About those Japanese nuclear power plants

Well, that didn't take long.  On May 5, 2012, Japan turned off its last nuke.  With the election of Shinzo Abe, the zero-nuke policy is up for grabs again.

Actually, this doesn't surprise me one little bit.  Countries that have nuclear power generation take great pride in the notion that THEY are fully capable of understanding the risks and can manage them.  Even when confronted by a catastrophic failure such a Fukushima, the Japanese can say, "Well, just look at the natural disaster it required to bring down one of our plants?  You simply cannot tell me that ALL of our power plants are equally dangerous."

As so after a few months of looking at perfectly good power plants sitting idle while the nation scrambled to replace the electricity they generated, the pressure to restart a critical element of their infrastructure has become damn near overwhelming.

I think the interesting question now becomes, will Germany reconsider her zero-nuke stance?  She is under the same pressures as Japan (plus a few extras including neighbors like France who think they have gone crazy.)  The BIG difference is that Germany has a well-established Green Party that is in fact part of the current government.  There are Germans nearing retirement age who have been anti-nuke activists since they were teenagers.  As a result, reversing Germany's zero-nuke decision will encounter a great deal of organized resistance.  Even so, my Institutional Analysis is that the facts on the ground will lead to a modification of her zero-nuke policy as well.  It is just that the capitulation will be nowhere as easy or complete as in Japan.

Banksters are criminals running the economy

More and more people are awakening to the fact that even those big bankers who have been considered pillars of the community are in point of fact, just expensive criminals who go to work every day trying to figure out new ways to break the few laws left on the books that would circumscribe their actions.

The EU's biggest problem child may be Deutsche Bank.  Because they came relatively late to the crime spree, they weren't very good at it and have wound up holding the bag for a lot of banksters in New York and London.  It can be argued that the massive austerity programs being foisted on the peoples of Europe are simply maneuvers to cover up the crimes and stupidities of German banks—especially their big daddy Deutsche Bank.

Japan threatens the monetary cranks

This story is destined to be one of the most interesting of 2013.  Japan's new prime minister is calling for the Bank of Japan to monetize a $10 Trillion Yen stimulus package.  The ability of a central bank to monetize debt is always an option available to them but it's an option that terrifies / angers / worries the hard money boys.  And for a politician to make this a winning campaign promise has the inflation hawks in a near-state of apoplexy.

Japan has an interesting problem.  Her currency is very expensive.  Now usually an overpriced currency is a problem of the oil countries because they have something everyone wants.  When Holland was shown to have offshore oil and natural gas reserves, her currency skyrocketed.  Good for the average Dutch consumer because now all imported goods could be cheaper, bad for the Dutch worker because now his labor was priced out of the international markets.  The guys who set the price for currencies understand commodity wealth, but the wealth created by human excellence and genius is far less likely to be evaluated accurately.  For example, gold bugs often claim that fiat money is "backed by nothing" because it can't be exchanged for a rare commodity.  But Japan is one of those few exceptions—her currency is expensive because of her ability to manufacture highly desirable goods.

Japan actually would benefit from a much cheaper Yen.  For example, the Prius sells for roughly $30,000 or 2,543,700 Yen.  If the Yen were at 140 instead of 84.79, that same car could sell for $18,169 (everything else being equal.)  A lot more people could buy an $18k Prius than a $30K one.  And suddenly, Toyota and all her suppliers would have to put on an extra shift.

So our Mr. Abe has discovered that if he could push down the value of the Yen, he could bring some much needed prosperity to Japan.  And supposedly, the best way to drive down the value of his currency would be to get the Bank of Japan to print a lot of free money—to horrify the world's bond vigilantes by actually monetizing the debt.  So his plan will not only improve his trade standing, but it will pump a bunch of money into his domestic economy.  Now all he has to do is terrorize those dullards over at the BOJ into going along with his plan.  Suppose they will whine about how they are supposed to be "independent?"  Does the sun rise in the east?

The truth is, Abe can spend money like a drunken sailor and not do any lasting damage to his currency.  This is because his country knows how to convert intellectual capital into world-class production.  His is a nation that can just about validate any amount of money they can print.  In fact, if he actually puts this plan into place, he could trigger a bout of prosperity that would discredit the hard-money guys for a generation or two.

Winter light

It's Christmas Eve.  For those of us who tend towards skepticism about things like God coming down to earth and being born of a virgin, or far worse, Santa delivering toys to all the corners of the earth on one night, Christmas can easily become a season of genuine psychological pain—too much commercialism, too much fattening food, or too much time spent with people with whom you share little except maybe a last name.  The Christmases of my childhood were so traumatic that it took a couple of decades before I could begin to relax.

And yet in my later years, I have discovered there is much about Christmas to celebrate.  There is the music—no other religious holiday has 1/10th the music. Much is transcendentally beautiful.  But lately, I have come to more fully appreciate the cultural gifts of those who have celebrated Christmas over the years.  Much is actually related to the topics I cover on this blog.  Whether it is honesty in public affairs, building sustainable societies, inventing ways that make the whole community more prosperous, or coming up with ways of keeping crooks from destroying the community, the folks who seem to do it best come from places where winters and darkness are major issues.  Christmas is one of the ways to cope.  And while it has plenty of problems, it's probably not worse than ice fishing as a diversion from the cold.

Besides, Christmas has some real advantages;

• It's an excuse to feast.  It going to be awhile before you eat produce from the garden.  Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we eat oatmeal again.
• It's an excuse to light candles.  Before electric light, anything that pushed back the darkness was an expensive luxury.  Candles were often kept in locked trunks.
• It's an excuse to make music with your neighbors.  Some people are very talented so Christmas music ranges from children's carols to Bach's Christmas Oratorio or Handel's Messiah.

I happen to have a favorite Christmas composition from Bach's Oratorio BWV 248.  It is the Pastorale and when I was growing up, the people I knew called it the shepherd's song.  The reason the shepherd story is important to the Christianity of the North is that it teaches that the birth of a Messiah was first announced to folks working outdoors.  Now, it does not matter that this story is very probably not true, the lesson is still important—that people who do the important work of the community should be respected.  After all, look what your God thinks of them!  Here Bach wrote a purely musical tribute to the story of the shepherds—to the virtue of humility.  It is utterly beautiful.

Polish 'Coal-aholics'

It is abundantly clear that the Poles have ample historical reasons to hate all things German.  But just because the Germans believe burning coal is a disaster for the environment does not make it untrue—no matter what you believe about German thought processes.

One more time.  The reason that Peak Oil and climate change are not being meaningfully addressed is because they are problems of applied science—Producer Class problems.  It doesn't matter IF Al Gore is fat or is a mega energy hypocrite, climate change is still a fact beyond rational debate.  It doesn't matter if it's the Germans who want you to phase out coal-fired plants, it's still a good idea.  There is nothing quite so strange as hearing political arguments being used to try to discredit hard science—it's like children debating adults.

We really must work on this problem.

In the meantime, I would like someone to explain to me how the people of NW Denmark just went ahead and built a remarkably sustainable infrastructure while less than 500 miles away, a country actually chooses to invest in the most dirty lifestyle imaginable with no "reason" for doing it except to make a statement about an historical outrage.

Winter solstice 2012

The tiny little village of Welch MN roughly 10 miles from where the Cannon River empties into the Mississippi.



The Cannon River at Welch

Food and the drought

The Corn Belt drought grinds on.  We have a few inches of snow on the ground here in Minnesota but it would have been more like 18 if it had been slightly colder when the front moved in.  But the extent of the drought can most easily be seen by the incredibly low levels of the Mississippi.  The following story describes the low water below St. Louis so this drought also affects the Missouri basin.

Those lying economists

Neoliberal economics (monetarism, Austrian School, etc.) insists on teaching so much that is so demonstrably false, the rest of us have no idea whether these folks are drooling morons or pathological liars.  For years I have tended to believe in the "father forgive them for they know not what they do" explanation.  Now there is actual research that seems to show that the economics "profession" is indeed overrun with liars.

That IPCC report

Some of the defenders of the carbon-based order have gotten their hands on a preliminary IPCC draft.  According to them, the IPCC isn't quite sure if climate change is man-made.  The IPCC scientists were trying to be absolutely accurate and this is how they are rewarded.

The carbon defenders like to call themselves "skeptics" when in fact they are the exact opposite.  [sigh]  The dark ages are closer than I had feared.  I wonder how long this "debate" will continue.

Nanostructures triple organic solar cells' efficiency

There is something slightly ridiculous about this story even though I find it very interesting.  What has happened is that a guy at Princeton has figured out a way to make PV cells more efficient by placing a mesh over them punched with holes so tiny, they are actually less than the wavelength of light.  This mesh traps light—especially light coming in at odd angles. And since any PV array that is fixed operates a lot of time with the light coming from sub-optimum angles, this should dramatically increase the cells' efficiency.

Of course, this experiment was made possible because someone figured out how to punch a hole less than a lightwave in diameter.  I am sure it is very hard to do.  And probably expensive.  And probably impossible to get reliably high quality control.  And the resulting mesh will probably be damn near impossible to clean.

But other than that—it's probably a good idea.  Keep in mind that there are plenty of places ready-made for PV installation.  We already have a supply glut of PV cells we know how to make.  And so I'm not sure increasing the efficiency of PV cells is the best use of a Mr. Chou's talents.  Problems such as transmission and storage are MUCH more critical to a solar future.

On driving an old car

Cars are freaking expensive to own.  The only way around the expense is to drive an old car.  The downside of this strategy is that now you are responsible for maintenance beyond what's specified in most owner's manuals.  And then there is always the possibility something breaks that leaves you beside the road with all the hassles and expenses that involves.  And there comes the day when something breaks that is WAY more expensive than the car is worth.

But I got hooked on the process of caring for old cars while driving a Saab 900 296k miles (476,000 km).  My strategy was if, for example, a rubber hose needed replacement, all the rubber hoses needed replacement.  I never was stranded and the poor car was still running fine when it died in a tennis-ball-sized hailstorm.  The other rule was care for the paint.  Replacing the engine is easy compared to fixing damaged or rusted sheet metal.  Paste wax, friends.  The BEST investment you can possibly make.

Gave my old Lexus its fall paste wax job on Thanksgiving Day.  Not bad for a car 17 years old with 165k miles—note the reflections of the trees. This is Minnesota—it was 61°F when I started, 39°F when I finished two hours later.



I am still learning to care for my 1996 Lexus.  A low beam goes.  I toy with the idea of replacing it myself.  I went to the Sylvania website and download their replace your headlight video.  They want to make you believe it is easy.  Not on the LS.  Lexus of Maplewood wants $65 (plus the 50+ mile drive to Maplewood).  So while I contemplate my options, I notice one tire is low.  I drive past several gas stations with no noticeable air hoses and wind up at the local Goodyear store where I know the location of the air hose.  I run into my fave mechanic taking a break.  He says he'll replace the bulb for "$15 if it's easy, $25 if it's hard."  He has to pull the air filter to get to the back of the headlight housing.

No more coal fires—a thousand times NO!

There are those who would argue that the completion of the Keystone Pipeline will mean "game over" for the planet that sustains us.  I would argue that we are already dooming ourselves by building more coal-fired electrical generation.  It seems the IEA agrees with me.

As far as I am concerned, we should be trying to permanently suspend the burning of coal.  Burn something as carbon-intensive as coal, and you WILL inject CO2 into the atmosphere—chemistry offers no other options.  But such a ban faces serious obstacles.  Humanity knows a very great deal about finding coal and turning its energy into electricity.  We have been building the equipment that can do this for well over a century and are extremely good at it.  All the alternatives to coal-fired electrical generation have way more problems.  In fact, were it not for the smokestack gasses, coal would be the perfect solution for powering the modern society.  Unfortunately. those gasses are already causing calamities that are just a warm-up for the even greater calamities to come.

2012 wildfires

The way things are going, 2012 could turn out to be one of the good years.

DEC 16, 2012

2012 extraordinary year for wildfires in US

Check out this map. The year 2012 has been extraordinary for wildfires in the United States.

Oh that scary IMF

The IMF is threatening to kick out Argentine for—get this—fudging her statistical data.   (Ohhhhh!)

If that has now become a crime, we in USA are in real trouble.  I have been following the debate over how USA measures inflation and unemployment for decades and while the published figures tell us something, they don't tell us much.  Inflation numbers don't include food and energy—the two most important numbers there are.  The jobless numbers only include people who have been laid off and are receiving unemployments benefits—a tiny fraction of the jobless.

Mrs. Kirchner doesn't much care for IMF anyway and so may actually be provoking the IMF to kick her country out their front door.  Saves the trouble of quitting the organization her late husband believed (with ample reason) to be merely a tool of imperialist theft.

Peak Auto

I have already taken to calling the LFA "Peak Auto." I mean, who else has the skills, resources, and management commitment to throw into a ten YEAR project that has no other goal than to showcase the abilities of the world's largest and most influential auto maker? And like the original LS that was so superbly built it made the S-class Mercedes look like it was hammered together using anvils, the LFA has now set the bar so high that no one will ever equal its sophistication in our lifetimes.

As an automobile, the LFA is highly impractical.  As an engineering demonstration, it is magnificent.  It's flashy enough to draw a lot of attention to itself while demonstrating breakthroughs in carbon-fiber fabrication—among a host of other wow! accomplishments.  And being a Lexus, it demonstrates that human beings really can build nearly-perfect things.  This is what can be accomplished when grow-ups build.  This is good.  The sustainable society will require a lot of such near-perfection to work.  Thank goodness, Toyota has told the rest of the world how they do it.

Guess I'm not the only one

Who thinks that big conferences will do nothing about climate change.  The poor Germans (who have done more about climate change than anyone with the possible exception of much-smaller Denmark) are discovering how frustrating it is to be cooped up in a room full of people who barely understand the basic science of the subject.  Note in the article below, they are talking about abandoning the 2°C targets to concentrate on hardening their own infrastructure in order to better cope with the ensuing catastrophe.

I know how they feel.  I live in a country where even those who admit the climate is changing refuse to acknowledge the social and economic changes necessary to do anything about it.  Example: 350.org (perhaps the most vocally active organization addressing the subject) has decided the answer to the climate problem is a consciousness-raising bus trip.  Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters would be SO proud.

What happened to USA economic muscle?

It was destroyed by financial vandals who have NO concept of the extent of their destruction.  Why do I say this?  Because as far as I am concerned, the most interesting factoid of the 2012 USA election was the genuine astonishment by the establishment press that Romney should be facing serious opposition because of his role at Bain Capital.  For them, Bain might be a tad tacky and nouveau riche, but it is hardly the stuff of Bastille storming.

Unfortunately for those of the receiving end, Bain and operations like them ruined their lives and their rage could last 50 years.  In the following essay, Fraser mentions the problems of Youngstown Ohio.  I remember when they shut down Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1977-79.  I was watching a television documentary about retraining of "rust-belt" workers for the "new economy."  There was a scene where some very young functionary was explaining to a man who had helped create seamless tubing that he was now classified as "unskilled" for the purposes of government statistics.

Making steel is so insanely difficult, the few in history who could do it were world-famous back when steel was made by hand in small batches—witness the reputation of Damascus Steel.  In Japan where steel is a very big deal, the guys who can still do it the old way are designated as "living national treasures."  Not surprisingly, forming a seamless tube of steel is especially difficult—mostly because doing anything sophisticated with any material so hot is extremely dangerous.  Doing this was many things—unskilled was most certainly not one of them.

It was that evening I decided to make it part of my mission in life to explain the importance of those Producers who run the real economy.  Because anyone who can classify as "unskilled" a person who can make seamless tubing from steel is dangerously ignorant.  If someone actually believes making steel is an unskilled task, that person is extremely unlikely to have any comprehension of what it will take to build the sustainable society.

Shades of Humphrey-Hawkins

In what was probably Keynesianism's last gasp, Jimmy Carter signed a piece of legislation on October 27, 1978 called the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act.  Essentially, Humphrey-Hawkins made full employment the required primary goal of Fed monetary policy.  Hubert Humphrey was dying of cancer—he would only last until January.  So even though Carter was the first neoliberal Democrat, he cynically signed the bill as a nod to a dying lion of liberalism knowing full well he would ignore it.  And then soon enough, Reagan would become president and then Humphrey-Hawkins was really ignored.

So after 35 years of central banks making price (wage) stability their sole focus, we have a Fed chairman who is at least pretending that unemployment is legally one of his concerns.  He is discovering two truths: 1) The forces that made inflation-fighting the only goal of central banking policy are well entrenched to the point where their opinions are accorded the status of convention wisdom, and 2) Slowing growth is at least 100 times easier that stimulating growth.  The old Keynesians called this second problem "pushing on a string."

Saturday toons 15 DEC 12

Finance capitalism and its discontents

Last summer, I got into an exchange about how the country should deal with its geometrically expanding debts.  I was talking with an old-time DC insider.  Because he was spouting the conventional right-wing, Creditor / Leisure-Class view that a debt crises would be the perfect opportunity to take a whack at old-age pensions and medical care for the poor, I pretty much tuned him out.  Well as fall becomes winter and news seeps out about the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, it turns out he wasn't this random doofus, he was parroting the accepted party line of the DC "establishment."  Apparently, plenty of people with important (expensive) jobs in Washington think USA hasn't had enough austerity yet so some more would help.

Chasing Ice

Yesterday, I finally got to see this amazing documentary about the effects of climate change on some of the planet's major glaciers. Had some video documentarians with me who were actually squirming in their seats watching the intense and sometimes dangerous efforts required to capture most of the film's important footage.  If you are like me and do NOT need any further evidence of climate change, this movie is still worth seeing if for no other reason than the spectacular photography.

Even though Chasing Ice has some of the best graphics ever created to describe the problems caused by the accelerating levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and head photographer James Balog speaks to his conversion from being a climate change skeptic to a man climbing around dangerously unstable ice formations to track its effects, this film is mercifully short on preachiness.  After all, the man has a ton of superb footage to show you and most of it is breathtakingly beautiful.  My personal favorite was a shot at night taken from deep in a glacier melt hole.  The sky is shimmering from the northern lights.

The most amazing footage is of an event where a Manhattan-sized iceberg calves off from the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland.  The clip below shows some this action.