Chomsky on TPP

In the fictional account of the protests against NAFTA / WTO, a movie called the Battle of Seattle, one protagonist asks (somewhat rhetorically) "How do you stop people who will stop at nothing?"  Good. Damn. Question!

Not satisfied with running all the world's governments and cornering the world's wealth, the Neoliberals behind those trade agreements have decided there are a few gaps in their organized plunder they intend to close.  And so we have the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  And like those previous agreements, there are things they want to stop.  Because these agreements tend to be negotiated in secret, we do not know all the details but I am under the impression that one of the progressive loopholes they intend to close is the possibility for publicly-owned banks like the State Bank of North Dakota.

The reason this is believable in that these trade agreements have as their main goal the privatization of absolutely everything.  In the days of the Marxists, the goal was to collectivize all decisions.  That was a monumental failure.  It was just far too extreme.  After all, there are things that should be subject to collective decision-making just as there are things that should be left to individual initiative.  The problem with agreements like TPP is that they insist that all decisions should be reserved to the private sector—an idea as preposterous as anything the Marxists ever dreamed up.

I say this because I believe that the only way we will ever address a big problem like climate change is to have an aggressive, publicly-controled development bank that would be as large and powerful as the Fed or the European Central Bank—combined.

Is there a role for hydrogen powered fuel-cell cars?

Well, it looks like Toyota is about to find out.

As someone who has been fascinated by hydrogen and the wonders of devices like fuel cells for over 50 years, I will admit that I spent at least two decades preaching how the future was going to see the carbon-based economy replaced by a hydrogen one.  It is actually a plausible scenario except for one major problem—even if hydrogen-powered cars could be made practical, reliable, and safe, building up the vast necessary refueling infrastructure was going to be so expensive that even IF the energy giants wanted to do it, it was probably way too expensive to sell to the Exxon / BP / etc./ shareholders.

Toyota has so many top-flight engineers that their main problem is keeping them engaged.  There are only so many refinements possible to a gasoline-fueled Corolla, after all.  So they have decided that refueling is not their problem but making a fuel-celled car worthy of a Toyota badge is.  This is an example of grown-ups with skills doing something they do very well.  At the end of this short article is a small clip of Toyota doing cold-weather testing in Yellowknife.

So while I have lost most of my youthful enthusiasm for hydrogen vehicles, I am still VERY curious to see how this experiment turns out!

It was 42°F today in southern Minnesota

I had a friend visit me on Saturday to watch some football.  This being Minnesota, the conversation soon turned to the weather.  This friend was especially well suited to discuss the topic as he had been the producer of the weather reports for a local network affiliate in the 1980s.  So my question to him was, "Weren't January cold snaps much worse back when you were doing the weather—or have I just become an old curmudgeon?"  I was assured that indeed the weather was much colder in the 1970s and 80s, my memory was still working fine, and the clowns who are insisting that this latest cold snap is proof that global warming is a hoax are the one who are getting it backwards.

This AP article pretty much confirms what we remembered.

More biofuel progress

Last August, I created a post about some significant bioengineering experiments at the University of Minnesota.  I have long been skeptical about the promises of bioengineering, living as I do in the corn /ethanol belt.  But even though I am convinced that corn-based ethanol is perhaps the craziest idea in human history, my visit to this microwave-assisted pyrolysis micro-algae project convinced me I should at least keep an open mind about fuels derived from algae grown in waste water.

History teaches us that breakthrough inventions tend to happen when a lot of folks are convinced a project are worth pursuing.  So I was pleased to discover this description of another algae-based project in the Smithsonian Magazine.  I wish everyone well—after all it may be impossible to eliminate the need for all liquid fuels.  However, I also know that there is a minefield of real-world problems between a good idea and a good product.

Saturday toons 11 JAN 14

Renweables don't solve everything

One of the primary reasons for developing renewable energy is that fuel costs pose significant problems for the real economy.  Not only does a person (country, world) have to come up with some form of income to pay for these costs, but the fuel products are burned which means this problem is essentially never-ending.  In theory, with renewables folks should be able to plug this perpetual drain on their incomes.

In theory.  Spain and Portugal have done almost everything right when it comes to getting a handle on their energy costs.  Yet their economies are a freaking disaster.  Turns out predatory, finance capitalism can overwhelm even the best executed plans of the Producer Classes.  Anyone who doesn't believe the Leisure Classes are EVIL should look at this story.

Reducing a carbon footprint is harder than it looks

All that German effort to go green got a major setback in 2013. My explanation is that they are trying to do too many things at the same time.  It's bad enough that they were trying to replace coal fired plants without also suddenly trying to phase out nuclear as well.  After Fukushima, the highly organized anti-nuke forces pounced (and one can hardly blame them.)  But it would have probably been better to phase their nukes out over 20 years because something is going to have to provide baseload generation.  If it isn't nuclear, it will be burning brown coal.

The truth is, even the Germans don't know how to replace fire-based electrical generation.  And while it should be possible to run a society on wind and PV, a society with infrastructure designed to get power on demand will have serious problems converting to intermittent energy supplies.  Of course, a cheap and reliable electrical storage scheme would make that problem disappear in a heartbeat.

Any jackass can kick down the barn

Just like I grew out of My Weekly Reader in fourth grade, I grew out of CBS news in 1982.  Television is a damn inefficient way to get news anyway and after a couple of years of the Reagan administration, I had come to the conclusion that I could do without the cheap sensationalism, the sloppy reporting, and the historical illiteracy of the so-called Tiffany Network's "news" department.  So I am not especially surprised to learn that even by the degraded standards of CBS, they are breaking new records for bullshit "journalism."

I wouldn't even bother to comment on their latest efforts except that Sunday night, they decided to trash the subject of clean / green tech.  Regular readers of this blog know this subject is near and dear to my heart—mostly because I absolutely believe that we simply cannot solve the big problems like climate change and the end of the Petroleum Age without $trillions of investment in new and improved infrastructure.  Fixing these problems will require massive amounts of hard work, inventive genius, and a tight embrace of the Instinct of Workmanship.  Even then, solving such massive problems will be a close thing.

What we absolutely do NOT need is a bunch of cheap sensationalistic mouth-breathers telling us that because this will be hard and there will be setbacks, we should not even try.  Even worse, we just saw a major "news" organization claim that the very methods this country used to industrialize in the first place should no longer be tried because industrial capitalism is not politically respectable in today's world of Leisure Class uselessness.  Industrialization made us rich in the first place but according to CBS, this sort of wealth through hard work is no longer respectable.  Garbage thinking from garbage people!

It's cold! (Update, not really!)

This weekend, we put a new battery in one of the cars.  It was still starting but we were facing a prediction for -20°F (-29°C) this morning and had some serious reasons for wanting the car to fire.  Besides, the old battery was nearing eight years old so why push our luck?  There is nothing magical about -20°F. It's just that when I was a kid, that was the temp that provoked my mother into full worry-wart status.

So this morning it was an almost balmy -7°F.  This barely qualifies as winter.  Of course the car started—it would have with the old battery! But to hear the climate-change deniers over at Fox tell it, this mild cold snap is reason enough to discredit all the science and scientists who are working to give us a realistic description of what is happening to the atmosphere.

R.I.P Phil Everly

One of the musical greats passed Jan. 3.  The Everly brothers were so innovative and their harmonies so sweet, they influenced a couple of generations of musicians who would follow including the Beatles, Paul Simon, and Graham Nash.  They were the musician's musicians.  They have been covered by the greats.  They were especially popular in Britain so it was fun to see how the Guardian reported Phil's death.

Much of their popularity was due to the fact they gave love and longing a sound track.  This was especially true of Dream, Dream, Dream,

It's cold!

Monday, January 6, 2014, the governor of the State of Minnesota has closed all the schools because of the cold.  This doesn't happen often.  But I haven't heard anyone complain about the decision.  It's -19°F (-29°C) right now with a wind chill of -34°F (-37°C).  This is dangerous stuff and no one wants to lose a child at a bus stop.  In fact, no one really wants to find out how well the busses work at this temperature.

When I was doing research on the childhood conditions facing the Veblen family in those early settlement days, I was reminded of just how savage the weather was.  Thorstein's sister wrote about how their mother would pin mittens to the children's sleeves so they wouldn't accidentally fall off during the night.  Homes did not have central heating so while it was toasty in the rooms with stoves, it got seriously cold in the rest of the house.  And a couple of times a day it was necessary to care for the animals.  Just keeping them in water was a major undertaking.

So while it has not been this nasty-cold for about 20 years around here, it doesn't require much of a memory to recall when things were a whole lot worse.  Back in the 1970s, we had some brutal winters.  Cars still had carburetors and were VERY difficult to start.  Before Gore-Tex and Thinsulite, clothes were not very warm.  But it was also colder.  This current outbreak of extreme weather is very unlikely to break any records.  Talked with an old college roommate yesterday who grew up outside of International Falls.  When told temps were expected to fall in the -40°F range this morning, he snorted, "For the first week in January, that's pretty mild!"

So even on a day when the governor closes the schools to keep the children warm and safe inside, there is still plenty of evidence that the planet is getting warmer.  Now for anyone who has to go out in this weather to get necessary work accomplished, the fact that it is a few degrees warmer than the winters of the 1880s is not much comfort.  But for those who do not absolutely have to go outside, be careful, hunker down, and get caught up on some reading.  Winter is what makes us who we are.

And for those of us who survived a few winters in western North Dakota, someone who tells it like it is.

When the left abandons economics

One of my new year's resolutions is to stop being shocked whenever I discover that when it comes to economics, most of my best friends are neoliberal swine.  Best example is fine couple who once worked in Sen Mondale's office.  Over the years, they have indicated strong support for the whole neocon / neoliberal agenda from the invasion of Iraq to privatizing social security.  And for a long time I just assumed that they fell in with a bad crowd during the Reagan years and have not recovered.  Then it dawned on me a few months back while listening to Obama spout neoliberal garbage about the national debt, my friends could still be good "liberal" democrats.  It's MY problem if I keep confusing liberals for people who should be able to easily spout the economic reasons for supporting the New Deal agenda.

Veblen told us why government types eventually agree on the big topics—they're good members of the Leisure Classes.  For example, Veblen pointed out the main thing the whole class can agree on and that is the PROPER way to "earn" a living is through force and fraud.  Exactly how do good Leisure Class politicians call for jailing the banksters?  The answer is, They don't!  The problems with corruption on Wall Street are perfectly excusable so long as the politicians get a cut of the fraud.

This problem is not new nor is it confined to USA.  Here's the money quotes from Ms. Johnstone's article below:

French industry is vanishing, with factory shutdowns week after week.  Taxes on low income citizens are going up, to save the banks and the euro. Disillusion with the European Union is growing. EU rules exclude any serious effort to improve the French economy. Meanwhile, politicians on the left and the right continue their empty speeches, full of clichés about “human rights” – largely as an excuse to go to war in the Middle East or rant against China and Russia. The approval rating of President Hollande has sunk to 15%. However people vote, they get the same policies, made in EU.

Europeans are less and less enthusiastic about the EU as it ruins their economies and robs them of all democratic power over the economy. They can vote for gay marriage, but not for the slightest Keynesian measure, much less socialism.

Sounds like Chris Hedges pointing out that there is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.

But it is worse than that.  When the various Labor parties around the world embraced Marxism, they were simply buying a set of ideas that sounded pro-Producing Classes but were profoundly Leisure Class.  The fact that the Marxist states produced vile garbage shows you cannot have Marxism and high-quality goods simultaneously.  The only serious political movement that had a true Producer agenda was the Greenback / Populist / Non-Partisan League / Framer-Labor Party in the USA midwest and west.  (Yes my Canadian friends, I DO know about the Socreds and yes, they most certainly qualify.)

While it isn't necessary that the Producing classes take over politics (which is almost impossible to imagine anyway), to have a Green future, a Producing Class agenda is necessary.  And of course, the key to having a significant Producer agenda is to take control of monetary policy.  Give us a development bank and the Leisure Classes can have the rest.

2013—well, that was interesting

The defining image of 2013 has certainly got to be the picture of Pres. Obama yukking it up at Nelson Mandela's funeral.  The last president to actually use some presidential power was probably Nixon.  These days, a president is like a third-rate quarterback who calls the play sent in to him and is terrified to change it.  He doesn't run the economy, he has no influence on foreign policy, he has no control over a legislative agenda.  So his role is to dress up and read his script—and mind his manners for ceremonial occasions.  That he couldn't stay serious for the length of a memorial to one of the more significant figures in African history speaks volumes of how utterly bored he is with his role as puppet.

Notice here how little has changed in at least 40 years.  Of course, that should not come as a surprise—most of the "news" these days concerns the coming and goings of the Leisure Classes—finance and politics, sports and warfare, fashion and entertainment, and the never-ending pursuit of more perfect forms of uselessness.  In the world of the Leisure Classes, any change more profound than a new dance or hairstyle is to be systematically shunned.  If there is any change, it is usually a reversion to some infinitely irrelevant mediocrity.  For example, the political and economic discussions of the first 13 years of the 20th century were several order of magnitude more interesting and important than in the first 13 of the 21st.

Yet even in these days of Leisure Class ennui, they still have the capacity to astonish and entertain.  The Snowden leaks are revealing just what the country bought with its billions spent on "intelligence."  What it bought was the ability to track every phone call and keystroke of every computer on the planet.  Unfortunately, except for scamming the financial markets or keeping up on the sex lives of ex wives, no one seems know why anyone would actually want to collect that enormous pile of data.  But gossip is considered a Leisure Class virtue and snooping around on one neighbors is the essence of gossip so apparently just collecting the pile is an end in itself.

Then there is the matter of a new Pope.  As someone who comes from a clan that pretty much decided to ignore popes since 1517, I am bit detached from how important it is for the Catholic Church to occasionally burp forth someone who is willing to represent someone other than the super-rich right wing thugs that usually dominate discussions.  His most recent shocker was criticizing the beliefs in trickle-down economics.  Not surprisingly, the USA Catholic Right is going ballistic.  The Catholic Church is predisposed institutionally towards a profoundly conservative bent so we can reasonably predict that Francis represents a temporary flicker of light in a very dark place.  No one ever went bust betting on the darkness when the subject is Catholicism.

If more of the same-old from the Leisure Classes was all that happened in 2013, New Year's Eve would be appropriately spent getting roaring drunk.  Fortunately, the Producing Classes had a year that suggests we might not be forever stuck on stupid.

The Tesla Model S.  Whenever I am ghosting down the road late at night swaddled in fine leathers, late Beethoven quartets playing on the too-good-for-my-ears sound system, a climate system coddling me within a fraction of a degree of whatever I specify as perfect, I understand at a primal level why folks were never going to voluntarily give up the internal-combustion engine automobile.  No one in their right mind would trade a Lexus LS for a Nissan Leaf.  Then came the Model S.  Suddenly, that perfect audio environment of an LS sounds like a factory by comparison, that too-smooth-to-be-real V-8 is like a tractor compared to an electric motor, etc.  In the light of a Model S it seems that folks will someday very soon wonder why they ever put up with the fumes and smells, and the mechanical unreliability, of the gasoline-powered car.

Graphene.  If the Producer Classes have an occupation that drives all notions of prosperity and progress, it is clearly the material science folks.  And 2013 provided an example of just what research into graphene can accomplish when the South Koreans announced they had fabricated a super-capacitor from the stuff.  The idea that there is a method for safe, cheap, and reliable electrical storage that can be made from one of the cheapest and most abundant elements on earth is so wonderful, I keep re-reading the article to make sure someone hasn't changed the outcome.

Commodity-priced PV cells.  For years I have wondered how folks were ever going to adjust to the end of the Age of Petroleum.  Now the answer seems to perfectly simple—they'll just go out and buy some solar cells.  Solar cells became so cheap in 2013 they actually triggered trade wars.  In fact, 2/3rds of all solar installations worldwide have occurred in the last 2.5 years.  For the first time in my life, the end of the age of petroleum will not be some enormous trauma but will instead provoke a global sigh of relief.

So Happy New Year.  It is TIME to ignore the fools that have frightened us for so long and start planning for a much better future.

Suzuki on exponential growth

On November 28, Tony created a post that has proven to be one of our most popular ever.  It was a blast at the techno-pessimists and spoke of hopeful possibilities.  It was called Would'ya like a serving of hope for Thanksgiving?

Even though I am not willing to go so far as to claim that shortages are the result of bad economics, his post was quite persuasive.  I want to make this blog more upbeat.  But I also want to keep things mathematically literate.

I already have a highlight post that covers this subject—Elevator Speech #2--Continuous geometric growth in a finite biosphere is impossible.  Look for it on the left side.  But I also found this little gem starring David Suzuki that describes the problem of geometric growth about as well as it can be done.

In short, I want to get more optimistic but I intend to remain firmly grounded.

Buffett on wind power

If you wander over to a financial site like Business Insider, you will discover that most of the folks who are heavy hitters in that world are pure gamblers.  They occasionally talk about the real economy but that is very rare.  The one guy who stands out from this crowd of sharpies is Warren Buffett, who has made a fortune by concentrating on real economic considerations—like does this company make a good product.

So now we see that Buffett has decided to drop a cool billion on wind turbines to be erected in Iowa.  For those folks who believe in "trickle-down" economics and the ultimate virtue of the large investor, this is an amazing cautionary tale.  He is easily the most enlightened rich guy to prowl the canyons of Wall Street, and yet he is a serious Warren-come-lately to this technology.  Siemens and Vestas have already perfected the technology and set up production facilities in the USA Midwest.  The state of Iowa has invested in junior colleges that can crack out people who can keep those big turbines running.  The truth is, if we had to wait for guys like Buffett to provide us with new technologies, we might be waiting forever.

Greider on Yellen

Tony had a hit post over at Dailykos earlier this week where he pointed out, accurately, that Elizabeth Warren cannot save us, and neither can the Pope.  He suggested that left-progressives take a page out of the progressive playbook and start worrying about changing things down-ticket.

Interestingly, because the world's societies need massive infrastructure upgrades, and the Producing Classes can build almost anything that is properly funded, some enlightened new central bankers actually COULD save us.  Now since central banking is a haven for economic reactionaries, this doesn't seem all that likely—but in theory it is at least possible (think Marriner Eccles.)

Here is USA's leading authority on the Fed speculating on whether Ms. Yellen just might be the coming of that new, more enlightened, Fed Chair.  Me?  I'll believe it when I see it.  But then, I certainly did not expect an Argentine Jesuit to become such an enlightened Pope either.

Another warning on energy

It seems as though geologists must retire from big oil before they can talk sense about peak oil and its ramifications.  Of course, even the industry line that we have 53 years worth of oil at current consumption is frightening enough.  Oil is the most convenient, energy-dense substance we have ever found.  Replacing all the infrastructure that relies on oil could easily require 53 years and that assumes we start a crash program to replace it with renewables.  Unfortunately, the official line these days is that fracking (or some such thing) will save us so what's the rush.

100 years of the Fed

The Fed has been in existence for 100 years now. For the vast majority of that time, they have proven to be a disaster for anyone who has to work for a living—and by disaster, I mean Great Depression-level disaster.

The Fed has had exactly ONE director who was even close to acting enlightened—Marriner Eccles. And he was from Utah so came from a background of frontier-style economic development and the political thoughts of the Western political parties organized around money (Greenback, Populist, etc.)

Eccles understood that unless the real economy propers, bankers have no customers who can service their loans—and banks go out of business.

Now if this doesn't sound anything like the thoughts of Greenspan, or Volcker, or Bernanke, its because that useless protoplasm has never even entertained such thoughts.

O Day Full of Grace

Merry Christmas!

For someone who spent at least 40 years absolutely HATING this holiday—mostly because the folks hawking useless junk made it too expensive to enjoy—I find it a little odd to be encouraging the idea that someone should feel joy in the middle of this time of cold and darkness.  (It was -2°F (-19°C) this afternoon at 2:00 when I got back from grocery shopping so it is still occasionally cold at Christmas. And no, the crass materialism has not disappeared.)

Not surprisingly, the reason I feel the need to spread tidings of comfort and joy relates to music.  In spite of the fact that Christmas is now associated with a large body of intensely vile and truly ugly music, there still remains much that is transcendentally beautiful.  And as someone who spent much of my childhood learning to perform this music, it is where I have turned for refuge from plastic Santas singing about Rudolf and other manifestation of bad taste.  And this year, I learned something completely new about my favorite carol that is so wonderful, it makes me giggle.

I happen to live in a little town that is arguably the center of choral singing in North America.  In 1911, a young musician from Norway established a choir associated with the small liberal arts school his countrymen had formed in the late 19th century. Named F. Melius Christiansen, this musician was handsome, gifted, and charismatic and it wasn't long before his choir was touring regularly showing audiences just how intensely wonderful a cappella singing could be.  Soon he was writing arrangements that would musically challenge his increasingly gifted charges.

One particularly difficult number is entitled O Day Full of Grace which became a beloved Christmas standard for any choir that could actually manage to stay on top of its aural fireworks.  For years I have loved the thing just for the sound but for some reason, this year I decided I really wanted to know the words that are often lost in those soaring musical phrases. Google is your friend and I soon discovered that this little gem was written by a fellow named Nicolai F. S. Grundtvig who had adapted a 15th-century folk song in 1826 to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of the coming of Christianity to Denmark.

Grundtvig wrote approximately 1500 hymns but this accomplishment of his is rarely mentioned because of his big project in life—the folk school movement.  The Danes are still proud of their folk schools and for good reasons.  The goal of these schools was not only to teach practical skills to rural Danish youth, but provide them with a sufficient appreciation of their history and culture to make them effective citizens in a democracy.  The formula has been amazingly successful—last December I created a post about the role of a folk school in the development of the Danish wind turbine industry.  In fact, it can be argued that the ideas of Grundtvig are still relevant to the modern Danish economy.  Folk schools eventually came to USA and one in Tennessee called the Highlander Folk School helped educate Rosa Parks.

Not surprisingly, Grundtvig is still held in high esteem by many Danes.  In 1927, they decided to build a church in Copenhagen named for him.  Because Grundtvig was associated with innovation, the church would be a monument to modern Danish design—it remains one of the more spectacular examples of Protestant church architecture to this day.  It is built with simple yellow brick—the kind used to build warehouses.

Increasingly extreme weather

Even following my little rule that I refuse to discuss the changing climate except when something happens that is off the charts, 2013 was still a year full of notable events worth mention.  Here John Vidal provides a recap.

What I find especially interesting is that extremely violent weather events don't seem to lead to significant action.  Oh, we are still going to climate conferences where folks point at each other trying to assess blame.  Papers get published.  And polls get taken to see if the great unwashed have finally come to the conclusion that a radically changed atmosphere actually poses a problem.  Fortunately, these Leisure Class activities are not the sum of human endeavor.

We are still stuck on stupid in that bizarro world called economics so necessary changes are still woefully underfunded.  Even so, there do seem to be minor flickers of hope—especially in the world of PV cells.  And IF the graphene-based super-capacitors actually live up to their promise of providing safe, convenient, and affordable electrical storage, we might survive yet.

Haiti and solar power

For years I have been telling people, you cannot save for the future, you can only invest in the future.  I usually get a puzzled look so I would try explain, "The fact that you forego a purchase in 1981 and rack up the old electrons down at the bank is no assurance that when you need someone to change your drool bucket in 2015, that person will be there to do it.  No, you want to invest in social and physical systems so that when the time comes and you have become weak enough to require regular assistance, the economic and social conditions are fair and prosperous enough so someone will want to help you."  At that point, folks will usually ask me to cough up an example of what I am talking about.  And my stock response is, "You will know that folks understand the difference between saving and investing when the 401k plans start investing in solar-powered nursing homes."

Not that I have actually seen one, understand.  The point here is that we need a LOT of investments just like that.  When the time comes for the drool-bucket swap, the person who swaps will have needed reliable and affordable transportation, routine training in the sciences of sanitation, etc.  And since the work itself is essentially unpleasant, the rest of the swapper's working conditions better be first-rate.  Like working in a building that can power its own heating and cooling systems.

And now there is an example of such thinking.  They have built a solar-powered hospital on Haiti.  It is probably not the first such hospital but by all appearances, it is the largest and most sophisticated.  Ah, the irony—the poorest countries in the world have some of the best solar resources.  (And the last shall be first. Matt 19:30)