Japan fights deflation

This was like predicting the dawn.  The BOJ probably had a "serious" meeting with Abe.  And he says he will behave if elected and not make public pronouncements on monetary policy.  But it is clear what he wants.  Of course, this is exactly what the Central Bank's defenders do NOT want.  The reason is obvious—Abe's plan has a 100% chance of success and its good example would humiliate the bankster defenders for a generation or two.

Japan threatens to do something about its overvalued Yen

I have been arguing for most of my adult life that so long as folks are doing something clever with their resources, money pumped into the system would produce prosperity rather than trigger inflation.  If ever a nation could so regularly prove my point, it is Japan.  They crank out world-class products with such frequency, the rest of us can only watch and marvel.  Not surprisingly, the rest of the world wants to buy these superb products.  I grew up in a world where 400 yen traded for a dollar.  Two generations of build excellence later, and the yen trades for something like 81 to the dollar—an increase in value of something near 500%.  If Japan's central bankers were actually worried about their Producer Classes, they should have done something to halt the yen's rise at somewhere around the 200 level.

Japan's expensive yen has nearly priced them out of every market there is.  The obvious solution would be to do something to drive down the yen's value.  The best way would be to do something that pisses off the inflation hawks—like going toe-to-toe with their conservative central bankers and demanding they put a bunch of money into public investment.  And after Fukushima, they have PLENTY of places that need investment.  In other words, they want to raise their inflation targets.  All of this is perfectly logical.  And someone running for high office in Japan is demanding their central bank change course.

But you can count on the purists who maintain that central banks must be "independent" and that any goal besides "price stability" is worse than heresy to write impassioned articles condemning Japan's unorthodox understanding of their economy.

Isn't that spayshul? Investors discover climate change

From the department of "you can't make this shit up" we see a group of investment fund managers issuing a document calling on governments to stop that ebil ol' climate change.  I mean, here's a group of people who could actually DO something about climate change by channeling their fabulous wealth into replacing the carbon-fired infrastructure that is causing the problem.  But no—they want to retain the status quo that made them rich and so are reduced to signing petitions like a bunch of powerless lefty community activists.

Carbon taxes?

I am old enough to remember when Brookings was a reliably "liberal" institute / think tank.  Now it is reliably Neoliberal in economics and Neoconservative in foreign policy.  The following carbon tax proposal is theirs.

Here's the deal on carbon taxes.  They make the costs of burning carbon more like the planet values it.  Serious people have done major studies that show pretty conclusively that the only way to get people to reduce their energy consumption is to raise its price.  But here's the problem.  It doesn't much matter why you raise taxes, everyone gets in line to spend the additional revenue.  Now IF carbon taxes would go into a fund dedicated exclusively to building the infrastructure necessary to reduce carbon emissions, the idea would be pretty good.  But even such a fund has potential for a lot of leaks.  Superfund—the program that was supposed to address the most toxic chemical dumping sites put roughly 15% of their funds into actual remediation and 85% into renting offices and giving each other Powerpoint presentations.

Then there is the problem that taxation is just another way of sucking purchasing power out of the economy.  I would prefer to see the efforts to reduce carbon emissions come from pure economic stimulus.  After all, every time a buck goes into capturing our energy income from the sun and replaces a buck now being spent on the planet's stored energy capital, the society grows richer.  In other words, if such a project were properly run, it would be self-financing in a real economic sense.  In such a scenario, carbon taxes would be reduced to merely regulating demand.

Toting up the disaster's costs

As the folks who calculate these things tote up the costs of the billion-dollar weather disasters of 2012, some are reaching a rather astonishing conclusion—that Hurricane Sandy was NOT the most expensive.  That "honor" goes to the great Corn Belt drought.  Hurricanes may be the most spectacular weather events but for wrecking things, nothing beats old-fashioned drought.

Plouffe says cut Medicare and Medicaid? No! Hell NO!

Plouffe's betrayal on earned benefits is exactly the crap that lots of people warned against when they argued that Obama is not really a progressive. How many times do we have to repeat this? What's driving the deficit is not Medicare or Medicaid. Over half the deficit is caused by the Bush tax cuts, which by now have proven they do not, will not, can not pay for themselves.

Desertec—another victim of austerity?

Desertec is going through a rough patch—actually most Producer Class enterprises in Europe are.  But I am reasonably certain this is one of those projects that will not die.  Why?  It make thermodynamic sense.  If that were not enough, when it comes to powering our societies without fire, there are probably no solar sources more reliable than the Sahara.

So why is Desertec on hiatus if it is such a good idea?  The question is answered with another by Desertec's backers, "Where is the tax money?"  Of course, government funding is all going to bail out the crooks of the financial world.  Projects like Desertec are so large, they can realistically only be built by governments.  So long as we believe the neoliberal doctrine that nothing useful can be built by governments, we are seriously constrained in what sorts of projects can be accomplished.

Ah yes! Neoliberalism—the perfect doctrine for people with small imaginations.  Too bad the rest of have to suffer from their pinched worldviews.

German ennui over climate change

After years of nearly universal agreement that climate change was a significant problem that required coordinated action and the spending of billions of euros, it looks like the Germans are pretty fed up with the whole subject.  One can hardly blame them—it's hard to get out in front of a subject and even harder when no one seems to want to follow your lead.

My guess is that the real decline in interest in climate change is less driven by weariness over the subject and more by the incessant clamoring by the financial sector that only they must be paid—everyone and everything else must wait.  There are damn few problems that can be solved without financial resources—building a world that runs without most of its fires is certainly not one of them.

Unfortunately, the climate change problems will not disappear even though everyone really wants to stop thinking about them.  And when the next disaster rams climate change to the front of the line again, those who have used their time to think deeply about what must be done next will have a considerable advantage over those who have done no planning whatsoever.

Milk protests in Bussels

The main reason I first learned agricultural economics is that the advisor of my model airplane club had a day job trying to sell memberships for the National Farmer's Organization.  I soon discovered that I would rather listen to him talk about the NFO because I could easily solve my own model-building problems and so much preferred to hear his explanation of how farmers made a living—and he had a well-organized rap.  The NFO had a lot of dairy farmers in its membership so was pretty radical and concentrated all their efforts towards raising the prices and keeping them consistent.

The main problem facing dairy farmers is that their product, while very desirable, it also highly perishable.  This means that if they wish to reduce their excess supply, the only realistic option is to dump their milk.  So the goal of dairy farmers facing a price crunch is to waste their milk in dramatic ways.  There were many incidents of violence associated with dumping actions during the Depression.  But what the dairy farmers pulled off in Brussels would warm the heart of any NFO organizer.  Those fancy European Parliament offices will probably smell like spoiled milk for a while because the farmers sprayed milk with some high-pressure hoses.

All this points to a global problem.  The prices for grains go up because of climate change.  The prices for milk products don't have room to rise because incomes in most markets are falling for most people.  So folks like dairy farmers get caught in the middle.  They have fixed operating expenses.  I cannot imagine very many of them are covering their costs these days.

Drought and the Mississippi

The absolute worst thing that could happen after last summer's drought was an extra-dry fall.  Much of the corn and beans that were planted contained many "drought-resistant" varieties that were designed to suck out the last molecule of water from the soils in an attempt save themselves.  And while these characteristics probably saved something like 1/4 of the crop, it left the ground bone dry by harvest.  To show how dry, I got a pretty good picture of the amount of dust just one combine stirred up last fall.  It is dry!  This is Minnesota—it doesn't get this dry.

A nice wet fall would have recharged the soil.  But as can be seen from the story below—that did not happen anywhere throughout the Mississippi / Missouri River Basin.  And it's not like we don't ordinarily get rain in the fall—in 2010 we actually had fall flooding.  (LOVE those weather extremes, huh?)  Of course, this extra-dry fall means we have a head start on next summer's potential drought.

Whether or not suspending barge traffic will have much effect on the real economy is actually a very interesting question.  Even though shipping by river is extremely energy efficient and therefore very cheap for shipping bulk goods, barge traffic on the Mississippi is down dramatically over the last 30 years for a wide assortment of reasons.  Here in Minnesota, the long trip to New Orleans, plus the damage to Louisiana terminal facilities from Katrina, plus the delays caused by the rebuilding of the Panama Canal, plus a dramatic shift in grain markets to Asia means that much of the grain that used to barge down the Mississippi now gets hauled to the Pacific northwest docks by train.  In any case, barge traffic stops when Lake Pepin freezes over so we don't count on this form of transportation in the winter anyway.

But whether the problem is dry soils or low river flows shutting down barge traffic, this continuing drought in the middle of North America has serious implications for the global food supply.

Doha—what to expect

So long as criminals run the global financial system, it is impossible for anything meaningful to come from the Doha climate talks.  People who cannot afford to do anything rarely get anything accomplished and now the thieves have run off with all the money.  Of course, there is something very sad about people who think that a large meeting room full of harried bureaucrats arguing the minutia of the trillions of fires set every day by the earth's 7+ billion inhabitants can lead to any meaningful progress anyway.  But remove any authority to actually make large-scale changes and the resources to make those changes happen and the recipe for getting nothing done is baked into the event.

Toward a Political Economy of Oligarchy

From his lifetime study of the pamphlets, speeches, sermons, and newspaper commentaries that fueled the American Revolution, one of the conclusions Bernard Bailyn (the Harvard historian who was twice awarded a Pulitzer Prize, including for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution)  reached was that “To the colonists the most important of these publicists and intellectual middlemen were those spokesmen for extreme libertarianism, John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (d. 1750).” According to Bailyn, in the colonies, the entire corpus of their work were

republished entire or in part again and again, ‘quoted in every colonial newspaper from Boston to Savannah,’ and referred to repeatedly in the pamphlet literature, the writings of Trenchard and Gordon ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced.

I emphasize the last part of that quote, because I have been trying to revive the original founding era idea that the rich are as much a danger to the survival of a republic as is a standing army. This is especially important now, as it we need desperately to repair the ideological foundations for taxing the rich as a means of redressing the great economic imbalances the they have created with their near monopoly on political power. In the Founding era of the United States, the Founders had developed a "political economy of aristocracy, as Professor James L. Huston explains in "The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-19000" (The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1079-1105):

The revolutionaries’ concern over the distribution of wealth was prompted by a tenet in the broad and vague political philosophy of republicanism. In contrast to nations in which monarchs and aristocrats dominate the state, republics embodied the ideal of equality among citizens in political affairs, the equality taking the form of citizen participation in the election of officials who formulated the laws. Drawing largely on the work of seventeenth-century republican theorist James Harrington, Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth....

The answer to how the social system of aristocracy generated wealth inequality was easily found. American political leaders applied the labor theory of property or value; an unjust distribution resulted when a few were able to transfer the fruits of other persons’ labor to themselves. Aristocrats (non-workers and therefore non-producers) stole the fruits of labor from the masses of toilers (laborers and therefore producers). Aristocrats effected the transference by political means. It was control of politics that enabled aristocrats to steal the fruits of labor, to enrich themselves and pauperize the multitudes. By the time of the writing of the Constitution, literate Americans had clearly voiced the idea that a misdistribution of wealth was almost entirely a political act.

So it is more than merely interesting, especially given our times of financial and economic crises, that Gordon’s and Trenchard’s Cato’s Letters, were “a searing indictment of eighteenth-century English politics and society written in response to the South Sea Bubble crisis…”  In other words,, one of the most important works of English political theory that inspired the American Revolution, was written in response to the world's largest financial fraud and crisis up to that time.

In The Machiavellian Moment,: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: 1975, reprinted 2003), (See also my Machiavelli and the survival of republics) J.G.A. Pocock observes that Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig (a weekly periodical founded in 1720 by Trenchard and Gordon), “formed some of the most widely distributed political reading of the contemporary American colonists. Cato was mainly bent on diagnosing and proposing to remedy the state of national corruption revealed by the failure of the South Sea Company…”  (p 468) Further, Pocock writes, “It was neither accidental nor surprising that an old adversary of the standing army should find himself denouncing a gigantic job of the “monied interest” since the two were taken to be at bottom one and the same phenomena."

Back in December 2008, I wrote Need to be ruthless and punitive toward Wall Street. But, I'm not one of President Obama's advisers, and what we got instead was the President praising  JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as "savvy businessmen."

Obama's acceptance of these vicious financial predators as acceptable models of business acumen underscores the urgent need to revive the Revolutionary republican (with small "r") understanding of the political economy of oligarchy, and how the rich destroy a republic from within.

But we need to update and strengthen that understanding to fit our own times, by bringing together the idea of economic rent, with modern scientific understanding of our natural environment, and the limitations and constraints that environment imposes on economic activity. It is in any individual's self-interest to preserve that in which they are most invested; but the rich pose a particular danger because their self-interest often leads them to attempt to protect and preserve entire modes of economic activity that society needs to move past in order to avoid colliding with the limitations of natural resources inherent in any specific mode of technology. No more clear example can be imagined that the Koch family interest pouring hundreds of millions and billions of dollars into conservative think tanks and political lobbies that not only deny global climate change, but also actively oppose the development of clean energy technologies. But a more instructive example may be the Walton family interests, which seek to avoid the development of public understanding of how the Wal-Mart business model shifts much of its employment costs onto the government - a modern twist on the methods by which the wealthy "pauperize the multitudes" identified in the Founders' political economy of aristocracy.

The first line of defense of today's rich oligarchs is the conservative movement, which refuses to recognize the moral turpitude of the economic practices of speculation, rent-seeking, and usury. Just how dangerous the conservative movement is can be judged by the recent candidacy - for the higesth office in the republic - of Mitt Romney, a "private equity" scoundrel who conservatives rallied around and defended as a "job creator." It is in this light that I offer you the following quote, from the first few pages of Cato's letters; or, Essays on liberty, highlighting the fury of Trenchard and Gordon at the monied interests of their time. How much of it is polemical hyperbole is for you to judge, but as Chris Hedges has repeatedly noted, it used to be that financial speculators actually were hung. Remember, as noted at the beginning, Trenchard and Gordon were writing in reaction to the financial and economic crises caused by the South Sea Bubble.  

…. Nations should be quick in their Resentments, and severe in their Judgments. As never Nation was more abused than ours has been of late by the dirty Race of Money Changers; so never Nation could, with a better Grace, with more Justice, or greater Security, take its full Vengeance, than ours can upon its detested Foes. Sometimes the Greatness and Popularity of the Offenders make strict Justice unadviseable, because unsafe; but here it is not so; you may, at present, load every Gallows in England with Directors and Stock Jobbers, without the Assistance of a Sheriff's Guard, or so much as a Sigh from an Old Woman, though accustomed perhaps to shed Tears at the untimely Demise of a common Felon or Murderer. A thousand Stock Jobbers, well trussed up, beside the diverting Sight, would be a cheap Sacrifice to the Manes of Trade; it would be one certain Expedient to soften the Rage of the People; and to convince them, that the future Direction of their Wealth and Estates shall be put into the Hands of those who, will as effectually study to promote the General Benefit and Publick Good, as others have, lately, most infamously sacrificed Both to their own private Advantage. Something is certainly due to both the former. The Resurrection of Honesty and Industry, can never be hoped for, while this Sort of Vermin is suffered to crawl about, tainting our Air, and putting every thing out of Course, subsisting by Lies, and practising vile Tricks, low in their Nature, and mischievous in their Consequences.

… A free People are kept so by no other Means than an equal Distribution of Property; every Man who has a Share of Property having a proportionable Share of Power; and the first Seeds of Anarchy, which for the most part ends in Tyranny, are produced from hence, that some are ungovernably rich, and many more are miserably poor; that is some are Masters of all Means of Oppression, and others want all the Means of Self-defence.

…. they are manifest Enemies to God and Man, no Man can call them his Neighbours: They are Rogues of Prey, they are Stock Jobbers, they are a Conspiracy of Stock Jobbers! A Name which carries along with it such a detestable and deadly Image, that it exceeds all human Invention to aggravate it; nor can Nature, with all her Variety and Stores, furnish out any Thing to illustrate its Deformities; nay, it gains visible Advantage by the worst comparisons that you can make. Your Terror lessens when you liken them to Crocodiles and Canibals who feed for Hunger on human Bodies.

….These Monsters therefore stand single in the Creation: They are Stock Jobbers; they have served a whole People as Satan served Job, and so far the Devil is injured, by any Analogy that you can make between him and them.

Well; but Monsters as they are, what would you do with them? The Answer is short and at hand, Hang them; for, whatever they deserve, I would have no new Tortures invented, nor any new Death devised. In this, I think I shew Moderation; let them only be hanged, but hanged speedily. As to their Wealth, as it is the manifest Plunder of the People, let it be restored to the People and let the Publick be their Heirs: the only Method by which the Publick is ever like to get Millions by them, or indeed any Thing.

But, say some, when did you ever See Rogues Covered with Wealth, brought to the Axe or the Gallows? I own that the Example is rare, more is the Shame of this Nation, which has had such rich Temptations, and such frequent Opportunities; we have had publiek Guilt in abundance, God knows often protected by Party, and often by Money. Faction on one Side, and Riches on the other, have, as it were made a Lane for the Great Criminals to escape...

What delicious historical irony that the financial vehicles created to rescue Wall Streeter from the crisis they created, was named for the alley behind Wall Street, Maiden Lane.

Doha conference on climate change starts Monday

So Obama is going to send his minions Doha to do what?  Who knows?  According to this article, the main expectation is that he must recommit USA to a 2°C target.  Why this matters is left unasked but we can guess the answer is, "Not much."  And why is that?  Because Obama comes from a political world where everything is negotiable, and climate change is NOT one of those negotiable subjects.

Doing Obama's heavy thinking on climate change is a guy named Todd Stern who is the State Department's climate envoy.  Recently, he said in a speech:
"[2C] makes perfect sense on paper. The trouble is it ignores the classic lesson that politics – including international politics – is the art of the possible.  If countries are told that, in order to reach a global goal, they must accept targets their leadership sees as contrary to their core interest in growth and development those countries are likely to say no."

And to think we actually pay money for such "expert" advice.  Todd Stern is one of those guys who is just smart enough to be dangerous.  He thinks climate warming targets are negotiable.  Of course, they are not—if 3C makes the planet uninhabitable, it matters not one whit whether our climate expert thinks some sort of economic growth targets are more important.  The ONLY possible reason he thinks like this is he obviously believes he lives in the world where scientific laws can be appealed.  If the guy fell off a cliff, he would spend his last moments wondering if he couldn't reopen the laws of gravity.

Surrounded by such reality deniers, probably in depth, I think it will be almost certain that Obama will show up as the skunk at the Doha garden party.  It will be a surprise if he makes a big public stand supporting 2C.  Of course it matters not at all if he DOES support 2C because no one he seems to listen to has any idea how USA would meet those targets anyway.  So he could support 2C knowing that when nothing gets done, he'll just have to say "Ooops" (while the earth cooks.)

Saturday toons 24 NOV 12

Not moving on climate change

It turns out that the new emphasis on climate change over at the World Bank has an institutional explanation.  Their new president, Jim Yong Kim, has actual scientific training.  Apparently, this helps when it comes to deciding on what is important.  Because if you are a typical banker or politician, climate change is just another issue clamoring for your attention.  And for most pols, the loudest noises are being made by the banksters who are shouting about the needs of the credit markets.  And so austerity becomes a favored strategy over the quite necessary spending needed on industrial redesign.

One other note, I am in fervent agreement with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber below who claims we need nothing less than a "new industrial revolution" to cope with climate change.  The idea that conversion to a sustainable society is a project just as large as the original industrial revolution pretty much describes the second half of Elegant Technology and most especially Chapter Ten.  I notice he expresses frustration ("We've stressed time and again...but many politicians haven't listened.") that such a powerful statement fails to wake up the pols.  Well Hans, while your situation in Germany may be better than here in USA, I have discovered that such statements describe nothing for most people because in order for such a warning to have any meaning, the listener must have a fairly comprehensive understanding of technology and the history of industrialization.  Such people are exceedingly rare—I have only met a handful of them in my life.  Tony's one—which is reason #1 I asked him to write for this blog.

Did Anonymous give USA an honest election?

Living in Minnesota, I tend not to worry about fraudulent vote counting.  We have a system the good government types agree is virtually hackproof.  We fill out a paper ballot that gets scanned by a machine reader.  In theory, the readers could be tampered with, but it would hardly seem worth the effort because the paper ballots still exist in case the election is contested.  Between good-government purists and extensive case law, hand recounts can be extremely thorough.  Although there are some cranks who can still find flaws with this system, Minnesotans trust it to the point where we are comfortable with same-day registration and just rejected a photo ID requirement in the last election.  All of this works extremely well.  Not only is Minnesota at or near the top of voter turnout almost every election, but voting is almost hassle-free.  It only took me about seven minutes this year from sign-in to when a volunteer slapped an "I voted" sticker on my jacket.

Even so, I DO follow the voter chaos in places like Ohio and Florida and am quite contemptuous of folks who cannot organize an honest election.  It's obviously not so hard to do.  So if there are disputed ballots and 8-hour lines to vote, obviously someone is screwing with the process on purpose.

And now we have a tale where a group of hackers claims they thwarted an attempt to flip the results of the Ohio election.  I have NO way of checking out this story but there is one very public piece of evidence that suggests this story might be true—the meltdown of Karl Rove on election night when Fox called Ohio for Obama.  He had the look of a crooked lobbyist who has just discovered the politician he thought he had bought didn't stay bought.

Happy Thanksgiving

I come from a long line of folks who believe that gratitude is probably the ultimate sign of civilized person.  In our family, the Thanksgiving feasting didn't begin until everyone around the table had been given a chance to explain what they were truly thankful for.  Since we kids knew this was coming, we had thought about it for several days and usually had some pretty decent answers.

Today, I want to thank the people in my life who love me no matter how wound up I get with my weltschmertz.  Writing about the subjects I do, it would be easy to let the various major catastrophes in this world get me down.  And I will admit, there are times when my life force starts to flicker and sputter under the stress.  But I am reasonably healthy, I live in an area of the world that still produces WAY more food than we can possibly eat, and am warm and dry.  I have this wonderful toy that allows me to connect to like-minded people around the world.  But most of all, I have friends who are happy to see me show up and usually are interested in what I have to say.  What a gift!

So Happy Thanksgiving.  And here's to those hard-working members of the Producing Class who still make sure we have enough to eat.

World Bank on Climate Change

In one more tiny bit of evidence that the debate over climate change may FINALLY be shifting (at least a bit) we see the following evidence that the World Bank (yes!) has a new leader that understands that economic development and the climate catastrophe must be addressed simultaneously.  We Institutionalists who believe that bankers will at the end of the day act like bankers will tend to curb our enthusiasm until we see more than this little window dressing.  But on this day designated for giving thanks, we must celebrate such signs of progress no matter how small.

Now if the World Bank will just stop funding the construction of coal-fired electrical generation.

WTO renews its evil credentials

Since the crash of 2007-8 introduced crises thinking to the world of finance capitalism, many of us have been tempted to forget about some of the folks that were worthy of large and organized protests not so very long ago.   The most famous in USA were the Seattle protests in 1999 against the WTO (World Trade Organization).  This was one of those few protests that actually worked in the sense that they stopped a meeting called to rubber-stamp a bunch of neoliberal craziness.  The police rioted and lots of hippies got their heads busted, but the WTO was forced to withdraw and wait for another day.  The police have learned their lessons—no one has been able to delay the evil work of the WTO by one minute ever since.

The biggest beef people had with WTO was that it prohibited people from organizing to fight any invasion of outside big money.  They were not allowed to protect their factories, or mines, or their public resources like running water.  The anti-WTO types have a point—many locally owned and organized enterprises vastly outperform outside multinationals because knowing the local environment means something.  Add this to the fact that a local coop (or whatever) retains a much higher percentage of their revenue for the local community than a multinational that must repatriate profits to a faraway locale, and small enterprise has an astonishing track record of engendering prosperity.

But the bad guys are back.  This time, the WTO has jumped their own shark.  This time they have told us we cannot organize community and regional responses to atmospheric carbon overload.  Stupid, pinheaded bureaucrats should not be allowed so much power.  It appears the only qualification needed to work at WTO is a demonstrated fealty to the religious principles of neoliberalism.  In their madness, they are telling us that it isn't even LEGAL to organize to save the freaking planet.

CO2 hits new record levels

We have now reached the stage where increases in climatic CO2 are pretty much baked into the system.  Doing something different (going solar) is a possibility but is hampered by pre-industrial economic thought.

A new age of steam?

There is arguably no subject that has been more thoroughly studied than steam and how we use it.  Yes, The Age of Steam is behind us and so the vast majority of humans have never seen an operating steam engine.  Yet steam is still incredibly important—mostly because the overwhelming majority of electrical generation comes from turbines powered by steam.  Even more importantly, most of that steam is produced by burning coal—a process that is the #1 producer of CO2.

With a couple hundreds years of research into making and using steam, it would be easy to imagine that not much new is left to learn on the subject.  Well watch the video below—that really is a demonstration of producing steam from ice water!!  Like all new inventions, the discussion of what this means is probably pretty silly.  But Bill Gates is interested.  This technology was invented at a very serious university.  So even if no one exactly knows how this invention can be used, some seriously smart people think it's important.