Comments Rune has made

If this was a free market . . .

. . . then I should be able to choose the price at which I will sell my share of rights to undamaged air quality, as well organize a collective of like minded sellers to act as a bloc (so long as it is not so large and powerful as to influence the overall market price).  But the real system at hand is nothing like that.

Instead, I am represented in the market by proxies who are much more beholden to the buyers of my rights--if my rights are recognized at all--than they are to me and my fellow econo-men and women who are supposedly informed and willing participants in the "market."  

It is only a free market in the same sense that the wealthy business owners in the British Empire who inspired Adam Smith to pontificate about the virtues of such a thing were involved in free, international markets that just happened to be built on the spoils of a colonial system that was anything but free.  The market at hand is more or less free to those in positions of power and privilege, while those who are set up for exploitation are assumed to be without substantial rights or importance, and being so "underprivileged anyway," it is further assumed that "this is working very well for them," as former First Lady Barbara Bush once explained the basic concept.  Seems like a hell of a price to pay for something that is purported to be free.
On A cap-and-trade system will not by itself eliminate dirty energy's unfair advantages posted 1 year, 8 months ago 5 Responses

Building performance vs. green building

I agree with the earlier comment suggesting that green point rating systems are more of a problem than a help in this scenario because they lead to all sorts of green materials and whiz bang equipment being assembled in a new building without assuring that the hoped for energy efficiency gains are actually met.  The building performance trade addresses that head on by directly measuring the actual energy uses and losses of whole building systems as they are actually installed.  Doing so leads to reports that make it easy to see the amount of energy one might expect to use to heat, cool, light, and run a given building, which in turn makes it possible to estimate the relative financial advantage of a new or retrofitted high performance building (to the extent that one can predict the future costs and availability of energy) and factor that into purchase or finance decisions.

The three main problems are that there is relatively low awareness of the building performance (known as "home performance" in the residential market) and building commissioning trades so people don't know of the benefits it can provide, there are not nearly enough highly skilled professionals to do the exacting investigations and installation work necessary to realize the gains made possible through the whole building systems approach to building performance, and it is much, much easier to market and profit from investments in an alternative energy project (for which demand will likely outstrip supply for decades) than it is to educate the public and train crews of trades people and building inspectors (to say nothing of legislators writing building codes).  The result is that we continue to get endless hype about the almost religious hope and righteousness of renewable energy projects while the very large potential to reduce the demand for energy used in buildings--shaving off 1/3 of heating and 1/2 of cooling and lighting energy needs is a typical result--remains more or less unknown even to those who are passionate about the need to actually conserve energy.

Conserving energy is necessary because it is unlikely that alternative energy will be able to offset the dirty sources of energy unless the total quantity of energy demanded levels off or falls.  A 2% increase in the total amount of energy being consumed worldwide dwarfs the entire annual alternative energy manufacturing capacity even as new plants and projects are popping up like flowers in Spring.  We need some serious conservation programs, and building performance is one of the most promising and beneficial prospects for making a large scale, welcome impact.  Not only can building performance projects save energy, they also tend to improve indoor air quality dramatically, improve the comfort of conditioned living and working spaces, and result in less wear and tear on components of buildings.On Green building may be quickest path to decreased emissions posted 1 year, 8 months ago 8 Responses

The market is not screwing up.

Jon Rynn wrote:
So evidently, the free market failed.  Anytime a government-led economic process fails, cries go up that the government can't do anything (e.g., ethanol).  So if the market screws up -- and screws up royally -- can I then complain that the market can't do anything?

I don't mean to be picking on you, Jon, you just happen to be coming up with the most succinct quotes regarding some common ideas I have been thinking a out lately.

I don't see anything to suggest the market has screwed up.  It is functioning predictably to deliver predictable results.  Similarly, the government is not screwing up, it is functioning fairly well and predictably to deliver the same predictable results.

The real problem, if you want to call it that (I do!), is that the primary objective function of the game involves sequestering as much power as possible, then using that power (political, economic, social, it makes no difference ultimately) to further maximize the accumulation of power.  That always leads some or all of the heavy hitters to try to cheat the system through deceit and coercion, especially as the game appears to be nearing an end or meltdown of some sort due to the great success of some players leading to diminished opportunities for further gains once they enticed the rest of the field to offer up as much value as possible through "fair play."

It doesn't matter if we are talking about a managed economy, a democracy, a "free" market economy, a totalitarian government, etc., the problem remains the same so long as the primary objective function of the game remains the same.  The best laid plans to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number (or the most deserving, or what have you) will eventually be overtly and overwhelmingly corrupted when the power imbalance becomes great, which is a likely state to land in given that maximizing the primary objective function of the game usually involves maximizing a corrolary objective function, that of comparative advantage (which is taken as a sort of virtue in most economic thought and business strategies stemming from such schools of thought).

The reason this is a problem is that what most people want and enjoy is not being in a dangerous game of dominating the Earth and it people but having enough resources and options to be healthy and secure and not in a state of lack relative to their neighbors.  That was not always assumed to be the case, hence the praises of the grab-all-you-can lifestyle encouraged by classical economics back in the day.  Today, however, there is plenty of evidence pointing in that direction, just as there is plenty of evidence that large, wealthy societies based on values and social mores that promote greed and domination threaten to bring the whole cycle of boom and bust to a grim end once and for all.

I think most of us know at some level that we would prefer a society that encourages the most able and ambitious to gain the social and economic standing they seek by putting some of their efforts into seeing that future generations and/or less gifted neighbors have better opportunities to be secure and fulfilled, too.  At the same time, there are always those who resent the prospect of free riders to the point that they reject anything that smacks of welfare, social aid, or mandatory transfers of wealth to those who have or create less.  The thing is, at a time when we are collectively killing the planet and with it the best prospects for each and all of us, there is a compelling case to be made for the notion that less really is more, at least in matters of material consumption.

Which brings us to the bright dreams of salvation through clean, renewable energy.  Sorry, I just don't buy it.  First of all, the deck is set to grow demand for more energy as fast or faster than we can bring new supplies on line, which means we are unlikely to be significantly displacing much of the dirtier, deadly energy sources of concern so much as we will augment them with renewables.  But more importantly, more energy, whether or not it is clean, will be used to dominate and destroy natural resources being pressed to dangerous limits by a human population growing  the billions so long as those limits can be extended--as hey generally can given enough energy availability at a given moment.

Again, we need to start rethinking what it is we want out of government, productivity, trade, etc., if we are to avoid the final collapse from which very few, if any rebound and most or all suffer terribly.  A simple start might be to refine poverty in terms of fraction of the most wealthy and, rather than fighting poverty start thinking in terms of limiting wealth to a certain multiple (say, 8 or 10) of the poorest among us.  We might take in s step further and start thinking of wealth more in terms of the amount of help and promotion one can call from society when putting forward an effort to satisfy one's self interests without unduly foreclosing opportunities for later generations rather than focusing on locking up and consuming or degrading as many physical resources as possible regardless of the consequences for present and future generations.

Sound idealistic?  Sure it is.  And half baked, too!  But just how realistic and rational is our current system of measuring and pursuing welfare at a time when economic, environmental, and military destruction loom large in the minds of most of us.  I think we can do a lot better for ourselves in that regard.  I think we must.On A few thoughts for environmentalists posted 1 year, 8 months ago 95 Responses

I mostly agree, JMG

No time for details, but I think a mix of economic ideas and modalities is critical to transforming the way we use and value physical resources.  One point that gets overlooked is the connection between a large, impersonal, transaction based economic allocation and decision making system and the propensity to do things that harm others, quite possibly to a greater extent than a few are advantaged, all in the name of economic progress.  It is much more difficult to pull that off in a system in which people have ongoing and direct relationships with the people who are exchanging or collaborating in the development and use of goods and services.  It is also more difficult to go crazy with planet altering economic activity when you do more of your producing and consuming on such an intimate level with the number of human beings that you are able to know and appreciate to some extent.  Just something to think about.

By the way, there was an interesting conversation that turned into an exploration of the concept of resilience about a month ago.On Put a whole society on a tightrope without a net and wait posted 2 years, 4 months ago 8 Responses

What planet are you living on?

Jason Scorse wrote:
There is nothing intrinsic about economic growth and ever-increasing resource use per se, although of course they often go hand in hand. Also, as economies develop the energy/GDP ratio drops dramatically. Will we get to a point where innovation is so great that economic growth actually can come with less absolute resource use? That's the $64,000 question and I think the answer is affirmative in the sense of capability, but like I said, the politics is the biggest impediment right now.

I do believe this is just the sort of fanciful economic thinking JMG was properly criticizing.  While it is true, there is no theoretical reason why people could not acquire such a strong preference for good ideas, good performances, and good meditations that they would grow the economy by creating and demanding more of such and refusing to accept, um, "goods" as a substitute, in truth, that is not what has happened.  Ever.  And there is no reason to believe that economic growth will somehow become magically decoupled from the growth in consumption of scarce physical stuff for the simple reasons that people like physical stuff and when people do lots of good thinking, quite often it results in ideas about how to make even more and better things out of physical resources, which results in greater wealth chasing more stuff.

Let's bear in mind that these more developed countries in which energy per unit of GDP declines are the same developed countries in which a vastly greater percentage of physical resources per capita are consumed than in those less developed, less efficient (and less consumptive) countries that are home to most of the people of the world.  And as we are seeing in some of the biggest countries that are eagerly pursuing "economic development" as people become wealthier, they tend to spend their wealth on much more stuff, if not the land itself.

How does this work?  Well, to give a canned example, once a society has gained a certain amount of intellectual capital, to say nothing of an impressive base of physical resources that tend to be supplied in great quantities from afar as well as domestically, they are able to make better, more valuable products.  So, for example, instead of cranking out cheap cars that fall apart, they produce highly valued BMW's and Mercedes Benz that sell for ten times as much, yet don't require much more energy to build.  And, there you have your increase in GDP per unit of energy.  But you also have people getting much more wealthy by making such fine and highly desired goods, which, in turn, allows them to buy more stuff, as well as services (they tend to go together rather than be substituted for one another).  So, not only does physical consumption continue to rise with such economic growth, but so does the level of "services" that lead to the political policies that continue to exploit the poorer people and places of the world to the detriment of ecosystems far and wide, to say nothing of the plight of billions of humans who hunger for their own shot at material well being the privileged hundreds of millions take for granted as their right.  So, where exactly does this hope for a change in politics come from, when it is the very champions of conventional economic growth measures and methods that promote and pay for the politics that putting the planet in peril for the sake of extending an relatively brief and unprecedented surge in productivity as well as population?  Sorry, but JMG is right, much pontificating about what could be (but never has been) notwithstanding.

Biodiversivist also makes a very good point.  We are much better off investing in promising ventures that might not otherwise get off the ground than to merely dangle yet another reward from someone to grab if they manage to develop a product or process that would make them rich (thus contributing to the vicious cycle of consumption and self-perpetuating politics) even without a public handout after the fact.  And if it is to be a public investment, perhaps some thought to seeing that the returns go to the public welfare, instead of yet another corporate welfare recipient, are in order.On Here are some posted 2 years, 4 months ago 32 Responses

Battery exchange stations

Gar, I agree that most of the time, most of the people will not need to swap their battery to keep on motoring along.  However, given that most people will on occasion want to drive 250+ miles in a day at least once in a while, the limited range and relatively slow refueling (recharging) times of electric vehicles have been very effective arguments to kill the true electric cars and come back with wasteful hybrids that perpetuate the petrol economy.  I think it is important to point out that there is a simple and reasonable way to address the issue head on without any added inconvenience or risk to the would be electric car owners and operators.  Standardized battery swapping stations would do the trick.

Yes, it would make sense to have some standardized smart technology on each battery that provides a record of how it has been used and how it is holding up.  That information, along with a quick estimate of the remaining charge in the battery being turned in for a new one should go into figuring the appropriate price of a given exchange.  And when a battery seems well past its prime, it should be retired and recycled.  I should think that making it painless and quick for the driver to address such matters, rather than being stuck with a major expense and complicated decision making process about where, when, and how to get rid of a dying battery would be another major selling point over the present situation.

Finally, Gar, I think you are very much underestimating the perceived cost of having to wait 15 minutes or more for a recharge on the go.  Consider the risks people will routinely take by speeding to shave what turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes of a trip of two or three hours.  Now consider the implications of waiting for a few cars in front of you to finish their 15 minute or more charging cycles before you can even begin on a busy holiday weekend when most people are most likely to want to charge up on the go.  A quick and easy battery swap would solve that problem and others, as noted.  I think it is an idea worth pushing, for it can be done and it pretty much puts to rest the few remaining arguments against an immediate shift to electric cars with their much better energy efficiency, even without going to the lengths necessary to create hypercars.  We need to find ways to get this show on the road, so to speak, instead of endlessly dreaming and jaw boning about what might be possible to begin ten years from now, which looks to me to be a part of the strategy of Toyota and others that do just enough to look serious about true electric vehicles in mass production while reinforcing the standard arguments about why consumers won't be happy with what can be done today.  Let's not help them out by pretending that relatively slow recharging and waiting is a given for electric vehicle operators.  It just ain't so.On Let's go all the way posted 2 years, 4 months ago 22 Responses

Jon Rynn and Wiscidea

Only have one minute, but here is a quick follow up.

Jon, I am not sure what sort of feedback you want for me, but I can't see anything at all inappropriate about asking me to look over some related articles you have put together.  In general, we seem to be about 80% to 90% on the same page from what I can tell, so I expect I'll find your articles interesting when I get a chance to look at them.  Mo' later.

Wiscidea, yes you are wierd.  I like it!  But, by definition, most people are not like you.  When you put more money in their pockets, especially these days when there is a negative savings rate (i.e., people are spending more than they are earning) in the U.S., consumption and disposal of stuff increases.

I tend toward your way of doing things, and when I do acquire stuff, I tend strongly toward the four R's.  (The fourth R, long forgotten in most of the developed and disposable world, is Repair.)On How to talk about the future without depressing everyone posted 2 years, 4 months ago 54 Responses

Missed the point again

Ah, sure, if what you want is an emotional support group, then that's great.  If you're actually interested in understanding and solving the problems among a community of people who already understand that we have a problem, then it's not so useful.

Hopeless, suffering, scared, disoriented people aren't great problem solvers.  Most people get freaked out and tend to turn away from major environmental crises if they don't have the company and support of others who understand and see some hope for going foreward.  Thus, as I explained a couple of posts ago, there are ways of talking about gloom that can be quite helpful and meaingful to people and can lead to better problem solving possibilities than if we all just shut up and act like noting is wrong with half baked plans to make it all better using the same approach and limited grasp of reality that made things such a mess in the first place.

Too, if we find we can't find a happy way out of the mess for all now in it, it does help to make the most of our lot instead of being told to shut up and don't interfere with the true believers in happy endings, a vast span of reality and some very awful ends to entire populations notwithstanding.  No one knows who we will fare.  Could be good, could be grim.  To simply assert that it will be good if we all believe that to be true is just as lacking in integrity as to assert that if it is bad there is nothing that can be done to make it less bad.  Where is the evidence or logic to support that, especially when the comment was in direct response to a post that began with a conditional statement indicating that doom is possible but not inevitable based on what we do about the potential for said doom?

Actually, we have not "increased energy efficiency by many orders of magnitude", at least not in this century.  Many orders of magnitude is at least a 1000x improvement, and we haven't seen that.  In most sectors, we've managed at most less than one order of magnitude.

My seat of the pants analysis says that is about right or may as well be, given the practical implications of trying to allow the one-billion most resource consumptive people on the planet to live as they do, accompish what they do, and buy and through away all the things they do using the technology and materials of, say, the Bronze Age.  The amount of energy required to grow, extract and process the materials alone would be literally out of this world, and many things, such as distributing this simple message around the world in real time for next to no energy expenditure at all, rise to infinity, as there was no way to do it no matter how much energy you put into it.  Meanwhile, there are another 8+ billion people and rising (fast) to account for, too.On How to talk about the future without depressing everyone posted 2 years, 4 months ago 54 Responses

Missing a few points, GreenEngineer

GreenEngineer, contrary to your mechanistic and psychologically and spiritually void analysis, there may well be a lot of value in discussing inevitable or highly probable doom.  For example, if we accept that a very large fraction of us will know firsthand the pain and fright of cancer, talking about it can help us to make the best of that experience, to enrich one another's lives as we all end up being involved with that horror (as a patient or a friend or family member of someone who is), and we may even be inspired to do something about the present trends that make it all but certain that cancer will touch our lives many times over.  Similarly, talking about the reasons why expectations of environmentally driven doom has real value for real human beings on many levels, not the least of which is finding ways to fair as well as possible if our best efforts at improving our lot fail.

I happen to agree with JMG on his summary of the impact of energy efficiency that is not used to achieve energy conservation.  Certainly his observations are supported by history thus far.  We have increased energy efficiency by many orders of magnitude over time, and at each turn the ultimate result is that we find it attractive to use more net energy per period of time doing more things with our energy slaves than was attempted in the past.  Also, there is a very striking correlation between global growth in energy consumption (both in aggregate and per capita) and population growth.  It does not strike me as far fetched to anticipate that reversing one without the other is unlikely.

That said, I do think it is important to our future to take advantage of the massive potential for near term energy conservation through adoption of a plethora of opportunities for energy efficiency that should be readily adopted by people with minimal coaxing or lifestyle adjustments (although some smart financial assistance and true cost pricing is essential to getting the most out of that possibility).  But that is only half of the answer, and it will prove to be a self-defeating enterprise, unless we invest minds and money into redesigning our way of life, our trend in global population growth, and the infrastructure that encourages and trains us to live as we have been in recent decades.On How to talk about the future without depressing everyone posted 2 years, 4 months ago 54 Responses

When you want the truth about global warming

do you really think a clumsy hit piece put out by a right wing PR shill whose firm  was behind the dirty politics of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, helps promote the teaching of biblical creation myths in schools, and is working to push the failed agenda of the National Abstinence Education Association is the most likely place to find it?On Ante up posted 2 years, 4 months ago 7 Responses

Telling the whole truth is good, but . . .

. . . there are some ways of doing it that go down better than others.

Most of us could probably scare the average person into shock and denial by telling all we know of looming environmental and related social crises in a good, long blast.  That's because most people have no sense of being able to do anything about those matters.  The deer in the headlights reaction, or something more aggressively defensive, is quite natural because it does look to them as if they are going to get creamed.

It is helpful to point out the immediate advantages to technological and lifestyle changes that can accompany most of the shifts we need to make before dwelling too long on why we need to start making those changes right away.  Generally, there are ways to address most of the big social issues people complain about (e.g., not enough time with family, friends, and neighbors, obesity and other health crises, rising energy costs, creaky economy for wage earners, etc.) while easing off the resource intensive activities and consumption that are putting the planet in peril.   If you can talk in terms of how to feel less vulnerable to risks and craziness of modern life, people are quite happy to listen.  And from there, it becomes easier to talk about some of the scary stuff and show how the same personal changes can contribute to greater environmental security and control over the truly essential needs to live a healthy and happy life.

It's also important to remember that everyone has a role to play, and for most people, that role is not taking ownership of some drastic save the world project or radical lifestyle change to be made overnight.  We need researchers, teachers, helpers, TLC providers, administrators, and just people who can appreciate good efforts and good works and express that to those who might otherwise think they are wasting their time.  It all counts.  It is all necessary.

On the other hand, I agree with those who roll their eyeballs at the slick and feel good approach the article seems to promote.  There is not only room for the whole truth and our authentic concerns and reactions to what we expect, there is no way we will ever make our best decisions and act on them with conviction if we keep hearing and echoing a fairy tale story that is guaranteed to have everyone living happily ever after.  We are faced with huge challenges and huge unknowns, just as were generations throughout history.  And like our ancestors, many of us will lead extraordinary lives that are rich and valuable to those around us and those who follow precisely because we have such challenges to call on our best and promote the same in our neighbors. On How to talk about the future without depressing everyone posted 2 years, 4 months ago 54 Responses

What is the meaning of this?

I think this case has several important implications.  Moreover, what I consider to be the most important perspective in terms of environmental impact has not been discussed so far.

First, some perspective on the issue that is already being kicked around: the restraint of trade implications for the proposed merger.  With no more knowledge of the specifics of the case than what was presented in the lead article of this thread, it appears that the FTC is intervening based on Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits mergers that would significantly lessen competition, and perhaps some miscellaneous details of the Federal Trade Commission Act.  (Note: I am not a lawyer, don't even play one on TV, but I do have a diverse and a well worn background in business and economics that has exposed me to in depth matters of many aspects of business law spanning land use to executive compensation to the legal aspects of intellectual property and marketing, that latter encompassing antitrust considerations.  So, I am an interested and widely experienced participant in these arenas, not a specialist.  Specialists have my welcome to fill in the blanks and make corrections as they see fit.)

From this angle, the FTC must define the market before it can make the case that the merger will have a negative effect on competition in the market.  The relevant test is whether a sustained price increase, one that is not huge but enough to make consumers think twice about continuing to buy from the seller (Whole Foods), would lead to a significant amount of substitution to what another seller is offering.  If so, then the sellers to which consumers would switch are in the same product market.  If not, then the seller already has significant monopoly power.

Based on the comments of Mackey's alter ego, WF may have significant monopoly power except in markets where Wild Oats is a competitor.  His stated intention, in internal e-mails, is to take over Wild Oats through a horizontal merger to maximize WF's concentration of market power in those remaining competitive regional markets.  (In this national case, we are concerned with an overall "product market"--actually a service market--but it is the regional markets involving Wild Oats that are keeping WF's overall product market power in the country somewhat in check.)  What the FTC needs to look at to determine whether the merger is anticompetitive is a what-if analysis of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to see if the result will give WF a "highly concentrated" share of its product market.  Unless Mackey can make a convincing case that WF shoppers see the Wal-Marts and Safeways of the shoppers' habitat as genuine substitutes for qualities and value presented by WF, and HHI analysis will probably find that WF already has achieved a concentrated market share and the merger will leave it with a highly concentrated share, which is to be prevented by the FTC under the law.  That's why he is suddenly claiming that the big stores that carry major national brands in a much more austere store than WF presents are somehow in fierce competition with WF, despite his blogging entries indicating just the opposite.  Without those big chains being included in WF's market, it is tough sledding to make the case that a take over of Wild Oats would not be a major anticompetitive move.

* * *

The FTC's case against the merger can be summed up as follows: A combined Whole Foods/Wild Oats would be the only nationwide supermarket specializing in premium-priced organic groceries, with an emphasis on perishable goods (fresh produce, meat, and dairy products).

Yes, that does seem to be the only angle they are pursuing.  If they win, it's just a matter of an injunction blocking the merger.  But given Mackey's explicit statements indicating a strategy designed to systematically destroy his competition, as opposed to just running the tightest ship he can and letting the market respond to healthy competition, I think there is a stronger case to be made, one with criminal penalties attached.

Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it illegal to attempt to monopolize a market or, if there is monopoly power, to willfully acquire or maintain that power.  Usually, it is difficult to make the case that a firm is trying to monopolize a market because most firms with the wherewithal to monopolize a market are run by people sophisticated and polished enough to hide their intentions behind permissible business goals.  But Mackey is a rabid hater of all that stands in his way of total domination, including the unionization of his own employees, and he has repeatedly and very clearly stated his intentions to prevent competition.  There is no doubt that Mackey is trying to monopolize his market by destroying, and now by devouring, the competition--he said so.  And if the HHI reveals that WF has monopoly power, which Mackey's blogging entries claims to be the case, and not by accident--then it is pretty easy to prosecute him for willful acquisition and maintenance of that power.  Unlike Section 7 of the Clayton Act, these violations of the Sherman Act are felonies, with big fines and jail time available as punishments for individuals convicted of them.

I suspect the DOJ, which is probably in the most corrupt and, now, due to rats jumping ship, decrepit state it has ever been in, will not lift a finger to uphold the Sherman Act, even though it appears to me to be more or less a slam dunk case.  In addition to being in disarray, the DoJ under Bush and Cheney has been a partner in such crimes, first and foremost by helping players in the energy companies who were in on the energy policy meetings Cheney held in 2001 to escape justice for rigging the price of energy, which created blackouts and price gouging in California.  If they were to go after Mackey, it would only raise awareness of the laws and how they are not being upheld in the many cases in which Bush and Cheney cronies are just as guilty, if not quite so stupid as to explicitly state their intention to break the law in public (although internal energy trader communications do nail them just as effectively as Mackey has hung himself).

* * *

But enough legal stuff.  This is an environmental site.  The environmental angle, here, is that the whole arrangement of the law promotes low, low price so consumers will shop till they drop.  And this is regarded as a good thing.  But from an environmental stand point, squeezing everyone to do their damndest to extract as much stuff out of the Earth as possible and encouraging--hell, not just encouraging, but defining--people to be consumers above all other human virtues and values (such as well paid workers or careful caretakers of the land) is problematic, to say the least.

I need to leave it there for now, but I am interested in comments on that perspective.  It's clear that Mackey is setting out to crush competition so he can build his business empire without cutting his employees or suppliers in on any more of the pretty penny he extracts from mostly upscale shoppers, but what do his monopolistic and monopsonistic tendencies mean for the environment, especially when those same tendencies are repeated in other, larger businesses and industries?On Why the FTC is right to block Whole Foods' buyout of Wild Oats posted 2 years, 4 months ago 28 Responses

Whoops . . . but . . .

"Rune: 24 Million Tons, not just tons"

My bad.  I read "mtons" as metric tons and didn't make the connection to the number of dollars involved while quickly skimming the report.  Thanks for the catch.

Adjust decimal point accordingly and raise new questions about the accuracy of the report.  The voluntary, no-clear-standards, pick up game of carbon offsets is already knocking off 0.3% of global emissions in real time?  I have trouble believing that.  I suspect that credit is being given the for the entire time series of projected carbon sequestration for projects as they are funded (at least in some cases), rather than recognizing the carbon offsetting as it actually occurs over a span of decades.  No time to dig back into the report at this moment, but I am very interested in anyone else's findings regarding that matter.On A new report with numbers and stuff posted 2 years, 4 months ago 17 Responses

Bashing loves company

I am not sure I have anything new with which to bash coal, but there are a couple of disturbing bits of news about friends of coal ignoring or lobbying in spite of the known dangers of coal to increase the use of it in the U.S.

First up, the railroad industry, darling of many environmentalists, is stepping forward as a shill for coal in the Rocky Mountain states.

Railroads putting money on coal despite pollution concerns

GILLETTE, Wyoming - The cloud that hangs over the coal industry for its contribution to global warming has yet to cast a shadow here, across the vast network of railroad lines that haul coal from the sun-baked flats of the Powder River Basin.

Railroads across the country are spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying locomotives, adding track and building cars. Much of the activity is focused on upgrades to the nation's coal transportation network that includes Colorado Springs, and nowhere is the spending as intense as in the Powder River Basin of northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

. . .

Coal accounts for 21 percent of industry revenues -- $11 billion of $53 billion in 2006. More than 852 million tons were hauled last year by the major railroads, accounting for almost 80 percent of the coal produced in the United States, according to the Association of American Railroads. Almost all of it went to power plants such as those in the Springs.

So as mining and utility companies wage a public relations campaign to parry rising criticism of their contribution to climate change, railroads are joining the fight. In public speeches, on media tours and in corporate reports, railroad executives are touting the advantages of coal as a low-cost energy source with ample domestic supplies.

Parroting the message of the utility industry, they point out that coal produces an estimated 52 percent of the nation's electricity. They stress future technologies could potentially reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide -- a major greenhouse gas. And they remind that rail remains the most efficient way of getting coal from mine to plant.

. . .

These actions have not gone unnoticed. Frank Wilner, an economist with the United Transportation Union, has accused the railroads of going a step beyond coal advocacy, to lobby against legislative proposals for a new tax or other restrictions on carbon emissions. Wilner described the utility, mining and rail industries as "arm in arm, fighting any carbon taxes or any additional costs that might be imposed to clean the coal."

Rail representatives have rejected those claims, arguing they have lobbied for policies favorable to moving coal -- not against environmental regulations that could affect their bottom line. Tom White with the railroad association said the group opposes carbon taxes but is not lobbying against specific legislation at this time.

FULL STORY at Colorado Springs Gazette

In other news, South Carolina is rushing through plans to build a billion dollar coal fired power plant in advance of its own environmental report and against the wishes of the people it will "serve."

S.C. utility pushes for coal plant
Other states choosing more environmentally friendly power sources

Coal-burning power plants have been shelved from North Carolina to Texas recently as concerns rise about pollution, high costs and global warming.

But in South Carolina, state-owned Santee Cooper is forging ahead with plans for a nearly $1 billion coal-fired plant on the Great Pee Dee River.

Conservation groups are outraged. Santee Cooper says it has no choice.

Last month, the company asked government regulators not to wait on completion of an environmental impact study before issuing a critical air permit.

Santee Cooper also held its own public meeting in May to make the case for the plant. Thursday night, company officials spoke at a state-sponsored public hearing about their plans.

The company wants to avoid an "unwarranted, indefinite delay'' that ultimately could cost customers, Santee Cooper president Lonnie Carter said in a June 15 letter to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Company officials say a coal-fired power plant is the most realistic way to meet a growing demand for power. Last year alone, Santee Cooper added 7,400 new customers. Santee Cooper wants the plant operating by 2014.

"We have a legal obligation to provide power to our customers,'' spokeswoman Laura Varn said. "Growth is increasing at such a rapid pace.''

Critics say Santee Cooper should slow down -- and look at what's happening in other states -- before deciding to build a new plant. .

Because of the link between pollution from coal-fired plants and global warming, many utilities are seeking to develop alternative energy sources and redoubling efforts to be more efficient. Conservation groups want Santee Cooper to do the same.

"You need to squeeze every drop out of the lemon before you build a billion-dollar coal plant,'' said Blan Holman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Dana Beach, director of the Coastal Conservation League in Charleston, said Santee Cooper has shown little interest in negotiating with environmentalists.

"They have a siege mentality right now,'' Beach said. "They feel like everybody is attacking them on the legitimacy of the plant. They are not realizing these same interests are very happy to work with them toward a collaborative analysis.''

. . .

In Santee Cooper's case, the company wants to build a 660-megawatt plant that would release more than 4 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, environmentalists say.

The company has plans for a second coal-fired plant that could increase those emissions to more than 8 million tons annually, according to the Coastal Conservation League.

That's a concern in the Palmetto State, Beach said.The state has 13 coal-fired power plants and is among the nation's leaders in increasing carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, the Associated Press recently reported. Statewide, coal-fired power plants pump about 30 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, statistics show.

Varn acknowledged the new coal-fired plant will release carbon dioxide, but she said it will control 85 to 97 percent of other major pollutants when compared to older coal-fired plants.

. . .

Varn said Santee Cooper isn't any different from other utilities. It has plenty of incentives and programs to save energy.

In fact, Santee Cooper says it has one of the most successful energy-savings programs in the region.

Company programs include burning landfill gas to produce energy and offering solar water heaters. It also is studying other ways to provide solar and wind energy.

But Varn said fewer than 1 percent of Santee Cooper's customers take part in key energy efficiency programs offered by the company.

"We can't force people to conserve energy,'' Varn said. "There's a dual responsibility with that.''

FULL STORY at The State (of South Carolina)

Sounds to me like South Carolina's government could do more good by forcing people to start conserving energy by beefing up the building code and requiring performance based inspections when houses are sold or built, as California is now doing, rather than throwing up it hands and claiming it must force a dirty coal plant on the people for their own good, even if it kills them.On This week's coal-sucks update posted 2 years, 4 months ago 22 Responses

When the roots die, so does the soil

One of many reasons to care about the plight of smaller farmers, the abundance of which results in rural towns, is that to the extent they are uprooted and replaced with large scale industrial agriculture, soil degradation is being accelerated.  The negative impacts on farm productivity due to the advance of soil degradation are being counteracted with genetic engineering and substantial inputs of fossil fuels as well as pesticides and fertilizers synthesized from oil and natural gas, which is making the underlying problem steadily worse.  In fact, soil degradation is a problem, and in many places a matter of "serious concern," in the majority of farming areas in the United States.  Notably, agriculture accounts for about two-thirds of man made soil degradation in the U.S. (over grazing accounts for another 30%) compared to less than 30% of European or worldwide soil degradation, as indicated in this report.

Low impact farming, the type that conserves and grows soil, requires a large and highly educated farm management labor force.  Intensive industrial farming thrives on replacing wise farm managers and workers familiar with the land, weather, and a variety of nutritious crops, with massive machinery and fossil fuel used to push maximum yields out of mind bogglingly large tracts of land, usually planted with a single crop.  Every year, the soil is further thinned and exhausted as a result.  An enlarging region of the U.S. touched by drought, which is forecast to become the norm according to most global warming models, is most heavily impacted by the trend, as are the farmers that once dotted the landscape.

The immediate effects of this shift are shared worldwide in terms of releases of carbon that was once held by the soil into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, and regionally in terms of silt and eutrophying fertilizers that are washed and blown from the soil to rivers, lakes, and oceans where it chokes and kills much of the biodiversity once found there.

Eventually, however, there will come a time when the loss of U.S. soil quality and the worsening effects climate destabilization cannot be overcome by the brute force approach of industrial agriculture to farm productivity needs.  We will be in serious need of well educated farmers who have studied their land and crops and prepared for changes that lie ahead for it.  Where will they be found after we have driven them from the land and exterminated the culture and values that would have promoted the brain trust we will need?On How legislators can help the rural posted 2 years, 4 months ago 11 Responses

Servers are the trains of the Internet

When they are actually being used at or near capacity, shared data and applications servers can be very energy efficient, just like trains that are more or less full.  The thing is, servers, to a much greater degree than trains, keep using energy regardless of the number of users being served because they never turn off, whereas as train schedules at least conform to times of peak demand.  Whereas one can simply turn off a self-contained laptop that is not being used during the majority of hours of the day, servers never sleep.  In fact, redundancy is built into server farms to make sure they never sleep.

Unlike personal computing equipment, there has not been an Energy Star program for servers, routers, and switches, but that is finally changing.  Meanwhile, the faster nets that Odograph was referring to are big power suckers with a long way to go before they reverse their trend of rapid energy consumption growth:

. . . "Data centers use 50 times the energy per square foot as an office [does]," says Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager at PG&E.

Industry experts say the power consumption of data centers is doubling every five years or so, making them one of the fastest-growing drags on energy in the U.S. "The IT industry is where the automotive industry was 20 years ago," says Rakesh Kumar, research vice-president at consulting firm Gartner (IT). "We are so backwards when it comes to using alternative-energy and energy-efficient technologies."

. . .

To keep servers at the right temperature, companies mainly rely on air-conditioning. The more powerful the machine, the more cool air needed to keep it from overheating. By 2005, the energy required to power and cool servers accounted for about 1.2% of total U.S. electricity consumption, according to a report released in February by staff scientist Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and sponsored by chip manufacturer AMD (AMD). Gartner reckons that by 2010, about half of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will spend more on energy than on hardware such as servers. Energy costs, now about 10% of the average IT budget, could rise to 50% in a matter of years, Kumar says.

That is, unless companies take some radical measures--soon. . . .

SOURCE: BusinessWeek Online.

That 1.2% (and rapidly rising) share of electricity may not sound like much, but it is significantly more than enough to swallow the entire national wind and solar output.On Hard to say, but Zonbu has clearly done its homework posted 2 years, 4 months ago 20 Responses

The opportunities abound

I think this article provides some of the answers to your question, Bill:

. . . Congestion pricing works if it is part of a bundle of policies and practices for reducing traffic.

The fixation on congestion pricing also ignores the dramatic reduction in traffic in other cities that was accomplished without congestion pricing. For example, over a period of 25 years Copenhagen cut traffic congestion by aggressively promoting walking and biking. The city installed a first-class system of bikeways, part of it on pavement that was once used by cars. Selected streets and public plazas in the center of the city were closed to traffic and turned into attractive pedestrian ways. Many other cities in Europe that were once flooded with traffic gradually took back their streets from private vehicles and restored them to the public, producing lively environments and a boom for businesses. Project for Public Spaces has shown some of the methods used in U.S. cities.

The cities that have successfully retreated from life-throttling congestion had strong public authorities that carried out a set of consistent transportation policies over a long period of time. This allowed them to accomplish their goals gradually, by linking them to every capital project and new development, and by changing the way they operate on a daily basis. Many of the cities that have been successful continue to build new mass transit lines, strictly enforce regulations, and incorporate traffic reduction measures in neighborhood renewal projects.

None of this is likely to happen in New York City because there is no policy commitment to reduce traffic in the first place. The Department of Transportation's main goal is to move traffic, not reduce it. There is no clear city policy for improving the pedestrian infrastructure - the thousands of miles of sidewalks. Instead a dozen city agencies apply their own, often conflicting, policies, often making the pedestrian experience a trying one. Improvements in the city's surface transit system are stymied because buses get caught in traffic. And even with new commitments to expand the city's bicycle infrastructure, there's a long way to go before over a third of all commuters use bikes, as they do in Copenhagen. The Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief, spearheaded by Transportation Alternatives and other advocacy groups, rallied November 14 at City Hall to call for a change in city policy.

In sum, it looks more and more like what's missing in New York City isn't just congestion pricing but long-term planning for traffic reduction. Without taking that first step, individual measures like putting tolls on the East River bridges will collapse before the howls by that small group of drivers who appear to be satisfied with the current state of chaos.

And note that this criticism is limited to considerations of mobility problems.  There are certainly many more ramifications for the environment, however, that need to be addressed while planning for how people live and get about--and in and out of--the city. The problems are all connected.  The solutions must be, too.On Dead posted 2 years, 4 months ago 4 Responses

Been there, done that

While the crest of the dot-bomb wave was still rising, I was involved with Jamcracker.  Most of the talent left when it looked like the company would fail.  Frankly, I am surprised they are still around.

Jamcracker set out to replace in-house PC software ownership, and most common servers, at businesses large and small by offering a single portal through which users could log on and use a variety of web based software packages their company had subscribed to through Jamcracker.  In that way, companies could shed responsibility for maintaining and upgrading software (where far more problems than hard drives present actually take place) and they could purchase relatively simple computers or dumb terminals through which to access the "best of breed" software.  One of the main stumbling blocks, however, was that most people and businesses actually prefer to put up with all of the cost and trouble of running their own show rather than sacrifice the ability to customize their software in ways that just aren't cost effective to make available to the masses, as well as to choose to niche software, which puts them back in the full blown PC and software maintenance game.

I suspect the same problem exists for hardware choices.  People will want to have some new goodies that mass providers don't want to support until they bugs are worked out and incompatibilities are addressed, which, in many cases is never because of the constant cycle of change in the tech industry.

It's a nice idea.  And the fact that Jamcracker still exists--though not as the major player they were once expected to be--suggests there is a viable niche market for this sort of thing.  But until other shifts are made in the general culture and infrastructure of life in the most developed countries--and especially in North America, where property rights and individualism are regarded as next to godliness by many--I think it is going to be a tough sell.On Hard to say, but Zonbu has clearly done its homework posted 2 years, 4 months ago 20 Responses

Oh, to dream!

Charles, put away the blinders for a moment and look around.  Look around on Grist, even.  Traffic congestion is hardly the defining challenge of our time.  It is certainly not the defining environmental issue of our time.  And yet, there is growing consensus that reshaping the values and behavior that have put the world in a situation in which man made (or exacerbated) environmental hazards pose a substantial threat to all is the defining challenge of our time.

If you narrow the choices to congestion pricing or do nothing new, you will miss out on the sort of thinking that might actually contribute the shifts in behavior and belief that might actually contribute to meaningful solutions lifestyle issues driven by compartmentalized infrastructure planning, that remains largely sealed off from any appreciation for its contribution to the bigger, more important issue at hand.  Congestion pricing is just a way of getting those who can least afford to drive out of the way while reinvesting in the same lifestyles and social structures (with a perfunctory nod to Olmstead's vision of the importance of green, open spaces).  It does not represent a step forward so much as a reentrenchment of the status quo, which will again be pushed to the limits, leaving it to another generation to think in terms of sustainable, or at least more livable, redevelopment of a heavily populated area.  What is called for, I believe, is retrenchment as a response to the forecast increase in the number of commuters and consumers in New York and in wealthy, highly populated, highly consumptive countries in general.  Congestion pricing simply obscures the real issues that should be of concern on an environmentally oriented site such as Grist.

Rune, I am afraid that your ideas are pipe dreams.  There are small car-free areas in many cities, but nothing on the scale that is needed to reduce congestion in New York; are you really suggesting a car-free area in all of Manhattan below 86th st?

During peak hours of travel, yes--but not without a major investment into workable alternatives.  I am saying that the environmentally sane and forward thinking perspective more or less obligates one to consider that option and what it would take to work.  Quite a few of us already regard the suburban paradigm based on personal cars zipping in and out of the cities is a dead end in the foreseeable future, so why should we not be promoting genuine reinventions of life in and around the cities instead of accepting a massive transfer of wealth aimed at facilitating more of the same?

It may be that investing in highly available, electric public transportation for all, and for goods as well as people, is a much better solution to getting around during peak hours, both on environmental and social equity grounds.  It may be that some rethinking and promotion of new ideas about how much getting around is actually necessary, desirable, and sustainable is in order, especially if considered in the context of people having more time to devote to local self sufficiency activities instead of spending so much of their lives in a series of transactions punctuated by much needed distractions spread around town.  But so long as the supposed environmentally minded leaders are lining up with the message that "you're either with us or against us" on congestion pricing being the only possible alternative to doing nothing new, the important and creative thinking necessary to bring real and lasting improvements to city life that are in line with pressing regional and global environmental considerations are unlikely to be explored and refined into genuinely environmentally and socially progressive solutions.

City planners generally agree that license-plate based rationing has failed to reduce congestion significantly when it has been tried: people get a second car to get around the rationing.

Charles, knock yourself out with efforts to turn back any new thinking, but it just won't work.  First of all, I linked to a report from Athens showing that they were able to make license plate restrictions pay off there.  Second, I already pointed out the potential to use existing technology to inexpensively circumvent the potential for the most likely form of cheating, which you have noted after the fact.  By simply requiring a transponder of the sort used to charge tolls for bridges and roads automatically, it would be possible immediately identify if the owner of one or more cars was making more than his or her allotted shares of trips into the city--no license plate checking necessary.  Those who rarely travel into the city and do not have transponders could pay a toll or, perhaps, electronic cameras could capture the license plates of cars that are not equipped with transponders and, using optical character recognition, if they are flagged for making too many trips into the city, a fined is levied, just as is done for those who fail to pay bridge tolls.  The point is, with just a tiny bit of creativity, the red herrings you and others towing the mayors line about congestion pricing being the one and only true choice can be solved at least as well as his loose plan promises to address some immediate issues while it mostly ignores larger, longer term matters that will crop up again and again until they are resolved or become catastrophic.

Finally, no one has addressed the main point of my eariler post, a point that Ivan Illich first made in Energy And Equity.  The real inequity involved here is between the small minority of the world's people who drive and the vast majority who do not drive, who will not be able to drive in the foreseeable future because of ecological constraints, and who will suffer and die in immense numbers because of global warming.

Actually, that is what I am driving at (no pun intended).  And I am charging that it is the blind trust in and promotion of congestion pricing as a "solution" that actually avoids the bigger issues to be solved and the creativity necessary to reach a better outcome than you have described.  You yourself, however, have not come up with anything that advances the matter.  Care to try?  Or is it just to risky to have a dream and see what can be made of it if you share it with others for them to improve upon?On The connection between congestion pricing and carbon taxes posted 2 years, 4 months ago 18 Responses

I agree with everybody

This is a fun thread for me to read, so far.  The first things that came to my own mind have already been said, and while I was not keyed into the protectionism argument of Boeing and Airbus, that makes good sense, too.

As for Detroit, well, in addition to doing a fantastic job of marketing personal cars as extensions of the American's machismo (and, more recently, womanhood) and overblown need to resist any and all attempts by any institutions to encourage even the slightest sacrifice of hedonism or individuality in the public interest, I think the tight relationship between American car makers and oil companies with major political operations in the U.S. is hard to miss.  The oil companies, with some help and encouragement from Detroit, do a great job of delivering cheap, subsidized (in the form of tax, regulatory, and even judicial favors) fuel for cars, while Detroit beats up on every attempt to transition to more efficient vehicles and truly cleaner and more environmentally friendly fuels.  You don't see that sort of game being played by the airliner manufacturers.  They know they are in for even more hurt than they have already experienced if they can't find ways to use less and/or less costly fuel and the oil industry knows it is a waste of time to suggest otherwise.On Boeing's new Dreamliner plane boasts increased fuel efficiency posted 2 years, 4 months ago 11 Responses

Sorry Charlie! Not even close. . . .

The options that Rune lists are just pipe dreams that will not happen, and in this case, the perfect is an enemy of the good.  (Rune also apparently does not know the widely publicized fact that Bloomberg plans to spend the revenues on public transportion.)

That comment strikes me as so thoroughly off the mark I am not sure where to begin.  I threw out a few examples of alternatives to congestion pricing merely as a way of demonstrating that the original article rests upon a false choice that comes down to charging for and investing in improvements to the status quo through price rationing of road space or continuing the neglect and crumbling of the status quo by doing nothing new.  I should think anyone with half the imagination of your average schoolchild should be able to make the case that there are many choices beyond this dichotomy, many of them more appealing that congestion pricing, at least to citizens living outside Bloomberg's bubble.

Which brings me to the next point in this rebuttals.  The examples I provided were not pipe dreams.  Most of them have the very same quality the mayor clings to when explaining his "bold" plan for transportation: they have been done before and they worked elsewhere.  (So much for bold, huh?)  There is nothing new or unproven about car free downtowns, they have been created and loved in many forms throughout the world.  Similarly, my suggestion of rationing through regulation is nothing new, it is an idea that has been shown to work in several cities with terrible congestion and air pollution problems, such as Athens, Greece.  Nothing about such schemes or others that I did or did not mention are "perfect," nor did I make them out to be so, I just pointed out that there are options, the options can be more democratic than the financially stratified plan put forward by Bloomberg, and that is important to focus on meeting public needs in ways that promotes new ways of doing things (such as telecommuting--another example of a program used in many cities--and car free downtowns) so that you don't keep building a bigger and more costly version of the same old problem that needs to be rebuilt every couple of decades or so, which is what congestion pricing will accomplish in New York, I believe.

As for not being aware of Bloomberg's plan to use the revenues from congestion pricing to fund repairs and expansions of public transportation, I am.  But I am also aware that in the same breath, the mayor says he will be using the money to rebuild roads and related infrastructure to serve motor vehicles.  And what really sticks in my mind, and seems to take up a lot of the mayor's attention, is that his plan is fixated on raising an enormous amount of money (in fact, as he frames the matter, the main problem all along has been not enough money to do more of the same, not a need to actually do something "bold" and new) which is to be handed over to a new bureaucracy, which will devise new rules to hand out gobs of cash to who knows who for a series of one time projects meant to advance half a dozen transportation related objectives of which expanding and repairing public transportation is only one.  This from a man who is telegraphing his plan to leave the city by having left his party in what seems a likely run for the White House.  But, hey, he's a talented politician and his tactic seems to be working inasmuch as people from various walks of life are all hearing what they want to hear in the mayor's jumbled messages.

And so, with that in mind, I did note that the mayor, who seems to be able to speak in considerable and minute detail about the problems with New York's transportation system, seems to be rather vague about how his grand status quo 2.0 plan will actually shake out.  But seeing as he is looking at a run for the presidency, would it really be too surprising if he staff's the SMART bureaucracy with political pals who will see that other political pals are significantly enriched by the while affair, however it actually works out for the public?

As JMG has noted in the carbon offset conversations, meaningful responses to enormous and imminent environmental problems, such as climate destabilization, will require big shifts in public behavior.  And as I mentioned in a follow up to that thought, and will mention again here, such changes typically follow big changes in technology and infrastructure, which yields new ideas about how and what to do in the course of day to day life.  Nothing like that will flow from congestion pricing and spending gobs of money on fixing up roads and expanding existing public transportation systems.

Finally, there is nothing that suggests that a half-step toward privatizing public infrastructure that was once equally available to all has any implications whatsoever for maintaining the public goods of air or water as such and insisting that those who damage those public resources pay what it costs to fix them rather than buying cheap exemptions or even insisting that they be paid off in return for not doing more damage.  And, in that, the primary point of the original article was flawed and foolish, in my opinion, much as I would like for the author to be right about reclaiming the commons.On The connection between congestion pricing and carbon taxes posted 2 years, 4 months ago 18 Responses

Technology often precedes behavior changes

JMG, I agree that significant behavior changes are necessary to achieve anything close to the sort of carbon emissions reductions called for by climatologists who are estimating the minimum shift necessary to avoid catastrophic climate destabilization in the foreseeable future.  And, like you, I see many of the "market solutions" being tossed around as but one of several factors that are doing more to forestall the necessary behavior changes than to promote them.  On the other hand, I agree with those who have pointed at that it does little good the demand change and throw up one's hands when it is not immediately forthcoming.

Looking back on it, we got into the mess when a series of technological innovations prompted a series of changes in both behavior and belief.  I mean, suburbia, two car garages, washing machines and refrigerators, and the 9 to 5 grind didn't just happen because people decided that is how they wanted to live, it happened because stuff was invented and marketed with some ideas about how people could live and people took the bait.

I am pointing this out because I think that gives us some clues as to what it is going to take to stimulate the next big shift in behavior and expectations about how we live in an era of massive population gains, overburdened and declining resources, and destabilization of natural systems that humans learned to regard as more or less stable during the short span of the industrial growth era.  In the near term, there is a lot of long hanging fruit to be plucked in the form of energy efficiency--enough to arrive at actual energy conservation--if we would only focus on that instead of looking for new ways to quickly pillage land, water, and fossil fuels to supplement our dangerous fossil fuel habits.  But even with big gains in energy efficiency, we still need to make large shifts in the behavior of billions of people to decelerate man's contribution to global warming as well as to head off a host of other environmental crises now underway.  Thus, while we are evaluating techno-fixes in which to invest as a result of carbon taxes, caps and trades, and the rising market to appeal to do-gooders, I think it would be very helpful to ask whether the technologies will promote or hinder the types of lifestyle and infrastructure shifts, as well as the beliefs and expectations, necessary to continue the pattern of carbon emissions reductions that will be required in a couple of decades, by which time the long hanging fruit of big efficiency gains will hopefully be in the bag.  If the answer is no, and the technology motivates people to continue living a high consumption and disposable lifestyle, it should be recognized as more a part of the problem than the solution to this puzzle.On Trees should play a bigger role posted 2 years, 4 months ago 27 Responses

Subsidy?

An effort to fund clean-up of an ongoing industry's waste is essentially a subsidy for the industry, conceals part of the problems they cause, and could actually create a new industry dependent on the first one! Just a theory. Any opinions?

That issue turns on the matter of rights.  If the industry has a right to pollute or waste at a given level, then paying them to reduce their waste or pollution below that level in return for carbon emissions credits of your own is a legitimate investment that should lead to a desirable outcome, assuming there is a carbon emissions cap that is meaningful (as was not the case when the Kyoto driven market collapsed, for example).  However, if the industry does not have the right to waste or pollute at the present level, possibly due to regulations for efficiency or emissions levels, then, yes, you would be subsidizing them to due what they are already required to do under the law.

This assignment of initial rights is probably the most important single issue in all analysis of carbon trading schemes (or any other economic scheme meant to guide investments and changes in behavior for the social good).  Historically, wildlife, water, air, and most things we would call nature have been part of the public domain in the U.S.--even when they traverse or contact private property.  The guiding principle has been that we are all free to do a little dumping and extracting in this public domain so long as the overall detrimental impact of individual actions is minimal or immeasurable.  With a rising population and increasing energy use, many activities that once met the standard of doing no significant harm are now having a substantial negative impact when taken cumulatively (and in many cases, when assessed individually due to the more fragile state of "nature" in certain cases).  Thus, the recent trend in "takings" disputes toward compensating property owners for abiding regulations necessary to prevent them from doing significant damage to the public's commonly held natural resources represents a major transfer of rights from the public to private parties without commensurate compensation to the public, even though the leaders of this movement claim just the opposite.  In my opinion, it is a major mistake, which we cannot afford, to let that trend continue, but the private property trumps all interest groups seem to be gaining the upper hand at the moment.On Measure, monitor, reduce, offset posted 2 years, 4 months ago 10 Responses

A few comments

As it stands today, you are taking a small risk that your purchase may not actually result in CO2 reductions.

Without proper analysis and auditing of carbon reduction investments, the risks are much greater than you suggest.  A big problem, which you have acknowledged elsewhere, stems from treating long-term, complex manipulations of the natural environment, such as reforestation projects, as if they amounted to simple and immediate carbon sequestering machines.  The risk here is that we may be to use the abundance and diversity of life, for which there is generally no accounting in many carbon reduction schemes, even if we succeed in a net carbon reduction.  And, of course, the ultimate objective of these carbon reduction schemes is to guard against a precipitous decline in the biotic density and diversity upon which our own survival and quality of life depends.  Meanwhile, many popular carbon reduction schemes run a substantial risk of failing to deliver results as soon and as substantially as expected.  Given the urgency and magnitude of the problems at hand, as well as our limited resources with which to address those problems, these are not matters that should be brushed aside.

I also don't see why an individual should do everything reasonably possible to offset carbon emissions that are under their direct control before buying offsets from a third party. Individuals are just as likely to screw up as a third party.

I think there is a much better reason than that for dismissing such a rule.  Quite simply, the marginal utility of investing a given quantity of resources into helping our neighbor reduce carbon emissions may be greater than investing those same resources into cleaning up our own relatively cleaner act.  For instance, if the only thing standing between our present circumstances and carbon neutrality is investing $400 to replace our gas oven with a large solar oven, whereas the same $400 could be used to seal our neighbor's drafty house, thereby saving much more heating oil energy than we would ever use for cooking, investing in our neighbor's problem is much better for society and should be encouraged and rewarded as such.

There are enough trees on this land to nullify the lifetime carbon emissions of several individuals, once they mature.

"Once they mature," being the key phrase, here.  This relates to Rule 4 of Rune's Rulez, which encompasses of the common wisdom of not counting your chickens before they hatch, or, as I put it originally: "credits are only available according to the estimated amount of carbon sequestered b[y] a given project in a given year.  So, if you plant seedlings in a temperate zone, you will get next to nothing for your investment for many years to come, but if you become the biochar wizard and stash lots of carbon today, you can cash in at once."

This is a very important issue, and it is ignored by some marketers of carbon onset projects.  Given the level of damage being done to biodiversity by man-made climate destabilization taking place today, as well as a positive feedback effect on carbon emissions left unmitigated for substantial periods of time, schemes that are expected to sequester substantial amounts of carbon well into the future, but which will not do much to reduce carbon accumulations today, should be heavily discounted when assessing their present value.

Nobody, anywhere, ever, has argued that the private, voluntary offset market is any kind of substitute for larger emission reduction programs.

David, that is pretty much what the Bush administration has proposed all along, most recently at the G8 Summit as the preferred course for the future.On Trees should play a bigger role posted 2 years, 4 months ago 27 Responses

Crazy Talk

I think the main reason why this discussion has spun into a more or less pointless emotional upheaval is that the language and fields of study most appropriate to addressing the issues that have been repeated umpteen times has been steadfastly avoided.

Issue one is the credibility and reliability of carbon emissions remediation or carbon fuel conservation programs.  Such an issue is the stock and trade of accounting.  It's a matter of making some simple rules to approximate the complex real world impacts of carbon fuel use, counting up the impacts that would take place without countervailing programs, counting up the impacts with countervailing programs, auditing the counts for accuracy, and accurately reporting the contributions of each actor involved.

Issue two has to do with predicting the likely human responses to various schemes of assigning rights to and costs of releasing carbon into the atmosphere as a consequence of other individually desirable activities.  Such matters are exactly what is captured in the frame of economic analysis.  Yes, physical sciences are necessary to understand probability and possibility of carbon emission of sequestration given a certain set of human actions, but it is economics that best predicts which actions will be taken in the context under discussion.

Issue three has to do with the further complexity of unintended consequences to other scarce resources, such as water, topsoil, and biodiversity, given a certain economic program or set of programs that aim to alter carbon emissions or sequestration behaviors in multiple societies.  Again, physical sciences will provide the details of the likely environmental impacts of human activity, but (sound) economics will best describe what activities are likely under various economic conditions, such as carbon trading markets, carbon taxes, or carbon caps.

I made a stab at laying down an initial framework for appropriate economic analysis of the problems at hand  in Joseph Romm's initial thread on this issue when I hastily jotted down Rune's Rulez before taking off for an extended backcountry outing.  In my opinion, Romm got himself into a never ending cycle of unsatisfying conjecture and exceptions to his own conjectures by completely ignoring the language and lessons of economics and accounting, instead relying on moral and ethical pontification and over generalization, such as insisting that each individual make the maximum effort to reduce their carbon emissions related activities before availing themselves of the opportunity to invest in others' possibly more effective efforts toward the same end, or simply declaring that no tress should ever by cultivated in the name of carbon reduction.  Others have simply played off of this unproductive approach rather than reframing the issue in the terms that have been used by numerous studies to assess the problems and effectiveness of carbon reduction regulatory and market mechanisms.

If I had the ability to start a thread of my own on this subject, I would refine my initial Rune's Rulez, point to the analyses that have convinced most well intentioned policy wonks and business people that carbon taxes backed by sound auditing measures are more effective, reliable, and efficient means of reducing carbon emissions worldwide, while politicians and business opportunists favor carbon offset trading, which is more likely to result in a system that is gamed for quick and ill gotten profits by those making the markets and those using accounting tricks and outright lies to sell something on paper that does not actually produce the declared value for which it is sold in the real world.  However, I have no way of starting such a thread, so I will just wait and see if anyone else who does is inclined to dig into the economics and accounting angle.  So far, it appears that was a thread killer when I brought it up early on, so I won't take the time here to clean up some obvious flaws in my first contribution toward that end.  I am certainly not inclined to dive into any of the numerous rounds of conjecture and personal insults.  That's just pointless.On Many offset critics appear to be shadowboxing posted 2 years, 4 months ago 76 Responses

Rune's rulez

As I have been anticipating the splendor of Romm's rules, I have been thinking about what rules would and would not promote desirable outcomes.  I am about to head for the hills for a week, so I thought I would share a few thoughts before I am offline and turning my thoughts to other matters.

1.  No one has the right to destroy existing biological services that have a net effect of sequestering carbon.  In any economic systems modeling, one of the most important determinants of outcomes is who has which rights and resources at the beginning of the process.  If we recognize rights to destroy natural services, we are setting the course of net gains of carbon in the atmosphere without any marginal cost to the owner of those rights and, thus, no marginal revenue paid to those who might otherwise mitigate the effect.  We don't want that.

2.  A carbon tax is charged whenever carbon based fuel is extracted or converted to a form that is intended for fuel use.  (So, for instance, wood would be assessed as taxable as soon as it is cut and split or pelletized, and could become eligible for a rebate if it is later converted into another form that will not be burned.)  The rate of the tax shall be the estimated average cost of sequestering the amount of carbon fuel that is expected to be extracted or converted in the country in which the conversion or extraction is taking place, using the best available technology, plus an overhead factor to pay for the administration and monitoring associated with the tax system.  (It might due to divvy up the volume of sequestration by company rather than country, or by other bases.  The important concept is that the marginal cost of mitigation will likely increase as the volume of carbon per unit of time increases, so we don't want to use the cost of sequestering the first unit of carbon as the taxable amount applicable to the total amount of carbon fuel that will be ready for use in a given period, as that would tend to underestimate the true value of mitigating the total volume of pollution that would be released without mitigation.)

3.  End users of carbon fuels are immediately elligible for credits equal to, say, 80% of the amount of energy saved in a given operation (such as powering a machine or heating a building) compared to existing technology, to be recognized in each year of operation of the energy saving technology for the estimate life of the technology.  Think of it as a reverse depreciation schedule denominated in carbon credits.  Carbon credits are to be converted to currency according to the prevailing carbon tax rate in the year in question.  The amount of credits shall be N(1/(1-X)), where N is the number of carbon units in the fuel actually used that year and X is the rated fuel efficiency of the new technology as compared to the old (so, if the new technology uses two-thirds as much energy, X would be .67).  The reason for not allowing a 100% credit for carbon saved is to account for the tendency to do more with energy when it takes less energy to do a unit of work.  So, for instance, people raise their thermostats and leave the lights on more when more efficient heating and lighting is installed.  There is a name for this effect, named after a person, but I can't recall it at the moment.

4.  Carbon credits can also be earned by investing mitigation services that are not directly tied to energy using technology.  So, for instance, enhancing the carbon sequestering properties of soil, planting trees (sorry, Romm), or operating some sort of atmospheric carbon vacuum cleaner would qualify for credits and a rebate at the prevailing rate of the carbon tax in any given year.  However, these credits are only available according to the estimated amount of carbon sequestered b a given project in a given year.  So, if you plant seedlings in a temperate zone, you will get next to nothing for your investment for many years to come, but if you become the biochar wizard and stash lots of carbon today, you can cash in at once.

Some other things he has said

I think the following comments put this latest article by van der Veer into the perspective JMG's friend had in mind.  It also answers some questions about where his company is investing.

Delivering Technology: The Key Role of International Energy Companies

by Jeroen van der Veer
Chief Executive
Royal Dutch Shell p.l.c.

. . .

I don't believe the world is running out of energy. Nor do I believe that - taking unconventional resources into account - we are even close to "peak oil." Nor that we must choose between economic development and action on climate.

. . .

What Do We Need to Do?

We need to do three things:

• make the most of fossil resources
  
• develop alternative forms of energy
  
• improve energy efficiency

Because of their efficiency and abundance, fossil fuels will remain at the heart of our energy system. We need to make the most of them, which must include dealing with their carbon emissions.

The biggest impact would come from significantly increasing the amount of oil we recover from reservoirs, little more than a third on average at present. At Shell, we see considerable scope for this, but no simple solutions. It depends on sustained investment in extending knowledge and applying technology.

Continuing advances are helping us to:

• reduce geological uncertainties
  
• drill better-placed, more-productive and cheaper wells
  
• manage reservoir processes more efficiently
  
• enhance the recovery of stranded oil

"Smart" technology, which enables engineers to monitor and control reservoir processes remotely, could significantly boost recovery.

Enhanced oil recovery techniques, which use heat, gas or chemicals to make oil flow more easily, will be increasingly important. But these projects are costly, complex and technically demanding.

These techniques depend on experienced people who are able to understand the subsurface possibilities, choose the right tools and apply them effectively.

The industry is also learning how to find and develop hydrocarbons in more difficult geology and harsher environments. For example, at Shell we are using our deepwater experience from the Gulf of Mexico in places like Nigeria and Malaysia.

Consumption of liquefied natural gas could double over the next decade. But this also depends on technological, as well as commercial, innovation.

Gas-to-liquids (GTL) technology offers another way of getting gas to customers. Shell has been pursuing this for 25 years, developing our proprietary technology, gaining operational experience from our first plant in Malaysia and building markets. Our planned 140,000-barrel-a-day plant in Qatar is due to come into production around the end of the decade. We believe GTL will be increasingly important, providing high-quality fuels to help reduce transport emissions.

Our experience illustrates three things about developing energy technologies: It takes long-term commitment. Being integrated matters. And it opens further opportunities.

 Technological advances will also be important in refining, in particular in dealing with heavier and more acidic crudes and in meeting demand for light and clean products.

There are also very large unconventional resources: heavy oils, oil sands and shales, coal-bed methane and contaminated and tight gas.

And, of course, there is a lot of coal, particularly in countries like the United States and China.

. . .

 Shell is also testing an environmentally sensitive way of unlocking the very large potential of oil shale in Colorado, using electric heaters to gradually heat the rock formation and release light oil and gas.

Coal gasification offers a way of using coal more efficiently, cleanly and flexibly. The resulting syngas can fuel efficient combined-cycle power plants. It could also be used, with the same technology as GTL, to produce high-quality liquid fuels.

I believe the world will be able to rely on the efficiency and convenience of fossil energy for a long time to come.

Developing Carbon Solutions

How does this fit with the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?

I have a vision of green - or greener - fossil fuels with much of their carbon dioxide captured and sequestered either underground or in inert materials. I believe this is practical and could, certainly in the medium term, be cheaper, more convenient and more flexible than alternative energies. . . .

Oh well, it was a nice fantasy while it lasted.  A CEO of a major oil company pushing for meaningful efficiency such that it actually resulted in conservation of energy and other resources being pushed to their limits.  It's not exactly what he said, but it was fun to think for a moment it might be what he meant.On An oil exec gets the diagnosis right posted 2 years, 5 months ago 15 Responses

Private, market-based schemes are not enough

Good comments, Chris.  Thanks!

Rather than pontificating about the wisdom or realism of continuing to play the games of U.S. politics and policy that have put the country in a deep and sinking hole when it comes to GHG emissions (as but one concern of relevance to this discussion), I think it makes more sense to look to countries that are actually succeeding and see what they regard as the best ways to make further progress.  Sweden was featured last week as a modern, industrial country that is making great strides toward reducing both the use of fossil fuels and GHG emissions.  Here is what the head of Sweden's EPA, Lars-Erik Liljelund, said it would take for his country to satisfy the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 25-30% by 2020:

We can accomplish this with relatively small effects on the Swedish economy.  But it is crucial that the state takes powerful measures to direct the process. This is not going to happen by itself.

The news article from which the quote was taken makes clear that Liljelund's comment was made in the context of both carbon taxes and markets for carbon emissions trading.

As we have seen in the S&L scandal, the banking scandal, the Alyeska pipeline scandal, the lack of double hulls and clean up crews in Alaska scandal (commonly known as the Exxon Valdez disaster), the energy trading scandal that brought down Enron and the associated accounting and auditing scandal, to name but a few striking examples off the top of my head, big business tends toward corrupting market functions in mature industries when not subject to diligent and proactive government regulation and oversight.  It's just too tempting to try to lie and cheat when (1) the responsible decision makers can usually get rich and move on before the scandal is discovered, (2) the eventual punishment is generally less costly than the rewards of cheating (note, for example, that Exxon still has not paid even the greatly reduced damage award it was ordered to pay years ago), and (3) competitors are likely to cheat and run the honest companies out of business before lengthy, expensive, and uncertain litigation can correct the situation.

Which brings us back to Dingell and the corporations he does his best to protect in return for their support.  He knows all this as do the lobbyists of his business benefactors.  They know that conditions have finally gotten to the point that the public won't stand for doing nothing any longer, so he tried the next best thing from the standpoint of the local car companies--a nonbinding efficiency standard with lots of loopholes and giveaways to other polluting industries whose favor he is courting.  That failed, so now it's onto a carbon trading scheme that can probably be designed to allow just the sort of abuse that led to the host of business scandals I mentioned above.  I think those who truly want meaningful change on the GHG emission front in the U.S. in their lifetimes are naive to think that a market based system of taxes and carbon credits trading--especially if done internationally--will do the trick unless it is backed by tough regulations, inspections, and enforcement with criminal penalties.  There is every reason to believe that such a scheme will amount to nothing more than a new way to make money using old tricks in the name of genuine progress if it does not include some robust and unfettered verification and enforcement.  Given how little attention is being paid to that point, I doubt that there much chance that we will get anything of the sort if we don't start pushing that point hard and immediately.On He's pro-carbon tax, anti-CAFE -- which matters more? posted 2 years, 5 months ago 20 Responses

Cheap and environmentally preferable option

In most bike friendly cities there exists at least one place the specializes in refurbishing and selling used bikes.  That is a great way to go for an electric bike conversion because you can get just the parts you need, you can usually get an experienced bicycle mechanic to make sure everything is built for durability and proper function (unlike department store bikes, which are not assembled by bicycle pros), the price is right, and you do not create new demand for the manufacture of a whole, new bike in a country that may be using unsavory labor practices and a particularly dangerous mix of energy sources to make and ship the bike.

In Seattle, one such outlet is Recycled Cycles.

BioD, I am interested in the details of your project.  Can you say a little more about the cost of the batteries, how long they are lasting for you, what other batteries you considered and why you chose the ones you did, what choices of controls and motorized hubs you considered and what and why you chose what you did, etc.?  I suspect you have done some detailed research and thinking about your choices and I would like to share in the benefits of that rather that reinvent the wheel--so to speak.  Thanks!On Ultimate Seattle hybrid plug-in posted 2 years, 5 months ago 25 Responses

Size matters

Renewable energy is a great investment.  The industry is so small relative to demand, yet so hyped, subsidized, and in demand for very valid reasons, that it can be expected to grow at 30% to 100% or more for decades before it ever scales up to something that might result in excess supply--especially if we keep ignoring much brighter prospects to make an immediate difference through conservation technology.  So, it is no wonder that we see almost as many stories about all the nifty ways to make wind and solar bigger--as well as offers of snake oil in the form of croplands being hijacked into energy production--as we see offers of pills and devices to make penises bigger in our spam folders.

Size does matter.  And, when wind and solar grow up, I am sure they will get bigger, just like the mature members of the energy industry.On Quite engorged, actually posted 2 years, 5 months ago 15 Responses

Consider what it takes to go organic

Leif, I don't think there is any question that rich, living soil sequesters carbon, among other wonderful things.  The trouble is, we have enormous expanses of ground under tillage that have been exhausted and adulterated.  It takes a long time to bring the soil back to life after being on artificial life support.  Even the biointensive projects that John Jeavons has spread around the globe general involve a bit of cheating on the front end to prime the system.  Doing this on a massive scale begs the question of where we should get the inputs to kick off a massive transformation to organic farming.  A couple years ago, Richard Heinberg wrote a very convincing article in his Muse letter outlining just how many well trained warm bodies it would take to do a good job of going organic on a low energy budget.  It's a long haul.  Definitely the right direction, but not a quick trip.

My former neighbor, Michael Abelman, once of Fairview Farms, has been making the point for quite a while that local farms with personal interaction between farmers and consumers (not to be confused with signing up for a box of CSA veggies on the internet) is probably more important than any standards or certifications for organic farming.  Provided there is a reasonably high level of education and knowledge among consumers, I am inclined to agree.  If people see farming as a part of their community instead of a vague concept, like wilderness has become, they are more likely to appreciate farmers who are taking care of the land, water, and air while turning out healthy food, and farmers that are cutting corners are less likely to get away with it among informed and involved neighbors than they are among occasional inspectors who have only a mild financial interest in the results.

It may turn out that reducing the amount of refrigeration and shipping, as well as carbon inputs into what are now industrial farms, is as important or more important than converting to accepted organic methods, as a first point of focus.  It may not.  But encouraging small(ish) and (relatively) local farms may, again, be a better way of getting the best and quickest results for the people than setting another set of blanket policies that can eventually be gamed by some of the players who aren't intimate with the other stakeholders they are effecting.

Anyhow, I am just throwing out a few thoughts that can be connected when thinking of what a practical, effective and, by necessity, long range farm policy might include if we are looking to rally around a new model or two.  I am interested to see what others think and want to add or warn against.On Don't blame farmers for the farm-subsidy mess posted 2 years, 5 months ago 21 Responses

Let's look at this again

Tom wrote:
If subsidies were a boon to their recipients, then we'd expect to see farmers' fortunes steadily climbing since the early 1970s, when the federal government began to replace its old supply-management system with the direct-payment strategy in use today.

In fact, as Tufts University researcher Tim Wise showed in a 2005 paper [PDF], real net farm income has at best stagnated in that period.

Tom, you have overlooked the most important part of Cook's message and, in the process, completely misconstrued his point, in my opinion.  In his conclusions, Cook wrote, "The important policy questions in this farm bill cycle have much less to do with what becomes of subsidy payments than with who receives them, and why."

From that, it should be clear that Cook recognizes (1) that not all farmers are subsidized (or not subsidized equally), and (2) that it is the competitive advantage of those who are benefiting most from these unequally and/or unfairly distributed subsidies that is causing problems, not the existence of subsidy payments themselves.

Indeed, Cook devotes the middle part of his essay to describing how the bulk of the subsidies are pocketed by a concentrated group of farmers who may not need them at all and, in at least a couple of cases, may not seem to fit the mold of the type of farmer the subsidies were intended to benefit.

Now, if the problem is that some larger, wealthier farmers (that is to say, those that already have some economic cushion and probably opportunities and advantages the other farmers do not enjoy) are walking off with a disproportionate share of the subsidies, we should not expect that to show up in Wise's analysis of average farm incomes and profits as a whole in the form of steadily rising net incomes.  It is not clear what the overall effect might be on all farmers taken as a whole.

What we should expect, and what both Cook and Tom are getting at, whether Tom sees it or not, is that the bigger, wealthier farmers getting a large share of the subsidies are able to invest in higher value assets that further their competitive advantages, thus allowing them to sell at somewhat lower prices if necessary and still make excess economic rents relative to the bulk of poorer, smaller farmers who are just scraping by, possibly with some help from subsidies if they can get them.

Naylor wrote:
Why do we have subsidies in the first place? Due to perpetually low commodity prices that seldom meet the cost of production for farmers, subsidies were created to make up the difference.

Sorry, I don't think that really covers it.  The purpose of farm subsidies was to stabilize the farming industry (which is what it is--it is not a profession, like medicine of law) was to encourage good stewardship of the land (by keeping some fields fallow).  By encouraging farmers to plant more than they were sure they could grow and sell, it kept them from running short in lean years.  By shoring up prices in bumper crop years, it kept farmers from going broke and not being around next year or being bought out by wealthier and richer farmers, leading to monopoly power and problems.  Along the way, the government learned to use the surplus supplies of commodities both as a welfare handout and as a tool in international trade wars, but that is a tangent I'll set aside for now.

The point is, the subsidy program was eventually influenced and rigged by large interests in the farm industry to allow them to destabilize the market (thus failing one of the purposes of subsidies), in part by engaging in ever more intense and less diverse land and crop management practices (thus undoing the other benefit that subsidies were meant to bestow).

And that, I believe, is what is wrong with the subsidy program and what needs fixing.  I suspect Cook would agree.  At this point, it may take more than simply reworking the subsidies, it may require anti-trust action among the bio-tech and livestock industries that are quite happy to keep lobbying to continue the status quo farm policies, which are serving their interests quite well.  But one way or another, we would be better off with farm policies that promote the original goals of good land management, stable incomes, and stable food prices.  I happen to believe that small, competitive farms producing a relatively diverse mix of crops and/or animals would be a wise way of achieving those other ends.On Don't blame farmers for the farm-subsidy mess posted 2 years, 5 months ago 21 Responses

Battery exchange stations, not quick charges

Am I missing something?  I just don't understand why every electric car enthusiast I come across is so stuck on extending the range or recharge time of batteries.  A patent for a battery exchange module was granted before the electric car was completely exterminated.  It would not difficult to improve on this concept and have working exchange stations at universities and other research facilities in a matter of months if there was money and a desire behind the idea.  Once there is proof of concept, I think it would be clearly easier to set some standards for battery modules and battery swap stations than to spend who knows how many years and how much money trying to improve the range and recharge times of batteries.

Most of the time, people should be able to recharge over night or while parked at work during the day, so we would not need nearly as many recharge stations as we have gas stations.  Mostly they would be used for long trips, so just having them along major highways should do.

The stations themselves could have a compact carousel of standardized batteries in a bay that the driver drives over.  There are several ways of indexing the location of the battery module on the underside of the car, so I won't belabor the point.  The driver could flip a battery release, the lift on the carousel could remove the depleted battery, a charged battery is popped into place, and the deed is done.  A quick test of the remaining capacity of the replaced and new batteries determines how much the driver pays for the swap, and off he or she goes.  Meanwhile, the depleted battery is trickle charged on the carousel and it is ready for use by the time it comes around again.  Or, if it is at the end of its useful service life, it is recycled and replaced.

I am sure there are some issues with this, but I am not seeing anything that should stand in the way of working towards this today as a real, long term solution to the need to have the flexibility to drive a long distance sometimes without have to maintain a whole second set of engine, fuel, and refueling capabilities.  So, I say, let's chuck hybrids and move to all electric vehicles.

Again, what am I missing?On How to transform personal transportation with existing tools posted 2 years, 5 months ago 29 Responses

It's USA, one and two

Missing from this analysis is the fact that the U.S. has sent most of its dirtiest industries, and especially the dirtiest segments of dirty industries, abroad, especially to China.  Even so, when it comes to GHG, the U.S. remains on an upward swing.  Think of it as a two-track growth plan for poisoning the atmosphere.  Where once the U.S. lead the world in GHG emissions from activities that took place mostly on its own soil, now it does all that plus it has smokestacks in China working overtime to make that much more air pollution associate with stuff that Americans will consume and throw away.  

Go, team, go!On And They're Off posted 2 years, 5 months ago 1 Response

Water woes

August 22, 2006

. . . "One in three people is enduring one form or another of water scarcity," the International Water Management Institute says in a report compiled by 700 experts and backed by the United Nations.

The scarcity figures are higher than previous estimates.

"It is much more widespread than we thought at first," the institute's director-general, Frank Rijsberman, said. "It's very concerning. We see what we can easily call a water crisis in quite a few different countries," he said, citing as examples Australia, south-central China and India.

"Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 per cent increase in water use for agriculture on rain-fed and irrigated lands," the report says.

Demand for irrigation - which absorbs about 74 per cent of all water used by people against 18 per cent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 per cent for households - is likely to surge by 2050.

Many nations are also shifting to produce biofuels - from sugarcane, corn or wood - as a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels. High oil prices and worries about global warming are driving the shift. . . .

The United States is importing uranium

Are you trying to say that the United States needs, or could conceivably within the next 1,000 years need, to import uranium?

The United States has been importing uranium from Canada for a while, now.  And Canada keeps having accidents that cause supply restrictions and price spikes.

Whether we ever "need" to import or mine uranium is another matter.On So says Jim Henley, and yours truly posted 2 years, 5 months ago 33 Responses

Problem solved

Reserves of uranium and thorium are plentiful worldwide, and all other mineral and chemical resources can be produced from those.

Sounds like you've got nothing to worry about, then, Nucbuddy.  You can just dig up fresh sources of ionizing radioactive energy and keep your mojo working forever.  And, should that ever fail, you can just stretch out in the open somewhere and wait until nightfall when one of us humans can find your glowing carcass . . . and encase it in thick, dense material in which to transport it to, say, that evolutionarily accelerated animal park in what was the Soviet Union when a certain event called into question the recent cover story of The Economist announcing the era of clean, safe, reliable nuclear energy.  LOL.

Jon, we are largely on the same page, often literally, according to your citations.  I am just saying that we are better served to keep in mind our best choices will probably not be found in black and white terms nor at the extremes (e.g., living as some band of Native Americans once did), although the contrast and clarity of extreme examples does serve to make certain points.  But let's not forget to return to the chaotic swirl of possibility and wonder once we get clear on the concepts of use and interest.

In that vein, I am not convinced of the utility of distinguishing between resource independence of self-reliance.  In real life, I suppose once would do well to be ever mindful of the possibilities for collaboration or going it alone, and plan and reconsider accordingly at all times.

There needs to be an ethic which states that taking away wealth-generating capacity is not wealth, it's "illth", to use Hazel Henderson's phrase.

Oh, is that where that came from?  I thought one of the people at Redefining Progress actually had an original thought.  Oh, well.  <snrk!>

There are many strands of true cost and positive psychology systems sprouting up in this, the dawning of post-autistic economics era. . . . Oh, no, I hope I have not shocked the reclusive keepers of the faith and original relic of Adam Smith's ghostlike hand by sharing yet another term of cultural relevance and irreverence.  Hey, sometimes simple honesty can come as a shock for some people.  Just imagine what the next 20 years will be like for them.  The always diplomatic and reserved Howard Kunstler (LOL!) shared some rather tame thoughts (for him) about that yesterday.

. . . We're involved in Iraq because we don't want to begin thinking about modifying our behavior at home. We are desperate to preserve our access to Middle East oil because that is the only way we can keep running our society the way we're used to running it. Mostly, we don't want to face the tragic misinvestments we've made in the infrastructure of happy motoring, and we don't want to face the inconvenient truth that there really isn't any combination of alt.fuels that will permit us to keep running all the cars the way we like to run them. Either we keep getting the oil or say goodbye to the American Dream Version 2.K.
     The public has now decided that this nation's primary mission is to find some magic way to keep the cars running on a fuel other than gasoline. Everyone from the greenest greenies to the most medieval-minded Kansas Republican senator has joined in this collective wish. They are certain to be disappointed. All the Priuses in the world will not avail to save the Drive-In Utopia. The public will learn painfully what Iraq is all about.
     Every time somebody blames the politicians for this predicament, I'm reminded that the politicians are actually doing a fine job of representing what their constituents want. What they want is to not change their behavior. Not even the science and technology folks want to think about changing our behavior. They just want to find new ways to continue the old behavior. They're invested in the triumphal effort to come up with a happy motoring rescue remedy. Their techno-cred is on the line. They all want to be the first kid in their housing subdivision to run a car on dark matter.
     So, we've gone to Iraq on the quixotic mission to stabilize-and-pacify this key territory in the greater region of the Middle East, so we can keep getting oil imports out of there in a reliable and orderly way, so we can keep on driving all our cars. And the whole thing has turned out rather badly.
      Now there is another consensus forming. Across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, elected officials are now clamoring to "stop the war in Iraq." By this they mean get US troops out. What cracks me up is their juvenile belief that being there is somehow optional for us, that we can keep on running Wal Mart and Walt Disney World without paying any price for it in the costs of policing the Middle East.
     If we don't maintain a military presence in Iraq, it is perfectly plain what will happen: Iran will instantly gain control of the southern Iraq oil fields. Iraq doesn't have an army anymore. It is incapable of preventing Iran from acquiring control of its territory. From that vantage, Iran would also effectively threaten the sovereign existence of Kuwait. Then there is the question of how much instability Iran could generate next door in the Shia-dominated Persian Gulf shoreline region of Saudi Arabia, where most of that nation's oil lies. (Meanwhile, there will be plenty more Iran-inspired mayhem in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.)
     It seems to me the answer to all this is clear: the first thing the US has to do is reach a different consensus about our behavior here at home, starting with the proposition that the happy motoring era must end. If we're not willing to do that, we're eventually going to lose both at home and in our struggles abroad. You can be sure that coming disturbances in the oil markets will make suburban life untenable while exhaustion and bankruptcy breaks our military.
     The air waves and internet sites are full of blather now about ending the "war" and bringing the troops home. The presidential candidates are agonizing over their various positions on the Iraq adventure. I'd like to hear one of them tell me how Atlanta is going to function without Middle Eastern oil, or how Wal Mart will move its merchandise from San Pedro to Lansing without a "warehouse on wheels," or how the thousands of yellow school bus fleets will carry on next September.
     Actually, instead, I'd like to hear talk about drastically reforming our zoning laws to discourage any more suburban development or a pitch to allow some of our tax money to fund a US passenger rail revival. I'd like to see a candidate refuse to attend a Nascar race on the grounds that it's an unconscionably stupid fucking waste of energy resources. I'm waiting for one of these birds to tell the American people the truth: you can't have it both ways. you can't get our military out of the Middle East without changing the way we live.

I'm sure he was just kidding. . . .On So says Jim Henley, and yours truly posted 2 years, 5 months ago 33 Responses

Wow!

Maybe someday, poor people can catch local fish and feed them to their families, again, without doing lasting damage to the brains of their children, among other things that tend to be more top of mind around here.  Fingers crossed.On More victories posted 2 years, 5 months ago 4 Responses

Energy independence: a populist message

Not independence. Resilience.

I think that is exactly right, David.  And while we are at it, lets recognize the need for resilience rather than "sustainability," too.  We are entering a period in which all number of interrelated systems are expected to experience greater volatility.  What once may have made it possible to calculate and live by sustainable rates and means is increasingly a thing of the past.  Resilience in the face of change is where it is at.

Now, back to "energy independence."  This is an appeal made to consumers who feel very dependent upon certain goods, various forms of energy being foremost among them.  The question, then, becomes, upon whom are they dependent?  Most of them are not schlepping overseas to bring home bags of oil to mix with increasingly dear and mostly domestic (North American, at least) supplies of natural gas and electricity generated by mostly local coal and uranium.  No, they are dependent upon a small number of big, mostly multinational distributors of energy, often posing as "American" companies.

To become energy independent, consumers either need to gain control over their own means of producing usable energy, or they need to be able to buy from a field of many truly competitive suppliers that do not have sufficient monopoly power to manipulate the total quantity of supply and, thus, price.

Secondarily, these distributors need to be able to by adequate stocks of inputs from truly competitive markets, or take control of their own supplies.  But whether those supplies come from abroad or not is mostly beside the point unless they are subject to "country risk" because they are getting most of their supplies from a small number of less than stable countries and cannot quickly and economically switch to suppliers elsewhere.On So says Jim Henley, and yours truly posted 2 years, 5 months ago 33 Responses

What, me worry?

Rune,
Depressing, ain't it? I'm more of an optimist and think that there is not one single solution, but things will turn out for the better. And if not, then I'll be dead, and it probably won't matter to me then.

Well, no, I am not depressed by this situation.  I would like it to be different, and I take pleasure in helping some people make a difference, if only at an individual level or in moderately sized groups.  And that is why I am not depressed by the typical and messy bumbling of my particular cohorts in this particular chapter of the dramatic and often ridiculous story of human history.

Look, people screw things up big time for other people, and often for other species.  That's just a part of what we do.  Always has been, probably always will be, for so long as there are humans.

Just the same, many people have managed to lead, rich and meaningful lives.  I rather enjoy that myself.  There are no "solutions," but there are ways to increase or diminish hope, wisdom, justice, comfort, curiosity, creativity, pleasure, and love for the many during our own brief moment to appreciate the sentient experience.  I am onboard for increasing, rather than diminishing, those fine qualities of life.

Of course, my ideas about how to keep the party rolling without undue damage to person or place may not be immediately obvious or acceptable to some of my co-hosts.  That's to be expected.  And, so, from time to time, I speak up about that and point out where I think some of their ideas might be far fetched, if not downright dangerous.  It's only fair, as there seems to be no end to the number of people who will take it upon themselves to shoot down ideas that I and people like me find promising, all the while promoting their own idea of the true secret of life.

I don't think it is necessary to attack people's politics, when we can just explain the hedonic treadmill, and how jumping off might make us happier.

Well, Odograph, I assume that comment was in reaction to my previous post, and, if so, it does seem that you have said a mouthful.  For instance, I put the focus on personal perception and empowerment in the context of pervasive economic institutions, and from this you seem to have come away with the notion that I have "attacked" someone's personal "politics."  Tell me, who is it you have in mind, and what brand of politics might that be?

If I wanted to talk about one of the mechanisms underpinning the psychological, social, economic, and environmental dynamics I briefly sketched, I could have confined my comments to the "hedonic treadmill."  But that was neither my intention nor my point.

Oh, well, party on, dude! <grin>On With the right rules in place, it could work posted 2 years, 5 months ago 115 Responses

Complicated problems rarely have a single solution

In threads like this, folks should be required to provide at least a one sentence summation of the solution that they propose to whatever issue is being addressed if they wish to refute the arguement being made by the thread starter.

Let me be the first to say how glad I am that no one is expected to come up with the solution to climate destabilization/peak oil/petro-food/species declines/etc./etc. types of conundrums.  Frankly, I am most put off by the people who think there is a simple solution and that they have found it.  More often than not, what we are facing are Wicked Problems.  The best we can do for ourselves is to pick at them until a fuzzy notion of promising and less promising sets of complex actions emerge from the discussion.

With that in mind, there are some unrealistic ideas, and it helps to expose them so, hopefully, not a lot of time and other resources will be wasted on them.  But requiring people to come up with the solution to complex problems marked by uncertainty is itself an unrealistic idea, IMO.On With the right rules in place, it could work posted 2 years, 5 months ago 115 Responses

Wouldn't It Be Nice? Come on, sing it with me!

JMG:
I keep hearing that Beach Boys song ... "Wouldn't it be nice ..."

Any of our resident poets care to take a crack at rewriting the lyric to address our carbon problems?

Well, here ya go!  After singing a few bars, be sure to click on the links to gain even more information and perspective to further this great conversation.

Wouldn't It Be Nice?--Like California Dreamin' All Over Again!

Wouldn't it be nice if solar could scale?
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long.
And wouldn't is be nice if corn was benign?
Then perhaps Morris would not be wrong.

The highest use for plants is no use
The end of wilderness is abuse

Wouldn't it be nice if intense farming
Wasn't wiping out diversity?
But what it would take to go organic
Just might take too long for you and me

It's time to think outside of the box
A battery exchange? Now, that rocks!
Wouldn't it be nice?

Wouldn't it be nice if conservation
Got as much hype as ethanol?
But rather than learn obvious lessons
We pretend we can have it all

But wouldn't it be nice?
On With the right rules in place, it could work posted 2 years, 5 months ago 115 Responses

What, no one even mentions GMO issues?

GreyFlcn has already addressed several things that came to mind as serious omissions of this article, but here are a couple more.

Ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline and, as such, the more it is substituted for gasoline, the less able our already maxed out system of fuel pipelines is to deliver the quantity of fuel needed in various regions of the country.  That means shortages in California and elsewhere are likely as the percentage of ethanol in gasoline blends increases.  The gasoline distributors don't want to build new pipeline capacity unless they are convinced there will be a good payback for doing so.  One way to get a good payback is for consumers to pay a pretty price for a greater volume of fuel over a long time.  Another is for the government to offer more incentives and tax breaks for the distributors to keep people from shooting each other in long lines to fill up gas tanks.  Once those long lines develop, by next summer if not this one, the industry may be in a position to bargain for policies that ensure both outcomes--that is, subsidies and ongoing upward demand for the volume of fuel flowing through the pipelines.  Neither of those options will get the country aimed in the direction of serious conservation, which a couple people have noted is really the wisest, most economical, and most certain way to reduce GHG and dependence on fossil fuels.

Growing corn organically sounds great.  By all rights, we should just halt all use of natural gas and oil as fertilizer and pest management inputs, just like we should wave a magic wand and convert to an all dirty power sources to solar, wind, tidal, and, for a more limited time, geothermal.  Ah, but reality keeps getting in the way.  And the reality is that it takes lots of time, investment, risk, and energy up front (which means conventional energy, you see) to make such transitions.  Merely knowing how to do something on a limited scale does not mean you can quickly transform the infrastructure that took the better part of a century to develop into something else.

Knowing that, big agra has felt secure investing in ever more industrialized and synthetic means of boosting, or at least maintaining, output per acre.  It's not clear that acres of dirt are actually the limiting factor to be worried about, but that does seem to be how the game has been played for a very long time.  And one of the most recent efforts in that direction has been to resort to bioengineering corn and soy, often with consequences that threaten an eventual return to agricultural methods that do not rely on oil and gas inputs or some two dozen derivatives thereof that blur the meaning of the word "organic" in this context, or I would use it to describe the alternative means of agriculture to whic I am merely alluding.  (Sorry.)

So, what do you suppose might be the consequence of getting the whole country substantially dependent on a GMO crop for its fuel supply when the time comes for big agriculture to ask for permission to turn loose, the bioengineered switch grass that BP just effectively bought a controlling interest in UC Berkeley to develop?  Isn't it likely that industry will argue that we have nothing to lose by turning loose more (and very different, actually) GMOs for the purpose of growing fuel now that we have already condoned such for ethanol production through corn?  And as the water and bioactive soil problems already mentioned in this discussion worsen, won't regulators, politicians, and the public at large be just that much more desperate and willing to gamble on minimally tested GMOs if they discover they are already hooked on GMO fuel crops of some sort the way they are now hooked on oil and willing to promote its production from dirty, water threatening sources such as tar sands?

I dunno about all of you, but to me serious conservation of water and energy coupled with localization and diversification of increasingly "organic" agriculture makes a lot more sense than investing synthetic strains of monoculture crops grown on a hyper industrial scale far away from most consumers as a way to address fuel needs--while more or less overlooking the already visible implications for food prices and availability.  YMMV--especially if it depends on increasing quantities of alcohol to turn you motor.On With the right rules in place, it could work posted 2 years, 5 months ago 115 Responses

This article is a distraction from the real issues

This article was just reprinted on AlterNet, and I pointed out there, it really doesn't add much to the discussion of what to expect as a result of Peak Oil.  Is the military fighting to maintain control over oil flows and petro-dollars?  You bet!  Will the expected oil shocks destabilize the economy and societies around the world?  No doubt!  Should we be organizing massive conservation and energy transformation projects right now?  A report commissioned by the U.S. DOE makes that abundantly clear.  But, as I noted in the AlterNet post linked above, the military should have no problem jumping to the head of the U.S. supply line to get what amounts to a mere $10 billion worth of petroleum at $80 per barrel prices to keep spreading love and democracy around the world as they are so committed to doing these days.

I dunno, maybe Klare ran out of ways to say Peak Oil means war and strife, but this really wasn't one of his more insightful attempts.On More than meets the eye posted 2 years, 5 months ago 27 Responses

Alternative energy won't scale any time soon

I just read through all of the above comments and the only one that seemed connected to the business reality of providing substantial substitutes for conventional energy in the near to medium term was amazingdrx's mention of the importance of conservation, IMO.  Think about it.  We have built up the oil, gas, and coal economy in earnest over the past 100 years.  We did it because it was relatively cheap, quick, and easy to do so.  Now we are seeking to develop new energy sources that mostly convert various forms and effects of current solar energy reaching the Earth into something we can use almost immediately.  It has not proven to be nearly as quick, cheap, or easy to figure out how to do this on the enormous scale we have come to rely on conventional sources to provide.  This despite more and more fat grants, tax breaks, and consumer subsidies that are being poured into newer sources of energy.

The fact is, the most hyped sources of cleaner current energy (as opposed to dirtier, ancient, stored in the ground sources) make up a tiny fraction of 1% of world energy sources.  Even if we can grow the clean and new energy sources as quickly as we were able to scale up the simpler tasks of pumping and digging vast stores of fuel out of the ground, which, so far, we can't, it is going to take the better part of a century to get close to where we are today in terms of energy demand.  And so long as that demand grows at a modest 1% per year, the increase in the quantity of energy demanded will dwarf the new energy coming online at current 30% to 80% growth rates--rates that are very difficult to sustain, by the way.

Some day, probably after all of us are dead and the population as a whole has declined enough to reduce energy demand for that reason alone, cleaner, current energy conversion and use may be the answer to most energy needs.  But for right now, with the capabilities and cost structures we really face when we go about reducing the amount of GHG and toxins we put into our air and water when we light up our world, heat and cool our buildings, and do some work, efficiency and conservation measures beat the crap out of the potential to make a dent in the problem with new energy sources.  To put it in perspective, a mere 1% decrease in what would otherwise have been the level of this year's energy demand trumps all of the wind and solar generation installed over the past few decades many times over.

What this means to energy storage is that efficiency is critically important because it provides a way of balancing peak loads and peak generation from the energy sources most of us will use for most of our energy needs for most of our lives.  If we can keep dirty peaker plants offline, and maybe retire some other older plants, by storing the excess generation capacity of cleaner plants, we will be able to do more good in the next decade or two than all of the wind and solar we can even hope to see during that period.  And, of course, what we learn about efficient and less expensive storage will eventually pay enough benefits to worry about when cleaner and more current energy sources eventually scale up decades from now.On How can renewable energy 'power up'? posted 2 years, 5 months ago 45 Responses

Models are all we have

Sammie sez:
Can we please stop using the term "feed-back loop?"  Mother Nature does not have a damned feed-back loop.  It is how the mathematical models react under certain conditions that can create a ficticious feed-back loop.  Point to your forehead and say "this is a feed-back loop."

Sammie, here's a little news flash for you: Mother Nature is a fictitious character.  Whether or not she has a feedback loop or any other quality is up to the people imagining and describing "her."  

Perhaps you knew that.  But did you know that most of what we regard as components of "nature," such as sound, color, temperature, and solitary things, from atoms to galaxies, are just products of our minds, symbols of things we are prone to believe actually exist, but which we lack any way of directly experiencing, let alone approaching logically or discussing without resorting to symbols and models.  All language and logic, in particular, including any mathematics, are symbolic in nature, which is to say, they are models of other things and ideas, "real" or imagined.  In fact, most of modern philosophy is so tied to this notion of symbolism being the meat of "reality" that the elements of language are themselves treated as the objects of interest rather than the abstract concepts we intuitively think of as being concrete and exogenous to our minds.  So, while you may think you have something truly profound to say about the distinction between a quantitative model of climate processes and the qualities of climate processes themselves, if you are human, you are just fooling yourself about that in the final analysis.  That's fine with me.  What isn't fine, in my opinion, is for you to derail a good discussion that many people are interested in by throwing out snarky comments that actually go nowhere when you take a moment to consider what is behind them.

Perhaps youdon't know what is meant by a "feedback loop" in the context of global warming caused or contributed to by human activities.  Others do, I am sure, given that it has become a term of art used with increasing frequency by climate researchers describing both actual events and simplified models of those events used to predict the consequences of various activities that might be undertaken by people.  If you have missed out on that, take heart, for ABC News has dumbed down the concept without losing its essence just for people who are so removed from this issue that they have no idea what it means.  And, of course, you could simply ask what one means when they use a term you find confusing.

So, sorry, Sammie, but "feedback loop" is already well established as a key concept in climate dynamics, as well as in quantitative methods employed to simplify and better understand them.  Your request is not only late, but lame at this point.  The term feedback loop is a simple way of alluding to many complex and detailed processes of a certain nature.  That is why many of us use the term when the basic concept, rather than the details, are important to our point.  Knock yourself out trying to convince the world that we can't use such linguistic devices, much as you used the term "Mother Nature," to effectively communicate.  But do it somewhere else, OK?  Thanks.On Dirt cheap carbon posted 2 years, 5 months ago 30 Responses

Too bad he didn't mention the health impacts

Last July, more than 100 people died in a severe heat wave in California.  The majority of the victims were elderly people living in homes that were not built to cope with extreme temperatures that last for many days on end--almost two weeks in this case.

As climate destabilization takes hold, the elderly will be among those most directly at risk of prolonged peak weather events.  Education and preparation could make a real difference in how many of them fare.On Revkin puts global warming in AARP Magazine posted 2 years, 6 months ago 6 Responses

Three lies, no waiting

Greenwashing is just the application of three well worn varieties of misleading P.R. applied to the objective of appealing to growing environmental sensitivities of consumers.

Lie #1: Bait and switch.  Traditionally, this works by luring a customer into the store on the promise of an excellent bargain only to point out that the bargain product won't actually satisfy the customer's needs as well as some options or even completely different products.  The customer may or may not buy the advertised bargain, but the point is to get them to buy other things (instead or in addition) that undo the bargain effect of the advertised bait.  In the greenwashing game, the bait is a credible green product, such as a CFL, sitting amidst a sea of plastic, toxic chemicals, and nature destroying, energy intensive products that the would-be green consumer is enticed to load up on during a shopping trip that was motivated by an impulse to buy green.

Lie #2: Our product has X% less harmful crap in it, so the more you consume the better will be the results.  Traditionally this appeal has been used to push products that directly damage the health of consumers, such as cigarettes, sugar and transfat laden goodies, and such.  In the world of greenwashing, it applies to products that result in the release or ingestion of harmful substances or the destruction of valuable natural resources.  The trick is to use "natural" or "organic" sources of harmful substances (e.g., natural endocrine disrupters, hormonal mimics, or pesticides), use less of the same old bad stuff, or wipe out natural resources using "organic" or other supposedly green methods (e.g., converting precious wildlife habitat to organic production of a growing quantity of food, energy, textiles, or other industrial inputs).  The pitch remains the same: this stuff is less harmful, so consume more of it (thus undoing whatever good it might have done if we simply substituted bad stuff for not-as-bad stuff or, more obviously and importantly, actually reduced the amount of bad stuff, regardless of its degree of badness, we are producing and consuming).  As always, you can't get out of this trap by buying more, which is what the people spinning this pitch are urging, you still need to buy less (or none) to get where you want to go.

Lie #3: The tearful Indian.  This is one of the oldest and least understood greenwashing myths.  Back in the 1970s, faced with the threat of effective regulations to hold packaged goods and fastfood producers responsible for the entirely foreseeable problem of litter resulting for consumption of their convenience products wrapped up in inconvenient cellophane skins, bags, bottle tops, and flip top cans, the manufacturers banded together to create a P.R. consortium to put the burden on individual consumers, thus letting themselves off the hook.  They ran an award winning TV commercial all over the airwaves featuring a tearful white guy posing as a Native American upset by the naughty littering of his fellow American consumers.  It may have done a bit of good in terms of increasing the sense of individual responsibility for properly disposing of inconvenient packaging, but it was a great success in terms of its real objective, which was to defeat attempts to introduce effective regulations to eliminate flip tops or promote recycling--both of which eventually won out after the ad stopped running--or several other initiatives to reduce wasteful packaging by holding producers responsible for the cost of disposal that are a reality in other countries but still aren't getting serious consideration in the U.S.

So there you have it, greenwashing in three easy steps:
(1) Promise a little green, sell a lot of black;
(2) The more you buy (slightly less Earthwasting products), the more you save (the Earth), so do your part and buy more than ever; and,
(3) It's not our fault our products do some harm when you dispose of the waste we build into them, it's your fault for not going to the trouble and expense of properly disposing that which we could have eliminated in the first place (to say nothing of all the harm that goes into manufacturing them in the first place or takes place even when they are "properly" disposed of).

Three lies, no waiting.  Next customer, please!On Not always, but green branding has potential to connect consumers to their 'inner green' posted 2 years, 6 months ago 20 Responses

Go, lemmings, go!

I'm thinking, maybe a whole caravan of Hummers (with one driver and no passengers in each, of course) picking up speed as they head down an ever steeper, narrower, canyon dirt road with no room to turn around, as they head straight for a cliff.  The longer the drivers wait to apply the brakes, the less likely it is that it will do any good.  There is some possibility that some of those in fortunate positions in the back of the pack could act to save themselves, but most people are looking at a serious accident at best if the whole mob doesn't act quickly and together.  And if they do get a clue in time to avoid going right over the cliff like a bunch of over sized lemmings in an absurd Disney film, it will mean getting out and walking because there is no way back to the same old highway they used to get to the canyon without some serious hardship and reinvestment in what will hopefully be some much more practical technology for moving some hell raisin' monkeys without tails from place to place.On No more canaries in coal mines, please posted 2 years, 6 months ago 31 Responses

Tilting at windmills (and solar panels)

Reality check: right now, alternative energy accounts for about 0.05% of worldwide energy generation (not counting hydro, which is only renewable for the limited life of a given dam and is doubly threatened with decline due to global warming induced changes to the water cycle in key regions).  If we could wave a magic wand that would allow us to produce as much new alternative energy generating capacity next year as is installed worldwide today (which we can't) and the rate of new alternative production doubled every years for a decade (compared to the 30% growth rate the solar industry is going all out to maintain), alternative energy would account for less than 6% of today's energy demand, which, of course, is steadily growing.  On the other hand, we could simply swap out our incandescent light bulbs for CFLs, ease up on the accelerator, turn off computers that are not in use, and a few other simple adjustments that would save, say 1% of the energy we are using today and simply maintain those little adjustments without doing anything more for through the year 2018 and more than double savings the completely unrealistic growth in new, "clean" energy I have suggested.

So, why are we fed a steady diet of hype about alternative energy programs and investments?  Simple.  It's a great way for investors to make money, so investors are all revved up about a situation in which demand will almost certainly outstrip supply for decades to come, especially when the level of demand keeps getting inflated with subsidies and government requirements and goals.  In turn, those in government and consulting to government are getting blitzed with money from the big business and investment entities that are spending what amounts to pocket change to keep the snowball of hype growing.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for investing in newer, cleaner, more durable, and more efficient ways to produce energy.  But if that continues to be the focus, instead of investing in ways to reverse the growth in energy demand and actual start using less energy worldwide, no amount of investment in new energy is going to lead to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the foreseeable future, new energy rules or not.  No, what we need is some education about the many fold benefits of conserving energy with technology that exists today, coupled with some serious investment in properly implementing that technology and, especially, making it available to the hundreds of millions of consumers who cannot afford the upfront costs of buying it but who would add up to huge energy reductions if they were all able to save a substantial amount of their individual uses of energy over the years.

It's either that or be forced into a dead end of more "clean coal," new and improved nukes (with less and less hope for reasonable waste security and storage), and continuing to waste trillions of dollars and millions of lives scrapping over a declining supply of oil that is central to many worsening problems I thought we were trying to solve.On New energy rules could unleash an economic boom and help quash climate change posted 2 years, 6 months ago 18 Responses

I was not thinking in terms of strategy

Although there is some thought to the broadest of ideas for how to move forward, I was thinking mostly in terms of how to present visions that get people moving forward.  So far, lots of attention is coalescing around big, expensive techno-fixes that will supposedly allow us to go on living more or less as we are today.  I think we need to paint some vivid picture of that, too, and contrast them with a few alternative futures.

The problem with going on living as we are today aside with some one-trick pony adjustments, aside from the fact that it is not practical due to the dynamic swirl of problems we are facing, is that people don't actually like the way we are living today.  The savvy salesperson types will see this as an opportunity, not a problem.

Most people are very cynical about the ability of their government to truly serve them across the board the way people did in the few decades following World War II.  They sense the global economy with a free flow of capital among fewer and fewer big pockets is no longer lifting all boats, and they are quite right about that.  They know they are busier and more stressed than ever, which means they have less time and less of a mindset to enjoy themselves, their families, their friends, and their learning and leisure pastimes.  Reducing or removing some of those unpleasant images from the new pictures we want to entice people with is half the battle in coming up with something new that catches the eye and stimulates the mind and heart.  And it seems like a no brainer that pictures of alternatives by which people can spend more of their time doing things they care about and enjoy while being better able to provide for their own needs, directly or in cooperation with those in their area, will have some real appeal.

I don't see that we are anywhere near having sound new programs to champion, however.  That limits the efficacy of investing too much time in large advocacy groups.  Also, while it would be nice to see some of the bloated and disingenuous miracle programs, like converting crops into biofuels, scaled down and replaced with something with more immediate practical potential, like energy conservation within buildings, there is something to be said for simply backing way off of the whole big government, big business, big bucks model and getting into the eco-equivalent of our garages to bang out the next generation of livable technology.  For one thing, it takes a whole lot of steam out of the mostly illusory quest for the next, big killer application that will save us all from the world we have created by relying on the next, big killer application.  For another, it helps us get back to our own senses of self and imagination to create futures that really do satisfy us and our neighbors instead of just being sold yet another bill of goods.

Now, that said, there is certainly value in getting together with the best and brightest from around the world now and then, and big conferences as well as the database that Paul Hawken has been cooking up are great for that.  But, again, I don't think we are anywhere close to having one, big pretty picture of how to move forward, and we will probably miss the mark if we set out to create one.  Better to be thinking of a bunch of random mosaics that might set us onto a whole new era in the art of living than striving for one big mural that more or less conforms to what we have been doing up to now, I believe.  The more we can each work out our own techniques and talents, the better we will be able to capture honest perspectives of the challenges our future holds, without being shocked or afraid, and reflect back our own ways of interpreting and even redefining those visions of sunrises yet to dawn.

No one knows what that will really look like.  Most of the pictures we are being presented from on high are actually cartoonish at best, sketchy and absurd at worst, if you stand back and compare them to the world around us.  We need to be spending more time in our studios and less in the same old galleries if we want to find a new vision of the future that actually reflects who we are and want to become.On Concrete images of a greener society posted 2 years, 6 months ago 27 Responses

Damn, we're screwed again! Or, maybe not.

Heath certainly has a point, people are suckers for pretty pictures.  And if you don't show 'em the numbers, you can get them to say yes to everyone.  Reagan proved it with his City on the Hill metaphors, that people flocked to in doves when given the choice of Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War (on energy waste), which was to be fought in cardigan sweaters while we turned winter thermostats down to 68 degrees and never drove faster than 55 mph.  Never mind the enormous debt to fund the tremendous military build up and the illegal chemical, cocaine, and weapons trading to secure enough Middle Eastern oil to get the economy (and climate) cookin' again.  As long as that remained hidden, everyone wasn't paying close attention was convinced that Ronnie was wonderful.  It was the beginning of the end of our manufacturing base, the staying power of the dollar, and (not coincidently) the Fairness Doctrine that might have caused the media to show us some of those truthful pictures no one wanted to see but would have led to some big shifts in opinions and priorities that might have kept us out of the squeeze we are in now.  But the pictures were pretty and the numbers remained mostly hidden and everyone lived happily ever after (well, except for our victims in the Central America and the Middle East--sorry, nobody's perect) . . . for a while.

So, now, we have the choice of pictures of our next generation eco-villages (too bad Ronnie took the solar panels off the White House, that would have been a nice retro tie-in) versus Doberman's portrait of the hell to follow if we play make believe one more time.  Guess which picture the media is gonna show.  Why, the one that sells and makes short term profits for the few remaining holders of substantial capital, of course.

I'm with Billhook on this.  We have become a poor country by being careless and clueless.  The sooner we admit it to ourselves and start living accordingly, the better chance we have of not falling into the ranks of the hopelessly poor and unable.  Right now, we are not so poor that we can't live rich and fulfilling lives if we are smart about it.  But what we have won't go far when the climate, and thus the economy, becomes increasingly wild and unpredictable, and our tech toys, gadgets, and bling start looking like worthless junk as we concern ourselves with basic things like access to water and land to feed ourselves, and well insulated shelter and functional machinery to keep ourselves warm and functionally, if not fashionably clothed.

No, it's not part of the mainstream vision, and it won't be seen on TV any time soon, no matter how you try to dress it up and sell it.  But not only might it save the dear behinds of those of us willing and able to ease on into a lifestyle that we can sustain when all hell breaks loose or, more likely, the movie sets everyone is treating like real towns and cities simply fall into useless disrepair, but it might get us off the treadmills leading to nowhere and give us more time to develop the talents, friendships, and communities we truly enjoy, as well.  Along the way, we might even find a lifestyle that really can meet the CO-2 reduction targets we need to reach if our children and grandchildren are going to have any sort of future we can look them in the eyes and prepare them for.

Picture that.On Concrete images of a greener society posted 2 years, 6 months ago 27 Responses

Thanks for covering this. Hype, indeed!

A couple things jumped out at me in the NYT article.  When they get into the economics of it, they make some wild claims and flat out errors.  For instance, early on, they claim that the average American drives 33 miles per day, but somehow they convert that into $3,400 per year, which works out to about $9.30 a day, assuming they were talking about 33 miles averaged over a 365 day year.  That implies about three gallons of gasoline per day, meaning the vehicle is getting only 11 mpg.  There is something wrong in their figures, but no matter, the important thing is the three gallons per day, every day, to get in the $3,400 per year range.  Sorry, but you can't get there from here.  They said repeatedly that the system would only produce the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline in surplus energy several months out of the year--if they are right and the skeptics are wrong.  That leaves them at least 2 gallons per day, or about $2,200 per year, short of covering that $3,400 they gave themselves credit for.

The giant leap to claiming they could bring costs down to 20% of what they just forked out speaks for itself as hype, especially when one considers how fast and loose they are playing with their motor fuel funny money.  (And no allowance for converting the car to carry a huge quantity of hydrogen for when one wishes to actually travel beyond the city limits, by the way.)

But the whole story about solar being able to scale up several orders of magnitude in a few years, so that it might account for at least a good portion of the projected growth in worldwide electric demand, though perhaps doing nothing to offset the huge amount of electricity already consumed daily, really gets glossed over.  Yes, there have been modest efficiency gains while the industry does its best to maintain 20% to 50% annual growth.  But when you start talking about ramping up at 200% to 500%, which is what would have to happen for solar to be a sizable portion of the energy supply and demand solution, look for the wheels to come off and costs to go through the roof before they eventually settle down again when growth is allowed to level out and the industry catches its breath again.  Didn't see anything about that.

Also left out was how poor the durability of hydrogen fuel cells is, and how important fuel cells are if people are not going to fill up their yards with ugly tanks and strap something similar onto their cars to enjoy the sexy, if deadly hydrogen fuel economy so many people are convinced will save us . . . any day now.

But, hey, other than that, it looks like a "slam dunk" (with apologies to George Tenet).On All about hydrogen posted 2 years, 6 months ago 17 Responses

Build soil, grow trees, enhance the water cycle

Gar, this really isn't my area of expertise, but my own dabbling in this subject has left me with the impression that growing soil through mycorrhizal inoculation and other organic techniques, strategic planting of deep rooted trees (preferably with lighter colored leaves to minimize absorption of solar heat) to give a boost to the water cycle in areas at risk of desertification, and smart irrigation techniques are important pieces of the carbon sequestration through agriculture game.  Here are a couple of web references for you to poke around in for inspiration and leads to a new and more fruitful search.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/CarbonHydrology/

http://www.amazingcarbon.com/KingaroySUMMARIES.pdf

linked textOn We haven't quite figured it out yet posted 2 years, 6 months ago 35 Responses

Maybe the Denier Guy should come back to Earth

This is just more speculative hot air about a hydrogen miracle.  They speculate that it might be possible to cheaply process low grade gallium, which does not exist in nature.  They speculate that it might be possible to create a breakthrough aluminum recycling industry because, at the current cost of aluminum (which will sharply increase if demand goes up to the degree it would if we started using it to produce a replacement for the volume of gasoline now consumed) there is no way to produce hydrogen with this process that can compete with the price of gasoline.  They speculate about the future of rapidly rechargeable (so you don't have to wait forever to refuel) and durable fuel cells (currently a major problem) that might make hydrogen fuel practical and economical to use for transportation.    Oh, and when you get to the heart of it, what we really need to do is crank up the nuclear power industry, which has never been safe and cost effective enough for private industry to take on without massive public subsidies, services, and guarantees, or scale up alternative energy well beyond the most optimistic expectations for the next couple of decades. . . .

The aluminum could be produced at competitive prices if the recycling process were carried out with electricity generated by a nuclear power plant or windmills. Because the electricity would not need to be distributed on the power grid, it would be less costly than power produced by plants connected to the grid, and the generators could be located in remote locations, which would be particularly important for a nuclear reactor to ease political and social concerns, Woodall said.

But other than that, it's pretty much a slam dunk solution to all of our problems.  Read all about it.On The boldest plan on the table posted 2 years, 6 months ago 25 Responses

Very good wrap up and analysis

Thanks for taking the time to parse this issue and do a very fair job of it, too.

Grandfathering amounts to handing over remaining public environmental rights to interests that have been stealing and swindling them all along.  There is no widely accepted doctrine that says if you can poison or deprive the resources of others you are free to do so if you can make a buck while you are at it, but that is pretty much what big polluters have argued.  Grandfathering such practices is just the final surrender in the battle over this unjust practice.

I like the cap and auction model, so long as we set caps low enough to actually reduce carbon emissions in line with the drastic measures the latest climate destabilization models indicate are necessary to have a prayer of providing our children and grandchildren with a planet and an economy that isn't terrifying.  So far, there is very little realism in that regard among those who are happily grandfathering in rights to effectively continue to make things worse and worse with each passing year.On It runs together several distinct things posted 2 years, 6 months ago 7 Responses

Where are the agricultural and building components

Bill Richardson is my favorite of all the mainstream candidates, but he isn't dazzling me with his vision for energy and greenhouse gas reductions as much as some, apparently.  Earlier this week, an international initiative to seal, insulate and downsize HVAC systems was announced to much fanfare in countries where they are already clued into such things, but it got little notice in the U.S.  Apparently, Richardson's team isn't interested (I can't imagine they are not aware, given that Bill Clinton was one of the central champions of the plan) given that there is no mention of a similar domestic plan in Richardson's strategy.  That is a huge mistake, as energy use in buildings is right up there with transportation, and the potential efficiency gains in the near term are much greater, especially in the U.S. where we lag well behind much of the industrialized world.

Also, there seems to be no sense of curtailing subsidies of meat production, which is a major contributor to CO-2 emissions in the U.S.  I guess that might be a little much to ask of a former governor of a ranching state, but it is worth nothing.On The boldest plan on the table posted 2 years, 6 months ago 25 Responses

Oh, good!

I was worried about yet another policy to make organic just another meaningless brand name.  I hope they never succeed at knocking out the local inspectors who live with the land they are inspecting.On It's safe, for now posted 2 years, 7 months ago 4 Responses

Pelosi in '07

Nothin' sez you can't impeach them both, given that they have both committed multiple high crimes.  In fact, the only way to stop them from committing more high crimes is to get them out of high offices where they can and will do so.On So much BS in so few words! posted 2 years, 8 months ago 5 Responses

Welcome to "Synthetic Biology" gone wild

Well, not wild perhaps, but crazy.

BP, the folks who neglected pipelines in Alaska until they leaked all over the wilderness they said they would protect, has just signed a half-billion dollar deal with what is supposed to be a public university featuring some of the world's top, independent researchers.  The object of the deal is to allow BP to claim patents on GMOs cranked out by Berkeley researchers, who will work hand in hand and under the direction of BP researchers to create the lovely new organisms that will be turned loose as quickly as possible to meet the incredible demand for biofuels that is being projected and funded like, well, like the stupid and expensive war that took off in a hurry with lots of the same corporations making money hand over fist as a result.

And the war connection doesn't stop there.  They are modeling the whole enterprise on the Manhattan Project.  And as with the Manhattern Project, the whole affair is described in new fangled terminology so as not to tip off the public as to what is really going on until in terms they recognize.  Terms like "synthetic biology" (biotech), "biobricks" (genes), and "DNA circuits" (GMOs).  Basically, they are coopting not only a university research program, but agriculture, and, soon, water and land management, by trying to get motorists hooked on their new products before the enormous risks and costs set in--all in the name of increased energy security, of course.

Read all about it.On Edwards, Canada, and now South Africa posted 2 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses

Consumers R Us . . . feh!

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.
   -- Herman Daly, former World Bank economist

As Birdboy noted, if we can see ourselves as a part of nature, nature can have quite a lot of value apart from its potential for use to devour much or all of it.  Much of the discussion seems to come from the perspective that we are consumers first and last, that all good in the world and all well being in our lives hinges upon our ability to suck down as many resources a we can (sustainably, of course), and that all precepts of healthy, natural, and thriving ecosystems having value just as they are is as foreign as praying to a god of rain for precious water in our midst--which we may be doing in the foreseeable future.

On that note, perhaps we can consider for a moment that there is no such thing as sustainable development, there is, at best, wise and flexible use and reuse of some resources, subject to what promise to be rapidly changing conditions.  Being wise and flexible in this context entails a bit of sensitivity and unity with nature if we are not to get bitten in the butt by yet more unintended consequences.  One way to gain that sort of wisdom and sensitivity is to not only go visit nature--out there somewhere?--but to do what you can to make sure it stays with you and surrounds you as much as possible.  But if everything is to be thought of in terms of extractable or extracted resources, that cannot and will not happen.

Foreman is making sense to me as someone who sees the need to build a strong hedge against alienating ourselves once and for all from nature . . . our nature.  I suppose if you can't get past being nothing but a consumer, what he wants to stake out and appreciate would probably be termed a luxury good, as it is in so many environmental texts.  But for some, it is simply sacred and beautiful.  Much of it stands out as not a good at all, not something to be traded or consumed, but something to be revered and to learn from.  And in that, there is great value, both in immediate and practical terms and more esoteric terms of wellness and well being.  Personally, I find it troubling that so few seem to appreciate that these days.  No wonder Dave Foreman looks like nothing but an unhinged idiot to you.

And I think one needs to learn to speak the language of the dominant group in order to effect change, because revolutions hardly ever work, but gradual shifts and social movements seem to be both more effective and, in the end, less despotic.

Stephanie, it's all fine and well to learn another's language and even to take care not to use the trigger words that will set off people you hope to have a meaningful conversation with.  It's quite another thing, however, to adopt their world view and metaphors, however.  If we want them to understand our perspectives and values, it's important to cling to them and speak clearly and determinedly about them, lest we lose them and our arguments all in the same course.  Like caniscandida, it seems to me that you could do a better job of showing some backbone and saying what you feel and believe right up front.  It doesn't appear to me that anyone is going to be so intimidated that they will fail to say what is on their mind, too.On Earth Firster urges a return to conservationism posted 2 years, 8 months ago 42 Responses

Oh, what could possibly go wrong?

The company mentioned at the opening of the story, Horizon Wind Energy, was until a couple of years ago known as Zilkha Renewable Energy, whose CEO, Michael Zilkha, like his father before him, refused to talk about his company in public or to the press.  It seems the Zilkhas, by virtue of some earlier oil and gas energy deals, "became major shareholders in El Paso [Corp.]" in early 1999, just a couple years before that company illegally gamed the natural gas delivery and pricing system to create energy shortages and bilk Californians out of billions of dollars.  Just guessing, but I suppose Zilkha doesn't want to talk much about that, either.

But don't worry, neither of the silent Zilkhas are CEO of Horizon Wind Energy today.  Goldman Sachs has installed Alec G. Dreyer as the new head honcho.  Alec came to Horizon from Dynegy, Inc., which saw its stock finally rise almost as soon as Dreyer left, after sinking like a stone then remaining more or less flat while he was there, during which time the company's credit was declared to be "junk" by Standard and Poor's--the result of an illegal trading scandal similar to the one pulled off at El Paso Corp.  (Not that Dynegy has cleaned up its act.  As David Roberts recently pointed out, Dynegy is in a merger deal that will make it the owner of the most dirty coal fired electric generation plants in the United States.)

While he was there, Dreyer did get some unique experience at Dynegy . . . as a named defendant in a law suit in which he was among those leaders of the company who failed to protect the retirement benefits of employees.  More importantly to Goldman Sachs, which is supposedly very concerned about promoting environmental responsibility, Dryer was also a losing defendant in a case in which the EPA busted the company for failing to install pollution control equipment, which led to a bunch of emissions violations.  Those violations were Dreyer's responsibility for, as president of the company, it was up to him to oversee"environmental policy for all of Dynegy, as well as environmental compliance activities."

I'm not sure these are the best credentials for a supposedly green business leader, but kudos to Goldman Sachs for getting Dreyer into a business in which there isn't much opportunity to cut costs by increasing dangerous emissions.  Now if Goldman Sachs could just set a good example for Dreyer by cleaning up its pattern of illegal trading.  Perhaps that will be a little easier now that the scandal ridden Henry Paulson stepped down as CEO so he could contribute to the Bush administration as the U.S. Treasury Secretary.

So, like I said, what could possibly go wrong with such marvelous leadership and experience to draw upon?  Well, other than the fact that the electric grid in Texas won't carry much more energy, the turbines needed to generate the energy are back ordered for a couple years, and they are installing them in tornado alley, where they could easily be destroyed, year after year, by weather that is expected to become increasingly violent as global warming progresses, I mean.  ;-)On Goldman Sachs and other financial powerhouses get into the Texas wind biz posted 2 years, 8 months ago 8 Responses

H.L. Mencken and Frank Zappa said it best

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Or, as Frank Zappa put it at the dawn of the Reagan era, When future historians write about us, if they base their conclusions on whatever material goods survive from present-day America, we will undoubtedly stand alone among nations and be known forevermore as, "Those who chose cheese."

Now, as usual, Frank Zappa was a little less direct than Mencken, but if I may present a little more of his essay, "Cheese," I think you will see that he was getting at an important point that rings as true today is it did 25 years ago, if not more so.

As you will recall, folks, nobody ever had as much going for them in the beginning as we did. Let's face it; we were fantastic. Today, unfortunately, we are merely weird. This is a shocking thing to say, since no red-blooded American likes to think of his or her self as being weird. But when there are other options and a whole nation chooses cheese, that is weird.

Our mental health has been in a semi-wretched condition for quite some time now. One of the reasons for this distress, aside from choosing cheese as a way of life, is the fact that we have, against some incredibly stiff competition, emerged victorious as the biggest bunch of liars on the face of the planet. No society has managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the fiction that it is moral, sane and wholesome, than our current crop of modern Americans.

This same delusion is the mysterious force behind our national desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as intelligent. Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmetize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a particular type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile, to the point where the ability to communicate on the most Mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become "one of the guys."

Let's face it, nobody wants to hang out with somebody who's smarter than they are. This is not fun. Americans have always valued the idea of fun. We have a national craving for fun. We don't get very much of it anymore, so we do two things: first, we rummage around for anything that might be fun; then, since it wasn't really fun in the first place, we pretend to enjoy it, whatever it was. The net result? Stressed cheese.

But where does all this cheese really come from? It wouldn't be fair to blame it all on T.V., although some credit must be given to whoever it is at each of the networks that "gives us what we want." You don't ask, you don't get. Folks, we now have "got it." Lots of it. And, in our infinite American wisdom, we have constructed elaborate systems to insure that future generations will have an even more abundant supply of that fragrant substance upon which we presently thrive. . . .

The only way to cut through the bullshit is to expose the man behind the curtain, so to speak. However, that is only effective if the people recognize the man behind the curtain as someone who cannot be trusted and has been shown to do harm in the past.  Otherwise, people are quite happy to roll in the bullshit even when they know that's what it is, much as people like to buy billions of dollars of lottery tickets each year, even though they know they have a better chance of being struck by lightning than ever winning the fortunes they dream of.

Fortunately (and regrettably), some of the most influential men behind the curtain today are known to be quite evil, untrustworthy because they have played the same game they are now playing with global warming to harm and kill thousands upon thousands of Americans in the past (and present).  The name of their game is "uncertainty."  The pitch is simple: why worry and sacrifice about something that may not happen when it is so much easier and cheaper to just keep doing what you have always done--which has always worked well enough up to know, right?  Then the hook is set by pointing out that no one knows with perfect certainty how the deadly risks that the majority of scientists have determined to be real will actually play out on any given day, leaving out the fact that they can say with a very high level of confidence that most people will suffer terribly and terminally at some point if they do not do what they can to avoid the risk at hand.

In the past, when these people played the game, they did it in the name of Phillip Morris, which bank rolled the effort to sow seeds of doubt and denial about second hand tobacco smoke in and effort escape liability or suffer reduced profits because they knew and scientists knew they were making people sick and even killing them.  It was from these roots that we got the terms "junk science" and "sound science" as part of the sales pitch, which was made by Steve Milloy (of Fox News and junkscience.com) and the P.R. firm APCO, both of whom are prime drivers behind global warming today.  That part of the story needs to get raised every time global warming skeptics play the "uncertainty" game, as the CEO of ExxonMobil--which has replaced Phillip Morris as the new client and financier of the game--did the day after the IPCC announced it unanimous position on the near certainty that emissions of greenhouse gases stemming from human activities and enterprises were driving global warming, which is without a doubt underway.

Simply put, the only way to get Americans not to choose bullshit is to point out that in today's techno-tuned world, unlike the days of ma and pa on the family farm, the stuff is likely laden with a strain of E. coli that has been known to kill people while the businesses slopping it about escape responsibility for the harm they have done.  That tends to wake up even the weirdest "cheese" connoisseurs.  Even those who buy into some weird nostalgia doing as they damned well please and possibly getting killed as a result tend to see that Mencken had a pretty good point when he said:

To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.

In a word, "no."

There was nothing classy about Gore letting Inhofe get away with misleading the public with his sound bites that falsely imply that the vast majority of climate scientists have it all wrong and that there is some doubt about whether human emissions of greenhouse gases are accelerating global warming.  Gore was, once again, playing for political connections that might make him wealthier in the future rather than taking the stand he knows he can and should take if he is serious about putting his concern about the planet's future first.  He did it when he ran for president in 2000 and left environmental issues out of his campaign while he groveled for donations from industry.  He did it while he sat quietly at Clinton's side as the salvage logging bill was signed into law, eliminating the force of all treaties and environmental laws that restricted damaging logging and forest road building operations.  And he is doing it now, as he talks up carbon offset credits and carbon taxes as the focus of his vision, never mentioning that he stands to get rich from such policies (see me comments below for more on that).On Gore gets a warm welcome on Capitol Hill, and a few heated exchanges posted 2 years, 8 months ago 20 Responses

Women do most of the consumer shopping

Yeah, the male bashing is counter productive.  We need to be united in reducing consumption, promoting conservation, and last and least, converting to renewable and carbon free energy sources.  Alienating an entire gender based on faulty logic and too little research isn't the way to pull that off.

But, if we did want to know who is shopping until they drop (and the planet withers), wouldn't it make sense to ask the people in consumer marketing who does most of the retail purchasing?  Well, as it turns out, BusinessWeek did just that a couple years ago.  Here is a bit of what they said:

. . .  Who's the apple of marketers' eye? It's not free-spending teens or men 25-50. It's women, thanks to their one-two punch of purchasing power and decision-making authority. Working women ages of 24-54 -- of whom the U.S. has some 55 million -- have emerged as a potent force in the marketplace, changing the way companies design, position, and sell their products.

Women earn less money than their counterparts -- 78 cents for every dollar a man gets. But they make more than 80% of buying decisions in all homes. . . .