We chose not to fly

It's about freaking time. In my humble opinion, the most harmful climate change deniers are not the knuckle draggers who can bring themselves into believing that nothing is happening and this is one giant hoax. Rather, it's the serious scientists who claim that greenhouse gasses are about to destroy the ecosphere and then fly 100,000 miles a year to conferences where they back-slap with their buds while peddling their wisdom. NO ONE will ever live down such behavior, such hypocrisy.

Here are three people who have decided to set a better example. Although reducing one's travel from 100k to 30k isn't all that much of an improvement. Perhaps some day before the Greenland ice sheet melts, maybe these folks will realize that if they have anything important to say, they can do it by videoconferencing. Well, we can hope.

Oil bites back

Well, the laws of oilfield "gravity" are finally kicking back in. They are:

1. In spite of small motor-efficiency gains, the demand for oil continues to soar. Those people in China and India who finally got a nice car are not about to park it in the front yard and look at it.
2. It has been a long time since the discovery of a major oil field. At some point, maybe soon, demand will significantly outstrip supplies. The scramble will be on.
3. Fracking was a diversion. It cannot succeed because the energy gathered through fracking barely exceeds the energy it takes to frack. It's not easy to rearrange underground rock formations.
4. The sanctions on Iran may prove a significant boost to their national prospects. Keep it in the ground. By the time sanctions are lifted, the price of oil may have doubled or more. In real economic terms, the price of oil can only go up.

The position of USA is very precarious. For over a generation, this nation has waged war on the middle-east oil nations. Spilled a LOT of blood in the process. Mostly to prove that oil was forever. Well, it's NOT. And the people who can control the global production of oil come from places where people seethe with anger at the very mention of our name. No one owes us any favors. And even with fracking, we are still net importers of petroleum products.

Now IF we had put this problem—one that was already well-defined by 1973—on a WWII footing as Jimmy Carter suggested when when he called the energy problem "the Moral Equivalent Of War," the coming events would be so much easier to manage. Instead, official Washington took to calling his quite reasonable suggestion MEOW. Oh Jimmuh! you were such a pussy. Carter discovered that rational argumentation just wasn't butch enough.

A sense of urgency

Quite honestly, I do not know a great deal about Robert Hunziker. But on Monday, he wrote a piece that was special because it injected urgency into the climate debate. Urgency is a quality I often forget to stress both in my life and this blog. So I really appreciated his effort. If we are to escape the fire and energy trap we have built for ourselves, time is rapidly running out—if the goal is to build a post-fire civilization, we should have gotten serious about it in 1973. Projects take time. BIG projects take BIG time and effort. So rebuilding complete civilization, which is the biggest project I can imagine, will require trillions and a global effort.

In addition to reposting him below, I wrote him an email.

Your There is no time left was magnificently crafted—not to mention scary as hell.

As I see it, the fact that no one wants to talk about genuine climate change solutions is that the problem is SO large, very few can comprehend even a tiny segment of the big picture.

The basic problem is fire—that’s where most of the excess CO2 is generated. Making things worse, we are burning carbon that is millions of years old (coal, petroleum). And making this catastrophic, civilizations were designed to run on fire. This took humanity at least 6000 years to accomplish. If your essay is even partially correct, we have about 5 years to replace this incredible investment.

Part two is cultural. This sort of solution will absolutely depend on the kind of people who build the extremely difficult. While the idea of covering a cloudless hunk of the Gobi with solar cells is imaginative, it doesn’t work unless people figure out how to move that massive energy to China’s great cities. Since this has never been done before, it rivals the moon shot in complexity. (Five years, huh?) And yet, we live in a culture whose closest portrayal of the scientific and technological literate is The Big Bang Theory. Yet it is precisely these sorts of persons who have ANY chance of building the new and necessary world. At least we could stop making fun of them and learn what they must accomplish.

Rebuilding complete civilizations will be expensive. We need the world’s central banks to change policy so that the end-fire project is properly financed. Unfortunately, the people who pull the large levers of monetary policy share a fatal flaw—they are scientifically and technologically illiterate. Yet they can either ensure a new civilization or watch the one we have burn to a crisp. Time to make a new qualification for potential central bankers—they MUST be able to demonstrate an understanding of what it means to live in a fire-based civilization.

Congratulations

15,000 scientists warn of scientifically predictable global destruction

This is one of those bad-news—worse-news stories. The bad news is that the science on climate change in 1992 was damn near flawless already. And we have gotten a LOT better at it in 25 years. And the science says that without a radical alteration in business-as-usual, we are doomed on this planet. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The worse news is that the brightest minds of the species seem to believe that warnings lead to action. Not without a plan they don't. Preachers have been warning about hell-fire and brimstone for thousands of years and I have yet to see how all that fear-mongering has ever led to a better society. Why is it any better when our best scientists believe that if only their warnings are dire enough, someone in the greater audience will somehow come up with a solution?

We get the point. Climate change is dangerous. Now, oh bright ones, lay out some reasonable possibilities for remediation. I don't want to get all worked up about a problem unless there is something  I can do to help. Otherwise, screaming headlines about the world coming to an end is just meaningless motivation.

Also, I am not at all certain it actually requires 15,000 scientists to tell us we are in deep shit. It seems like 500 could monitor our ride in the handbasket so that 14,500 could work on what to do next. Just a thought.

Oh goody—another dirty climate conference

Someday soon, humanity must make organizing and attending climate conferences a capital crime. These things are worse than useless but they grind on because the folks who like these sorts of things are convention planners. It's what they do. This year's climate extravaganza is being held in Bonn Germany. No one knows why or what they hope to accomplish. An estimated 23,000 people are descending on a tiny little backwater that is obvious ill-equipped to handle them—belching thousands of tons of CO2 on their sacred journeys of self-importance.

If anyone suggests that anything important could be accomplished with video-conferencing, the face-to-face crowd reacts in horror. According to them, those who would eliminate these conferences are the worms of humanity—the introverts. Since the only legitimate way to call these conferences a success would be the ability to point at falling CO2 levels, and that clearly has not happened after 23 years of conferencing, a sane person would try something else. But these folks cannot even progress to video conferencing. And since few or none of them seem willing to grapple with the problems of progressing from legislating outcomes to funding outcomes, we can assure ourselves that no meaningful progress will happen anytime soon.

Climate change is a Producer Class problem that will only respond to Producer Class solutions. Climate conferences are extreme manifestations of Leisure Class behavior. Pretty much explains why they are useless. After all, useless is the primary goal, the heaven, of the Leisure Class.

The economics of waste

There is no particular reason to believe that Charles H. Smith is a Veblen scholar or that he has even read The Theory of the Leisure Class (TOLC). Nevertheless, if someone had been assigned to summarize TOLC, the following would rate an A+ because these are exactly the points Veblen was trying to make. For example, Veblen includes a whole chapter on why the Leisure Classes believe that waste enhances their status, entitled Conspicuous Waste.

This essay is short and sweet, and the reader isn't required to learn a bunch of arcane terms as is the case with a reading of TOLC. Several times in my life I have been asked to "translate" TOLC into modern English. Because I am terrible at such tasks, I have begged off. But I DO think it is a good idea. And however Smith came to write the following, it will be an excellent substitute until someone actually reworks Veblen's classic.

Summer Sacrilege

Paul Street is rapidly becoming the most interesting contributor to Counterpunch. As the USA stalls out politically over the partisan arguments concerning the legitimacy of the 2016 election, Street is suggesting that reasonable folks rethink the usefulness of all this squabbling. And maybe get back to thinking about the incredibly serious problem of climate change.

So far so good. But the one "blasphemous" thought Street has that I cannot agree with is entitled "Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change." Street wants us to believe that the root cause of climate change is, ta da, Capitalism. Well, no. The cause of climate change is too many people burning too many fires. If anything, the "cause" of climate change CAN be ascribed to Industrialization BUT Capitalism and Industrialization are two VERY different things. The confusion between the two pretty well explains why even though socialism can talk a good talk when it comes to environmental problems, it has a dismal track record when it comes to performance.

For example, when I first became concerned about environmental problems, one of the more articulate spokesmen was this guy named Barry Commoner. He had written a book called The Closing Circle. One of his brilliant insights he called the Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources—every barrel of oil (etc.) discovered and extracted only makes the next barrel harder to find and more expensive to recover. Anyone who wants to know why fracking is so expensive need only refer back to this law. But for all his genius, Commoner stumbled because of his willingness to believe that Capitalism and Industrialization were the same thing. He was an avowed Marxist and believed that Socialism would yield far superior results when it came to environmental matters. When the Wall came down and "socialist" industrialization was revealed as the utter catastrophe it was, poor Commoner, for all his genius, was tossed on the ash heap of history. Which is unfortunate, because his Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources is still perfectly valid.

One thing the "left" should keep in mind is that the "capitalism" of stock markets, monetary policy and central banks, and the rest of the activities associated with the movements of money, did NOT cause industrialization in the first place and if the past 40 years are any guide, is the leading cause of de-industrialization. This is MOST unfortunate because for all the rapacious damage that Capitalism has inflicted on industrial activity, it staggers forward in its crippled state because industrialization fills real human needs.

What Exxon-Mobil knew

The story of what the oil companies once knew and promoted on the subject of climate change is deep and complex and for me, endlessly fascinating.

• I find that the scientists at big oil knew a very great deal about climate change and their role in it as early the 1980s not the least bit surprising.
• What I find less believable is the notion that big oil spent big money to broadcast their enlightened views on climate change. I know of no one, including me, who has any recollection of those efforts. Like most, I thought climate change was a theory discovered by the heavy hitters at NASA as a spin-off of the explorations of Venus and its CO2-rich atmosphere. My views are a lot more nuanced and complex since James Hanson's testimony in 1988 but the extent of the scientific understanding of big oil is still news to me.
• The really big story (from my perspective) are the events that made the oil companies change course so dramatically. What happened in those momentous years of the late 1980s—the fall of USSR and the Berlin Wall and end of ideological competition to the most grotesque forms of Robber Baron capitalism? the ideological triumph of monetarism and neoliberalism? the examples of "problem-solving by mandate" in the automobile industry and against Dupont and their Freon? 
• What made their road from enlightened to irresponsible so short—was their institutional mandate for business-as-usual so powerful?
• It is possible that even big oil, with all its resources, really did not know what to do about so massive a problem as climate change?

What? It's a damn shame the oil companies did not act to change the world as mandated by their own scientific research. It would have been most interesting to watch them try!

Carbon taxes and their discontents

Regular readers of this blog know that I am most certainly NOT a fan of carbon taxes.  As a public policy prescription for climate change, they fail on two obvious and disqualifying levels:

1. Carbon taxes assume that if you just make it more painful to use carbon, folks are just naturally going to figure out how to do with less.  And while this idea works when the subject is discretionary use of energy (water skiing, for example), the overwhelming use of energy is for activities that relate to survival—cooking, growing food, keeping warm, work-related travel, etc.  For the necessary activities, the only solution is to replace the energy consumption with new tools and methods that don't require fire to operate.  Unless carbon taxes are strictly used for infrastructure replacement, they are worse than worthless because they lead to problem #2.
2. Carbon taxes are the theological equivalent to the extremely controversial doctrine of indulgences. They allow the rich sinner to pay for the forgiveness of his sins.  While indulgences are mostly a cynical fund-raising ploy, they actually do structural damage to the social contract.  For example, Al Gore believes in carbon taxes.  As a very rich man, they would have minimal effect on his lifestyle in any case.  So after he made a small pile on his movie that was supposed to be a warning about climate change, he spent part of the proceedings jetting around in a very nice bizjet—perhaps the most lavish user of carbon fuels ever invented.  And how does he sell this hypocrisy?  He bought some indulgences—some carbon "offsets" and some political speeches about carbon taxes.

And so in the all-so-enlightened state of Washington, some folks have been agitating for carbon taxes because they have convinced themselves that to pass carbon taxes is to be on the bleeding edge of carbon awareness. And because this is mostly a lefty project, it has to pass all sorts of hurdles of political correctness—which is really a bad idea in the case of climate change because the problem is mostly a physics / engineering matter.  Energy matters are not especially enlightened by pre-industrial ideologies.

The following is a long and complex essay and if you want to find out what happens when stale ideas (like indulgences which were around to trigger the Protestant Reformation in 1517) meets a global society run by fuels that simply can no longer be burned, read it all.  I look at it as just another cautionary tale of what happens when folks try to apply Predator Class thinking to a Producer Class problem.

Business Insider lowballs the costs to fight climate change

That a serious program for combatting climate change will cost at LEAST $100 trillion is a bedrock principle around here.  Even so, I always look at anyone who is willing to put a number on such a project—even if it hopelessly underestimates the magnitude of the problem.

Rafi Letzter is one of the new young writers for Business Insider—I have never noticed anything by this person before.  And the writing and perspective is pretty damn good—climate change is already well under way and we as a nation have signed on to coming up with a solution.  So now the question is, what will this cost.  And the person chosen to provide this cost estimate is a business economist from Columbia.

Geoffrey Heal has a very impressive academic CV—18 books and 200 academic articles.  He is a member of Columbia's Earth Institute—the very same place where Jeffrey Sachs hangs his hat.  But keep in mind we are talking about an econ professor at an institution at least as reactionary as Stanford or the University of Chicago.  So we expect some routine errors to be baked into his assumptions including:

• It is possible to take the total energy consumption and figure out how much it would cost to build that capacity with windmills and solar cells.  Of course, this is insane because while it (almost) applies to applications like stationary power plants, it doesn't apply to aircraft, agricultural machinery, or ships at sea.  The costs of electrifying the whole infrastructure seems to have been left out of his thinking.
• Corruption! Any project this big will attract the Leisure Class charlatans in their masses.  We are not only talking contracting graft here—we are also talking about the soft core corruption of the endless bureaucracies of the pretty regulators.  Remember, over 90% of Superfund money went for office rents, etc. and less than 10% was spent on remediation.
• Privatized!  Heal cannot imagine any big building project being anything but a private venture.  A big WPA project was not even considered.  I cannot even imagine something this complex without massive public investment.
• There is a virtue in trying to save the climate on the cheap.  Well, Heal, since operating the public spaces on the cheap is what has led to the problem in the first place, suggesting that this could be done for something between $1-5 trillion shows how little you think of a livable planet.

The very next day, Letzter posts another article pointing out the problems with Heal's analysis (also included below).  I will probably read Letzter again.  Heal, probably not.

More on fracking and Peak Oil

The hype surrounding fracked oil is so irrational, I have a hard time taking any of it seriously.  The idea that a process that fractures deep underground rock formations to liberate tiny oil deposits was going to make USA an oil exporter  again has set some new record for delusional thinking.  Some of this ridiculous hype was understandable—after all, much was in the service of selling junk bonds.  But damn, folks, isn't there some level of credulity you will not cross?

Apparently not.  One of the things that continues to sadden me in my old age is the continuing revelations of just what otherwise "sane" people believe.  As someone who was raised in a religious home, I was exposed to irrational beliefs from my earliest awareness.  I just thought (hoped? believed?) that religion was the only place for crazy opinions and if I could only escape those people, I could live my life in some sort of rational utopia.  Sadly no.

The ultimate absurdity of the fracking mania was the idea that somehow fracked production was discrediting the fact of Peak Oil.  In fact fracking was proving the whole notion of Peak Oil.  The guy below explains this better than I have the ambition to try.  Recommended reading.

Climate change and Big Oil

The stories about what the oil industry knew about climate change just get juicer.  Probably the main reason I am so hooked on these tales is because Institutional Analysis could have predicted (and probably did somewhere) exactly the behavior of the oil companies.

Start with Institutional assumption #1: The oil companies always know.  They have to know everything possible about the crude they will turn into gasoline and jet fuel—including which oil fields it comes from.  These people build and maintain infrastructure so complex, massive, and expensive that most folks find it incomprehensible.  Their work is not only difficult, it is very dangerous so getting the answer right is often a matter of life and death.

Because this basic assumption is true beyond rational debate, it follows that the oil industry employs the best scientists on earth.  They have the most money to pay for top talent and plenty of good reasons to employ them.  The science of climate change has been pretty much settled since the early 20th century and is simple enough to explain to a reasonably alert 7th-grader.  OF COURSE the oil scientists understood climate change.  And now we see that they relied on their calculations to makes design changes in their infrastructure.  That's called putting your money where your mouth is.

What Big Oil chose to do with all this leading-edge understanding of climate change was not so predictable but in retrospect, quite understandable.  Because it is quite obvious that they looked at the climate change problem and concluded that even with all their massive scientific expertise, they didn't know what to do about it.  And so they chose to make the environmental pests go away.  They concluded that the environmentalists didn't know how to fix things either but they did know how to write regulations off-loading the fix on someone else—such as the oil companies.  So the environmental scientists had to be neutralized, and for an astonishingly small amount of money, they were.  Turns out it isn't hard to confuse the general public about matters they already find confusing.

The real lesson here is not about the power of Big Oil, but their self-defined powerlessness.  It's easy to sit on the sidelines and wonder why the oil companies didn't just turn their immense scientific and technological skills towards the problem of building the new green energy infrastructure.  But having stared into that abyss, they chose to muddy the academic debate while corrupting the processes of democracy.  Turns out that was a whole lot easier.

Climate change—the year in review

On Christmas Eve, I did two things I almost never do.  In the afternoon I actually went to see a movie in a theater.  My curiosity about the attempt to make a movie out of Michael Lewis' The Big Short was far too intense to wait for it to show up on Blu-Ray.  And before I attempt to write a review, I intend to see it again because as moviemaking, this thing is beyond brilliant.  The other uncharacteristic thing was that I sat through most of the Midnight Mass from the Vatican.  No matter what what one thinks of those centuries-old rituals, there is no denying that as high theater, it's pretty hard to top the Vatican on Christmas Eve on a stage designed by folks like Michelangelo and built by Producer royalty with bleeding-edge skills.

Not surprisingly, I awoke the next morning with a nasty Leisure Class hangover. I had one about The Big Short.  It is utterly unfair to criticize a magnificent attempt to explain in a little over two hours something as complex as the 2007-8 financial meltdown for what is left out, but I really wish the movie had addressed a few obvious issues.  Such as:

• The movie's heroes are the folks who discover that the hottest investment instrument is constructed on bullshit assumptions.  While this was an interesting bit of sleuthing, the really interesting folks are the ones who dreamed this scam up and managed to get most of the world to believe that garbage mortgages could be packaged in a AAA investment.
• There was no discussion of what causes otherwise intelligent people to believe that such magic as compound interest over a long term is possible.  Our heroes merely confirmed that math works.  That such a tiny sample of the financial business community was actually able to count is scary as hell.
• There was no discussion of what happens when finance grows from 6% to 24%. Just imagine what could have been done with that money spent on useful projects.  I keep beating the drum around here that this money should all go towards building the zero-carbon society but in truth, almost anything that would have shut down the party the banksters threw for themselves would have been a major improvement.
• Etc.

As for the Vatican...Pope Francis made a big splash last summer about climate change as a moral issue.  Apparently that sermon does not apply to the conspicuous waste of his Christmas celebration.  I can only guess at the carbon footprint of the Midnight Mass, but I would imagine it is something on the order of a medium-sized Indian village for a year—especially if one adds in the CO2 loads of the pilgrims traveling to this event.

This Leisure Class hangover proved mostly beneficial, however.  Yes it annoys me that anyone with a realistic agenda for addressing the greatest threat the human race has concocted for itself has to operate in the cultural sewage created by an obviously entrenched Leisure Class.  The Vatican high theater is a harmless amusement compared the rituals surrounding the awarding of the Riksbank Prize (Nobel) to some of history's biggest economic charlatans, conmen, and fools in Stockholm.  When you are glorifying an economics of plunder, it helps if you know how to pull the cultural levers.  These people may in fact be ridiculous but ridiculous people are also extremely dangerous.  As the Pops used to say, "Any jackass can kick down a barn!"  So in the coming year, I will attempt to better understand their crazy.

Of course, leading the fool's procession are the folks who deny climate change is even happening.  This is possible in USA because the vast majority slept through their 7th-grade science classes so they have no tools to separate valid claims from BS.

COP21 in Paris—did they save the world?

The champions.  Don't laugh—these guys just saved the world...NOT



There has been a bunch of self-congratulatory bilge coming from the major participants of COP 21.  Considering the task, there was almost no hope that anything meaningful could have happened in Paris.  Setting targets is a LONG way from marshaling the resources, plans, and organizational ability to accomplish a task and unfortunately, Paris was about setting targets.  How those targets would be met in a world where the economic rules are set by criminals and every honest citizen is a target of those crooks never seems to be mentioned.  And so 40,000 people climb into jets and go home to wonder just HOW real reductions of CO2 can be had.

It's not like we haven't seen this act before.  I was especially incensed by the sheer goofiness of the Durban conference in 2011.  They also had a picture of self-congratulatory joy.



Just a quick reminder of what that conference accomplished




There were other critiques of COP21.  Lots of agendas out there and Paris offered plenty of grindstones for the various axes.

TPP—even worse than expected

The TPP covers 5,554 pages of dense legalese which probably means there are at least that many really bad ideas contained therein.  As far as I am concerned, however, the biggest problem of such agreements are twofold:

• The real economy has many elements.  Trade agreements tend to focus on the merchandising side to the exclusion of almost everything else—most especially manufacturing.  Here in USA, this sort of unbalanced approach has led to an almost complete de-industrialization while at the same time, has caused retailing space to skyrocket to over 85 square ft. per capita.  The structural problems this unbalanced approach has caused to the economy is almost incalculable. 
• Agreements like TPP essentially outlaw any attempts citizens might want to try to bring some balance to the public sphere including local-content laws, environmental controls, and most especially public banking.  Private finance will NEVER create the funds necessary to address big problems like climate change.  As a result, agreements like TPP will make meaningful attempts to correct the problems that lead to climate change legally and structurally impossible.

As a result, stopping TPP is literally a matter of life and death.

Climate change is a demand-side problem

Today we examine two approaches to the Paris climate debate.  One points out the inadequacy of the carbon targets being talked about for Paris.  The other cites the massive costs for doing nothing.  Both suggest the futility of such gatherings.

Regular readers understand I think it insane to fly in a bunch of delegates from around the world (at significant expense to the atmosphere) to attempt to find an agreement on targets that governments will pinky-swear to meet by methods still to be determined.  It is insane.  If these people were at ALL serious about the climate-change problem, the FIRST thing they would do is cancel these goofy conferences to show that they intend to at least address their OWN carbon footprints.

But the problem is worse than even that madness.  The environmental bureaucrats on their way to Paris have a serious flaw in their reasoning—they think they can fix the problem on the supply side.  Beat up on the oil companies.  Stop building pipelines.  Tax the shit out of hydrocarbons so people will think harder about their energy-buying decisions.  You know the drill.  But when it comes to addressing the demand side, their suggestions are usually worse than lame.  Of course, they're lame—we can't have carbon considerations change things like big climate conferences or Al Gore flying around in a Gulfstream.

It's kind of like the thinking that gave us the war on drugs.  Use military methods to stop the supply but do nothing to dry up demand (assuming any such thing is possible.)  One might argue that there is essentially an infinite demand for liquid fossil fuels just like there seems to be an unlimited demand for feel-good drugs.  One big difference, however.  If we cannot dry up demand for fossil fuels through intensive infrastructure redesign, we will most certainly destroy the biosphere for human habitation.

Paris COP 21—courting irrelevance

Let's get something perfectly clear.  I doesn't matter one little bit what CO2 targets the various environmental bureaucrats agree to in Paris IF there isn't a serious plan to finance the changes necessary to meet those targets.  NONE!  So it is even less important that the plans they are attempting to pass in Paris aren't even enough to theoretically make a difference.  Some suggestions:

• Instead of these "30% reduction by 2020"-type targets, the approach should be 100% reduction as soon as possible and get on with an all-fronts program.  Fighting over some numbers is pretty damn juvenile when you think about it.
• The fossil-fuel industry should stop worrying about its "future."  Considering how complex it will be to eliminate the need for those fuels, they will be hard-pressed to supply the (hopefully) declining demand.  (Of course, considering how far ahead of the curve oil company scientists were on the science of climate change, they probably know this too.)  Besides, even if we stop burning petroleum, we will still need the stuff as lubricants and feedstocks.
• The article below is from The Guardian.  The Brits are good at showing concern but are very unlikely to contribute to the production of the pieces necessary to build the new green society.  Their industrialization was exposed as second-rate at roughly the time Titanic sank (1912) and it is unlikely to recover.  But they could do the planet a HUGE favor—stop the criminality of the City.  We cannot build a green world with criminals running the economy.  Fix that problem and we will forgive the Brits if they never invent better solar cells or storage devices.

De-carbonization? Never mind

On May 21, 2015, I created a post created around a DW article that introduced (for me) the term de-carbonization.  I LIKED that term.  I have been using it.  The post was about a planning agreement for the Paris Climate Change conference that got Merkel and Hollande to agree that de-carbonization was the goal.  I was pumped!

Yeah, well the de-carbonization goal has been dropped for Paris.  Folks.  The evidence is in.  If an important conference like Paris cannot even get something like de-carbonization right, such conferences are truly are worse than useless.

NOx and pollution control

The fuss over the failure of the auto manufacturers to comply with the diesel standards for nitrous oxides is remarkably telling.  First of all, it should be made completely clear that building automobiles remains arguably the most difficult undertaking the Producer classes ever make.  Car manufacture is more difficult than aerospace because of the sheer volume of units produced.  Building an airliner is much more akin to building a skyscraper because very few are made so many operations are allowed to be relatively inefficient.  Cars are much more difficult to make than medical devices because of the incredible cost constraints.  And of course, cars are more difficult to make than computers because cars also have computers plus everything else.

The reason the complexity of automobile manufacture is so important to remember is that these facts make a mockery of what the technologically illiterate believe about cars.  For example, there are those who think that some day, a lone inventor in a garage will make some stunning breakthrough in emissions control or fuel efficiency.  Obviously, that will never happen but the true believers will explain that is because the big boys hate honest competition and will crush the lone genius.  And now we see the environmental extremists thinking that the only reason companies are failing to comply with emissions standards is because they are greedy or are unwilling to put forth the necessary efforts.

However, when everyone seems to be failing to meet the new diesel standards, the question must be asked, "Are the standards reasonable?"  My guess is that they are not.  But the environmental bureaucrats will never admit they are wrong.  Because they refuse to admit that there are physical realities that are responsible for this outbreak of environmental lawlessness, the possibilities for real progress are likely to degenerate into expensive and pointless lawsuits.  Environmentalists are fond of pointing out that the laws of nature will ultimately trump all other considerations, yet they will not realize that they cannot regulate emissions problems out of existence by issuing mandates that are physically impossible to accomplish.

Unfortunately, there are many people who seem to believe that the problems of climate change can be solved if only we elect politicians who will enact tougher legislation to outlaw greenhouse gasses.  Such people are worse than wrong, they have delayed the possibilities for progress for at least three decades now.

Volkswagen troubles from a German perspective

The story of how Volkswagen's "clean" diesels actually failed the NOx emissions tests continue to unfold.  There hasn't been such a juicy Producer Class story in a very long while.  For while the TDI line of diesels are some of the cleanest ever built, the fines and lawsuits for this environmental crime could top $100 billion.

1. The number of affected Volkswagen and Audis is around 480,000 sold from 2009-2015 (roughly 80,000 per year).  USA isn't a huge market for VW's diesels (by comparison Toyota sold 428,606 Camrys in 2014 alone).  Worldwide, VW has sold 11 million TDIs.
2. VW, it seems, is not the only manufacturer to build production diesels that regularly emit more NOx than the vehicles tested for certification.  The other offenders include: Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai, PSA (Citroen, Peugeot) and Fiat.
3. In every meaningful way, VW did not cheat its customers.  The TDIs it sold were objectively better (better mileage AND performance) than ones that met the legal NOx limit.  Already Wired magazine explains that VW's USA customers are NOT going to like any of the proposed fixes.
4. The rest of the German manufacturers are PISSED at VW for endangering the "Made in Germany" brand.  With good reason—it takes decades to build such a brand.

Complicating all this is the very real fact that Germany is the greenest industrialized country on earth with a very effective environmental movement.  Mostly because of their superior mileage, VW was marketing their TDI diesels as a green solution.  And yet these are the people being accused of cheating on emissions tests.  So what went wrong to trigger this possible $100 billion calamity?

All arrows point to one culprit—the NOx standards.  The very thing that makes diesel engines more fuel efficient (higher combustion temperatures) is what causes the formation of NOx.  This means that almost anything that decreases NOx will almost certainly decrease the efficiency of the engine.  Now whether the standards are legitimate is a whole other question but since almost everyone is forced the cheat to make an acceptable car, (2 above) and the customers will hate the legal cars (3), maybe the regulators came up with standards that effectively barred the sale of diesel cars.  VW will almost certainly stop selling diesels in the USA market.  They sell over 10 millions cars a year—they hardly need these problems to sell a mere 80,000.

What really makes this such a fine Producer Class tale is that at Volkswagen, the Instinct of Workmanship triumphed over all other considerations.  VW was simply not about to sell an inferior product just to meet rules that were set by people who don't actually have to make real hardware that conformed to them.  Faced with the prospect of selling less that they could build, they as a huge corporate giant decided to ignore the regulations.

This should be a warning to all those who think that if we can just agree to lower CO2 emissions, the solutions will arrive just like the pizza you ordered.  Well this doesn't work.  If you want to do something very difficult—and trust me, lowering CO2 will be very, VERY difficult—you need to make your plans around what is physically possible.

In the meantime, Germany is beginning to recover from this blow to one of their trophy industries.  The first two articles below come from Deutsche Welle (an official voice of the German government.)  The last is from RI and addresses the question of whether VW's woes will lead to the end of EU sanctions on Russia.