Paying for climate change

Anyone want to talk about a big, nasty number? Try $5.8 billion. Now that may not seem like much in the world of aircraft carrier shopping but for a poor country like the Philippines, this estimate for the damage caused by typhoon Haiyan must seem like a crazy-large fortune.  And the $5 million the UN has pledged for disaster relief seems like an insult. In a country where a typical dwelling probably costs about $1000 or so, this number demonstrates just how widespread and massive the destruction was.

The costs of extreme weather

The main reason I cover climate change issues so relentlessly is because any meaningful solution to this problem will cost big bucks and the current economic environment will not allow us to spend that kind of money.  So obviously, the economic thinking needs to be changed.  Lobbying for such changes is the main reason I write this blog.

But once in a while, I am reminded that the costs of doing nothing are also enormous.  So we find ourselves in the situation where an economic brain-lock prevents us from spending the money we need for remediation while at the same time, we are forced to spend the money anyway to clean up the damage.

Pretty much sounds like complete insanity to me.

NAFTA on steroids—Stop TPP!

Recently, I got an email from someone I met in the struggle to stop the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) back in 1993.  He was ahead of most of us in that he had actually written a book outlining the impending catastrophes that would result from this piece of economic extremism.  We had lost touch in the past 20 years (mostly my fault I am sure) so I was glad to hear from him.  And he inspired me to create this post.

One of the things we activists did that spring was arrange a political rally for our congressman who while a Democrat was clearly one of those "third-way" types that thought it was a fine idea to allow Wall Street to give money and help set the agenda for the party. Even so, we were his constituents and we held out the faint hope that a big turnout would convince him to see the flaws in the proposed legislation.  So our congressman was treated to a string of speakers who outlined how major elements of our economy were about to be sacrificed to the chance to buy socks for $2 a dozen.  We could have been talking to a wall—he voted for NAFTA in support of President Clinton who was making a big push to pass it.

I went home from the rally and wrote what I considered an impassioned plea to scuttle this obviously terrible idea that had somehow gained the support of the party of the people.  And while this critique of "free" trade has been on the Elegant Technology website since it first went up and has proven fairly popular over the years, this effort basically marked the end of any attempt by me to influence electoral politics.

Essentially my objections to these sorts of free trade agreements are due to my extensive reading of how economies developed which showed pretty conclusively that in nation after nation, advanced economies came into existence behind high tariff walls.  This is how industrialization came to Britain, USA, Germany, Japan, etc.  In fact, the idea of free trade only became popular when the Brits discovered that this was a perfect cover for the ruthless exploitation of their colonies and that it also had the delightful side effect of preventing places like India and China from developing a competing industrial system.

I had come to hate the free-trade argument precisely BECAUSE it was anti-development and as I had argued in Elegant Technology, the only way we could meaningfully address the growing environmental crises was to develop a whole new green infrastructure. And the best way to accomplish that was to employ the economic methods that had allowed the economy to develop in the first place.  A short summary of that argument can be found here.

So now the neoliberal swine who gave us NAFTA, etc. have a new scheme to offer. Like NAFTA, it is being negotiated in secret and will be subject to fast-track approval when it finally comes to Congress.  But I am personally not concerned that I don't actually know what is in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) because I would be astonished if there would be anything I could support.  These things tend to look pretty much alike.  Even so, I am delighted to see that WikiLeaks got ahold of and published the part that deals with intellectual property.  And while I am not especially concerned with this issue, there are many serious people who are including some with awesome intellectual clout like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The folks behind the TPP are used to getting their way because they have the enormous power of unlimited funds behind them.  But this time they may not and this leak may be the event that upsets their best-laid plans.  While I am not predicting a defeat this time, I think it inevitable that their demise cannot be so far off.  Because the free-traders have a fatal flaw—their economics are catastrophically wrong and there are only about 250 years of economic history that proves it.

Japan and wind power

This is one of those stories that makes you wonder, "Whatever took them so long?"  Actually the answer is pretty simple—windpower isn't an obvious choice for the Japanese like it is say, for the folks in North Dakota.  Land for wind turbines on those crowded islands is extremely scarce and offshore, the water gets deep very rapidly so they cannot build in shallow waters like, for example, the Danes.  Then there was the fact that their nuclear power proved safe and reliable (until Fukushima.) Nuclear power needs a maintenance culture and the Japanese have that in spades.

But with their nukes shut down, they are scrambling find a substitute because upping their fossil fuel consumption is both very expensive and tends to piss off the climate change crowd.  As the wind industry rumbles to life in Japan, we see the sorts of organizational behavior that allowed them to dominate the automotive world.  They are organizing their efforts around a trading house named Marubeni and they are talking in brave terms about a new export industry.  Mostly, however, this effort will play to their incredible strengths in building world-class machinery.  So even though the challenges of building deep-water wind turbines will be daunting, I for one do not doubt they can produce Nikon / Lexus / bullet train quality goods.  And yes, I am quite certain that they will have satisfied customers before long.

I wish them luck!

The Warsaw conference on climate change

For many reasons, I believe the climate change debate is about to enter a new phase.  Some of those reasons I have already created posts about.  On the plus side, we are discovering that even in bastions of climate change ignorance and naked stupidity like Texas and Oklahoma, the folks on the street are roughly as enlightened about the issue as they are in Massachusetts (the political positions of their respective representatives in congress notwithstanding.)

But the down side is even more depressing as the events at the current climate conference being held in Warsaw demonstrate so vividly.  We see the Japanese backtracking on previous committments to reduce their carbon footprint—mostly because they have shut down nearly 50 nukes post Fukushima. Australia and Canada are also backtracking even though their reasons are not nearly as compelling as those of Japan (hey, you must make those fossil fuel lobbies happy, eh?) And then we see Al Gore issuing his "dire" warning that climate change will destroy human civilization in only 100 more years—which has the side effect of telling a whole lot of people that hey, we still have plenty of time to fix things.

On the surface, this sounds like more business as usual.  That's because it is.  However, the important message is beginning to sink in—however tentatively—which is, doing something about this problem is going to WAY harder than we first thought.  Oh, and conferences, treaties, and other sorts of expressions of good intentions are not going to accomplish much.

The truth is usually funny

In another entry in the "you cannot make this up" category, we discover that J.P.Morgan Chase decided to reach out to the public and allow them to ask them questions on Twitter.  One must assume they were expecting many "how can we become as awesome as you?" sort of questions.  Instead, they got what they deserved.  Here actor Stacey Keach reads some of the better ones. Incredible.  Read Matt Taibbi's take on this PR fiasco here.

Saturday toons 16 NOV 13

Are supercapacitors finally a possibility?

I must admit that when I first read about capacitors in junior high (early 1960s), I thought their behavior was so unbelievable I just put the whole subject into the category of magic I hoped to one day understand.  Of course, most of the circuits I was playing with had capacitors but they were tiny and I just assumed that whoever specified them knew what they were doing.  I DID read about the possibilities of giant capacitors one day being used for significant electrical storage but the engineering involved was in the same category of giant flywheels—again almost unimaginable.

Well some folks, thank goodness, have been imagining and with the discovery of graphene, have begun to make the elusive supercapacitors actually work.  This folks, is fantastic news.


The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Texas and Oklahoma citizens are not so crazy

Watching Texas and Oklahoma politicians in action is not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart.  They dumb down the nation's textbooks, they cheapen the political discourse, but worst of all, there's a whole bunch of climate change deniers who sound like drooling morons when scientific studies are debated.

But it turns out, most folks from these states can actually do things like read thermometers and rain gauges—and have memories good enough to remember what those readings used to be.  What with prolonged droughts and crazy heat waves and force 5 tornadoes, these people are as conscious of climate change as almost anyone anywhere in the nation.

So for all my liberal environmentalist friends out there I would say, "Stop excusing your inaction because you think the deniers are winning.  They are not. And IF you wish to lead on these issues, you better come up with something more interesting than a program to raise consciousness.  The consciousness is fine—it's the what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it part that needs more work."

A green industrial strategy?

When I wrote the precursor to Elegant Technology that was published in Finland in 1989, I was shocked to learn that many of my readers thought my book was funny—as in it made them laugh. This was noted in several reviews. I didn't know just how to respond—while I like to think that I have a pretty good sense of humor, I certainly did not write anything I deliberately tried to make funny.  So of course I asked anyone who would answer what he or she thought funny.  One answer was my contention that we could organize a conversion to a green society using largely the same organizational techniques used by the military-industrial complex.  I certainly did not think such a suggestion funny.  After all, a green technology would be, by necessity, bleeding-edge sophisticated and no one got to do bleeding-edge like the MIC.  Why not borrow such a strategy?

The real reason folks thought such a suggestion funny is that when they thought about environmental problems, their knee-jerk reaction was to reach for the Garden of Eden, back-to-nature solution.  The fact is that this option was eliminated so long ago, it is not even worth considering but there it is—the first suggestion at every gathering of environmentalists.  If you don't believe me, I encourage you to read the comments this video provoked—follow the link.  Garden of Eden thinking lives on.

Transcript: PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.

Getting serious about climate change

I have just spent a couple of hours looking at pictures of the devastation that is the Philippines.  It is enough to make grown men weep. If I have ever sounded flippant about the human toll climate change has caused, I sincerely apologize.  And I make this promise—no more Mr. Nice Guy.  If anyone tries to deny the science of climate change in my presence, I will utterly destroy that person with every debating skill I have learned in my life.

Denying climate change is not clever.  It is not cute.  It is the act of fools.  It is the act of psychopaths.  And this especially goes for the Poles who have "invested" in brand-new coal burning plants and then have the temerity to host a climate conference this year.  What ARE you thinking?!

The latest climate change "hoax" roars through the Philippines

I have a rule about commenting on extreme weather events—they must be record-breakers.  This time, the record in question is: What are the maximum recorded winds of a storm at landfall?  This seems to have been broken.  Unfortunately, the human toll and damage to the life-support systems of the country have probably suffered record damage as well.

Typhoon Haiyan swept ashore in the Philippines on Friday Nov 8 at 4:30 am local time packing winds in the neighborhood of 200 mph (320 kph, 90 meters per second).  To a landlubber like me, such a storm is almost incomprehensible.  We have tornadoes here in the American midwest and while I have been lucky enough to have never seen one in action, I do know about the sorts of damage they can cause—especially the big ones.  A force 4 monster leveled one of the little towns I lived in as a child—just reduced it to splinters.

Here's the deal.  The arbitrary line between a force 4 and 5 tornado is windspeeds of 200 mph.  So Typhoon Haiyan was as destructive as a force 4 tornado (think Joplin Missouri or Moore Oklahoma.)  But here's the difference—a very large tornado is only a couple of miles wide.  You can be in the center of the destructive path and yet be a few-minute walk to somewhere where the water systems work, the electricity is on, and the roofs still keep out the weather.  Rescue efforts can begin almost immediately.  By contrast, Typhoon Haiyan laid down a path of force 4 tornado destruction almost 300 miles wide.  It will be weeks before we even know how many people were killed and years before things can be rebuilt to anything like it was pre-storm.

Renewables encounter the industrial saboteurs

The Europeans have decided that they should embrace renewables while here in USA, we are going fracking.  Right now, there are those who think that we have made the right choice.  I seriously doubt it.  When the real bills for fracking come due—just in time to notice that this is a very expensive way to extract fossil fuels from the earth—I am pretty sure that folks will come to the opposite conclusion.  But this piece comes from Business Insider and they are notorious for taking short-term views of almost everything.

There is SOME validity to the arguments that Europe's push to meet their pretty ambitious emissions targets has indeed made electricity expensive and that expensive electricity has and will cause a world of hurt to Europe's poor.  In my mind, this says that the real problem is trying to meet some tough carbon emission standards using neoliberal economics—the flaw isn't the attempt to cut down on carbon pollution but the crazy idea that everything worth doing should be profitable.  Veblen called the folks who use the monetary mechanisms to disrupt the necessary workings of an economy "industrial saboteurs."  It is hard to imagine a more accurate description.

One can only hope that these conditions are temporary because it is a disaster if they are not.

Saturday toons 9 NOV 13

The mess that is Fukushima

While some serious scientists are telling us that it would be a good idea to start building nuclear power plants again because of the threat of climate change, the Fukushima disaster keeps reminding everyone just how dangerous such an idea really is.  Yes, it required a freak set of circumstances to bring down the Fukushima complex.  Yes, TEPCO has been so inept at handling the disaster that recently, Prime Minister Abe did the unthinkable—he actually asked for outside assistance.  (Notice that idea has gone nowhere fast!).  But even so, it is extremely difficult to argue that that such a set of freak occurrences cannot happen elsewhere.

So now TEPCO is about to embark on a very dangerous operation they have known was necessary since the big tsunami—they have to move the spent fuel rods off-site.  Moving fuel rods is a normal operation of a nuke, but the automated systems for this operation have been damaged so this must be done manually.  There are 1500 rods that are both heavy and fragile.  The money quote is “There is more radioactivity in that fuel pool than in all the bombs than in all the bombs that were fired in above ground testing. So we have the equivalent of 700 nuclear bombs worth of material in that fuel pool. These [the fuel rods] are not going to pull out easily and the fear is, is that they might snap and release the radiation that’s inside them.”

Keep in mind here that Fukushima is close enough to Tokyo and its 30 million inhabitants that even a slight mishap would put all those folks in an exclusion zone.  TEPCO estimates this operation will take 18 months.  And then the hard part begins—removing the damaged reactor cores.

Conformity is so important to economic thinking—NOT

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise (as Gomer Pyle would say).  The Initiative on Global Markets took a poll of academic economists and gloriorski, they took the exact same position—all of them—that the Fed itself would.  Now here's the "ironic" part—one of the questions was whether the Federal Reserve should be audited—a political position that has drawn growing support in Washington in the past few years.  The support comes from seeming opposites such as Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders.  The Fed is opposed to an audit because they believe—probably correctly—that if their workings were exposed to the light of day, all sorts of bad things would happen to them including a loss of their ability to act independently from political demands. (The horror.)

Now anyone remotely interested in how the economy is doing should just leap at the chance see the Fed's books.  The Fed is an important actor in the economy so it's kind of hard to say anything meaningful about economics without good information on what they are doing.  So here we have it—a bunch of top-flight economists have decided that their "scientific" discipline doesn't actually need key data.  So they are not scientists at all—but rather shills for a narrow point of view on monetary policy.  And like the faithful acolytes they are, all of them without exception have toed the Fed's line.  (Cue Gomer)

Keep an eye on the water—ocean warming

Because my favorite college prof, by far, taught energy and public policy, I have some opinions on energy issues that I have held for a long time that properly belong to him.  They are:

1) Nuclear power generation is properly thought of as a state technology and attempts to convert it to private enterprise is both hypocritical and nonsensical.  Until we jettison this crazy idea, nuclear power will remain too dangerous and only profitable with massive subsidies.

2) No matter how many problems nuclear power has (and he could go on for hours about those problems) the dirtiest power source will ALWAYS be coal.  In those pre-climate change days, he taught about the evils of coal's combustion products like mercury and acid rain.  What he insisted we understand was that air pollution tends to become water pollution—and while air pollution is an enormous problem, water pollution is deadly.

So it doesn't surprise me one little bit that the added atmospheric heat and CO2 is ending up in the oceans.  That is how these things work, after all.  (Because air and water are both fluids, they tend to act in identical ways and because we spend our time living in these fluids and navigating the interface between them (boating), we have accumulated an incredible amount of information on the nature of these fluids.)  So as anyone familiar with the science will tell you, this is NOT good news.

The austerity swindle

Actually, when you think about it, there is nothing "neo" about neoliberalism.   It's a set of ideas that have been around since forever—or at least since the moneychangers started getting economists to justify their greed and the tactics used to satisfy that greed.  It turns out the the sort of economic thinking used to organize a society to maximize prosperity for the maximum number of people is the exception.

This reality came as something of a surprise to me.  I was educated to believe that economics had evolved over the years to the point where a near-universal prosperity was well within the realm of possibility—and that only fools would even consider returning to the bad old days of colonialism, feudalism, slavery, usury, and the rest of the manifestations of Predator Class thinking.  Well, we were wrong—it turns out that the economics of unchecked greed is the default position and what was even more sinister, that thinking was just sophisticated enough to seduce folks who didn't think about economics very hard.  And so I watched in horror as politicians from the supposed representatives of the poor and middle class sell out to the economics of the Predator classes.  It didn't just happen to the wicked and stupid.  Jimmy Carter was a Baptist Sunday School teacher who was once Hyman Rickover's fair-haired boy in the nuclear navy.  Bill Clinton was once a Rhodes Scholar who could act as empathetic as anyone on earth.  And Obama was once the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

But as Hossein Zadeh argues below, it is those Democratic neoliberals who have done so much damage to all manifestations of progressive economics.  What is even more pathetic, these folks have actually believed this was a good thing.  To this day, I doubt Jimmy Carter has ever questioned his decision to appoint Paul Volcker to head the Fed, or to deregulate the trucking and airline industries, etc.  Clinton has never apologized for NAFTA or the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  And Obama is set to rip apart the remnants of the social safety net and apparently thinks this would be a good idea.  He even calls it a "grand bargain."

Is nuclear power necessary?

Mention nuclear power at a gathering of self-proclaimed environmentalists and you will understand immediately what it is like to actually take a dump in the punch bowl.  Sociologists talk about boundary-maintaining mechanisms—the issues that determine whether or not someone is a member of a group.  Opposition to nuclear power is indeed a boundary-maintaining issue for the vast majority of environmentalists—at least in the English-speaking world—and for many it is the most important one.

These are people who argue that we can make a shift to renewables that in combination with major improvements in energy-efficiency, would allow us to go green.  For over 30 years, I have argued this point of view myself.  But the older I get, the more I worry that we don't have the sociology to pull off such a trick. The biggest problem, of course, is that current economic thinking will not allow us to spend enough money to effect such a big change.  I happen to think that such economic thinking is insane, but since about 98% of working economists are more concerned with debt servicing than a significant rebuild of the planet's infrastructure, it doesn't much matter what people like me think.

In the meantime, the environmental movement has not been able to make much progress in an actual conversion to a green society.  MUCH time has been lost holding conventions, publishing papers, and getting arrested in civil rights-style protests.  And in all this time, the output of carbon emissions has not slowed one whit, the number of successful net-zero habitats is tiny, the overwhelming majority of environmentalists still believe pollution is something we can outlaw, etc.

I am hardly alone in wondering if we still have time to build the green future we imagined.  When James Hansen was on Letterman, David asked him point blank if he didn't think it was already too late to do anything about climate change.  Hansen bailed on him and put on a happy face, but we know that Hansen can count and knows that at the current rates of green reform and renewal, it IS already too late.  So it was not especially surprising that Hansen is one of the big name scientists who has asked the environmental movement to drop their opposition to nuclear power.

I can almost hear the screams of protests.  I mean, I know environmentalists who know only two things—clubbing baby seals to death is wrong and nuclear power is out of the question, but they're open to compromise on those cute little seals.

The perpetual ugliness of "American Exceptionalism"

188-2.  Really.  That's how badly USA recently lost in a General Assembly vote to condemn USA's economic blockade of Cuba.  As a foreign policy strategy, the USA's continuing confrontation with Cuba would have to improve considerably to rise to the level of simple insanity.  I just hate this sort of thing—along with all the other reasons the warmongers give for making life miserable for others for no reason that makes any sense to any rational being.  I want to work with everyone to solve the grave problems facing human existence but because I detest the machinations of the military-warmongering set, I regularly am accused of harboring "isolationist" sentiment.  It's the slander hurled at we poor "misguided" folks who think that almost ANY policy is better than blowing things up and murdering people.  If warfare ever had value, it most certainly ended August 6, 1945.

Nice to know that no matter how global one's perspective, the New York Times will call anyone who doesn't enjoy the thought of wrecking things an isolationist.  I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone at that hopelessly arrogant publication that it is they who are the partially evolved.

Fuel cells for cars

Like many, I went through a serious hydrogen phase in my green thinking.  Part of this was due to youthful experiments with the gas.  In those innocent / optimistic days of the early 1960s, I was able to get my hands on the materials necessary to construct a primitive hydrogen generator on my parents back porch one summer when I was still in junior high.  A neighborhood pharmacist actually GAVE me a gallon of hydrochloric acid in return for a promise that I would make a few hydrogen-filled balloons for his kids.  Because the hydrogen molecule is so small, the resulting balloons did not stay inflated very long, but we got a few to climb out of sight.  Mostly, I was interested in making enough hydrogen to get some small explosions.  They were quite amazing—a gallon jar filled with hydrogen made a satisfying whomp when lit.  Actually, what was amazing is that no one got hurt, I didn't burn the house down, and nothing was ruined by spilled acid.  Even so, enough responsible adults got worried enough by a kid producing small explosions that my source of acid dried up.

This led me to an attempt to produce hydrogen gas through electrolysis.  My source of direct current was the transformer for my electric train.  I did not make much hydrogen this way—after running my generator for three days I only had made a few teaspoons of gas.  Soon the summer ended and I went back to school having learned that while fooling around with hydrogen was a lot of fun, it was extremely difficult to handle and contain and that separating hydrogen out of water would require very sophisticated machinery and a lot of electricity.  That summer's experiments were the source of my skepticism whenever I have encountered hydrogen enthusiasts who claimed that the only path to the future lay in replacing the carbon-based infrastructure with a hydrogen-based one.

But because it is possible to run many thing on hydrogen, the enthusiasts have been able to look past the very real practical problems of making the new society work.  Just the problem of self-serve fueling stations for cars and trucks should be enough to scuttle most hydrogen enthusiasm—but not all.  And so we find that the world's largest carmaker is going to try to sell a vehicle powered by a hydrogen-fueled fuel cell.  As someone who has had a more-than-normal experience with hydrogen, I remain skeptical.  However, this is Toyota and as someone who lives in a town crawling with hybrid Priuses, I am impressed by what that company can do through sheer determination.  The question will be, will Toyota's supply of world-class engineers be enough to produce a car my Prius-driving neighbor could fill with hydrogen?