Cancun and climate change

So it is November 2010 and we see another example of "we don't know what to do so let's have a convention" on the very serious topic of climate change.  This time the ultra-concerned are flying to the lovely resort of Cancun Mexico.

Don't get me wrong, I have been convinced by the science of global warming since 1988.  It, and it's sister problem Peak Oil, are easily the two most serious problems facing humanity.  But the idea that some folks with laptops, powerpoint presentations, and an ocean view are going to somehow address these problems is literally beyond insane.

Why do we know this to be true?  Well, look at Ireland.  Let us assume that they have a comprehensive plan to reduce their carbon footprint by 90% and erect a new infrastructure powered by renewables.  Let us also assume this plan will cost roughly 100 billion Euros.  Oops!  That money has just been spent bailing out crooked banks.

Ireland--like watching a slave auction

The tragedy that is about to befall Ireland--and by extension the rest of Europe--is absolutely inevitable unless there is a major rethinking about how debt is managed.  It must be remembered that bankruptcy laws and other restrictions on the moneylenders over the years have been enacted in response to outrages like we are seeing in Ireland.

The Chains of Capital are Only as Strong as the Weakest Link

Ireland and the House of Cards

Meanwhile, back in the real economy

While the banksters mount their assaults on sovereign nations, it is easy to forget that even at its worst, these Predations are only a distraction from the much bigger problems like securing the energy supply.  The implication here is that even if we could get folks back to work doing something, that "accomplishment" would trigger an oil price hike that would choke off any economic recovery.

Peak Oil Is Officially Set To Starve The Economy

Ireland vs the banksters

The crooks who are currently destroying Ireland have a very similar MO to the folks who attacked Iceland.  Only Ireland, so far as I know, is not calling for a new constitution.

A guy who is something of an expert on banks and their ridiculous assumptions, the infamous Nick Leeson thinks Ireland should just default.

Democracy vs the banksters in Iceland

One of the rarer birds in creation is the progressive Lutheran clergyman.  Obviously there have been some over the years--most recently during the efforts to unseat communism during the days of DDR.  One of the most interesting was this 19th century Danish bishop by the name of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig.  According to Wikipedia, "Grundtvig and his followers are credited with being very influential in the formulation of modern Danish national consciousness. It was steeped in the national literature and supported by deep spirituality."

Grundtvig was a teacher who became a passionate reformer.

Happy Thanksgiving

In many ways, Thanksgiving is the purest of the holidays.  No matter what your religious heritage, learning gratitude is essential to becoming a civilized being.

In our house when I was a child, we were expected to be able to answer the question "What are you thankful for" in a ritual that came before we ate.  Over the years, I have settled on one answer, "I am thankful that skilled people grow my food."

This is a picture of my grandfather and his brothers threshing wheat in Wilson County Kansas in late summer 1940.  Skill, hard work, AND organization brought in the harvest.

This is what the harvest looked like last fall in Minnesota.  7720 views the last I looked.

As the banksters crush Ireland

This story is getting old.  A bunch of crazy bankers who did not think the laws of financial gravity applied to them made some seriously bad bets and now they must either eat their losses or else get someone else to cover for them.

So the socialization of losses begins.

More thoughts on the Chevy Volt

Officially, I don't have a position (yet) on the Chevy Volt.  Even as a kid, I was never a GM guy (long story and trust me, my brother has more than made up for it by buying GM religiously over the years).  But the idea that you would have essentially an electric car that had an on-board recharging system sounded like a good idea to me.  After all, the best way to increase the efficiency of an internal combustion engine is to run it at a constant speed.  If the IC engine in a car was mostly there to recharge batteries, it could be pretty small AND you could run it at a constant speed.  So even though this was GM, I HAVE been watching Volt pretty closely.

Well now that Volt is about to appear in showrooms, we are seeing the reviews.  Two are quite interesting.  First we have a review by David Pogue of the New York Times.  As a long-time Mac person, I have read Pogue a lot over the years because he has been NYT's goto guy on all things Apple.  So even though he is not a car guy, Pogue is probably qualified to write as someone who really understands electronics AND new product introductions.

November 11, 2010, 1:28 PM

The Volt Recharges My Batteries

David Pogue 

I’ve been fascinated by the Chevy Volt since the day I heard about the concept.

Which is this: it’s an electric car without the short range of electric cars.

Usually, when your electric car’s battery dies, you’re dead on the road. You have no choice but to tow it, or wait hours for it to recharge.

General Motors’ concept is to equip the Volt with a tiny gas-powered generator that can power the electric motor even after the battery’s dead. It’s sort of like a reverse Prius: instead of having a gasoline-fed car assisted by a battery, it’s an electric car assisted by gasoline.

It’s a huge gamble and a huge challenge. Three years ago, I interviewed Bob Lutz, General Motors’ vice president of product development, about how difficult the Volt project was. Especially developing a battery that can last 10 years (it’s warrantied for eight), work in blazing heat and freezing cold and have enough capacity to power the car for 40 miles a day on electricity alone. (That, says G.M., covers the driving needs of 82 percent of Americans.) more

And then there is Motor Trend--one of those testosterone-laden car magazines that usually have orgasms over 200 mph sports cars--especially red ones that look good on the cover.  They have a "Car of the Year" award that is highly coveted by the car company's marketing departments--mostly because the award is bestowed for mostly objective reasons.

2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year: Chevrolet Volt

Worse than evil--utterly useless

Folks often get lost in the minutia of the never-ending scams the banksters seem to invent.  And you have got to hand it to these crooks--a credit-default swap really IS an amazing way for the clever to separate money from the credulous.  But the real question is rarely asked--does the money business serve any useful purpose?  And the reason this question is rarely asked is because the answer is almost always NO!  Remember, the following is from the New Yorker.

ANNALS OF ECONOMICS

What Good Is Wall Street?

Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.

by John Cassidy

Displacing old technology with new is VERY difficult

And here we see some of the problems the new electric cars will face. It's yet another reminder how wonderful petroleum is.

5 Reasons Electric Cars Will Disappoint

Rick Newman

2011 Nissan Leaf

They're cool. That's for sure.

The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt could turn out to be the most innovative mass-produced cars in a century. By taking some or all of their power from a household electrical outlet, they offer the first real glimpse of transportation that doesn't rely on petroleum—and could even crest the magical 100-miles-per-gallon threshold, once the official electricity-to-gasoline conversions are complete. Even better, the two electrics offer something new without the ugly packaging that has doomed futuremobiles in the past. They're cute, actually.

The Leaf is a perky five-passenger hatchback with sporty handling that can go about 100 miles on an eight-hour charge. The Volt, a bit edgier, is a four-passenger hatch that can go about 40 miles on a charge, with a gas engine that kicks in after that. Both offer a comfortable interior, futuristic controls, and do-gooder credibility. Together, these first-generation electrics set worthy standards for competing models from Toyota, Ford, Smart, and even Chinese manufacturers to meet or beat as they arrive over the next few years.

Now for the bad news: Hardly anybody will buy one, and for a good long while most car buyers will consider electric vehicles to be a great purchase—for somebody else to make. more

The problem with historical illiterates in high places

I tend to shock people when I say that I didn't vote for Obama because he tended to screw up his history.  Paul Krugman provides another interesting reason why not knowing history is turning Obama into such an abject failure.

FDR, Reagan, and Obama

November 21, 2010, 2:07 AM 

Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling — because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation — but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying

We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the1933 inauguration — which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn’t take place until March — Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear. more

Chalmers Johnson R.I.P.

This is a man whose very existence I cursed during the days of the struggles against the Vietnam War.  At the time, he was an arrogant prick who claimed that because we protesters hadn't had extensive experience in Asia working for the C.I.A., we were unqualified to have legitimate opinions on the subject.

Well, in his book Blowback, he wrote an extensive introduction as to why we got it right and he got it wrong--and then proceeds to write the trilogy for which he will be remembered that corrects the record.  As I often say, it's the folks with the capacity and willingness to evolve that are the most interesting.  I have written about him before.

Chalmers Johnson

G20 Seoul Korea--the gathering of the Predators

There is a depressing sameness to these gatherings that has destroyed any motivation to write about Seoul 2010.  Finance types gather to carve up the world and their trained lapdogs in the economics "profession" scramble to write absurd praises to the wisdom of the markets, the virtue of naked greed, and the evils of trade unions, blah, blah, blah.  Predicting this outcome was like predicting dawn.

The Predators really ARE evil

There are times when the Predator Classes look almost harmless.  After all, they provide us with royal families, investment banks, soldiers all dolled up in useless uniforms, professional sports, churches, armies of lawyers, and much of the rest of the trappings of what we call civilization.

So once in a while, we need a reminders of just how dangerous and how much damage the Predators can do.  Taibbi gets it.

Quantitative Easing

I have been meaning to write on the subject of quantitative easing (QE) for some time but have not because this is a HUGE topic and I hate getting it wrong.  But here goes...

QE is the name given to the process whereby the Fed injects money into the economy by purchasing assets like stocks and bonds.  The difference between this method and the usual method is that money is "created" without increasing debt.  As can be imagined, the investor classes hate QE because it undermines the essential rates of usury.  And so it is almost never employed and the protests are loud and organized whenever it is.

But here's the deal, mechanisms to create money without simultaneously creating debt has quite an enviable track record in stimulating economic activity.  Marriner Eccles was quite fascinated with his QE powers and used them to extricate the USA from the Great Depression and fight WW II.

Interestingly, Paul Krugman is such a fan of QE that he thinks we should be talking in terms of $10 trillion.  Since I think we should be spending in the neighborhood of $2 trillion per year to solve the problems caused by the end of the Age of Petroleum, I like it when economists talk about trillions of QE.

Hedges confirms a suspicion

Like many other folks who went through the educational system in USA, I spent my time wondering how folks who were so aggressively ignorant came to run our schools.

Part of my problem came from the simple fact that most of my rural schools were underfunded in important ways.  K-6 was spent in a school run by Mennonites in an experiment in ecumenicism my father claimed was worth it no matter how loudly we children would protest.

The good part was that the Mennonites were education junkies who also believed that an elementary education could be sufficient for most adult members of their society.  The idea that a graduate of their elementary school could not read, write gracefully, or do arithmetic was so unthinkable as to be labeled evil.  And because Mennonites can be found in unusual places around the world, they taught an international perspective that is quite unusual for the typical USA student.

The bad part is that this international perspective was the perspective of a tiny element of Protestant Christianity.  Ironically, because Mennonites are so clannish that joining their tribe is neigh unto impossible, it makes the whole missionary venture pretty pointless.  Even so, because I had a serious crush on a missionary daughter in sixth grade, I got to know quite a bit more about the Belgian Congo than even a serious student of National Geographic would have.

The high schools I attended were in tiny rural towns.  The lifer teachers were the hopeless incompetents who never got a better job offer.  Occasionally, young teachers fresh out of college would provide some respite from the normal mediocrity but they didn't last more than two years before moving on.

Quite honestly, there wasn't a day before I left for the University of Minnesota that I didn't go to school fully expecting to know more about any given subject, and be better prepared, than my teachers.  But the U was going to change that--or so I hoped.  The mighty U was so loved and lavishly funded that the problem of "learning" from folks who didn't know their subject just had to be in my past!

Well not so fast!  The spring of my freshman year saw the assassinations of M. L. King and Bobby Kennedy.  We young Democrats got all excited about the battle between Eugene McCarthy (YEA) and Hubert Humphrey (Dump the Hump).  This was especially interesting because these two were our Senators--the wounds of that political battle were still visible 25 years later.

And so I soon discovered that my university education was going to be quite political.  Only, my professors were remarkably silent about the big events of the day.  I sat through four weeks of lectures on War and Peace the same quarter as the Tet Offensive and my professor couldn't find it in his heart to bring up the Battle of Hue.  How could this possibly be?

It took me many years to figure it out but when I did, the answer was amazingly clear.  Just like the organized ignorance of my childhood was brought to me by the intellectual left-behinds, so my University education was this mish-mash of incoherence brought to me by the folks who were left over after the purges of McCarthyism.

So in today's Truthdig, Chris Hedges writes about some of the talent we lost to political repression.  Because we were taught by the sort of people who could make a Sarah Palin happy, we boomers are damn lucky we can pick our noses.

Chris Hedges on the death of liberalism

The guy is trying to sell a book.  He talks about the historical decline of the liberal institutions in USA.  Since he dates the beginning of this decline to the USA entry into World War I, I am inclined to give him a lot of credibility because that is how I read history as well.  BOTH of my grandfathers--who were quite unalike as men--refused to cooperate with their draft boards during WW I--one for religious reasons, the other for political ones.  Hedges talks about how they shut down the magazine "An Appeal to Reason."  My grandfather subscribed to that too.

Good stuff!

The energy problems encapsulated

The biggest frustration I have whenever I try to explain why something like Peak Oil is such a threat to civilization is that folks usually do not understand the processes that are necessary to produce something new.

And why should they believe the introduction of new products is difficult?  If anything, the biggest problem most have is that they are overwhelmed by new products that show up every day clamoring for their attention.  "How difficult can it be to find and switch to a new energy source?" such folks wonder.  "After all, I have switched between cooking with electricity and natural gas several times in my life."

At that point, I am usually reduced to helpless sputtering.  First of all, switching between methods of cooking is perhaps the easiest conversion possible.  And even that isn't so easy--even IF both electricity and natural gas are already hooked up to your dwelling.  A project to replace an electric stove with a gas-fired one will involve running a gas pipe from your furnace room to the kitchen--a job best handled by a licensed pro.  Holes will have to be cut in walls and floors, etc.  The fussy cook could easily spend $3500 even before the stove was purchased.  At that point, most folks will just say, "Screw it, I'll just keep cooking with electricity."

This also points out my Rule #1 of energy consumption--because it is SO hard to change the energy usage of something once it is built, the MOST important considerations comes at the design phase.  (A longer version of this argument can be found here.  It's my best thinking on the subject of energy efficiency.)

And yet...we are going to have to do exactly that which we would rather avoid.  The problems we have concerning our reliance on oil are not explained by a psychobabble term like "addiction."  We need oil because we built our society to run on 87 octane gasoline and #2 Diesel fuel.  And changing that reality will be orders of magnitude more difficult than running a natural gas pipe to the kitchen.

In fact, someone has actually calculated the size of the problem facing a society built for 87 octane gasoline.  I am willing to bet these guys aren't very far off.

It Will Take 131 Years To Replace Oil, And We've Only Got 10

Is it getting bad enough yet?

As someone who personally gave up on street protests in April of 1970, I have mixed feeling about taking to the streets.  On the other hand, when nothing changes through elections and other institutional methods, what else is there?

So really, when do Americans begin to riot?

The Nouveau Poor

Recession Shadows America's Middle Class

Casting bread on the water

When I was growing up, I must have heard at least three dozen sermons on the following text:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.  Ecclesiastes 11:1.

This passage was a favorite of both my rural Lutheran preacher father and the Mennonites who educated me.  And while there were minor variations on what exactly this verse meant, there was wide agreement that it was a call to use one's God-given gifts (talents, time, resources, and labor)--the "bread"--in the service of the wider community.  The point was if you cast your "bread" without asking for a reward, you would discover that your "bread" would return anyway in wonderful and unexpected ways. (This idea is quite similar to Buddhist concept of Karma.) And so communities are built, one generous and selfless act after another.

For me, this blog is in many ways about the purest example extant of casting bread on the waters I can think of.  It is a LOT of work.  It required a lifetime of research and investigation to be able to write coherently on the topics I write about.  I know I have readers because of Google analytics but almost all of them are "lurkers" so feedback is minimal.  And I am not being paid for my efforts.

But last Tuesday, some "bread" floated back into view.  I got a wonderful email from a long-time "hero" of mine by the name of Amory Lovins.  Even though Lovins is a couple of years older than I, our lives and thinking have traveled along remarkably similar paths.  For example, while we both discovered that high energy efficiency was desirable for housing, my efforts were directed at what could be done with the existing housing stock while Lovins was off building a no-holds-barred demonstration project that employed as many energy-efficient ideas as he could put in one building.

The real economy, fall 2010 (Minnesota)

Under some orders from the significant other, I went for a drive in the countryside of the Minnesota River watershed last Monday.  For November, it was a gorgeous day.  Except for the mighty rains in late September, is has been warm and dry for weeks--perfect for drying out the grains in the field.

After several years of economics that drove some farmers to bankruptcy, the Producers on Minnesota's corn belt are facing the incredibly rare circumstances of a HUGE crop combined with high prices.  I talked with one young farm kid who was grinning like he had won the lottery.

The Lake Crystal Coop pictured in my video serves eight locations and its members cultivate over 500,000 acres of land.  They have built that ginormous Medelia fertilizer plant in the video.

I have two old friends who are making a documentary about (among other things) the problems of nitrogen run-off in the Minnesota basin--which leads to problems in the Mississippi and eventually the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.  Since the farmers would prefer that NONE of the nitrogen they spread on their fields would be lost to run-off and are actually pretty careful about such matters, it is obvious that there must be enormous amounts of nitrogen spread on the fields if mere run-off can kill the life in a significant areas of the Gulf.

This video is about the agricultural infrastructure that traffics in massive amounts of fertilizer.