On Yes, carbon taxes are more transparent than trade system posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 14 Responses

jon

I think it's because c&t worked pretty well with SO2 and acid rain.

I don't remember exactly, but probably the UNFCCC looked at the Montreal Protocol as a model from the start, and the idea spread from there. On How awful does a bill have to get to lose your support? posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 32 Responses

baiting?

No evidence?

Um, didn't we just go through the real-life Warner-Lieberman experience, with permit giveaways and a grab-bag of goodies for coal and nukes (and I believe offsets and an escape valve as well if I recall correctly)?

I think support or opposition right there goes some way toward answering Gar's question.

And if the argument is that the next proposal will be much better, again we have the evidence so far of the relentless Appeasement imperative of this admin and these congress dwellers.

They gave away tax cuts and all sorts of concessions to get literally nothing (zero votes) in return, just insults. And now all they can talk about is further appeasement in the Senate.

Under those circumstances, no one should be optimistic that the next carbon bill is likely to be much better than as described in this post.

That's my evidence.

    On How awful does a bill have to get to lose your support? posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 32 Responses

Adam says

Of course, everyone is on board with using mandates to tackle these issues -- it's a completely banal observation to say that efficiency standards and transit investments are good things.

Yes, by now it is banal. But that doesn't prevent there existing enough reaction against this to effectively obstruct it so far.

I'm just as sick as you of the talk about mandates. Actually applying them is a different story.

This notion that we know how to fix climate change and we just have to do it is dangerously wrong. It also happens to be exactly what is underlying the new love affair with command and control.

The way I think we fix the cliamte crisis is by lowering emissions.

As for the love affair with command and control, the historical record tells me those who profit from denial and obstruction are simply dead-ending bunker-dwellers who will never compromise short of duress. I think dreaming of such compromise is doomed to be futile, and that appeasement does not work.

I also accept the urgency demanded by Hansen, Pachauri, and others. So if the idea is to wait for enough people to come around to reach a political critical mass where a good bill can be passed with bipartisan acclaim, I think that will simply take too long.

So it follows, if we really want effective mitigation, then C&C is our best hope. If that mean simply running over the opposition and leaving them as roadkill, so be it; we know damn well that's all they were ever willing to do.

I know this in itself won't help with the global compass of the crisis, and we still need something approaching a halfway decent carbon bill just to show China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, the GCC and other major emitters not currently encompassed within Kyoto goals that we're no longer a rogue nation here, that we're working at it, and that they should too.

So I do believe we need the dual legislative/administrative track. But I think legislation, in the short run, will be more about symbolism than real, effective action. In the short run, only C&C can have real teeth.

By now, the short run is all we have.

We don't need any new breakthroughs in technology to make massive emissions reductions. That's a different thing entirely than not needing technological progress.

"Breakthroughs" is what I meant. I don't deny there's some fine-tuning to be done.

I was thinking more of those, including some ostensibly within the community, who insist that we need to seek breakthroughs, and implicitly say we shouldn't do much else until we find them.
On Why the rush to defend this not-so-embattled style of legislation? posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 13 Responses

Carbon Command

CarbCom? :)

Hansen and Romm and others have said they think even more important than instituting a carbon price is establishing a regulatory ban on any new coal plants without CCS (i.e., any new coal plants).

Now that's a Command which should be issued, a Control which should be imposed!

(On the other hand, the aggrofuel mandates were a horrific mistake and need to be rescinded. But that doesn't look like happening anytime soon. They want to keep digging that hole deeper.)

Darrell says,

To use the World War II analogy, Roosevelt didn't seek to create market incentives for auto companies to build tanks. There was no time to waste; he just directed that they do it.

To be fair, FDR didn't need to create incentives - the war had already created a boundless market, since the army was going to snap up every tank they could churn out. (I point that out because that's probably what the enemy would reply, and since people like this FDR-Big Auto-tank example, they should be prepared for that response.)

But your basic point is right on - this is a war-level crisis, much more than just the "moral equivalent", and strong, fast action is needed.

All the requisite laws are in place already; just like with renewable energy tech, we don't need anything new.

We just need to rigorously enforce the laws we have.

If someone in power had the courage to do that, that's all we'd need to deal with carbon.  On Why the rush to defend this not-so-embattled style of legislation? posted 10 months ago 13 Responses

Let me stress

I wasn't trying to "defend" PETA or the tactic. I have no problem with it and see no need for a defense.

In comparing it to corporate advertising, "the other guy does it", I was just wondering if there were any of those here who are full of moral dudgeon wherever the profit motive is not involved, but are willing to excuse anything done in the pursuit of profit.

That is, those whose priorities are 180 degrees wrong. There's all too many of those in America.On Did NBC squash PETA corn-porn? posted 10 months ago 44 Responses

effective?

Well, it certainly has garnered lots of publicity (for example, AOL was just now leading off with it on the welcome page).

So if that was the goal, it worked. As for convincing the undecided, probably not so much.

Peak Oilers love Oily Cassandra (Grist story here: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/7/17111/15550), or at least I do :), but I doubt it's done much to spread the word among the uninitiated.

More like USO, to fire up the troops.

@ latenac: Owning a hummer or cutting emissions are serious actions. Core actions touch on principle, and there you're right, "the other guy does it" is no defense.

But here we're just talking about tactics.

(I.e., I haven't heard that PETA ever embraced the sort of feminism which condemns this sort of thing. As for what kind of internal disputes over it they may have among individual activists, I have no idea.)On Did NBC squash PETA corn-porn? posted 10 months ago 44 Responses

That reminds me

of how the national public schools' science teachers' organization (I forget the real name) rejected a donation of thousands of Inconvenient Truth books and dvds on the grounds they didn't want to get political (by which they meant, of course, that they'd already been bought by corporate interests and were already deploying corporate-friendly teaching materials).

Is there any alleged public agency which hasn't been captured?On Utah ORV trail system a poor model posted 10 months ago 24 Responses

SUVs -> uranium plunder

This is part of the dreadful chain reaction:

American SUVs need oil; that oil needs to be imported; Canada is the #1 importer; the horrific tar sands are a growing part of Canadian exports; refining the sands requires prodigious amounts of Canada's dwindling natural gas supply (not to mention the water); so Canadian natural gas and therefore electricity prices surge (while they even have to import LNG, since so much of their native gas goes to process oil for American hummers); and since so much gas has been diverted to the tar sands, electricity generation faces a supply crunch; so they're turning to a nuclear boom; so they need to mine ever-more uranium (whose price also surges, encouraging further exploration, ravage, and despoiling of the natives).On Seventy percent of world's uranium lies under native lands posted 10 months ago 9 Responses

I wonder

Given the record of the timber, mining, drilling, grazing industries where it comes to the public lands, how they get onto the land and then ferociously fight to change it into their own de facto private property, why does everyone assume that, if a cap-and-trade was enacted, industry wouldn't turn around and try to gut the cap afterward, while ferociously defending their now-enshrined "property right" to pollute?

I know, if I were a coal-industry strategist, and I became convinced some sort of "mandatory" carbon policy was inevitable, then I'd be thinking along the lines, Let's get as weak and industry-friendly a c&t policy as we can, then shortly afterward start howling about how we can't meet the burdens, it'll drive us out of business, the economy's too lousy, the sky is falling etc..etc.., and get the (probably already anemic) cap further weakened into meaninglessness.

And meanwhile they'd still have the "asset", they'd still have the rationed property right (they could probably also use the system vs. the entry of new, perhaps putatively less-emitting competitors).

I know there are also ways to game a carbon tax, or direct regulatory controls*, but it just seems like a c&t is crying out to be manipulated.

*Why is there so little talk of replicating Bush's dual legislative-administrative assault tactic? E.g., the supreme court has already said the EPA can regulate CO2. So why not, alongside whatever legislative initiative they come up with, also draw up plans threatening to essentially shut down large-scale emitters on direct regulatory authority? Not that they'd even have to be dead serious about it - the threat itself, that if we don't get a real carbon bill in congress, we might have to go the route of bureaucratic decree, should be a salutary brace of chilling wind to the obstructionists.      On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

vandals

I'm not against ORVs or their users on principle.

I am. These disgusting machines represent pure aggression vs. both the natural and social environment.

They're purely destructive of every element of the ecosystem - soil, water, air, biodiversity.

And they are incompatible with every real recreational use of the land. They are directly physically aggressive in any space, and the nazi noise reverberates for miles.

These violent effects are intentional on the part of those who deploy these weapons. They hate nature, they hate peace and quiet, they hate everything which is not being actively destroyed, since they live only to destroy.

These hominids are simply existentially violent and destructive. They are vandals, "vermin on machines" as they were referred to in The Road Warrior.

And there is most definitely nothing "elitist" about these truths. On the contrary, every poll shows overwhelmingly that Americans don't want these things on their public lands, in their national parks. The preferred Bush admin frame, that it's "preservation vs. recreation", is a lie.

On the contrary, the reality is that it's preservation and the recreation of the vast majority vs. a miniscule, violent special-interest minority.

(And BTW, people need to stop referring to this carnage as a form of "recreation". It's vandalism, being perpetrated by vandals, plain and simple.)

The people want and have the right to the peaceful enjoyment of their public lands without being assaulted by mechanized huns.On Utah ORV trail system a poor model posted 10 months ago 24 Responses

MSM and the economics

I've long considered it downright bizarre that the MSM seems to accept the IPCC's projection of effects yet still considers there to be something to be debated regarding the economics.

It seems to me, even if we didn't have strong evidence that the economics of comprehensive mitigation efforts:

1. wouldn't be overly expensive in themselves (in the short run);
   
2. would generate great economic value in themselves (in the longer run);
   
3. would forestall the overwhelming costs of doing nothing;

Yet the MSM doesn't draw this conclusion. For them it's just to blandly say, that's one element of the story we're done with, let's fiddle around with the next.

I often think of how Gene Shoemaker said it was his hunch that we'd detect an asteroid which was definitely going to hit Earth in 10,000 years, and that 9950 years would pass before anyone would even start to talk seriously about maybe trying to do something about it.

Of course for man today and the climate crisis it's more like 9990+, and still nothing done.
On Media's 'decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress' posted 10 months ago 5 Responses

It doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all...

...or one term for all audiences.

I think "the climate crisis" is as good as it gets - powerful and true - for general audiences and non-scholarly writing, while "climate change" is better for more scholarly or scientific venues or writing (not because it's more accurate than "crisis", but because it denotes rather than connotes, which is probably the scientists' preference).On 'Climate change,' 'global warming,' 'climate chaos' -- what terminology fits best? posted 10 months, 1 week ago 34 Responses

self-imposed shackles

This is yet another cautionary tale about bringing a pillow to a knife fight, as all of these formal "debates" have been.

Why would you agree to a contest which intrinsically favors manipulation and demagoguery if you're not willing to embrace those tactics yourself?

Principle is the great thing in life; indeed it's one of only a handful of things which can make us human, and make life worth living.

But where it comes to tactics, the watchword is flexibility and resilience. Otherwise you shackle yourself, especially where up against those who have no such scruples.

Engaging in formal debate looks like a losing propositon, since

1. the format implicitly equalizes the morality and conceptual or factual correctitude of "both sides",

2. it then in practice reduces these to mere procedural point-scoring, which

3. gives the advantage to the facile over the complex, the glib over the nuanced, the demagogic over the profound, the emotionally pleasing over the truthful. In other words, it does all the same things normal polemical expression does, but the "debate format" gives it this fraudulent patina of objectivity and sincere truth-seeking.

Scientists usually are not well-suited for this kind of thing since their whole culture (and probably the temperament which sent them into science in the first place) wants to exalt reason, and wants to believe rationality is a major mover in the world at large, when this just isn't true.

They're still captive to the Enlightenment Myth, that people care about reason and only need rational education to be made to think and act rationally.

But this is not the case, which is why on the whole scientists are probably especially ill-suited to engage in debate with professional liars.      On The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates posted 10 months, 1 week ago 7 Responses

Hi Sean,

I wasn't really meaning to criticize you personally for what you wrote, but what you wrote is a sore point for me.

I guess detractors would call me a "luddite", but I don't think having the money to fly around the world means a damn thing.

On the contrary, there's the evident fact that flying all over the place has not lifted vermin like Bush or Palin out of the cesspool into which they were born one bit.

The reason I pointed out Thoreau (whom I'd happily pick over any of this globalist scum) is to point out how spirit and art and intellect have nothing to do with gutter material measures like miles flown. On Slate encourages local dating for green's sake posted 1 year, 1 month ago 13 Responses

Sam's questions

A modification as defined under the Clean Air Act is an increase in any air pollutant or regulated contaminant, pure and simple. Perhaps we're already dealing with BACT or something but it sounds mysterious, not clear.

It's referring to infrastructure modifications. The original idea back in the 70s was that to force every existing polluter to install new pollution reduction equipment would be too draconian. But since existing plants would eventually have to be upgraded or replaced, it would be logical to require the anti-pollution installation then. This was the concept of New Source Review.

The Bush admin has tried to gut this in many ways. The case in question here involves accounting tricks - allowing a method of measuring emissions increases which wouldn't trigger NSR (whose threshhold has already been severely undermined.)

Then the second part of the justification (in the post) says that the operator shouldn't have to pay for it. Do us taxpayers pay for it or what?  Does the operator just get off Scott-free?

Nobody would pay for it, since it wouldn't be done at all. (Though they also try to hedge their bets here - the admin has also sought ways to get PUCs to allow utilities to raise rates to make consumers pay for any NSR installations which do have to be undertaken.)On Oversight chair warns Bush administration against attempting to weaken the Clean Air Act posted 1 year, 1 month ago 2 Responses

Strange how...

...these criminals understand the concept of "property" only where it's private.

McCain has long opposed the Clinton administration's roadless rule, arguing that decisions about public lands should be made by locals.  During his 2000 run for the presidency, before President Clinton had even finalized the rule, McCain was campaigning to repeal it: "The idea that Washington knows best and that local residents cannot be trusted to do what's right in their own backyard is the epitome of federal arrogance."

It seems he's too stupid to understand the concept of public property, and that the "local" yahoos have no more prerogative regarding it than anyone else anywhere in America.

Fine - let's apply the Mccain standard to all those houses he claims to "own". Let his beloved locals decide what's best for that property. Surely they shouldn't be hamstrung "in their own backyard" by his absentee "arrogance". On Where the presidential candidates stand on public-lands issues posted 1 year, 1 month ago 27 Responses

Someone tell the WSJ...

"That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress," writes the editorial board.

Um, yeah, and Congress exercised that purview when it passed the CAA. Obama's just saying he'll enforce it, where Bush refused.On A roundup of environmental news from the presidential race posted 1 year, 1 month ago 1 Response

no problem at all

"He said changes to the climate were "happening much quicker than we anticipated or even feared a few years ago" and it was "right to step up the pace"."
This seems to be the common mantra these days among those who wish to use AGW as the excuse for the next huge increase in government and taxation.

Of course there is only a single data point to justify the "happening much quicker" mantra; and that is the Arctic meltoff of 2007.  All other data say that climate is changing much more slowly that we feared a few years ago.

No, the argument is, if there is no problem, don't fix it.

As it stands, the only problem is that we will eventually run out of fossil fuels, and the only thing that we need to do to fix it is to start a consistent and even paced program of building nuclear reactors.

But according to my data points - that when I went to the gas station they had gas, and when I flick the switch the lights come on - we're not running out of energy. So why would we need more nukes?
"If there is no problem, don't fix it."

[Just using Borzoi logic, which would apply even if he were telling the truth about the climate change data points, which of course he's not.]On European Union sticks by GHG plan, United Kingdom goes for 80 percent cut posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

Adding to..

..Colin's quote from Davis, another reason the Depression analogy is imperfect (i.e. why we're in much worse shape today) is that back then, however busted the economy was, the resource base was intact.

Today oil, soil, metals, are all depleted. It's like the difference between having your car stolen but getting it back in one piece, as they eventually did back then, as opposed to getting it back, but it's totalled.

That's what we face now.  On Obama cannot politically afford to take the kind of bold green stances enviros are hungry for posted 1 year, 1 month ago 19 Responses

The evils of imbalance

This is a prime example of why I've long believed large size and wealth concentration, an abyss of inequality, are evils in themselves.

Even leaving bad intent out of it, just the inertia of large wealth and power concentrations tends toward greed, capture, and corruption. The omnipresent temptation to take a path which is both easier and more lucrative is a clear and present danger to the integrity of anyone who's not a saint.

You could say large concentrations, of their own accord, seek to become larger. The will to power is always operative even where people aren't consciously going Mwaa-hah-hah and rubbing their hands in crapulent anticipation.

We should look at this in terms of inherent imbalance, instability. A chasm of inequality and a mountain of concentration destabilize the economy, politics, and society.

As for the financial system vis the economy at large (to anticipate the next post), what's to me the obvious confluence is that finance is just the distillation of the general debt psychosis. The physical economy too is based on exponential debt and exponential growth, and is in fact just as untenable a structure, teetering just as precariously, as the finance Tower.

Nobody in any business has any experience of staying within his means. Everyone knows only how to pay with funny money, "credit", and pretend everything will be straightened out in some vague future which is never really supposed to come. It's musical chairs where there are infinitely more players than chairs, but everyone assumes the music will never in fact stop.

In recent months I've often come across the iceberg metaphor - that the travails of finance are just the currently most visible portion of a looming cataclysmic margin call which will resound across the entire economy, but which cannot be answered. That Wall St's ailment will spread to Main St, that credit freezing up will force the contraction of real-economy business activity, is a possibility, but I think it's secondary to the underlying untenability of the general macroeconomic debt exponent, whose curve can only get so steep before gravity forces it to fall back upon itself, like a breaking tsunami.

This will be the mother of all debt implosions. On Deregulation and inequality are bad for both the economy and the environment posted 1 year, 1 month ago 15 Responses

I guess it does.

These guys never seem to learn. This offensive seeking to privatize public discourse, by rendering brand names and even product types sacrosanct, is nothing new.

But as we saw with the McLibel case and the veggie libel law flap with Oprah, the moment cases like this surface on the media radar it's a PR disaster for the corporate thugs.

What should be needless to say, at least in America (though not in Britain, where mcdonald's technically "won" the Mclibel case) we have the 1st amendment. But these kinds of laws and lawsuits are an attempted end-run around that. And with all the right-wing judges who have been planted like explosive charges over the last 25+ years, the goons can sometimes make legal if not PR headway.

Right now in NJ we have an outrageous case, where the trial court and the initial review court have upheld a municipal law which allows businesses to display any kind of inflated thing, but which forbids any "disruptive" inflations being used as political speech. (In this case, a union was fined for putting up a giant inflated rat at a protest. They're appealing, of course.)On Nestle flexes its muscles at Miami water utility posted 1 year, 1 month ago 3 Responses

prices

But if the world goes into a severe recession, well, what's wrong with predicting $20 per barrel?  You have a problem with that number?

Uh, yeah.

Exploration and new production costs are already imposing a de facto price floor of >$70, a number expected to increase significantly by 2012.

The credit crunch is already affecting the industry, with small explorers becoming untenable and big producers scaling back exploration plans.
That's on account of both the general freeze as well as investors believing in particular that the recession will depress energy consumption and revenues, thus causing the flight from oil futures and succeeding price declines.
If this goes further into a severe recession, where are they going to borrow the money?

And as new discovery and production is retarded, even as existing giant fields deplete, the supply crunch will increasingly override demand destruction (which has already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, at least in the West).

As for what OPEC's going to do at their emergency November meeting, that's a wild card. On the one hand you have the price hawks Iran and Venezuela demanding production cuts to support a >$100 price, and at September's meeting OPEC agreed in principle to do this.
But the Saudis were immediately intransigent, informally saying they were going to disregard cut commitments they had just made.

Saudi behavior is difficult to figure out since it depends upon the real status of their reserves, which is a state secret.
But given their increasing domestic consumption, they seem to feel they can maintain foreign revenues only by keeping output high. This does put downward pressure on prices, which is harmful to the smaller OPEC producers.

That's why we're starting to hear talk that OPEC itself is on the verge of breaking up.

So what does all this mean? Exactly what Peak Oil theory predicts - price volatility. In the short run there are plenty of factors pushing prices up and down.

But the long-run trend is clear. We have plateaued global production and increasing exploration and new production costs, to bring oil of ever-lower quality to market. We have demand destruction running up against the wall of diminishing returns.

Add to that the recession and credit crunch. Whether or not (and how much) this is the result of Peak Oil itself is a matter of dispute, but at any rate this is aggravating those Peak Oil phenomena.

So, getting back to the beginning, while prices can be expected to remain volatile, they're certainly not going much below $70 for any significant length of time, and the overall longer-term trend will remain upward.  On Will we see $3 gasoline before $5? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 11 Responses

Tower of Babel

It's always the same thing with these people. They'll never stop until the earth is a sterile cinder. Intensification ("growth") and technology keep knotting ever more intractable problems, and the answer is always greater intensification and more technology. Keep building the Tower ever taller, ever more top heavy. Keep blowing the technology bubble ever more expansively and thinly. Make everything as bad as you can and exploit it as ruthlessly as you can, unto the end.

They would certainly rather see everything and everyone destroyed than ever accept an organized program of material descent and technological devolution.

Disaster capitalism is truly the final and most violent phase of capitalism.

Here's another article on this ghoulish campaign by the same author.On With little oversight, BP, Chevron, ADM, and Cargill cook up next-gen biofuels posted 1 year, 1 month ago 16 Responses

correction

Where I said "balances budget" I should've said doesn't incur debt.

I'm sure lots of heavily indebted entities have balanced books.On Municipal property assessment financing for solar and energy efficiency posted 1 year, 1 month ago 14 Responses

technology, guilt, etc.

vakibs - I agree that it's man's own failings which lie at the heart of every manmade problem, which by now is every problem.

But I do not agree that this renders technology innocent. While this is probably not the place to go into detail with my philosophy of technology, I will say that tech has an intrinsic inertia which drives it toward destruction and totalitarianism, regardless of the good or bad faith of governments, corporations, and the people in general.

While nuclear power doesn't cause high consumption or politico-economic centralization, it enables the first and intensifies the second. It helps confirm both.

Where it comes to technology and markets, I regard the two as inextricable. Where you have a technology involving massive capital, a large work force, vastly ramified logistics, tremendous infrastructure, elephantine corporations, and bloated government, you can't separate it from its market nimbus any more than you can separate a star from the space-time it bends.

(BTW, in the past I've referred to size itself as an evil, and didn't find much agreement. I wonder, now that we keep hearing the funereal chant "too big to fail", and the bells tolling failure anyway, the dirge "too big to prop up", how many people are having second thoughts.)

I didn't use "nukes" this time, though I must say, maybe I'm jaded, but I would never  consider "nuke" or "dinosaur" to be excessive rhetoric.

Re Jon's "one note song":

It's a good song, and I'd sing it deeper - both food and energy are such critical sectors, not only for normal consumption, but for socioeconomic and political stability and national security, that it's reckless and stupid to leave such strategic terrain in the hands of sociopathic corporations.
That's like entrusting your health to a doctor who openly says, as his professional oath, that he cares nothing for your health, only his fee. So it is with corporations and their shareholder profit mandate, the enshrined corporate principle.

So it seems both obvious in principle, and is now being confirmed in practice (as it's been confirmed so many times before), that the community must either own outright or intensively oversee and regulate such critical elements of the economy, which are really core organs of society.     On Nuclear proponents are, like, totally John Galt posted 1 year, 1 month ago 43 Responses

What's the deal...

..with McFossil always almost boasting about doing what he's told?

We have this ANWAR example. Last spring, in explaining his flip-flop on offshore drilling, he openly said he now does whatever oil executives tell him. If I recall correctly he originally said he'd give Greenspan absolute obedience on economic matters.

For that matter, when he "suspended" his campaign and made his half-assed descent upon Washington to crash the ransom planning, he didn't seem to have had any idea what he advocated there either until the House republicans told him what to advocate.

What the hell kind of chief executive candidate is this?On Can you see Russia from behind that skirt? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 2 Responses

gonzodon

I think she was probably referring to environmental issues in general, using the ozone hole as an example because that was her personal wake-up call.
Just like I might use habitat destruction and how it devastates wildlife (my entree to environmental concerns).On Ingrid Jackson's question about climate change put candidates on the spot posted 1 year, 1 month ago 8 Responses

No, not like France...

Of course they do want nationalization of the costs - the loan guarantees, the insurance program, letting utilities jack up prices for current ratepayers to pay for any future reactor costs, no doubt the security costs involved in thousands of waste transports to god knows how many Yuccas, and don't forget oil subsidies (oil being heavily involved in uranium extraction and transports, plant construction etc.)...

Yeah, they want to nationalize all that. But otherwise they're of course free marketeers, and we need to preserve fat profits for the utilities and mining companies. That part has to stay private; otherwise, what's the point of nukes?

Friends of the Earth said it best - what nuke supporters want is what they've always had to have - a "preeemptive bailout for the nuclear industry".   On McCain mystified by Obama's concerns over nuclear posted 1 year, 1 month ago 28 Responses

It's unfortunate

that activists often feel they need to start from a diminished, already-compromised position and level of expectation in order to accomplish anything. When you start out already defeated in spirit, it's pretty much inevitable you'll be defeated in action. how does the adage go, "most battles are won before they're fought"?

The results are then ordained - an anodyne rearguard action which at best delays the defeat, but which has already implicitly conceded it.

I just got an e-mail from the Sierra Club advertising a collaboration between Carl Pope and Boone Pickens trumpeting Boone's natural gas scam.
http://action.pickensplan.com/rally

That's a good example - they're so grateful that someone, anyone who's an erstwhile enemy nabob has paid any kind of lip service to renewables that they'll collaborate in the greenwash, that Boone really cares about wind and about the fatuous "energy independence" notion, and that the absurd idea we're going to keep the "happy motoring utopia"(Kunstler) going on compressed natural gas is anything more than a utopian haze itself, really intended to accomplish nothing but big profits for a few bigshots.

(Although, even as Pope hails Boone as a born-again activist, Boone's investors are evidently having second thoughts:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&refer ...

According to this, 15% of the investors in Boone's hedge fund may want their money back.

If the point of the Boone gambit is to capitalize on the meme that America is on the verge of a natural gas production renaissance on account of shale gas, then perhaps the reason investors are getting nervous is that cracks are appearing in this cornucopian projection, as discussed here:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46776)On Christine MacDonald on Big Green NGOs and soy expansion in Brazil posted 1 year, 1 month ago 2 Responses

James Kunstler....

...is expecting pirate raids on the West coast during the dark times of the Long Emergency.

Here's hoping they hit places like Malibu!

Arrrrr!On Overfishing drove Somali fishers to piracy posted 1 year, 1 month ago 2 Responses

psychological benefits

Yeah! We shouldn't need to pay the ransom either, since this should lift us out of our "mental recession." On The offshore drilling moratorium lapses today posted 1 year, 1 month ago 5 Responses

typo

Climate expert Terry Barker fears that governments are underestimating climate risks just as they underestimated climate risks, and says that massive investment is needed to reduce those risks.

Should that second "climate" be "economic" or "credit" or "debt" or something?

Great stuff, all of it. I especially like Johnson's take on the fraudulence of the military-industrial complex as the best job generator. Has anyone done a study comparing the ratio of federal spending to job creation in various Keynesian scenarios vs. the military and weapons procurement?On The financial crisis, the bailout, and green investment posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

Yup

* Inducing an additional 218,000 to 242,000 jobs in the non-nuclear industries throughout the country.

It's trickle-down everywhere you look with these people.

Today I got an e-mail announcing FOE's new anti-nuke campaign, focusing on the obscene loan guarantees, which they refer to as a "preemptive bailout" of this doddering, unviable, welfare-guzzling industry.

Good stuff. On Where does McCain get his claim that nuclear will create 700,000 jobs? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 3 Responses

What is to be done....

The connection is basically as you already said.

(Well, that's the proximate cause, though any number of things could've precipitated the crisis, and I imagine as things work out and the historians get to work on it, lots of other things will be found or asserted to have played their part.)

As for using federal money for a Keynesian spending program on infrastructure (efficiency and renewables being the best such investment imaginable) instead of to boost the manic-depressive psychology of Wall Street, I fail to see how any sane, rational person wouldn't see the infinitely superior wisdom in that, even if it might entail some short-to-middle term pain and even fear.

Sanity? Reason? Of course, that rules it out from Washington considerations. That a Keynesian response is a non-starter is one area where there really is almost no light between Reps and Dems.

(Let's not forget the strange coincidence that one of the milestones in creating this disaster, the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagal, was a coproduction of Phil Gramm and Robert Rubin, now top economic advisers to Mccain and Obama respectively.)

At a structural (and conceptual - since "psychology" is so important in all this) level, targeting the housing issue directly would be directly addressing the root problem, whereas applying an astronomically expensive balm to soothe Wall St's psyche is only trying to treat the symptoms far on down the chain.

Now, this chain is linked into a circle, and no part of it can be allowed to break completely.
But, if we're to be really serious about restoring the integrity of the entire chain, it would be best to put the main effort into strengthening the fundamental link, and housing is the fundamental involved here - economically, socially, and philosophically.   On Could reducing homeowner costs through efficiency help meliorate the housing crisis? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 14 Responses

Well Bob and David,

...if you think that's the real danger in this country, and not Blackwater....On Gallup polls indicate that Republicans are less likely to recognize global warming posted 1 year, 2 months ago 52 Responses

For more info

Here's a link to several posts on the subject at Joe Romm's Climate Progress.On Is the American Physical Society a crack in the climate change consensus? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 3 Responses

marketing a concept

From an environmentalist point of view, is the point of this car to make electric cars in general look more sexy?

I ask because, taken by themselves, attributes such as "0-60 in four seconds, tops out at 130 mph" are not only frivolous and unnecessary, but the lust for this sort of conspicuous consumption and material thrill-seeking is a big part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

So I guess the constructive way to look at this is to showcase luxuries like these as a way to generate a more favorable view of the generic concept, "electric car".  On Tesla profile in New Scientist posted 1 year, 2 months ago 4 Responses

schizophrenia

"What do I do? What do I do?

If I say global warming is real, that might further hurt our SUV sales!

But I'm supposed to be here promoting the Volt! And if I say global warming's not real, I might hurt that!

What do I do? What's our business model again? I sure hope the government bails us out!

Free market! Free market!

Hummers! Volt!

What do I do?...."

(Sound of head exploding, balance sheet imploding.)On Touting the Volt, GM exec denies anthropogenic climate change posted 1 year, 2 months ago 9 Responses

This is pretty telling.

From the NYT editorial blog:

September 16, 2008,  3:05 pm
Hey, How Hard Is It to Be President?
By The Editorial Board

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina -- a major player in the McCain-Palin campaign -- was asked on a KTRS Radio program in St. Louis whether Sarah Palin had the experience to run a major company like H.P.

Her answer: "No, I don't. But you know what? That's not what she's running for."

Of course, the McCain campaign insists that Governor Palin would be ready to step in as president should anything happen to him.

Running a company, it seems, is hard.

Leading a nation of 300 million people, with a budget of around $3 trillion, a couple of major wars going on, and the capacity to blow up the planet. Well, that's doable.

The same should be true of a VP as "energy czar".

[That's funny - don't we already have a Department and Secretary of Energy? This is a stark example of how a mccain admin would be Republican business as usual - bypassing the career experts, doing an end run around established government process, including regulatory process, throwing mud on stable government in general.
Also, am I the only one who's unnerved by the steady popularity in this country for seeking out a "czar", with all the authoritarian desires that term implies, for every problem, real or perceived? This at least is not a Rep vs. Dem issue - I recall czar-lust under Clinton as well. Rather, it bespeaks an impatience with, perhaps an exhaustion by, normal, stable government, and the dream of a man on horseback (or in this case yahoo on a snowmobile) sweeping that all away.

Clarification - I said it's not an intrinsically partisan issue, but the demagogy, irresponsible executive power, and desperation for simple answers involved does inherently favor the Rep agenda.

Still, it's possible the "energy czar" talk is just talk, to reinforce for the rubes this absurd lie that Palin know anything about energy or anything else, or that she has any qualifications at all. Not to mention the lie we keep getting, that she "took on Big Oil", as if there was some difference in policy principle, when all it was was a squabble over the loot.]  

Fiorina says elsewhere that Mccain too wouldn't be able to run a big company. (She ought to know - she was incompetent at it as well.)On GOP VP candidate says she'd be in charge of McCain's energy policy posted 1 year, 2 months ago 6 Responses

energy and politics

And he keeps insisting that it's not particularly political. "Energy is easy," he says.

Then again, Al Gore (who apparently is also in the room) asked him directly about what's blocking this stuff in Congress, and he basically dodged. "Partisanship," blah blah.

There's a word, Jeff. It starts with an R. Try saying it!

It shouldn't be political (Hansen has been saying the same thing).

But the Reps politicize this for the same reason they politicize everything else: by now all they represent, all they are, is greed, violence, and nihilism. Burn Baby Burn.
So the only way they can win elections is by turning everything into a political wedge issue. Everything is directly part of or adjunct to the culture wars.

Thus drilling and AGW holocaust denial have a richer significance than being "just" energy or environmental issues. They go to the core of a furious, mindless, really childish reaction to the end of this fat, arrogant, globally belligerent way of life their kind has become so used to. This is "reaction" in its purest form.

So nothing will be dealt with on its merits. Otherwise we'd long ago have shifted to a renewables-based grid and electrified mass transit as the energy/transportation base, and installed a rigorous carbon price, which by now we'd hardly even need. On Immelt: yay RPS! posted 1 year, 2 months ago 3 Responses

nader

My take on Nader is that if he would've started organizing his own party from the ground up say, back in the 80s, and focused for many years on building and publicizing that organization, by this decade perhaps he'd really have a viable 3rd party.

But he didn't want to do all that drudge work, and have that much patience for that many years, so he just started going off on these quixotic "campaigns" based only on personal charisma and reputation. These have just been ego-trips.On Ralph Nader criticizes Obama and McCain for not standing strong against offshore drilling posted 1 year, 2 months ago 19 Responses

I don't quite follow this part

Net metering

For small renewable generators that operate on the premises of a power consumer, power companies allow the customer to "run their meter backwards," crediting the customer for the full retail cost of the electricity they generate on premises. While this may appear to be simple and fair compensation to the customer/owners of the generator, the (hidden) subsidy for net metering comes from other power users who compensate the power utility for lost profits from the sale of electricity to those self-generating customers. Another limitation of net metering is the loss of revenue for over-sizing the on-site generator and overproducing clean electricity above and beyond usage on-site.

I thought running the meter backwards is when the on-site renewable generator is running a surplus and the utility buys that electricity (crediting the customer vs. his elctricity bill), as they are required by law to do here in NJ and in some other states.

I hadn't heard before of the green tags. That sounds like carbon offsets - can be moderately beneficial if done right, but isn't going to be a major part of the solution, and can easily be abused.On Renewable energy promotion policies: non-transparent or hidden posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

GMO

jonas:

It's highly romantic and pre-scientific to believe that there's an inherent difference between the cumbersome and slow process of cross-breeding in order to achieve a very precise target (e.g. drought tolerance), and speeding things up by cutting out the unnecessary labor and achieving the same desired target at once.

Just to add to what zegg and permiewriter said, traditional breeding, as I already said, must involve crossing actual creatures who are naturally crossable.

But in a laboratory any manner of monstrosity can be attempted. Didn't they synthesize glow-in-the-dark rabbits or something?

If you don't understand how something like that is qualitatively different, is, yes, unnatural, then that's obviously an irreducible philosophical chasm.

BTW, not long ago, in another thread, weren't you crowing about a breakthrough in drought tolerance which you said had nothing to do with GMOs?

And you say it again here:

By the way, one last point: you don't really need GMOs any longer to achieve great goals (drought tolerance, salt tolerance, cold tolerance, pest-tolerance, etc...).

Modern rapid genomic screening techniques allow you to breed plants the "traditional" way (your "melding of natural gene complexes") and achieve these goals.

You literally speed up what farmers have been doing all along. And you don't have to target and change a single gene. You just breed at a hyper-fast rate, in a virtual environment, and then you go real world. A non-GMO crop with specific qualities is the result.

If this is true, then that completely strips away any rationale, however tenuous, for the very existence of GMOs. Therefore that they still do exist is all the more monstrous a crime.On The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

vakibs

It doesn't matter what the title (which by the way is added by the site editors, not the author) says. Read the piece.

"Coast to coast", "the hands of women and immigrants, the hands of fourth-generation farm kids, the hands of college graduates and former farmworkers-turned-farmers", "the young farmers now emerging seek to reclaim, restore, and resettle not only the deserted rural towns of America, but also to revive the fabric of urban life with markets, gardens, bees, corn patches and waterways".

Sure sounds like America to me.

Beyond that, the mainfesto, as Jonas but not you recognized, clearly presupposes a 1st world democracy.

Next time read more than just the title.  On The key political, economic, and cultural needs of young farmers posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

This bogus talking point:

Humans have been genetically modifying crops and animals for thousands of years. Nowadays, we have simply found a method to do it more precisely, rapidly, and with greater success.

must be smashed wherever we see it.

There is no comparison between the gradual art of plant and animal breeding, working with actual specimens over, as is said here "thousands of years", and the direct laboratory manipulation of the genetic code itself.

The former process attempts to meld natural gene complexes, while the latter really wants to eradicate genetic complexity in favor of targeted instrumentalism. (For an analogy, think of the difference between the natural nutrition complex in a fruit or vegetable, vs. a lump of sterile processed food "fortified" with some synthetic vitamin.) This is in fact impossible, but as a matter of ideology, not science, they dogmatize that it is, and that it's a lie doesn't matter because it serves to maximize profit and power concentration.

We advocates of the freedom and integrity of the genome are not "science-averse", on the contrary we oppose the abuse of science, tactical science and technology used in a predatory manner, and pseudo-scientific lies injected into the public discourse for the sake of power and profit.

BTW Jonas, since you say you believe there's nothing new about GMOs, I assume you don't believe they should receive patents.   On The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

hmmm,

Quite a day to be discussing regulation and "the continuing financial viability of the firm selected".

The enthusiasm for unregulated markets in the last 30 years of American public policy has obscured how large pieces of infrastructure get built. Unregulated markets, to work according to their ideal, require economic actors to be able to create competing offers which are judged by consumers or buyers according to the total value they represent. Infrastructure, by its nature, involves building structures so massive that competition is considered economically inefficient, if not socially undesirable (two roads or bridges that "compete" with each other would be an eyesore and end up being much more expensive for society).

What's been especially obscured by this lying Orwellian "free" market concept is how the government picked the automobile and gasoline as oil's primary use as THE industrial winners of the 20th century, and how an automobile-dictated infrastructure followed inexorably from that.

Before we even reach the concept of roads and bridges competing with one another, we've already elided how the policy choice was made to lock us into all these roads and bridges for the personal automobile in the first place.

Now we have the automobile, this infrastructure which appends from it, and the suburban sprawl which appends from both.

Which leads us back to the other massive winner-picking folly of the government, unquestioned and overwhelming any issue of regulation or deregulation, which are mere details - the boosting of "home ownership" at all costs.

What was the point of that supposed to be, social and economic stability or something?

Yeah - it's working out really stably nowadays.  On How do we build (energy) infrastructure? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 2 Responses

GMO science and recklessness

And guess what? The mapping of the human genome revealed that the GMO giants got the science wrong: the relationship between organisms and individual genes is much more complex and mysterious than researchers originally thought. And that, Kimbrell says in this interview, helps explain why after 25 years of R&D, the GMO industry has only managed to create a couple of viable traits.

There's another example of how rampant scientific ignorance is in America.

Among GMO supporters, even the allegedly well-educated often make an argument along the lines of, "They just take one gene out and/or insert a new gene, to achieve a well-calibrated precision effect, so what harms could it cause?"

I don't know how often this is true ignorance and how often it's intentional lying, but either way it suppresses the truth that most if not all traits are determined by a bundle of genes working in synergy, and most if not all genes contribute to many traits and have an effect on many other genes. So it defies believability that genetic modification is some sort of smart bomb achieving a precision effect. On the contrary it is carpet bombing a vast area to try to hit a small target, with effects which can only be guessed at.

It's a radical repudiation of the precautionary principle, which is why support for it is mutually exclusive with environmentalism.

[BTW Tom - you say you only started farming (and I assume writing about it) in 2004? I had assumed you'd been doing it for much longer. That gives me some hope that it may not be too late for me to become at least passably competent at it.]  On The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

fun stuff

From From the Wilderness:

One audience member elicited boisterous audience laughter by asking another presenter, "Now we have one situation in the market in which we get conventional fuel, namely oil, we burn it in a combustion engine, and we do work.  Now what I understand the hydrogen defenders are promoting, led by Mr. Jeremy Rifkin, is a hydrogen economy consisting basically in getting the conventional fuels again and producing alternative/solar energies or clean energy... or a wind generator ...to produce electricity to then split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen and then compressing the liquefied hydrogen for transportation and storage and then injecting the hydrogen into the fuel cell to produce electricity to do work in the machine.  Do you really believe that this is efficiency?"

shared emission responsibility

drx says

In the developing world is already doing this, wether we reduce GHG or not.  A lot of it to produce goods we use.  All the cheap food and cheap junk at places like Walmart for instance.

Which is in part why the delayer catch-22 talking point that America shouldn't impose a carbon price until China's willing to do so as well is fraudulent - a significant part of China's emissions are also America's emissions.On Is the IPCC so wrong their theories contradict a basic laws of physics? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses

You can relax...

More importantly, what does it do to the green agenda? Rhetoric about the "end of cheap oil" has driven much of the push behind everything from renewable energy sources to local food in recent years. What happens if oil settles in for a while at, say $50 per barrel?

I think the message here is that the oil market is not our friend. We can't count on ever-escalating oil prices to bail us out on climate change, or rebuild robust local economies. These critical tasks are going to require hard political organizing no matter what, and they may have to take place in a climate of cheap(ish) oil.

...this "peak oil zealot" can assure you, prices aren't going anywhere near $50, and there is nothing surprising about what prices have been doing lately.

Peak Oilers have long predicted that as Peak Oil takes hold, the effect on prices will be extreme short-term volatility within a general upward trend.
Two steps up, one step down, is an expected pattern.

You can compare it to the predicted weather effects of climate change: weather volatility, increasing incidence of extreme events including unusual "cold" manifestations, all within a general warming trend.

So these extreme price-weather events we've been seeing fit right in with the general climatic price increase.

As for which proximate factors have been playing their parts right now:

1. The increased Saudi production (after years of stagnation) has temporarily alleviated fears of an impending chronic shortage. It's too early to tell the nature of this increased production - could they have done this all along, like they always claimed they could? How long can they maintain this new level? Can it go up even further?
Or is this a temporary overachievement which will cause the post-Peak downward curve to be all the more steep?
(BTW, this recent increase only brings production back up toward the 9.6 mpd 2005 level. We're not yet in any brave new world of saudi prolificity by any means.)

2. There has been some "demand destruction", a fancy term for rationing by wealth. The poor have to choose between food and fuel, the middle class has to tighten its belt, while the fat rich continue their happy motoring.
Demand destruction can only go so far. Here especially a law of diminishing returns set in, as Jeff Vail wrote about in part one of his current Oil Drum series on geopolitical feedback loops. Demand this year has perhaps shown itself to be more elastic than many commentators expected. But as the low-hanging fruit is "destroyed", as gasoline consumers cut back on whatever consumption was truly discretionary, the remaining demand becomes increasingly inelastic.
So anyone who's expecting a similar demand response to the next price surge is likely to be disappointed.

3. To whatever extent speculators exacerbate the fundamentals-driven price fluctuations, we see here how much it's driven by perceptions and emotions. Just as for awhile they were fired up by hype like "next stop $200!", so then they got spooked by demand declines, but also by new Saudi hype, and then its modest production increase.
Most ridiculously, it seems they psyched themselves up so much for Gustav to absolutely clobber the Gulf, that when the damage to oil and refinery infrastructure proved significant but not as bad as they expected, they ran with the (relative) good news and disregarded the (absolute) bad news.
It's similar to the stock market this week, this emotional volatility. On Monday the market rallied because everyone was euphoric over the Mae and Mac bailout, but by Tuesday they were depressed over Lehman's prospects and the market tumbled. It's like manic-depression or the euphoria-crash roller coaster of a crackhead.

Now we wait to see how much damage Ike did, and how gasoline supply and price will respond to that.

So to sum up:
*Production has been stagnant since 2005, and the price trend had been overwhelmingly upward.

*If this is the Peak, we can expect to see ever-greater price volatility (extreme-weather events) within the climbing price climate.

*The recent Saudi production increase and American demand decline (both modest) will have to show far greater staying power before we can consider them lasting features rather than manifestations of volatility themselves.

*Speculators probably exacerbate trends rather than generate them; this aggravation will be a synergy of emotional volatility with other system volatilities.

Appendix:  

Meanwhile, the OPEC nations themselves seem nervous about the prospect of a crash. Interestingly, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela -- all of whom are more or less hostile to the U.S. -- are pushing for production cuts. Good thing our dear friend Saudi Arabia is telling them to go to hell!

This is a simple example of the big producer undercutting the smaller producers. As price declines, the Saudis can still collect their revenue through bulk sales.
But the smaller producers don't have that option, so they can only watch revenues dwindle.

That, far more than hostility to America, is why Venezuela and Iran are the price hawks in OPEC. On The oil market can't save us from climate change posted 1 year, 2 months ago 33 Responses

vakibs

@russ

Anybody opposed to expansion of nuclear power based on economic grounds is a fossil-fuel guy. Take what he says with a pinch of salt.

You don't have to be a fossil fuel shill to have this objection, and I can assure you I would not have cited a shill.

The fact is, although the economics is not one of my primary objections to nukes, if I was writing an anti-nuclear piece for publication for a general audience, that's the argument I'd emphasize. On So how much do renewables cost anyway? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 30 Responses

apocalyptic moods

In our case, the handwriting on the wall comes not from a moving finger but from the painful reality of scientific understanding and observation as transcribed and interpreted by our top scientists and the likes of the very moving Mr. Fingar.
Humanity is being weighed in the balances. Let's all hope we are not found wanting.

Peak Oil, climate change, habitat and biodiversity destruction,the exponential debt and suburbanization pyramid schemes, globalization and the trade deficit, the new geopolitical Great Game, and along with these new thunderheads, all the age-old ideological strife....yes, it may be the time for an "apocalyptic mood"....

Isaiah 34:

1. Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it.
   
2. For the indignation of the LORD is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter.
   
3. Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood.
   
4. And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.
   
5. For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment.
   
6. The sword of the LORD is filled with blood, it is made fat with fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams: for the LORD hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea.
   
7. And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.
   
8. For it is the day of the LORD's vengeance, and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion.
   
9. And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
   
10. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.
    
11. But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.
    
12. They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing.
    
13. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.
    
14. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
    
15. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate.
    
16. Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them.
    
17. And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it unto them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they dwell therein.

35:

1. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
   
2. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God.
   
3. Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.
   
4. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you.
   
5. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.
   
6. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.
   
7. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.
   
8. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.
   
9. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there:
   
10. And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

40:

15. Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.
    
16. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering.
    
17. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.
    

 
Ezekiel 34

 1: And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

2. Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?
   
3. Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.
   
4. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.
   
5. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered.
   
6. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them.
   
7. Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD;
   
8. As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock;
   
9. Therefore, O ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD;
   
10. Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them.
    
11. For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.
    
12. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.
    
13. And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land, and feed them upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places of the country.
    
14. I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel.
    
15. I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord GOD.
    
16. I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment.
    
17. And as for you, O my flock, thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I judge between cattle and cattle, between the rams and the he goats.
    
18. Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pastures? and to have drunk of the deep waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?
    
19. And as for my flock, they eat that which ye have trodden with your feet; and they drink that which ye have fouled with your feet.
    
20. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD unto them; Behold, I, even I, will judge between the fat cattle and between the lean cattle.
    
21. Because ye have thrust with side and with shoulder, and pushed all the diseased with your horns, till ye have scattered them abroad;
    
22. Therefore will I save my flock, and they shall no more be a prey; and I will judge between cattle and cattle.
    
23. And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd.
    
24. And I the LORD will be their God, and my servant David a prince among them; I the LORD have spoken it.
    
25. And I will make with them a covenant of peace, and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land: and they shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods.
    
26. And I will make them and the places round about my hill a blessing; and I will cause the shower to come down in his season; there shall be showers of blessing.
    
27. And the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the LORD, when I have broken the bands of their yoke, and delivered them out of the hand of those that served themselves of them.
    
28. And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid.
    
29. And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more.
    
30. Thus shall they know that I the LORD their God am with them, and that they, even the house of Israel, are my people, saith the Lord GOD.
    
31. And ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God, saith the Lord GOD.

36:
  1: Also, thou son of man, prophesy unto the mountains of Israel, and say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the LORD:

2. Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because the enemy hath said against you, Aha, even the ancient high places are ours in possession:
   
3. Therefore prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because they have made you desolate, and swallowed you up on every side, that ye might be a possession unto the residue of the heathen, and ye are taken up in the lips of talkers, and are an infamy of the people:
   
4. Therefore, ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, to the desolate wastes, and to the cities that are forsaken, which became a prey and derision to the residue of the heathen that are round about;
   
5. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Surely in the fire of my jealousy have I spoken against the residue of the heathen, and against all Idumea, which have appointed my land into their possession with the joy of all their heart, with despiteful minds, to cast it out for a prey.
   
6. Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen:
   
7. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; I have lifted up mine hand, Surely the heathen that are about you, they shall bear their shame.
   
8. But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they are at hand to come.
   
9. For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown:
   
10. And I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, even all of it: and the cities shall be inhabited, and the wastes shall be builded:
    
11. And I will multiply upon you man and beast; and they shall increase and bring fruit: and I will settle you after your old estates, and will do better unto you than at your beginnings: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
    
12. Yea, I will cause men to walk upon you, even my people Israel; and they shall possess thee, and thou shalt be their inheritance, and thou shalt no more henceforth bereave them of men.
    
13. Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because they say unto you, Thou land devourest up men, and hast bereaved thy nations;
    
14. Therefore thou shalt devour men no more, neither bereave thy nations any more, saith the Lord GOD.
    
15. Neither will I cause men to hear in thee the shame of the heathen any more, neither shalt thou bear the reproach of the people any more, neither shalt thou cause thy nations to fall any more, saith the Lord GOD.
    
16. Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
    
17. Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman.
    
18. Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and for their idols wherewith they had polluted it:
    
19. And I scattered them among the heathen, and they were dispersed through the countries: according to their way and according to their doings I judged them.
    
20. And when they entered unto the heathen, whither they went, they profaned my holy name, when they said to them, These are the people of the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land.
    
21. But I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen, whither they went.
    
22. Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went.
    
23. And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, saith the Lord GOD, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.
    
24. For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.
    
25. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
    
26. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
    
27. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
    
28. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.
    
29. I will also save you from all your uncleannesses: and I will call for the corn, and will increase it, and lay no famine upon you.
    
30. And I will multiply the fruit of the tree, and the increase of the field, that ye shall receive no more reproach of famine among the heathen.
    
31. Then shall ye remember your own evil ways, and your doings that were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your abominations.
    
32. Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord GOD, be it known unto you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel.
    
33. Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded.
    
34. And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by.
    
35. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited.
    
36. Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that that was desolate: I the LORD have spoken it, and I will do it.
    
37. Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet for this be inquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock.
    
38. As the holy flock, as the flock of Jerusalem in her solemn feasts; so shall the waste cities be filled with flocks of men: and they shall know that I am the LORD.

Joel 3:

1. For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
   
2. I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.
   
3. And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.
   
4. Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompence me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head;
   
5. Because ye have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried into your temples my goodly pleasant things:
   
6. The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from their border.
   
7. Behold, I will raise them out of the place whither ye have sold them, and will return your recompence upon your own head:
   
8. And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off: for the LORD hath spoken it.
   
9. Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up:
   
10. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.
    
11. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD.
    
12. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.
    
13. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.
    
14. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.
    
15. The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.
    
16. The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the LORD will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel.
    
17. So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.
    
18. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of Shittim.
    
19. Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because they have shed innocent blood in their land.
    
20. But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.
    
21. For I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the LORD dwelleth in Zion.

Better lay off the acid, mac,

now you're starting to hallucinate.

I haven't posted on this thread in days, you jackass!

(Boy, this clown is obsessed with me. It's like having a stalker.)On Only GMOs and agrichemicals can 'feed the world,' don't you know? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 53 Responses

wolverine

I wasn't arguing the merits of the response, but the political fecklessness of it. It would of course be political suicide for him to have said what you recommend (though what he did say isn't much more effective).

If I've understood you correctly in the past, you don't think it makes any difference who wins this election, and while I can sympathize, I still think it does make a difference, which is why I've been having a sinking feeling about Kerry II for awhile now. On Obama mentions green programs in 9/11 public-service forum posted 1 year, 2 months ago 6 Responses

jon writes

I thought I read that China is going to build a breeder.  The whole thing makes me very nervous, because I still don't know that there is an operational plant anywhere, they seem to be horrendously expensive, and they produce plutonium, no?  So anyway, here's hoping governments become more involved.

I remember reading somewhere, written by someone opposed to significant nuclear expansion in America (on economic grounds primarily), that:

1. Given that the market doesn't support significant domestic expansion, and the government has already awarded this industry far too much in subsidies;

2. that the nuke industry is going to fight to exist in some significantly expanded role;

3. that China (and perhaps others) are going to expand their own nuclear capacities regardless;

4. but they perhaps aren't technologically advanced enough to safely carry out the innovations they intend;

5. that the American industry should focus on reinventing itself as a consultant to China and anywhere else relevant, which can be profitable and improve safety at these foreign installations.

budding bread/beer utopia !

See naysayers - the smaller decentralized future can be fun!On Two trends for bakeries, one encouraging and one dismal posted 1 year, 2 months ago 2 Responses

disconnect

why are you so weird

First off, there is no unitary "America" except in the purely technical sense. Is there one Europe?

That glop I spoke of is a radically alien manifestation, and there's plenty of decent people who disavow it completely.

Having said that,

That's a strange disconnect. We don't have it here in Europe. I've never understood this. Despite being a reasonably well developed country (materially speaking), the U.S. has so many taboos about so many rather boring subjects (science, sexuality, religion, etc...). It requires a lot of explanation. This explanation is best given by self-reflecting Americans, because we're tired of being called eurosnobs.

To put it very simply, while America is as modern as it gets where it comes to technology and (ironically) science, and organizational layout of government, economy, and society, where it comes to culture, wisdom, spirit, intellect, America is really still a medieval society, and evidently regressing to the Dark Ages.

So what does that mean? We don't have to think hard for 20th century examples of that paradox.

What about Vaclav Klaus of Chechoslovakia, or certain politicos from Poland? Ugh, and I don't want to get into ranting about Bavarian barbarians...

I don't know about Bavarians, but as for Eastern Europe, I get the impression that those who were dissidents under communism often went too far in the opposite direction and became obnoxious "neocon" types, Euro equivalents of the ugly American.

Just because the Soviet Bloc way was no good does not mean the American way is "good" in any absolute sense. That doesn't follow.
On New Scientist assesses McCain and Obama on science issues posted 1 year, 2 months ago 27 Responses

jonas says

How can the American population even consider voting for a republican after 8 years of irrational, quasi-terrorist, criminal governance?

In the mean time, a large Globescan poll shows that the world wants Obama - four to one.

(BBC: Obama win preferred in world poll).

Unfortunately, American has this cohort of filthy yahoos who hate the rest of the world and take a perverse gutter pride in outraging it.

That's the scum you see chanting Burn Baby Burn and frothing at the mouth over Sarah Palin, one of their own.

So they'd read your comment and laugh.

Yee-haw!

 On New Scientist assesses McCain and Obama on science issues posted 1 year, 2 months ago 27 Responses

community garden.....garden community

It's great to read about a place invigorated with bounteous gardens. I hope it is a growing trend.

I only wish there was any such consciousness around here where I live. Offhand I don't recall seeing a garden.

Energy Bulletin recently put up a beautiful story, full of transformative magic. It's called The Man Who Created Paradise, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read an account of life and beauty and hope arising out of ground zero environmental devastation.

Lots of luck with that community garden, Stephanie. That's one of the most worthwhile and rewarding endeavors I can think of, toward holism and health and friendship and community self-reliance, all the things normally dragged through the mud.

If there can really be a path to a human Renaissance, this is certainly part of that path.    On On the transformative potential of community-scale food production posted 1 year, 2 months ago 4 Responses

what Dems should do

If I was Reid I would craft the package to include only the minimal drilling provision, the one Hutchison said "does not have significant drilling", couple that with the oil corporate welfare stripping and the renewable credits, and force the Reps to vote against that.

Then if I was any Democrat, but especially Obama, I'd hammer away at the message - "They said they wanted drilling, but they voted against it. Now you see how they were lying to you all along, how it was just partisan political game-playing with them, while we actually tried to do something about energy imports and prices."
(It's unfortunate, but the way things are, I'd feel I didn't have the luxury of being overly scrupulous about that last piece of demagoguery.)

For once we'd put them in the position of having to try to make a "nuanced" argument: Yes, we do want to vote for drilling, but this bill was flawed, it didn't enable enough drilling, blah blah blah......

The only way it's going to be possible to enact a truly constructive energy bill is by electing Obama and extending the Dem majorities. That's why the Dems' only legislative priority pre-election should be to position themselves for the election.

After a victorious outcome will be the time for substantive legislation.On Reid to hold votes on three drilling plans next week posted 1 year, 2 months ago 4 Responses

Fine, fine...

But, did I quote you correctly or not?

All I did was read what you wrote.

Living in what is historically a know-nothing, anti-intellectual country, where in recent times that trait has reached monstrous proportions, I'm a little punchy on the subject.On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

oh yeah! sez who?

Richard

Calling me right wing puts you in the dog pound for the day. I'm so far left of you on numerous topics you couldn't find me if you had a telescope.

I'm inclined to doubt that, as some of my detractors around here could no doubt tell you.

Anyway, I'm not a "leftist". My world view can't be plotted on the standard ideological spectrum.

I think you understand that being smart, in and of itself, is the single leading cause of the problems we have in the world today.

I never said intelligence and smarts are not very useful. I simply said that they are dangerous without being balanced by other critical elements.

"Being smart in and of itself" is never dangerous and is never the cause of the world's problems.

If intelligence is enlisted in the cause of greed or bloodlust, then what causes the problem is the greed or bloodlust, not the intelligence.

What a slander.On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

Far worse than any troll

is this sort of self-loathing, right-wing sympathizing anti-intellectualism, which I'll reproduce in full:

I think you understand that being smart, in and of itself, is the single leading cause of the problems we have in the world today. I can assure you Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are very smart, to give two examples, as are countless other politicians, scientists and business people. But being smart without being "conscious" (if you understand my use of that term) leads to abuse of power, control over others, and misuse of resources.

There isn't any direct path from being smart to being conscious, either. The two are not really connected.

I'd rely on a less intelligent, but highly conscious person, every time because that person will seek out "smarts" from others and filter the information through their own compassion, intuition, wisdom, tolerance and balance to create solutions that work across the board. This is the path ahead.

I see no indication Sarah Palin or John McCain are conscious people. Smart yes... conscious, no.

This is in substance, if not word for word, the mantra of every mind-hating, science-hating, education-hating flat-earth hillbilly.

Just substitute Democrat names, and you'd have something any Republican would happily agree with.

Substitute "Christian" or "patriotic" or "entrepreneurial" for the vague term "conscious" (probably some trendy concept like "emotional intelligence", just a pop culture update of what the ancients called wisdom, is what was meant), and you'd get even more agreement.

Yes, "smart" is the problem. Intelligence is the problem. Reason and logic are the problem. We certainly have a surplus of those!

I can agree that the kind of tactical intelligence a hack like Cheney or Rove possesses, really more a kind of animal cunning, has nothing to do with wisdom, but it also has nothing to do with true human intelligence, which necessarily involves real thinking on values and principles as well as means and ends, on the Why as well as the How.

Maybe what was meant here was closer to my meaning than I realize, but I can only go with what was written, and as written it's right-wing anti-intellectual dreck.

Coming from someone who's been giving lectures on how to express oneself, that's quite disreputable.

 On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

rock bottom

I think that this latest "exploration" of tar sands and oil shale is the last stage before we hit rock bottom. Perhaps it's equivalent to the alcoholics that finds themselves chugging mouthwash.

That's exactly what it is. Tar sands, oil shale, deepwater drilling, heavy oil, Arctic exploration, CTL...

The earth-miners try to frame these as grand new opportunities, and I'll concede that depictions of the the growing Arctic freneticism as the new Great Game does stir the soul, but the fact is, as Peak Oilers are pointing out, all these are actually acts of desperation.

These are all admissions on the extractors' part that easily extracted sweet crude is just about finished, and that every drop of oil from here on will be more and more difficult, expensive, energy intensive, and environmentally destructive to extract. On It's time to break the American addiction to oil posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

yes vakibs

The utmost importance should be given to data driven analysis.

Constant validation of hypotheses by experimentation.

Rigorous study supported by mathematics.

Immediate dissemination of your results by publications.

Withstanding to very rigorous criticism through blind referee process.

I have nothing but respect for the scientific method, which is one of the most excellent tools ever devised, even if it remains utterly beyond the comprehension of most people including elected officials.

Nevertheless, it is nothing more than a tool, which can have good or evil applications (I compare it to a loaded gun) depending upon the ends for which it is enlisted. Where it is left to itself, as I said, it has no values other than the nihilism of instrumental reason and success-worship. The fundamental credo of most scientists and technicians is, "If it can be done, it should be done. Technology justifies itself, and no other value exists which could ever be appealed to for the cause of restraining it."

I was rejecting Jonas' contention that science should dictate policy, thereby enslaving all socioeconomic and socioenvironmental policy under this technology-itself[and concomitant profits]-justifies-any-outcome, which is also evidently David King's position.

There's a good reason why it's wise to be leery of scientists making policy prescriptions, even if in recent years it's mostly been the Right saying this vis climate change (an unusual exception).
I stress that I mean "most scientists". I regard James Hansen as one of the few true heroes of our time.

This is utterly, utterly false. And personally, I take it as a slander because I aim to be a scientist one day. Did you even know that the biggest opposition to the use of the nuclear bomb came from the scientists who were part of the Los Alamos laboratory ? It is the politicians who forced its use.

First of all, I said "most scientists". I know nothing about you personally, and there's no reason for you to take it personally. (The same goes for anybody else who thinks this doesn't describe him.)

Second, I said "most scientists". Yes I know about the deep ambivalence at Los Alamos, and of course you don't need to tell me about politicians.

I never said there weren't exceptions.
But I stand by my description of the rule. If I would've tallied every example I've come across of a scientist suggesting caution, or even that a line of research or technological development not be followed up, in the name of some higher value, vs. the number of times I've seen variations on "It's not my responsibility" and purely instrumental justifications, regardless of any hazard, the ratio would be extremely lopsided.

It's coincident that we discuss this as they're opening that collider in Europe, where many are worried that it may create black holes which can destroy the planet.

Now, I don't think that will happen. But, reading somewhat on the subject, I was struck by two things.

First, the scientists don't seem to have any real justification for this project at all. Even leaving Peak Oil out of it, I couldn't see how this was ever going to benefit the non-rich.
It really looks like a super-expensive toy that lets them play with the same thoughts I can play with reading a book of Hegel or Kant I got for a few bucks at the used book store.

Second, every expert, including the boosters for the project, does concede a probability, however infinitesimal, that this thing really will destroy the earth.

So I said, even if the odds are one in a googolplex, if the only upside is to let these scientists have a glorified late-night dorm-room bull session, then those odds are still too high for me, and lots of people agree with me.

But what difference does it make? Most scientists wouldn't understand a word of this, because it enlists values other than if-it-can-be-done-it-should-be-done.

 On Only GMOs and agrichemicals can 'feed the world,' don't you know? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 53 Responses

hohokam

Isn't the evidence that they declined because they overextended their irrigation system?

Yet their physical impact was many orders of magnitude less than what we have today. On Grist and Arizona State University team up on newsletter for students posted 1 year, 2 months ago 36 Responses

Richard

Obviously, you are angry about what's going on. There's plenty to be angry about. I've not experienced that that path works for me, though.

Yes, I do get riled up these days.

The next few years are man's last chance, and it looks like he's going to throw it away - and all this recklessness, irresponsibility, destruction, and contempt for the earth and the human spirit, have all been in the service of something so miserable, so wretched, so petty, just this gutter materialism....and I'm trapped amid it and forced to witness it.

Hmmm, yes, it does angry up the blood. I guess I need to work more on being ice-cold rather than red-hot, since I do in fact aspire to a wider field of activity than commenting on a blog.

Geez, I wish I knew of any organized, eco-intent gardeners in my vicinity. Now that's something I could get into.
Maybe even make me forget to be angry.

If anyone wants to read a beautiful short story about how a vibrant, soil-cherishing, humanistic life can arise from darkness, despoliation, and despair, read The Man Who Created Paradise, linked from Energy Bulletin.

I haven't stopped thinking about it since I read it.On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

What Dems should do

Well, just last week a Washington Post editorial said, "there's not much difference between [McCain's] energy policy and that of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.)." So maybe the house of cards will hold up until November.

The problem is that Burn Baby Burn is simple and stupid, and therefore media-friendly, while Obama's energy plan is complex and "nuanced" and difficult to reduce to compelling sound bites.
As for his pandering by saying he'll include drilling in an all-of-the-above package, that's not going to help in the election.

So the Dems' energy tactic must be to force a vote on an all-of-the-above package, including poison pills the Reps will gag on like stripping corporate welfare for Big Oil, to force the Reps to vote against it. (They don't really want drilling anyway. Drilling is far more useful to them as something those nasty liberals are obstructing than if it became a reality.)

Then, when they vote against this (or maneuver to prevent a vote), call them liars and partisan political game-players, hammer home the point that they were only pretending to want drilling, that it was just the same old sort of Rep dirty trick.

Meanwhile, if I was Obama, all this time, since the energy issue is not my friend, I would've done all I could to counterattack on a different front. I would've been hammering away on the economy all the way.

Yet, as Paul Krugman keeps pointing out, Obama has been all too timid and Kerryish on this.

Krugman zeroes in on this example in particular:
Obama keeps referring to how robust the economy was "in the 90s" and how bad it's been "since then" or some such way of saying things.

Why on earth doesn't he attack:

"Under Bill Clinton and the Democrats, the economy was strong and vibrant, and Americans prospered; while under George Bush and the Republicans, we've suffered every sort of economic decline - recession, stock market plunges, rising unemployment, rising inequality, exploding debt, corporate scandals like Enron, endless billions thrown down the money pit of pork and corruption, and now we have the mortgage and credit crises. George Bush brought you all of these. John Mccain promises to bring only more of the same. But we can get back to the prosperity we enjoyed not so long ago. We can regain the spirit and plenty our hard work deserves. But to do that we must go beyond the failed policies of George Bush and revive the prosperous policies which worked so well before him, and will work again in a brighter future."

Something like that.     On Where energy/environment issues stand in the Republican Party posted 1 year, 2 months ago 8 Responses

false equivalences rule

....doesn't reflect well on your tolerance or compassion.

Richard - I am indeed intolerant of those who have rendered themselves literally intolerable, through their aggressive anti-intellectualism and their vicious intolerance of anything which doesn't turn a maximum profit, or which doesn't feed their religious hatred.
On the other hand I'm happy to leave in peace those who are willing to live in peace.

I similarly have no compassion for those who are aggressively uncompassionate themselves.
This is because I have endless compassion for humanity and the earth, both of which have for so long been under such ruthless assault by these criminals.

I also find the all-too-common blaming the victim to be despicable. Not only bullies, but many bystanders, get mortally affronted when a victim of persecution DARES to fight back. I guess it upsets the order of things or something, when say an atheist, whose brethren have been persecuted and tortured and murdered for thousands of years in the name of so-called christianity, in the name of hate and mental darkness and hypocrisy and everything else endemic to that religion, dares to protest vs. the continuing oppression, which is unbelievable and intolerable in this day and age.

As for the cowardly notion we hear all too often from "moderates" nowadays, that we should tiptoe around scared of our own shadows and play by all the rules that only our side is supposed to recognize, and get ourselves dressed up in our sunday best in the desperate hope to impress some ignorant and mentally deficient "swing voter" - that's not only spriritually repugnant, it's also doomed to fail.

Do you really think anyone with any rational capacity doesn't already know the basic facts about how the Republicans are destroying this country? That their economic, energy, environmental, foreign, and social policies have all been disasters, and portend further catastrophe? That however little confidence you might have in the Democrats to turn things around, it's still a no-brainer that to give them a chance is the only possible way to mitigate the damage?

Anyone to whom all this is not clear is beyond the reach of facts, science, reason, or morality. So if you want to reach them, there's no other option, but to take the fight to the enemy, using the enemy's own weapons against them.
(Not that I think that's what's going on here on this blog. I may be wrong, but I imagine most people who come here already believe in ecological values and don't need to be convinced as far as for whom to vote.)

How do you think the modern (last 30 years or so) incarnation of the Rep party has not only survived but thrived? On paper they shouldn't have a chance. They represent nothing at the core but nihilism - just hate, fear, and greed. All their "ideas" are just fig-leaves for these.
Who is their proper constituency? The rich, religious wackos, and gutter thugs. None of these is a large group. So how do they get so many non-rich and non-fanatical people to vote for them against their own interests? They do it by lying, scapegoating, and mustering fear.

We certainly do not need to lie or scapegoat, since we're on the right side of ideas and issues, and facts, science, and reason are with us. As for fear, there was a post and comment thread on that just a week or so ago, so I won't revisit it here.

But that's no reason to tie our hands tactically. Because we have integrity is no reason to fetishize tactical scruple to the point of cravenness.
Gore and Kerry insisted on "taking the high road" while they were being kneecapped and kicked in the balls, and look at where it got them.

You don't bring a wrestling rulebook to a midnight alley knife fight. But usually that's all the Reps' opponents are able to do, and it's this unilateral disarmament which gives them strength.

How else can you explain these polls even being close?

I'll tell you one thing - it's not because of nasty, disreputable radicals like me.      On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

My irony-sense is tingling

Hmm...Sustainability? The Phoenix megalopolis?On Grist and Arizona State University team up on newsletter for students posted 1 year, 2 months ago 36 Responses

one more time

The alternative to law and elections is:

anarchy and tyranny.

You mean like what we have right now. The anarchy and tyranny of Hobbesian plunder capitalism, and the creeping tyranny of technology, governments, and corporations.

You don't get to pick and choose who is and is not a citizen of "your America".

I have, not "chosen", but recognized. Sure it doesn't mean anything now. All I can do is express what's in my mind's eye. What the truth is.

"I've made it clear I believe the contrary, that only decentralization and simplification can bring civilization through the fire in one (smaller and distributed) piece."  

And how would you get there from here??? Do you know ANYTHING about international politics and how nation states behave? Any state trying to "get smaller" would be consumed, if not militarily then by political and economic dominance. How could the US deconstruct? It is not in the realm of the possible.

What's "not in the realm of the possible" is for things to stay the way they are - a crazily top-heavy Tower of Babel, built on sand which is being washed away as we speak.

As for international politics, you again seem incapable of understanding very simple ideas. America is of course not going to enter energy descent and the collapse of the international monetary system and globalization alone. What do you think "international" and "global" mean???? It means everything is interlinked, everything is currently patched and twined and propped up together, and it means everything simplifies together.

So America will hardly be in peril of being "dominated". As dilapidated as its infrastructure is, America still has more to work with than most places. And if the transformation is undertaken in an organized, systematic manner, its position will be even better.
And then there's always that old reliable, the oceans as a barrier. (News flash - post-Peak Oil China is not going to be able to build a fleet to come across the Pacific. The only real foreign problem there's likely to be is a mass migration from Mexico.)

No, trying to correct my use of de jure vice de facto was you knucklehead.

Since you're reduced to childish insults, I'll reiterate my correction. We're talking about societal preferences, not technical or legal outcomes (you only imported that to try to cover up your error), so it is indeed "de facto". Compare de facto vs. de jure segregation. Which do you think is analogous to this argument?

I don't need to provide you with evidence. There's plenty of that right here on Grist

I didn't ask Grist, I asked you. So you admit you can't back up your argument.

Even during the Great Depression the whole thing didn't come apart.

Now you've proven yourself a complete ignoramus. The Depression was a political phenomenon. The resources of the country were still mostly intact (except for the Dust Bowl), the population level was still manageable, the physical structure was not a slave to the automobile, and the financial system, while obviously cracked, still had nowhere near as far to fall as it does today.

Today the level of debt is astronomical, absolutely irremediable. The country is bankrupt; the infrastructure is falling apart. Residences, business, food delivery, and government are all laid out in such a way as to be absolutely dependent, as dependent as a newborn infant, upon the car and cheap gasoline.
Most of all, we're running up against the Malthusian limits of fossil fuels, the foundation upon which this civilization is built. Without ever-increasing oil supplies, things fall apart.

The two situations are not even remotely comparable.

Some states will thrive in the coming millenium.

I hope so. I hope to have a role in it. But it won't be "thriving" according to your blinkered notion.

I'll leave you with one example, which will also get us back on topic.

According to this story in today's NYTimes, all these years since Katrina and they still haven't fixed the levees. The stupid place is certainly going to get clobbered again, and again and again.

Now, if even right now, when America is still relatively rich, and was so full of sympathy for the city's post-Katrina plight, it still can't be bothered to fix the problem, really spending just pennies,  then how on earth do you expect it to undertake an energy revolution, something vastly more expensive and cumbersome, during energy descent and economic meltdown, when all that paper wealth has evaporated?

New Orleans is a microcosm of what awaits all of America, and the world.  On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

mac

If the latter has the support among a majority of the population, it is dejure legitimate.

You and Wolverine hold opinions absolutely in the tiniest of minority on the planet.

This kind of flat-earth, quantity-over-quality bean-counting is beneath contempt.
Throughout history the majority has almost always been wrong about every real issue.
It's the creative and intellectual elite who have always borne the torch of insight and vision, with the hominid masses lagging hundreds, often thousands of years behind.

BTW, I think you meant "de facto". "De jure" means formal, official.

When you hate them, they hate you right back.

Believe me, I was the victim of their hate for many long hard years before I started hating them back. But now I'm counterattacking.

But what I find humorous is that you want it to happen - but decry those who are pursing policies that might lead to that end. Hasn't the inconsistency ever occurred to you. You should be working for Exxon - Mobil to help hasten the outcome you desire.

This is the last time I'm going to say this to you, since obviously you don't pay attention.

"Wanting" it to happen or not is irrelevant - it is going to happen regardless.

So there are two choices - orderly retreat or absolute rout.

Exxon's way is the dead-ender, scorched earth way of the bunker - business as usual until complete collapse.

This is not what I "want".

What I want is an organized transformation and simplification while there's still time (if there is still time).

Of course the greed fundamentalists "won't listen to me" as you say. It has nothing to do with my hating them, and everything to do with the fact that my way, they wouldn't be able to plunder the earth and society any longer.On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

biod

(Here's something I hope is more pleasant than these tedious trolls.)

I think I saw an electric bicycle the other morning while I was out running. It was dark, but I'm pretty sure the guy wasn't pedalling, and it had a high-pitched (not loud) sound.

I guess that's the first time I've ever seen one.

Murder, n. - A gathering of crows.

I think that says it all.On The eco-rundown on Alaska guv Sarah Palin, John McCain's veep pick posted 1 year, 2 months ago 120 Responses

hurricanes

For anybody who's squeamish about attributing stronger hurricanes to climate change because the science isn't settled, one thing which is guaranteed is that rising sea levels will render storm surges larger and more devastating, whether the hurricane itself was climate-change enhanced or not.

So that climate change effect, at least, is incontrovertible, and should be attributed.On New sea-level rise research, part 1: 'Most likely' 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 posted 1 year, 2 months ago 178 Responses

Alaskan petrostate

But this principle doesn't exclusively apply to "bad guy" dictatorships. Business is booming in the pro-American Gulf monarchies. And also in Alaska! What for most of the world is the "problem" of sky-high energy prices is the solution for places like Alaska and Russia that don't have real economies but are seeing prosperity anyway thanks to skyrocketing oil and gas prices.

Alaska should indeed be looked at as a petrostate, and as a resource plunder state in general (timber, fish and crabs, trophy hunting; not to mention how, with the blessing of the state government,  it's literally overrun by "vermin on machines", ORV riders).

I'm not sure why it doesn't occur to Matt, this is a "bad guy" dictatorship!

Alaska has little in the way of any legitimate, sustainable economy. Rather, its activity is based on looting, aggressive begging (the federal dollars cascade in for these welfare mooches), and buying off the citizenry by spreading around some of the swag (the oil dividends, pumped from public land, which actually belong to ALL the people).  

Looked at in that light, it's not at all clear why you'd regard an Alaska politician as expert in "the" energy crisis. Alaska politicians never worry that energy may be getting too expensive and think about how to respond. They worry that energy might get too cheap! Alaska politicians don't develop expertise in energy conservation measures or alternative fuels, they develop expertise in fighting with out-of-state executives about how to divide the profits that come from expensive energy. That's the energy problem people think about in Alaska, Oklahoma, and parts of Texas and Louisiana but it's not the energy problem people worry about in Michigan or Ohio or Virginia or Florida or New Mexico or Colorado or most anywhere else in the country.

This is a textbook example of the simple fact, there is no such thing as America, except in the purely nominal and legalistic sense. What Palin represents is in a zero-sum death struggle with the rest of the "country", and there can be no compromise because there is no common ground, even though people delude themselves with all manner of anodyne empty words derived from politics, religion, "patriotism", etc.
On Palin's 'energy expertise' posted 1 year, 2 months ago 16 Responses

growth bias

The reason the MSM will handle all other types of (generally cooked) government stats but seldom wants to touch these energy figures is because unlike those fraudulently rosy economic figures, this energy data tolls the bell for their "growth" economy, upon which all their advertisers, and the whole system, rely.

That's why you never hear of Peak Oil in the MSM, and that's part of why they systematically misrepresent climate change as the subject of a "debate". On Media drops the ball on drilling posted 1 year, 2 months ago 5 Responses

drill baby drill

I don't think it's an accident that they're frothing and drooling this replay of Burn Baby Burn. It's the same as the reason why "all details are stripped".

They know they've destroyed the country, that from here it's only "the downward path" as Jeffers called it. All they have left is atavistic nihilism, to revel in the destruction, and to dream of violence.

I don't know if David was exaggerating when he said he briefly felt real fear, but it's no joke. By now the Reps have mobilized whatever level of baseline fascist scum there is in America (using that term here simply to mean belligerent, aggressive stupidity).
Yet this is more visible than the far more ominous massive expansion of the private paramilitary/repression-industrial complex, Blackwater et.al.
(This expansion and its domestic ensconcement was one of the goals of the Iraq war.)

You can bet, when things really begin to bite, when the Republican-set charges detonate in earnest and the economic system comes crashing down, that's when this cadre, bolstered by all this yahoo vermin, will try to impose a de jure police state (whereas so far the admin has only been able to move in increments toward a de facto authoritarian state).

It will be the final, most all-encompassing play by disaster capitalism.

The time to understand this is now, and the question to ask now is, what kind of forces can be mobilized to prevent this?
Unfortunately, so far there's little consciousness, and little organization.

Something to think about.    On Republicans revert to base-rallying strategy posted 1 year, 2 months ago 19 Responses

the good and the bad

Here's hoping this excellent Ecuadorian effort succeeds. I was also cheered to read about the counteractive Pennsylvania towns. I hadn't heard of that before.

This makes me think of William O. Douglas and his efforts to enshrine ecological values in law.

For example:

[edit] Trees Have Standing
In the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), Justice Douglas famously, and most colorfully argued that "inanimate objects" should have standing to sue in court:

The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.

He continued:

"Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole - a creature of ecclesiastical law - is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases . . . . So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."

As for cluster bombs, those are an American favorite as well.

It's ironic, given how American arrogance and hypocrisy vis Kosovo has contributed so heavily to Russian revanchism, that I can recall an atrocity from the Kosovo war, where America dropped cluster bombs on a Belgrade suburb.
I remember they lied saying the target was some nearby structure - but cluster bombs are anti-personnel, not much good vs. structures. On Rights of humans, rights of nature posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

fear

It seems this excerpt (based on which it looks like an interesting book, by the way) is dealing more with the attempt to turn free-floating anxiety into chronic fear, the "irrational fear" that FDR called "fear itself".

I can believe it's true by now that after the Bush admin's relentless campaign to make fear the overwhelming experience of everyone's lives, in order to capitalize politically and especially socioeconomically (class war from above), people must be both fatigued and suspicious.

So I imagine it's probably not a good idea for the environmental movement to attempt any similar incessant fear-mongering.

But that's not what people have been doing anyway. That enviros are doomers and gloomers and nothing more is a straw man constructed by the enemy. What I see is mostly an appeal to intelligence, coupled with information on what ills can come, but always superseded by a doable plan of action.

So to the extent we engage fear, we always couple it with hope and a plan.

It's the intellectually and spiritually bankrupt Right who have nothing to offer but fear and hate and greed, just an appeal to the gutter.

However, getting back to the original question, should enviros seize the battleground of fear during an acute event like a hurricane, there the answer is absolutely Yes.
The fear will be there, alongside confusion, desperate to be organized, and if we don't do it, the enemy will.
Just look at the way disaster capitalism exploited Katrina - their own man-made disaster - to scapegoat environmental regulations and slander environmentalism itself.

They'll do the same thing every time if the field is just left to them. I can't imagine how anyone could argue with this.
I guess among enviro types it often is a matter of temperament, a lack of "gumption" as Glenn says above.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, have been reluctant to appeal to fear -- either because they think doing so is unethical, because they think fear doesn't work for Democrats or, most commonly, because they lack the gumption to engage Americans' emotions and not just their minds.

Foremost among the skeptics of using fear for progressive politics is Alex Gourevitch, who wrote an article in the journal n+1 criticizing environmentalism for being a "politics of fear" oriented around "threats to the conditions of life" rather than "social controversies over power and distribution."

"Environmentalism is not just some politics," Gourevitch was quoted as saying in the New York Times's City Room blog. "It's built on the idea [of] a collective threat that makes security the basic principle of politics and makes the struggle for survival the basic and central aim of our social and political life. This, to me, is not a progressive politics at all."

Environmentalism....a "politics of fear" oriented around "threats to the conditions of life" rather than "social controversies over power and distribution."

I for one aspire to make it both.

 On Should environmentalists jump on climate disasters? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 15 Responses

However bad the economy gets..

...there'll always be work in the world's oldest profession.

Here I bet the enemy was able to get good value on the cheap. Innis and crew were well trained and hit all their points.

Let's recap:

-It's a class war from above, and all the aggressors are Democrats. (Standard totalitarian ploy - accuse your opponent of exactly what you're doing.)

-The measure is votes on 16 bills, and it's the same vote in each case for or against fossil fuels.

-Standard Luntz talking points: each bill has to "increase new sources of energy"; we need a "comprehensive approach".

-Robotic rote recital of the bunker litany: "clean coal" [anodyne misdirection], natural gas and oil [oldies but goodies], oil shale [the new frontier of boondoggling and rape and megaprofits for a handful], nukes, with renewables and efficiency tossed in at the end for show.

-GOP talking points: we shouldn't pit "bad energy vs. good energy"; what's needed is the "psychological impact".

Regarding this "psychological impact", it's a serious Republican ploy. Gramm's railing against "whiners" and the "mental recession" was just a clumsy iteration of it.

But compare this David Brooks piece. (He's talking about Chinese earthquake survivors.)

These were weird, unnerving interviews, and I don't pretend to understand what's going on in the minds of people who have suffered such blows and remained so optimistic. All I can imagine is that the history of this province has given these people a stripped-down, pragmatic mentality: Move on or go crazy. Don't dwell. Look to the positive. Fix what needs fixing. Work together.

I don't know if it's emotionally sustainable or even healthy, but it raises at least one interesting question. When you compare these people to the emotional Sturm und Drang over lesser things on reality TV, you do wonder if we Americans are a nation of whiners.

Yeah - just like Gramm saying it's an mental recession. The implication is unmistakable - things seem difficult for you [non-rich] Americans? You think you have troubles? Well, look at these brave, stoic Chinese. You could learn a thing or two from them.

Whatever happens [and of course in right-wing propaganda any deleterious result of class war from above is recast as a kind of "natural" process], "Move on or go crazy. Don't dwell. Look to the positive. Fix what needs fixing. Work together."

-Then of course we have the obligatory reference to the non-existent climate change "debate".

Never mind that the Bush admin itself (in its U.S. Climate Change Science Program) has finally conceded the science.

This is the best idiot parroting that money can buy. Could Innis pass an elementary quiz on any of the subjects he's talking about? Of course not.

But who knows - in the same way the Reps have been able to get so many hillbillies to vote for them vs. their own interests, perhaps these whores might be able to do the same for some inner-city poor:

who are presumably crying out for some psychological impacts.

Unfortunately, all too many of the white rural poor seem to be too stupid to do anything but cry out for these. We'll see about the minority poor.

 On Grist talks to Niger Innis about the 'war on the poor' posted 1 year, 2 months ago 4 Responses

private family matter?

Obama said:

How a family deals with issues and teen-age children -- that shouldn't be the topic of our politics.

While this makes good sense tactically (we don't want to make them martyrs), I want to make one thing clear, as a philosophical point.

It's the christian family-values types who proclaim private family matters to be a political issue. It's the Sarah Palins of the world who deny that such things are "private", since that's the core of their politics.

So, in principle, this is certainly fair game.

But then, as said, it's not good tactics to hammer on it.

BTW, no one should ever forget that Mccain is on record as saying he believes abortion should be a private, personal matter for the rich, but a public, political matter for everyone else.  On RNC: Me, in the Twilight Zone posted 1 year, 2 months ago 19 Responses

backwards and forwards

mac,
I don't conceptualize things according to this Judeo-Christian/technoscientific "progress" linear time scheme. To me the spirit of antiquity lives also in its cyclical view of time.

So I don't look at the "past" behind us and the "future" ahead of us, and that it's a question of "backwards" or "forwards". That's why I try to rehabilitate the term "revolution" in its original, cyclical connotation, whereas today it's firmly embedded in the linear world view.

So, using backwards and forwards only as terms of expression, I say that these have a rich dialectical interplay. Where it comes to energy and technology, there will be no clear distinction between going forward and going back, between redeeming what was good in the past and capturing what will be good about the future.

Fossil fuel civilization was an anomalous blip, and just as we arose from the ante-fossil civilization, so we must move on to the beyond.
It is this state of the absence of fossil fuels which is enduring. That's why I see no point in terms like "backwards". It's a restoration.

The common term is "energy descent", and so it must be at least quantitatively, in terms of quantity of energy consumption.
Whether it must be qualitative descent as well, or whether energy descent can help trigger spiritual ascent, is I suppose my major preoccupation.
Those are the ideas I'm gathering, trying to decide upon the right mode of expression. I'll probably start with a novel.

And do you honestly think that the societies that would emerge from the rubble would be freer or more egalitarian?

I don't assume anything. I don't know what will emerge.

Mankind moves forward technologically, or in all likelihood we face nuclear Armageddon and the total destruction of the planet.

Well, if America insists upon bunker-hunkering, on this new Great Game for every last drop of oil, and if Russia goes beyond protecting its own sphere (what it's done so far) and seeks new expansion, I suppose a new cold war and threat of nuclear war are a possibility.

But that wouldn't be an outgrowth of my world view. On the contrary, it's an extension of the ideology of growth and technological progress, just what I protest.

I'll say again, I don't "want" total collapse. What I want, and would seek if I could, is an organized transformation beyond fossil fuel civilization, to salvage what can be salvaged and is worth salvaging, relinquish without rancor  what's not, and as the cycle begins anew, try to build a new way of seeing and living. We don't have to say "better", but new.   On Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability posted 1 year, 2 months ago 45 Responses

jonas; the "free market"

jonas writes:

Russ, in 1800 there were 1 billion people on this planet. Today there are 6.5 billion.

It would be entirely naive to believe that you can take an idea that perhaps worked in the 18th/early 19th century, and just assume that it will work in the totally different universe of today.

The material circumstances of today are of an entirely different order than those of the 18th century.

"Going back" to these 18th centuries ideas as such, is obviously totally not an option. It would even be outright dangerous and a recipe for catastrophy (purely given the demographic conditions of today). The 18th century realities can act as a romantic, symbolic guiding principle, but surely not as a real model to follow.

First off, just to correct your reading comprehension, "18th century" referred to the provenance of the term "revolution", and I was citing this classical definition as opposed to its modern connotation.
I wasn't referring to 18th century socioeconomic conditions in particular as being the desired destination of this revolving back.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'll say that what's "entirely naive" is to think that the unique, irreplicable, and temporary conditions of the fossil fuel era (just a blip in man's history) are somehow "the" conditions which can and must be sustained, that this was somehow mankind's fated metaphysical destination.
(Talk about being a historical determinist, if you believe that somehow this state of civilization is going to be magically sustained.)

I'm not proposing anything which nature isn't going to force anyway. All I can do is propose that with quick, organized action, we can perhaps have a controlled descent rather than plummet and crash.

For example, recently there was a study by some think tanks which showed something very counter-intuitive. They found that countries who make heavy use of their natural resources, are less mired in conflict than countries that do not exploit their natural resources and conserve them instead. The strange conclusion of the researchers: 'green peace' is an illusion, countries who work for the environment risk more social and military conflict than countries who don't.

In other words, the countries who had a plethora of resources to exploit in the first place, who were able to smash the earth with tremendous impacts, and become rich in the process, have not had as much call to fall apart internally or go to war externally, while those who had little to exploit have sometimes rended one another over carrion - well, that's certainly surprising.

That's of course what we're talking about here.  "Green" countries, those which have consciously enacted significant environmental policies, have seen no conflict - unless of course you count American oil-seeking aggression.
But there we'd have an example of scarcity driving conflict.

As for markets, as soon as structures grow beyond barter dimensions, and especially once they become capitalist, they can never be "free", but are always directed by something.
The default directing force is the law of the jungle - bullying and brutal. Government can either reinforce might-makes-right (actively or tacitly), seek to ameliorate it, or seek to override it.

Those are the only options. As for the benevolent "invisible hand" (which is what I assume is what is meant by this mythical term "free market"), that only exists in economics textbooks.   On Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability posted 1 year, 2 months ago 45 Responses

jonas and mac

Jonas:

But think of this: who is this movement? Who is speaking? Which are the material and social conditions that have to be in place for such a movement and discourse to emerge? (Classic "marxist" questions). The answer is: such a movement can only occur in high bourgeois societies, with members who are well off and have lots of cash and free time to spend on new ideas, and who live in societies with large middle classes, all living in urban areas, and enjoying low fertility rates.

These bourgeois societies emerged after a very long process of modernisation. Only now, now that immense amounts of wealth have been accumulated, do members of these societies have the time and luxury to call for more environmentally-friendly production processes.

This puts me in mind of an essay I read just yesterday, linked from Energy Bulletin. It's on how the famous "tragedy of the commons" is really a myth; how there is no evidence that pre-capitalist herding saw this kind of dog-eat-dog selfishness, and lots of counterevidence vs. it; how on the contrary the assumptions built into the thesis are capitalist assumptions, and already assume an existing capitalist system. So the whole thing is circular reasoning - you preassume capitalism, and then discover capitalist relations prevailing. But that doesn't mean that's how things always were.

So similarly here, the world is fully immersed in the capitalist stage, and you look around and assume everything based upon that perspective. If the West followed a certain historical path, so must the rest of the world.

But the ideas we're talking about here did not originally lie in some "future", they were always latent and were often realized, prior to capitalism. Here, like in many other places, "post-industrialism" looks a lot like pre-industrialism. People don't need to evolve through all the stages of industrialism and its concomitant social organization; rather, they can, if they have the political will, have a true revolution in the classical 18th century sense of the term - a revolving back to sustainability following a wrong turn.

Because let's admit it, it's not poor African farmers who have come up with this 'slow food' or 'local food' idea. It's wealthy urbanites from Rome, New York, Seattle and Brussels.

I'm sick of this notion that ideas like these are typical consumerist lifestyle accouterments, "fashions". Yeah, there's a lot of posers out there, and a lot of stupid "features" in the MSM, but this has nothing to do with the integrity of the idea itself.

You know, that slavery is bad is also a late, "luxury" idea. Perhaps a fad.

So let's try slow/local food in our wealthy societies. We have the luxury to experiment, and if it fails, it's no disaster. But let's not be so crazy as to tell food-insecure, poor, agrarian developing countries that they should implement the same ideas, unless we are absolutely 100% sure that this can lead to modernity for them. If we do tell them they should listen to us without being sure of the effects of this ideology, then we might well be 'green imperialists'.

I confess I don't see how you decouple the two. We currently have global agriculture, and to whatever extent wealthy societies ascend from globalism, developing countries will essentially be left to their own resources. We don't need to tell anybody what to do, but we'd be saying, "We're headed this way".

Anyway, as you know, I don't believe there's going to be any choice in the matter, other than how organized the attempt at the next stage is. There just aren't enough fossil fuels for the developing world to develop the way the West did. So not only should the West be undertaking this transition now, and not only should the developing world, not "leapfrog" as you put it, but take a side path - neither really has any choice for much longer.

Mac - I do often get very angry at the injustice and ugliness of modern civilization. So that's why I sometimes express myself the way I do. We're hardly writing dissertations here, though for what it's worth if I was writing for publication I'd always be on my best behavior.  :)

As an enemy of all large structures, I'm hardly a Maoist. As you read above, I'm not a historical determinist where it comes to socioeconomic organization, except where the latter must follow the physical facts of energy availability.

 On Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability posted 1 year, 2 months ago 45 Responses

jonas

I doubt that anyone is advocating anything new, or anything which hasn't been studied to death already. Rather, they're advocating that existing ideas finally be implemented.

Also, I hardly believe even the fastest, most aggressive implementation of anything is going to be fast or aggressive enough to hit anyone like a bolt out of the blue.
After all, like I said, the ideas have been around for a long time. So all the actors know this agenda might possibly come into being. How much more preparation do they need?

We first have to explain them that we will be changing their market, and that we will help them so that they too can benefit from another system. We will, if needed, even provide alternative livelihoods to them, because the slow-food market will undoubtedly (initially) lead to massive jobs losses in the agricultural sector in the developing world.

(This sounds alot like an argument I've heard against getting off fossil fuels - that we somehow owe it to the petrostates to remain their slavish clients, because without us what will they do?)

The truth is, I don't know if you're right that there even exist all these small farmers in developing countries - I've read the opposite as well.
But let's say there are - I hardly see how these reforms could harm small farmers even a tiny fraction as much as agribusiness and globalization have.

Measures which disempower mega-agriculture can only help small farmers.

The fact is, we don't have time for going more slowly than as fast as politics makes possible. That's probably going to be way too slow anyway, and then everyone, small farmers included, is going to get hit simultaneously with the quickly intensifying effects of climate change and energy descent.

We have a small time window, and our ideas are as tested as they're ever going to be short of deployment. This is true in energy and its true in agriculture.

(Even if you're not as convinced as I about civilizational descent, the precautionary principle still demands the same outlook.)   On Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability posted 1 year, 2 months ago 45 Responses

Jonas

I'm afraid I can't agree with you here. However well-intentioned, this is just a recipe for endless delay.

If the goals are intrinsically desirable (and you agree that they are), we simply must fight to implement them. The goal is the good of the earth and of all peoples. The way to achieve the goal is to win the war as soon as possible.

Of course there's the likelihood of some people being harmed - robber capitalism always holds plenty of hostages. But it's only the atavistic struggle of the greedy to hold onto their power which spreads pain. Let them relinquish their illegitimate goals (just read the list - for each item it's clear who the enemy is), and there might just be time and energy to transform civilization before it goes down. Any such action is hard enough where there's full will to action. Anyone who counsels further delay is simply against the act itself.  On Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability posted 1 year, 3 months ago 45 Responses

links

I won't repeat my earlier comments, but since this is now the more active Boone thread I wanted to repost the links I put up at yesterday's Yay for Boone thread:

http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/columns/TimothyCarney/T ...

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b40890 ...

These provide the best account of Boone's predatory water/land grab in Texas, for which his wind farm is a fig leaf.On T. Boone Pickens embraces progressive policies but not progressive politicians posted 1 year, 3 months ago 25 Responses

subsidies

It seems to me we should look at this issue the same as we look at renewables vs. fossil fuels; in the same way as fossil fuels, agribusiness has been so heavily subsidized for so long, and been so destructive, that perhaps not only should its subsdies be stripped, but, just as for renewables, organics and whatever in farming is ecologically and socioeconomically healthy should get a leg up, in order to help level this heavily tilted playing field. On Can sustainable farming provide a sustainable living? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 26 Responses

bob says

It's OK to be a little cautious while we wait to see if their conversion is real and if it sticks.  But it's best to hold off on the attacks for what they did in the past if they are now working in the right, rather than wrong, way.

Perhaps, but you should really consider what he's actually doing right now in Texas.

I'll link this from the dc examiner. It's short enough that I'll just reproduce the whole thing here:

T. Boone Pickens wants your water

By Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist | 8/21/08 7:10 PM

Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn't own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. After he pulls it off, the media will deride it as craven capitalism. In truth, it is one the most audacious examples of politics for profit, showing how big government helps the biggest business steal from the rest of us. The plotline behind Pickens' water-and-wind scheme is almost too rich to believe. If it were a movie script, reviewers would dismiss it as over-the-top.

The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly "sustainable" practice, he has piggybacked this water project onto a windmill project pitched as an alternative to oil.

Pickens' scheme is a perfect demonstration of why it's worth asking cui bono -- who benefits -- from regulatory and environmental initiatives. Last week, this column pointed out that Pickens, before his current lobbying blitz for increased federal support of wind power, built the largest wind farm in the world.

I received dozens of responses from environmentalists and Pickens fans objecting to my implication that Pickens' profit from expanding wind subsidies ought to cast suspicion on his call for more wind subsidies. "Why should I care if someone's getting rich?" was the general gist, "windmills are good, and we need more of them."

This objection is grounded in a good instinct: The profit motive, far from being evil, is the driving force behind most of our society's advances. But, especially when it comes to government plans involving your tax dollars, asking cui bono helps us unearth less desirable aspects of the scheme.

Amid all the hype Pickens' windmill plan has gotten, the interesting part -- the water part -- has been mostly ignored, except for an excellent Business Week story by Susan Berfield and a column by Steve Milloy.

Roberts County, Texas, sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir that stretches all the way to South Dakota. It's in Roberts County that T. Boone Pickens set aside eight acres from his ranch for drilling deep into the aquifer.

Then he turned this parcel into a town, basically, with only two eligible voters -- both of whom were his employees. (This required a change in Texas law in 2007 -- a change facilitated no doubt by his $1.2 million in campaign contributions to Texas legislators in 2006).
Then there was an election in this district, in which both voters voted to make this 8-acre municipality a special fresh-water district.

Pickens' wholly owned government entity now can issue tax-free bonds (meaning he can borrow at a serious discount) and use the power of eminent domain to pressure landowners to sell -- or to take their land if they hold out. The eminent domain power is key to building the pipeline that will run this water down to the Dallas area, where Pickens hopes to sell the water. If your land lies in the path of his proposed pipeline, you got a letter explaining that T. Boone wants to buy a stretch of your land -- and explaining that he can use eminent domain if you resist. If this begins to sound too cutthroat to the public, Pickens just reminds journalists and politicians that following this water pipeline will be the transmission cables for Pickens' mammoth wind farm.

Are you really going to side with some greedy holdout ranchers over the future of green power? Sure enough, the Sierra Club is now rallying behind this whole scheme.

Nobody owns the aquifer -- that would be too capitalist, of course -- but in Texas, whoever has the water beneath his land can pump as much as he wants. The limits on this are usually pumping capacity (which requires money) and ability to sell it (which requires, among other things, pipelines). Pickens has cleared those hurdles, and now he can drain the aquifer faster than anyone ever before, future generations and other water users be damned.

This is why, when presented with some big government program, it's worthwhile to ask who's getting rich -- because you may find something interesting when you look below the surface.

Examiner Columnist Timothy P. Carney is editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report. His Examiner Column appears on Fridays.

wiscidea

Anti-GMOs people might be surprised to learn that the broad patent rights given to corporations severely interfere with research and innovation at academic institutions.

I known that for some time, and it didn't surprise me when I did learn it. It's just one example among a disturbingly long list of ways in which universities become compliant corporate feeding troughs.

Here we're talking about predatory agribusiness, but I could also mention the (increasingly privatized) military-industrial complex, the techno-surveillance complex, the totalitarian brain-scanning industry, industrial irrigation in California (for anyone not familiar with that history, you might not believe how much California irrigation has been state and federally subsidized to benefit a relative handful of big landowners).

In these and other cases, a malevolent corporate force ponies up pennies matched by public dollars and public university research facilities, to develop products and technologies for which the corporation generally walks away with the patent rights (the university might get some measly royalty or fee), which products and technologies are then used to assault our socioeconomic structure, our dignity, and our very freedom.

This is a big part of why I consider America's system of "higher education" to be rotten beyond redemption.

(Off-topic rant concluded.)   On U.S. foreign policy: GMO all the way posted 1 year, 3 months ago 23 Responses

Jonas

Quite frankly, I think that most nations will go through a phase of dirty modernity, which brings crude wealth, generates a demographic transition (like the one seen in Japan) and creates bourgeois middle classes, from which figures like Fukuoka can emerge.

Just wondering - where do you think the energy for this is going to come from?

Remember before you answer - any large-scale renewable system can be built only on the foundation of cheap, plentiful fossil fuels.On Long live 'do-nothing farming' posted 1 year, 3 months ago 21 Responses

mac

"You don't like phones that much, but you champion ""the predatory might-makes-right system. You're not concerned with negative externalities. In your "free market", cellphone junkies get to free ride on the backs of those who are subjected to having cell towers erected in their immediate vicinity. Why shouldn't all these freeloaders have to compensate the victims?"

An approach like this would be suffocating. Ostensibly every time anyone tried to do anything entrepreneurial they would require "someone's" permission. This is simply handing ever more control to bureaucrats to determine the courses our lives take. If that's the way you want to live, fine. But I'll take the more laissez fair approach that Thailand offers.

In other words, every time thugs wanted to attack they would need their victims' permission.

You know, it occurs to me, apropos of the dustup you and drx had over some term, that I've heard some nasty stories about the Thai sex trade.

If that's the way you want to live, fine.

But that's not "fine" with you totalitarians. Tell me where the frontier is where I can get away from all the capitalist scum, and I'll pack my bags tomorrow.

"It is "big politics". By which I mean, it is an issue of critical significance. Technological society is raising a cohort of hominids who will never learn what it is to become human."

It is up to each individual to figure that out, not have someone figure it out for them and not for people like you to tell them what is and is not OK.

By that of course you mean, it's up to the coercive mass to impose itself upon the individual.

"This is tautological. I obviously reject "whatever you want", since what most people seem to "want" does not justify the ecological destruction and social injustice which prevail."

The question was stupid in the first place. To go where? That would be based on the individuals requirements to get from point A to point B. Therefore, each case has its own requirements.

It's unfortunate that reading comprehension has become so poor. By "where" I of course meant, what's the point of a materialistic lifestyle, and why is it suddenly so important for all this scum to go jetting around the world, where for tens of thousands of years man did just fine without it?

"Man's resourcefulness". - Yes, "technology will save us", deus ex machina. Pay him enough and he'll make you a sandwich. Never mind that he has no bread or fixings."

And here you just dismiss it - no reasoned thought. Just "it's not going to happen". Why not? Well because you don't want it to. You want a global catstrophe that wipes out 6 billion people or so. I guess you haven't thought about the ecological impacts of what that would mean, have you?

Sigh...
I've said many times what I think is going to happen and why.

For any good-faith readers out there, here you see a version of the global warming holocaust denier process - no matter how many times you explain it to them, the next time they pretend you never explained it at all, hoping to deceive some neophyte to the issue.

As for man's population, I'm the one who's trying to figure out how to ameliorate the necessary retrenchment to 2 billion or so, what's estimated as the non-fossil fuel carrying capacity of the Earth.
You're the one who wants to do nothing until nature forces the crash, which will probably send population plummetting way below that.

And here you just dismiss it - no reasoned thought. Just "it's not going to happen". Why not?

Again, as you know damn well, I've explained this many times. I have indeed offered reasoned thought. You're the one who thinks leprechauns are going to provide massive energy.

(You STILL haven't answered the question I've now asked SEVERAL times - where are you going to get the energy?)

I'm not going to bother with this anymore.

We'll see.  On The limits of consumption-based food movements posted 1 year, 3 months ago 35 Responses

A kindred spirit

I just wanted to link to this excellent essay by Bob Brannigan at today's Energy Bulletin.On The limits of consumption-based food movements posted 1 year, 3 months ago 35 Responses

mac

Hmmm, you can call me "stupid" and "ridiculous" all you like. I'll refrain from responding in kind, but I will say that I think the record speaks for itself as to who is stupid and ridiculous.

As for being an "elitist prick", I assure you, coming from the likes of you I take that as the highest compliment.

I notice you didn't answer my very simple question - where are you going to get the energy to continue your gluttony?

(You avowed the term "gluttony". You are aware gluttony's a sin, are you not?)

It is IMPOSSIBLE not to concentrate wealth. It gets concentrated either through accrual in a free market, or it gets concentrated by political processes that in non-representative societies. And without the concentration of wealth, major projects can not be undertaken. Many here have called for a Manhattan project for energy - well, to do that would require the concentration of wealth.

I won't even engage with you the idiocy which has to be involved in believing there's such a thing as a "free" market.

For the benefit of any good-faith readers, I'll just reiterate that all markets are rigged, and the only question is how much the rigging is for the general benefit, as opposed to being rigged to aggrandize this wretched parasitic wealth structure.

I'm referring to markets in the context of large-scale politico-economic structures. I already told mac I don't believe "major projects" are any longer practically possible, and that even if they were I believe they're morally pernicious, so in the above quote he's showing a bizarre lack of reading comprehension, the way he seems to imply that I am among those who want a "manhattan project".

No, if the goal is to prop up the monster, I don't want it.

A ridiculous, stupid statement if ever there was one. In the modern world we have rapid transportation systems, we have the best food security situation the world has EVER seen in its history (as articulated right here on Grist), we have superb modern communications, the arts are flourishing (you've just missed it - listen to the music, the entertainment provided today - there's something for every taste, even for elitist pricks.), life expectancies are FAR longer than they were historically

I'll grant you the food security - of course only for the economic elite, even in so fat a country as America.

As for the rest - I'm going to introduce you to a radical concept: quality as opposed to quantity.

"Rapid transportation" - to go WHERE? To do WHAT?

"Modern communications" - to communicate about WHAT? Given your tone, I'm picturing you as one of these idiots with a cell phone as an appendage to his head (or, more accurately, you are the appendage of the phone), even as none of your "conversations" have any significance at all.

"The arts are flourishing" - You already said you despise the arts [on the agricultural Waterloo thread, for anyone who wants to check], so I can't imagine upon what knowledge you say this.

"Life expectancies are FAR longer than they were historically." - Life expectancies to do WHAT?

I'm sure these questions are way over your head. It's just my silly morality which demands of me a question, if man has to be such a radically disruptive, destructive force on this planet, then there better be a radically transcendent point to it all.

So I demand of those who destroy, and who applaud the destruction, WHY?

I certainly don't see any point. But then, I don't want the destruction to continue. I want devolution, stewardship, simplicity.

I'll quote again your core rah-rah fascism:

It is IMPOSSIBLE not to concentrate wealth. It gets concentrated either through accrual in a free market, or it gets concentrated by political processes that in non-representative societies. And without the concentration of wealth, major projects can not be undertaken.

Dogma - the non-existent "free" market, the conjuring of the bugbear of "non-representative societies" (Exactly where on Earth do you see a representative society? Concentrated wealth by definition eradicates "representation". Oh, I forgot - you dogmatically deny this.), the flat-earth belief that "major projects" must be undertaken, just for their own sakes.....

....just for the sake of an ideology called Greed Fundamentalism.

And never mind that the energy for this is running out.
Which brings me back to this - mac, I remind you, you didn't tell me where the energy is going to come from to continue your vaunted "gluttony".

What's the matter - do you have a proprietary interest in the magic of those leprechauns?  

 On The limits of consumption-based food movements posted 1 year, 3 months ago 35 Responses

green granny

Do women become "every bit as aggressive, greedy, and destructive as men" because they are empowered OR are aggressive, greedy, and destructive women MORE LIKELY to obtain power (maybe because the "professional" world still rewards stereotypical male behavior)?
Just wondering.

Well, it's not "stereotypical male behavior", it's stereotypical power behavior.

My point was the same as Lord Acton's - "power corrupts". I would only qualify that by adding, temporal power within the context of big wealth and big structures.

So my answer is, while those who are naturally aggressive and destructive (of either gender) are likely to seek power if they have any aptitude, the real evil is the power itself, which is prone to corrupt even those who did start out in good faith.

(Your Gandhi was a rare exception.)   On Why do more men than women support nuclear power? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 31 Responses

mac

Will women who leave men hating comments....

.... receive the same treatment?

Probably not - all too true.

Actually, as is evident from these comments already, it's not so much women who leave man-hating comments but what seem to be men who loathe their own gender.

That's silly, of course. As is abundantly clear by now, to the extent you empower them women are every bit as aggressive, greedy, and destructive as men.
Even feminists no longer bother trying to claim that if women ruled the world we'd have a peaceful, happy, holistic world.On Why do more men than women support nuclear power? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 31 Responses

if you're interested

Here's an essay on the geopolitics driving these events, by George Friedman at stratfor.com.

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power
August 12, 2008

By George Friedman

Related Special Topic Pages
Crisis in South Ossetia
U.S. Weakness and Russia's Window of Opportunity
The Russian Resurgence
Kosovo, Russia and the West
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let's begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region's absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded -- within hours of the Georgian attack -- the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

(click image to enlarge)
On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion
In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia's move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia's closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia's mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but -- along with the Georgians -- miscalculated Russia's intentions. The United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well -- indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow's calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

The Western Encirclement of Russia
To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO's expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic -- and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia's national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion -- publicly stated -- was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo's separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts -- including demands by various regions for independence from Russia -- might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia's requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere
Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem -- it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran -- and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow's interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn't all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia's public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened -- it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

that pesky reality-based community

I'd like to be a fly on the wall for the upcoming talks between Condoleezza Rice and the Russian leadership.

Yeah, it sure would be comical.

I don't know what's more pathetic - America's hypocrisy on Kosovo, its material impotence to do anything about this thanks to its imperial overstretch, or the sheer stupidity and incompetence the Bush admin has shown with regard to both.

It hardly needs saying, Rice is not the type to inspire fear or respect in anyone. Yes, if I was Putin, I'd be in the best of spirits right now.On Oil geopolitics of the Georgia pipeline posted 1 year, 3 months ago 19 Responses

Mad mac,

Large structures will prevail. Post fossil fuel era will simply replace fossil fuels with other means to support power and transportation needs. I know you WANT things to become more local, but it will never happen again.

No, I think you're the one who's mistaken.

Any post-fossil fuel energy infrastructure of any significant size can be built only on the foundation of cheap, plentiful fossil fuel. That's why Robert Hirsch says mankind would need 20 years head start on building this infrastructure before energy descent begins in earnest.

While in theory it may be possible to do this, in practice it is simply not going to be done. In the current political configuration it's not even possible to achieve such a meagerly modest goal as renewing credits for wind and solar.
It's all too clear that the bunker-hunkered dead-end scorched-earthers are all too intent on forcing civilizational suicide. Their entire agenda by now is pure obstruction:

-Deny climate change and forestall action until it's too late.

-Demagogue drilling and block renewable deployment until it's too late.

-Starve all public services and infrastructure into oblivion.

-To the extent they can't hijack regulatory agencies with treasonous political appointees, at least starve them of funding to render them impotent.

So government is not going to direct any "Manhattan project" or "Apollo program" or WW2 or New Deal or any analogy anyone chooses.
And as has become abundantly clear, private enterprise isn't going to do it either, not without massive government assistance which is not going to be forthcoming.

So a national renewable infrastructure is not going to be built. Instead men will keep drilling and burning unto the bitter end, and once the abundant juice runs out, the structures will be untenable and collapse.

You're right, I do want localization for its own sake, while I gather you don't.

But what either of us wants is irrelevant. Nature is going to devolve us, downsize us, localize us whether we want it or not.  On The limits of consumption-based food movements posted 1 year, 3 months ago 35 Responses

sam writes:

If wind power and other renewables are so good, why do they need tons of money? Keeping the kW-hr subsidy as it is seems to work, and little more is needed - other than perhaps a plan to coordinate permit approvals by federal, state, and local governments. Am I missing something?

This logic is certainly correct where it comes to fossil fuels, nukes, and automobiles, given how obscenely privileged and laden with public gifts they've been for so many decades.

But it's precisely this long dismal process of wealth and power accumulation, infrastructure calcification, and general entrenchment on the part of these winners the government picked for so long which renders it absurd to think renewables are on anything close to a level playing field.

As a practical matter,they need direct public assistance (not for R&D; you're correct that the technology is ready for deployment now - but the prices for home solar panels, for example, are still out of sight for lots of people without incentives and subsidies), while from the opposite direction we need to eradicate all the atavistic subsidies the entrenched fossil fuel and nuclear industries still get, and impose the carbon price they should've been paying all along.
(And also convert the utility pricing structure from profit based on gross delivery to profit based on efficiency - negawatts.)     On Media finally tells public about the real roadblock to good energy policy posted 1 year, 3 months ago 8 Responses

msm

It really is sickening how all MSM reportage acts as if there's a legitimate question as to whether or not offshore drilling will have any significant effect on imports or gasoline price at all, let alone anytime soon (thereby playing right along with republican demagoguery), or sets up this irresponsible and asinine false equivalence between the Dems wanting to force pay-as-you-go, and the Reps holding renewable credits hostage to extort the abandonment of this reform.

As for McCain himself, here again we've been seeing what Krugman calls the "Mccain rules", whereby the msm gives him a pass on every lie, every flip-flop, every stupidity, simply because their dogmatic mindset is that he's the "straight-talker", the "maverick", the man of integrity, and never mind that his campaign has provided zero evidence for any of this, quite the contrary.

Friedman's column today is spot on (Bob Herbert's column yesterday was also good), but as David points out, it's still "just" an op-ed, and therefore not a counter-example vs. the msm's general dereliction. On Media finally tells public about the real roadblock to good energy policy posted 1 year, 3 months ago 8 Responses

quasi-government

In many places the figure is much higher than that 20%. Indeed in some places it's nigh on impossible to buy a new house without it being part of an HOA (just part of the dismantling of public services everywhere).

So where these associations are acting as de facto governments, we need to get past the fraudulent frame that these are voluntary private groups to whom the constitution and state or federal law does not apply.

(Other examples include Walmart or Blockbuster, who forfeit any right to private censorship, and should be forced to honor the 1st amendment, where they have driven alternative media providers out of business. Here they, as the intentional result of their business practices, have voluntarily assumed a quasi-governmental mantle.)  On Homeowner associations restrict eco-friendly practices in favor of aesthetics posted 1 year, 3 months ago 1 Response

philosophy

This relates to why, leaving all considerations of practical politics and economics aside, looking at it just in terms of political philosophy, I reject cap-and-trade and prefer the carbon tax.

C&T, even where the permits are auctioned, represents a formal conferral of a "right" to pollute. It is in fact another privatization of public property, similar to selling off public land (just as giving away the permits is analogous to giving away public land).

A carbon tax (which, incidentally, contrary to what many claim, could easily be instituted so as to impose a de facto cap) OTOH would maintain the atmosphere as the public commons, would enshrine the concept that the only right anyone has here is a usufruct, and that any use which pollutes is therefore taxed.
The tax could be viewed morally as a fee or a fine, according to taste, but would not be conferring any "right" to the taxed action.  On Head of CCX endorses McCain's cap-and-trade program, reveals misunderstanding of climate policy posted 1 year, 3 months ago 6 Responses

If these are the choices,

it should be a no-brainer.  

By coincidence, I just got around to reading Thomas Frank's nightmarish What's the Matter With Kansas?.

Any governor who can stand tall against Big Coal and the morass of slime which always congeals around it, in a place like Kansas, is the kind of person we should be able to trust.

(Also, maybe a woman VP nominee will appease these Hillary dead-enders who have been implicitly saying they'd rather see Roe v. Wade overturned than vote for Obama.)   On The pro- and anti-coal contenders on Obama's veep shortlist posted 1 year, 3 months ago 3 Responses

right-wing echoes

Here we go again with this. I no longer know what to say about the Democrats and affiliated things like "We". Their contemptible compulsion to appease the Right can only be called moral cowardice.

Is it that they believe these stupid polls where people lie and say they don't want "negativity" or "partisanship" in campaigning, advertising, etc., even though time after time it's proven that this is what works?
(Not to mention the quaint little matter of the truth - that the Republicans are mercenary obstructionists and demagogues, that they and only they are responsible for Congress' failure to renew the credits or enact national mitigation.)

Or is it just a fundamentally craven temperament? Gore ran as a coward, Kerry ran as a coward, Obama has also shown such signs...

What really makes my head explode is the Dems' squeamishness about facing up to the truth of class warfare - that for close to 30 years now the Right has been waging ruthless class war from above, and yet all they've had to do to make the Dems flee the field with nary a shot is accuse them of waging class war. This actually makes the Dems tremble.

WHY??????

Until the Dems recognize that the Reps have betrayed America and turned viciously against America, that this is now a zero-sum civil war in everything but the physical shooting, and counterattack accordingly (or until an intrepid new organization comes along which IS willing to fight back), the looting and vandalism and rot will only continue.On We campaign continues to shoot itself, and climate movement, in the foot posted 1 year, 3 months ago 30 Responses

canis wrote

Thanks, Russ, for reminding Mad Mac of artistic creativity, aside from whatever despotic visions he might enjoy (in the other, WTO-related thread).  Thanks too for mentioning two places close to my heart, classical Greece and Renaissance Italy.

You're most welcome. I also enjoyed the cultural discussion you and some others had at this thread.

I've been kicking around the idea that if the core of man's modern predicament is his inability to recognize any limits, any boundaries, any "rules", and all tradition and authority is in practice completely dissolved (whatever fatuous blowhard politicians may continue to pay lip service to), that is that modern man is formless, and if the essence of classical culture (art, ideas) was on the contrary the primacy of form, symmetry, principle, then if one could conceive such a thing as a Peak Oil aesthetic and culture, an environmentalist and holistic culture, that logically it too must seek to build a bridge back to classicism. It must be revolutionary in the classical Montesquieu sense of the term, i.e. a revolving back to sanity and maturity after a badly wrong turn was taken.

On a different note:  

The problem (one of the many problems actually) that conservatives have is assuming that US liberals, who are far from united or monochrome, are somehow all-of-a-piece with socialist/Marxist/communist dictators, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, etc.

This is certainly an ironic passage. There is nothing "united or monochrome" about this list either. On Globalization failed, cheap oil is gone, local production is the only way forward posted 1 year, 3 months ago 58 Responses

Jon writes:

Just to give you an idea of how short Amtrak is, many of their extra cars are now rusting outside New Orleans, a conductor told me, because FEMA took them in case there was another emergency and they had to get people out fast.  

I guess maybe I am becoming a conspiracy theorist, as I was recently accused, since I read this and immediately I think, it's disaster capitalism in action again: the Bush admin hates Amtrak, and so uses Katrina as the pretext to take these cars out of service to further hobble it.On Obama loves high-speed rail posted 1 year, 3 months ago 16 Responses

replies from Russ

Ron asks:

So, can we assume that you would be in favor of breaking up Canada, China, India, Brazil, the European Union, Russia and the United States into their constituent states or provinces, and making each of those sub-national units into independent nations?

If you mean, would I love to see such breakups, that would be a big fat YES.

As far as I'm concerned, history's finest political delineations were achieved in the city-states of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance. It's no coincidence these were also history's finest efflorescences of culture and the spirit.

When I dream of post fossil-fuel utopia, I envision people living vigorous physical and spiritual lives free of vulgar materialism and "politics", harmonized with the land, with the basic political unit being the watershed district (and without large-scale irrigation projects, which always only re-establishes tyranny).  

Mad Mac:

What you may consider "vulgar" someone else might consider "grand". Just because you think large scale is "pure evil" doesn't make it so.

Spaceshaper already answered for me on claiming universal authority.
The only caveat I'll add is, since I had the misfortune to be born into a time which is hostile and oppressive for my kind, I certainly have the right to fight back. It's your system which is totalitarian in the literal sense, valorizing all things, pegging all these marketized values to the desires of gluttons, and forcibly demanding that anyone who wants to live more simply is still either conscripted into the rat race or has to go live in a cave.

You only have the luxury of telling others their values aren't absolute because your kind has been able to forcibly impose yours (so far) as de facto absolutes.
So while I certainly don't claim philosophical certitude, as a matter of practical action I've learned this from this world - this is a zero-sum battle for total power.

 
The "Arts" are very low on my particular priority list, mostly because artists tend to think they are smarter than the rest of us, when they're not.

What a bizarrely petty reason to reject the pinnacle of humanity's achievements.

As for the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica, the Parthenon, Angkor Wat and the myriad other architectural wonders of antiquity and the preindustrial age, I have great admiration for these.
For me the great dividing line where man passed from his progressive stage to his decadent stage was the advent of fossil fuels and the industrial revolution.

vakibs:

The horrors you describe are certainly possible, and I don't relish the thought of them.
But if that proves to be the price man incurs, if those are the necessary growing pains as man is forced to relinquish his technological toys, evicted from the ICU, forced to stand on his own two feet again, and assume adult responsibilites on this Earth, so be it.

(BTW vakibs, you accused me above of "conspiracy"-mongering, yet I just read your latest comment over on the Globalization Death Watch thread, and you were using terms like "plunder" and "colonialism". So if I'm a conspiracy theorist, it seems I'm not the only one. :) ) On Why the Bank itself bears its share of responsibility for the global food crisis posted 1 year, 3 months ago 17 Responses

vakibs

1. These are not "conspiracy theories", but well-attested facts. Naomi Klein did not invent the term or the concept "shock doctrine", she simply did straight reporting on what Milton Friedman and his cadres have said about themselves, and how they proceeded to do exactly what they said years ahead of time they would do if they ever had the power.
As for Peak Oil, which we discussed on the other thread, again I related simple facts and theories which so far have had observation match prediction, while you simply tossed out seemingly random statements which were empirically wrong.

2. You concede these might be true, but call them "unnecessary"!? If there's even a chance they're true, what could possibly be more relevant to progressive-oriented discussions of globalization or civilizational energy?

3. As for my underlying hatred of greed and materialism, and my propensity to find them active in most places where exploitation, injustice, and/or stupidity are prevailing, my study of history tells me that unfortunately one will rarely go wrong doing so.
   

bad deal

The idea that there's some kind of binding grand compromise in the offing here is a foolish one.

Do you really think any "deal" with these people will hold up? You can make deals, and then they'll just renege on their part of the bargain while making further demands.
They'll demand ever more subsidies, tax breaks, royalty alienation, rollback of environmental regulations....At the same time they'll demand that "alternative" investment go to coal-to-liquids, coal spray-n-pray scams, CCS RD&D boondoggles, nukes, the hydrogen cell procrastination scam, etc.

This is just old-fashioned appeasement plain and simple. (This comparison is precise. if you're worried about public opinion, remember that 30s appeasement was very popular.)

This is pandering to the flat earth notion that we can drill and burn our way out of the mess we're in from being addicted to drilling and burning. It's Homer Simpson sinking in the tarpit, plunging in his arms to extract his legs, and then his face to extract his arms.
If you really think the political situation is so hopeless that you still want to pander while Rome burns, you might as well just give up and admit, we're lost.

The Democrats certainly do need a better message, but what, if the people are such idiots? The enemy knows exactly what they want to do - keep the fossil fuel party going to the dead end, and permanently forestall any transformation beyond fossil fuels. They're certainly willing to make a tactical "compromise", since they know when they bust the deal, the Dems will just cave in again, as they always do, and be willing to make another deal. As McCain has admitted, the point of offshore drilling is not to really do anything about price and supply (which he knows it won't), but to send a psychological signal, to help keep everyone in the bunker (and of course to add more obscene profits to Big Oil's treasure hoard).

Of course, I'm aware of the political realities, that there's almost zero chance of America growing out of its clinical retardism and actually assuming adult responsibilities, that there's almost 100% chance we'll just continue to whine and pout and demand and scream "IT'S MINE!" So almost certainly every drop that can be drilled eventually will, of course at zero benefit to all these spoiled brats, just at tremendous profit to the dinosaur corporations.

So if a "deal" has to be attempted, there's at least one thing which seems obvious. I'd demand part of the deal be and end to ALL fossil fuel subsidies, incentives, royalty waivers, etc. Perhaps that's one issue WE could "demagogue". After all, when they refuse, we could say to the people,
"The deal's all set, but even as they pile up endless billions of dollars in profits they still refuse to give up their corporate welfare handouts which we know you hate so much. So THAT'S why your gasoline is going to keep getting more expensive - because ExxonMobil refuses to take $11 billion instead of $11.5, and their waterboys in Congress are worried about getting less in bribes, er, campaign contributions. That's why the Republicans are holding up the drilling deal."
(Perhaps this could be a poison pill to kill the deal, save the seas and coasts, while trying to turn the tables of obstructionism perception.)

As for Obama's willingness to temporize here, do you really think he's making a cold political calculation, or is this more evidence that he's soft in the face of the intransigence of greed and power? Other examples - health care, FISA, Iraq.  Also the general tenor of his campaign, as described by Paul Krugman:

Incidentally, it's surprising that the lousy economy hasn't yet had more impact on the campaign. Mr. McCain essentially proposes continuing the policies of a president whose approval rating on economics is only 20 percent. So why isn't Mr. Obama further ahead in the polls?

One answer may be that Mr. Obama, perhaps inhibited by his desire to transcend partisanship (and avoid praising the last Democratic president?), has been surprisingly diffident about attacking the Bush economic record. An illustration: if you go to the official Obama Web site and click on the economic issues page, what you see first isn't a call for change -- what you see is a long quote from the candidate extolling the wonders of the free market, which could just as easily have come from a speech by President Bush.

There's one thing we have to get straight - you can make a temporary deal, retreat a little bit, but that'll only cause them to step forward and attack again. There can never be a "compromise". They'll never compromise. Greed fundamentalism never does, and never can.

  On Since offshore oil is de minimis, why shouldn't Obama and the Dems make a deal? Part 1 posted 1 year, 3 months ago 4 Responses

the jury is in

I believe after 20 years of climate change science publicity, we have enough evidence for a verdict.

Umm, that would be a "no".

[Cf. also - evolution, belief in god, etc.]On Things smart people assume posted 1 year, 3 months ago 15 Responses

vakib - the Peak

I don't know what you mean by "postponed further and further".
It's true that Hubbert forecast the world Peak for around 2000. But this didn't take into account the oil shocks of the 70s, which induced enough improved efficiency that the Peak was set back some years.

All the modern projections among Peakers have had the Peak occurring sometime between now and the next several years. Production has been plateauing since 2005, which is the earliest (speculative) prediction I ever heard of. The main trend of projections has fallen in the 2007-10 range, and we're certainly within that range now. (Of course the Peak isn't something where horns blare and banners roll out on a particular day. History will likely see it as something smeared out over a few years, just like America's peak is smeared out over 1970-1.)  

So I can't imagine what "postponements" you're talking about.

And second, the world gross economic product is growing which makes deeper reserves profitable to extract.  

Hmm. Then why have the majors been investing out of their gargantuan profits only pennies for exploration? Why instead have they been plowing everything into mergers and stock buybacks and dividend payments? It seems these executives (with their vast stock options) disagree with you. They're acting very much like a bunch of guys who don't expect the gravy train to last much longer.On Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants posted 1 year, 3 months ago 67 Responses

civilizational descent

canis writes:

Mind you, though, that while I agree with you and DR that a gospel of painful renunciation is not going to get very far, I am not at all sure that that is what Amazing meant.  (He is trying very hard, you may have noticed, in his own way, to be a consensus-building diplomat, and for that he deserves applause.)  I entirely agree with Amazing (as I understand him), that when people understand what the Big Common Cause is, they will be prepared to give up a great deal, by way of simplification, even as our ancestors did during WWII.

I just want to reiterate that, contrary to what many seem to think, man does not have a choice here. Fossil fuels are going to run out whether the people at large decide to politically endorse it or not, and there will indeed be a tremendous renunciation, whether the people politically embrace it or not.

As for how "painful" this renunciation will be, that is a function of the policy choices people make right now. Energy descent will happen. Whether it's an organized, relatively gradual descent, or plummetting from a cliff, is what "politics" will decide. So far, across the board, society and government are choosing the cliff. That's why I've concluded there's no hope for "society", and am instead focusing on the ark-building movement.

To repeat what I've said elsewhere - the choices are orderly retreat or total rout.
But any kind of "reform" which still maintains the machine (let alone business as usual) is not among the choices.  
On Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants posted 1 year, 3 months ago 67 Responses

vakibs: Peak Coal

The "200 years" figure for coal reserves is just ancient industry propaganda which the MSM has been parroting for so long by now it's just a reflex action when they repeat it.

Estimated reserves have steadily been modified downward from the original pie-in-the-sky projections, and just as with oil, the easier-to-extract, higher quality coal is mostly used up.
So just as with oil, it'll take more and more energy and $ to extract the same amount of coal, which will be of lower quality and take more and more energy and $ to render usable. The EROEI and EROI get worse and worse and must reach a breaking point, and there you'll have the Peak.

So while a more reasonable estimate of how much coal is left at current consumption rates on paper is around 100 years, this doesn't take into account the production difficulty dynamic I just described.

And, if people think we're also going to keep this whole automobile fleet (and the burgeoning fleets of China, India, etc.) going on liquid fuel from coal, or if they think we're going to switch the whole shebang over to plug-ins or electric cars, or even if they just think that as natural gas peaks and rapidly descends that we're going to be able to continue to generate the current level of electricity, let alone have demand continue to "grow", by substituting coal, this would require a radical increase in production, just as the current level of production became more and more difficult and expensive to sustain.

So here too just as with oil, the growth machine requires ever-increasing production, which will not be sustainable for long. It won't be physically or economically possible.

Most sober estimates place the Peak sometime in the 2020s. This is what will be possible as remaining reserves become more inaccessible and lower quality, while demand continues to surge.

That's why we also believe that neither CTL nor electricity can sustain motoring as it exists today. There too the gluttonous West will have to go on a crash diet, while the developing world will never get there in the first place.

If you want alot more technical detail on Peak Coal, go to (sorry I don't have time to go fetch all these links, but they can be found easily enough) sites like The Oil Drum, Energy Bulletin, Richard Heinberg's Museletter (just today there's a new piece from him on coal, posted on Energy Bulletin), Charles Hugh Smith, just to name some places I've educated myself.On Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants posted 1 year, 3 months ago 67 Responses

market socialism

If the moratorium is lifted, and these states all say No as prognosticated above, get ready for howls from the interior about how this is "the country's" oil, "America's" oil, and how the coastal states are being selfish and antisocietal.

This argument has already come up in recent years when authorization of offshore drilling came close to fruition. It has come from and will continue to come from the same Republicans who in every other context are social darwinist market fundamentalists. The same pirates who always chirp "There's no such thing as society" and "Selfishness is good" will now bray, "How dare you be so selfish with society's oil!"

They're rugged pioneer capitalists, except where they're welfare-begging socialists.  On Coastal governors stand in the way of offshore drilling, even if Congress approves it posted 1 year, 3 months ago 4 Responses

Yes

This from Wolverine deserves a 2nd reiteration -

Keep in mind that electricity is not a necessity, but is a luxury that some humans have had for so long that they can't imagine living without it.

Every time I hear anyone (including most "environmentalists") take it for granted that the grotesque energy demand projected by the trends must somehow be met, I reach for my revolver.
(It's just like a few months ago when I got clobbered here and called a "monk" because I dared to suggest that flying is an illegitimate luxury which shouldn't exist at all.)

This technology-is-automatically-justified ideology is just part and parcel of the Tower of Babel of "growth" (also beloved by most "progressives").

As for what W said about nukes' being unnatural, this is indeed a core reason to reject them. This may be like poetry or jazz, either you get it or you don't, but there's something qualitatively different and ghoulish about using technology to synthesize something which does not exist in Gaia. Even fossil fuels and their refinements are "natural". It's like the difference between GMOs and the breeder's art. And those who want to deny the fundamental alienality of earth-bound fission or fusion are the same as those who want to conflate GMOs with carefully bred hybrids.

I'll add one more reason to reject nukes which I didn't see covered here:
Nuclear power is a centralized, heirachical structure which both derives from and helps intensify concentrated political and economic power. To want more of this is to head in exactly the wrong direction.

What is needful, especially as Peak Oil* and subsequent energy descent loom, is to seek decentralized, regional and local energy and political structures, since in the long run these are the only ones with any hope of endurance, while in the short run the danger of fascism is a function of how entrenched centralized power is.

*Anyway, Peak Oil pretty much rules out any massive nuclear expansion anyway (or for that matter any national renewables-based grid). To build any such large infrastructure can only be done on the foundation of plentiful fossil fuel. While on paper there may still be time and resources to do either of these, in practice they simply won't be done. I'm satisfied that America will never embark upon another large-scale infrastructure project. We're just going to hunker in the bunker and keep drilling and burning until the tanks are all empty.  
On Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants posted 1 year, 3 months ago 67 Responses

jonas

"OPEC sells oil to the West."

Yes, and the point is, since 2005 they've been pumping and selling just about all they can. All they're doing now is pumping the margin of spare capacity they had. There's little or no more capacity to be exploited beyond that, at any level of investment.

That's why for some years now, even while they claim they could pump lots more, they've demurred no matter how much America begged (until this most recent time), saying there's more than enough oil in the market already, and blaming any shortages on an alleged lack of American refinery capacity, or on generalized American "mismanagement" (that was last winter), and now we have the topper:
they couuuuuuuuld pump any desired amount well into the 22nd century [which is when Aramco insanely claims the Peak will finally come], but gosh darn it, because those hippies keep talking about hybrids, they just can't see taking the risk of investing what, if their claims are true, would have god knows how astronomical an EROI. Probably $millions on the dollar.

Anyone can see how crazy this is, how patently fraudulent.On The WSJ alleges that our use of hybrids increases oil prices posted 1 year, 3 months ago 23 Responses

maybe the ice will break soon

The Republicans' positions are loathesome and economically disastrous, and the people want them less and less. The Democrats are confused and cowardly, so their positions don't matter, and the people want them less and less.

Maybe both of these rotten organizations will crack up soon, and we'll actually start to have some real political open space in this country, instead of the ice-jam we've had for so long.  On Republicans are bluffing on drilling posted 1 year, 4 months ago 19 Responses

disaster

That such a hideous idea could even be seriously considered is a testament to the depavity and literal insanity of America's oil addiction.
Let's go over it:

Given the tremendous energy requirements to bake the shale, the EROEI would be paltry at best, perhaps negative.

It would be astronomically expensive. Who's going to pay for it? (One of Pombo's bills, as you might imagine, would have socialized all the costs.)

It would require monumental amounts of water in a place already dying of thirst.

It would be an environmental cataclysm. Picture MTR throughout the Rocky Mountains.

Advocates of this, anyone who would actually try to do this, would be among the worst capital criminals of all times.On It's a 1980 flashback, as energy price spikes make oil shale economical once again posted 1 year, 4 months ago 6 Responses

watersheds

John Wesley Powell recommended that the West be organized with watershed districts being the basic political unit. This certainly would have been far more rational, and with vastly greater potential for the sane development of the West vis its water supplies, than the idiotic way the states actually were delineated, which has led only to insanity, stupidity, and corruption.

Right now in New Jersey there's an attempt, with the Highlands Act, to safeguard North Jersey's beleaguered water supplies by organizing the region into water districts and limiting development according to available water supplies (quantity and quality).
Unfortunately, while the basic idea is good, the newly adopted Regional Master Plan promises to fumble the execution, allowing all sorts of loopholes, falling short in many way.

The same old story...On Oh, wait, we don't have a national water policy posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses

fundamentals

Much of the subdued supply response reflects inadequate investment and production shortfalls in politically volatile regions where large portions of the world's oil reserves are located. Additionally, many governments have been tightening their control over oil resources, impeding foreign investment and hindering efforts to boost capacity and production.

You see how even when an establishment figure acknowledges that it is fundamentals driving price, he still fraudulently emphasizes above-ground factors - "inadequate investment", and those nasty public governments ("Why can't we just get rid of them?", he sighs wistfully to himself) "impeding" and "hindering" the multinational oil corporations.

This is still pushing the neocon master plan - that the US needs to pry open nationalized oil resources for private development, which will magically send production up and away, which would send prices plummeting, which would then force the Saudis to start pumping 15, 20, 25 mpd just to maintain their revenues, and the global economy would then be awash in oil in perpetuity, and "growth" would go on forever.

This is the mythology which brought us the Iraq war.On Growing demand and tight supply fuels increase in gas prices posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses