World Bank on Climate Change

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

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

WTO renews its evil credentials

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

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

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

CO2 hits new record levels

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

A new age of steam?

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

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

Hostess stories show hostility of conservatives to labor unions and workers

In reporting the bankruptcy of Hostess, the unremitting hostility of conservatives to labor unions and working people is fully evident. Redstate's LaborUnionReport titled his or her article, A Eulogy: The Sad Day A Ding Dong Union Killed Twinkie The Kid. It quotes extensively from the company's statement on the company's website, then from a statement by the Teamsters Union, which had advised the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco and Grain Millers International Union not to strike without first trying to find alternatives. This is probably the largest quote from a labor source you will ever find on Redstate. But what is most interesting is the one paragraph in the Teamsters statement that LaborUnionReport did not include in his or her extended quote:

In fact, when Hostess attempted to throw out its collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters in court, the Teamsters fought back and won, ensuring that Hostess could not unilaterally make changes to working conditions during the several months’ long legal process that recently ended. Teamster Hostess members were allowed to decide their fate by voting on the final offer conducted by a secret mail ballot.  More than two-thirds of Hostess Teamsters members voted with 53 percent voting to approve the final offer.

The problem for LaborUnionReport, of course, is that this single paragraph demolishes his or her preferred alternative reality that it is the labor unions and the greedy workers whom are solely to blame for the destruction of Hostess. The paragraph shows that the company tried to illegally renege on its contract with the Teamsters, and, furthermore, the company was rebuffed in a court of law. Rather difficult to pin the blame solely on labor unions and the workers with those kind of facts!

Betting with trillions

When one imagines the amount of good a few $Trillion spent hardening the nation's infrastructure, or some other worthy cause, the fact that the global banking system plays with those sorts of sums all the time and have only hardship and destruction to show for it.

The following is an excerpt from a much longer essay on the social paralysis caused when debt service and obligations paralyze a society so it can no longer perform the necessary functions of survival.  It is VERY German and underlines a notion that our most crippling problems with money are the traps we set because we cannot think clearly about what money is supposed to be used for.

Street protests and climate change

350.org marches on the White House

Last week, a friend sent me a notice that Bill McKibbon would be speaking at the University of Minnesota for the reasonable price of $12.  Friend knows I read him on occasion and this would be a good chance to hear him live.  But the truth is, I didn't feel much like going.  It's not so much the $12 to hear a speech on a subject I have been following pretty religiously since the 1980s, or the fact that I have long ago set a high bar of where I will drive at night during the winter, it's the drive.  McKibbon is calling these speaking gigs his "Do the Math!" tour.  Good idea Bill!  My math tells me I would drive about 95 miles round trip—a distance that as recently as 100 years ago was a two-day trip on a horse.  The CO2 output of my car is roughly 1 kg (2.2 pounds) every 4 km (2.5 miles) so I would pump approximately 38 kg. (84 pounds) of CO2 into the atmosphere to make my little trip.  Hardly enough to change the climate, but when millions of people take drives like this—it adds up.

So today, I was delighted to discover that McKibbon's kickoff event would be livestreamed.  I could check out the action without the CO2 guilt.  I had some pretty high expectation considering how much I like his writings.  What I got was an almost prefect representation for how utterly irrelevant the Gandhian demonstration / civil disobedience model for social change is for addressing a problem as basic to the real economy as climate change.  When McKibbon announced that they had enough demonstrators to encircle the White House, I wanted to go "Bill!  Baby! This isn't 1930s India and climate change isn't the Salt Tax."  But don't take my word—watch the video linked above.

Time for the USA environmental movement to grow up!

My basic difference from most folks who write about climate change is that I believe that merely acknowledging its existence barely qualifies as a good start. I am only impressed by people who have reached the stage: Of course climate change is real—now what are we going to do about it?  I am especially impressed by those individuals, companies, and countries who have actually made some part of the solution work.

The amount of reality one must deny to deny that the climate is changing is so great, the deniers can be categorized as clinically delusional.  So let's not even engage such people in conversation.  They are simply wasting our time.  (And causing substantial intellectual damage because they are delaying the switch to the conversation about how we accomplish the necessary conversion to a solar-powered future.)

But even when we choose to ignore the delusional, this doesn't even begin to address the bigger problem—which is that even most of those who accept that the climate is changing have only a vague understanding of what that means.  They are in a form of denial too.  They know the climate is changing but somehow it's not them causing it.  It's those bad-guy coal companies, greedy automakers, right-wing lobbyists...you know the drill.  It's not their car starting 4000 fires per mile. It's not their cheaply-built energy-wasting homes built thousands of miles from farms and water sources.  Etc.  How can they take responsibility for their own actions—they haven't even thought about these issues?  Besides they "cannot" be at fault because they have been sorting their garbage since 1987 and have an endangered-habitat license plate on their SUV.

It dawned on me the other day that the real obstacle to doing anything meaningful about climate change was not the mouth-breathing yahoos who deny that anything is happening (or if it is, it isn't being caused by human actions but is probably god's will).  My guess that these folks will soon be marginalized like the members of the flat-earth society.  Unfortunately, even IF you ignore the mouth-breathers, you are still stuck with the sincere people who believe that climate change is a problem but somehow the effects can be mitigated with simple solutions—air drying the laundry, caulking up the leaks in old homes, etc.  You know, the "50 easy ways to save the planet" crowd.  The tea-baggers may have been replaced as the problem children by the NPR-listening totebaggers.

So I decided to conduct an small experiment.  I would write a deliberately provocative piece commenting on the uselessness / wickedness of totebag liberalism as it concerned climate change.  I posted it on a thread attached to one of those aren't-the denialists-stupid-and-naughty dairies over at DailyKos (which is arguably the epicenter of totebag liberalism in these United States.)  I wanted to see if I could get the totebaggers angry with me.  I was not disappointed.  You can see the comments it generated here.  This is what I wrote.

"Liberal" climate change denialism

Or Al Gore denialism, if you please. You remember our pal Al—the guy who made a reasonably serious movie about the climate change problems and then screwed up the ending with some of the lamest suggestions known to the human race. And then to prove he really didn't get it, takes the money he made from the movie and built one of the most irresponsible energy-hog MacMansions in Tennessee.

Also remember, his "BIG" cure for climate change was "cap and trade" which is nothing more than an update on the idea of indulgences—the disgusting notion that you can redeem your sins by spending money. An idea so outrageous it triggered the Protestant Reformation in 1517.

See, Liberals like to think they are morally and intellectual superior because they accept the idea that the climate is changing. But their denialism is just as profound because they refuse to acknowledge just how massive the problem is or how expensive and socially disruptive it will be to solve it.

When someone starts talking about climate change, I usually ask them how much they think it will cost to fix it. Any figure less than $100 Trillion and I just assume they aren't serious.

The totebag denialism was thick on the ground.  Some folks wanted to defend Al Gore although serious environmentalists in the rest of the world blame him for sabotaging the Kyoto Protocols of 1997.  I was blasted as ignorant for comparing cap-and-trade to religious indulgences.  I was reminded that cap-and-trade was legitimate because it was a right-wing free-market idea that had a pretty good track record for reducing the sulfur dioxide that was causing acid rain.  Nobody seemed to notice that a strategy for controlling sulfer dioxide emissions caused by a handful of sources may not work when applied to the production of carbon dioxide which is produced by absolutely everyone.  And of course, I was blasted because supposedly Al Gore's home wasn't the energy hog I made it out to be.

(I find this last claim particularly galling because I have been writing about energy-efficient homes since 1974 and know folks who have built net-zero structures with a tiny fraction of the resources available to Mr. Inconvenient Truth.  If Gore was serious about climate change, he could have built a home using all the state-of-the-art energy-saving devices.  Just imagine the hardware suppliers lining up to be part of Al Gore's "perfect" energy-efficient home.  But Al chose to pass on this golden opportunity to set an example.  Yet read the comments linked above—some Kos liberals wrote that those criticisms of his house were simply a right-wing attack on our noble Al.  Totebag environmentalism—defending the indefensible...again.)

Not surprisingly, no one chose to make an issue of my $100 Trillion figure—which was disappointing since I have been defending that number off and on since 1991.  They have not even thought about what building a society that has figured out how to survive without fire might actually cost.  But I can assure you, they KNOW we cannot afford THAT.  I mean, haven't you seen the debt clock in Times Square?

I wonder if that particular piece of nonsense survived Sandy.

Naomi Klein on Bill Moyers discussing climate change

In this clip, Klein and Moyers dance around with an extremely important notion—that climate change is the inevitable outcome of neoliberal economics.  Klein's money quote is "In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure."

I'll leave you folks to decide whether these two come up with ideas that could actually outperform neoliberalism.  Personally, I get a little suspicious whenever discussions like this skirt the issue of what solutions will cost and how long it will require to implement them but they are right—there is NO possibility of a meaningful solution so longs as the economy is run by people who think like vandals and thieves.


Naomi Klein on the Links Between Capitalism and Climate Change from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Saturday toons 17 NOV 12

Systematic corruption

In case anyone believes that there is not a huge skills difference between the Producers and Predators, note that the following crooked schemes were only possible because someone built an electrical grid and some other hardworking geniuses figured out a telecommunication system that allowed these useless hunks of protoplasm to take more out of the real economy than the laws allow—from the comfort of an air-conditioned office somewhere.  Of course, in this era of economic decriminalization, such laws are barely acknowledged.

What must be regulated

One of the more interesting outcomes of last week's election was the success of pot legalization in Washington and Colorado.  This is going to change politics because it can change the outcomes of elections.  Of course, I love it when people start getting the hang of Big=regulate, small=deregulate.  The ban on same-sex marriage is about to crumble too.

The boomers just want to make sure they can get their medical pot in the nursing homes.  C'mon guys, you can do it.

Worse than banksters?

Yes Virginia, there IS something worse than Jamie Dimon and J.P.Morgan Bank for the health of the real economy—the absolutely unregulated world of hedge funds.  Here we have a serious look at these funds by a German magazine who really cannot believe such financial mischief is possible.

Solar can work!

By far the best summation I ever heard for the challenge facing anyone who claims we can have a sustainable future without returning to the caves came from a young German student who had consumed some very large beers.  "I want to live a civilized life with less of an environmental impact than an Indian villager."  This was in 1970.  The Germans are still quite a ways from that goal, but they are making some serious progress towards it.

While we in USA are still debating whether climate change is real, the German are actually executing large plans for not only phasing out coal and other carbon sources of energy, they plan to give up their nukes.  And while everyone and their uncle can find fault with their plans, the German have already started to export solar power.  In 1970, USA was perfectly positioned to be the nation that led the way.  Got lost, didn't we.

Tesla S wins MT car of the year award

It has taken awhile—probably much longer than it should have—but the pieces for a sustainable society are falling into place.  Wind turbines and photovoltaics are either already cost-competitive with traditional (and highly subsidized) fossil fuels or are within shouting distance.  This means that soon there will be few excuses for anything that can be plugged into a grid to be powered by non-solar sources.

The stuff that cannot be plugged in face much larger hurdles.  We are not about to see battery-powered airliners, container ships, over-the-road trucks, or farm equipment anytime soon.  Even cars, which are by far the easiest vehicles to run on batteries, have seen most examples fail because they are unworkable or highly impractical.  Of course, the big problems are that batteries still don't store a lot of electricity (which limits range), are damn expensive, and require significant time to recharge.

Personally, I still believe the best idea so far is the Chevy Volt.  It solves the range and recharging problems by using a gasoline engine as range extender to get folks home even if they have miscalculated their battery resources.  It uses the existing refueling infrastructure to cover for emergencies or just damn-I-forgot-to-plug-in-my-car-last-night carelessness.  Motor Trend awarded it their 2011 Car of the Year.  The Volt is interesting because it is a middle-class car that assists it owners in the process of learning how to be electric car owners while not subjecting them to some frightening experience if they get it wrong.

There are those who believe cars like the Volt are merely transitional vehicles—that eventually if we are going to have cars, they will have to be all-electric.  Their strategy is to build a car with serious driving ranges.  This means they will need a bunch of batteries which makes them both heavy and expensive.  But hey, there are already heavy and expensive cars out there.  They are VERY nice cars so if an all-electric car must compete with them, it had better be a fine set of wheels.

Meet the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year—the Tesla Model S.  Because it needs around 7000 lithium-ion batteries to provide it with its nearly 300 mile range, it will weigh over 4500 pounds and cost nearly $100,000.  Since you can buy the latest Lexus LS for less than $85,000, the new Tesla is up against some serious competition.  Check out the numbers.  The Tesla can compete with anything in its price range in terms of performance.  And while we know nothing about its reliability and build quality, the pictures show an extremely handsome car that won't embarrass it's owner at the country club.

There are plenty of social reasons why nobody should be building a $100,000 car.  But there is one good reason why this is a fine idea.  New technology is very expensive so there is some value in recouping some of those R&D expenses by charging the early adapters a premium price.  Tesla promises that its next models will have lower prices which demonstrate they believe this strategy.  Now if only they can sell enough model S's to keep the doors open until their middle-class cars hit the street.  This is a formidable task.  There is vast unused automotive production capacity out there.  Cars are insanely difficult to build and there are already many companies that do it very well.  Tesla is getting help from both Mercedes and Toyota, so powerful actors want them to succeed.  Even so, Tesla will be very fortunate to make it.

While Karl Rove get a bonus like Vikram Pandit's?

The day after the election, Bloomberg reported some numbers calculated by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group fighting for greater transparency in campaign spending. The numbers are based on the number of races that Rove's groups helped finance in which Rove's choice actually won, compared to the total amount Rove's groups spent.

By the group's measure, 1 percent of the more than $100 million spent by American Crossroads achieved its desired results. Thirteen percent of the more than $70 million spent by Crossroads GPS did the same, the Sunlight Foundation said.... Only 5 percent of the money spent by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce resulted in its desired effect, as measured by the Sunlight Foundation.

Bloomberg quotes wrong-wing activist Richard Viguerie, which is rich irony indeed, as Viguerie is the patriarch of modern conservative political fundraising, and hence directly responsible for the corrupted system now in place.  

Conservative activist Richard Viguerie said in a statement Wednesday that "in any logical universe," Rove "would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again and no one would give a dime to their ineffective Super PACs, such as American Crossroads."

Of course, with usurers, speculators, and other assorted banksters running things, this is not a logical universe. Most recent evidence:

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was pushed out the door of his company in October after overseeing a precipitous decline in his bank's value. Overall, Citigroup lost nearly 90 percent of its stock price during Pandit's tenure. But that won't stop Pandit from walking off with $6.7 million for his last year on the job.

I would really like some wrong-wing pundit to step up and explain why Citigroup needed to so richly incentivise Pandit's departure. I understand the argument that Wall Street has to pay large fortunes to attract the best talent (which obviously is not working, judging by business results; the billions the banksters are shoveling into their accounts from the U.S. Treasury should not be dignified by calling it "business"). But why pay so damn much to someone to get their less than useless butt off the premises? Just strengthens the argument that wrong-wingers refuse to respond to: the mythical "job creators" are really financial vampires destroying our economy by outright looting.

Saving the planet or paying down the debt

The moneychangers have been having quite the run.  These days, they are jerking around democratically-elected governments as if debtors have no rights at all.  But the choice being faced by USA politicians is especially grim—do we pay off the investors or do we save the planet from climate change.  And since Hurricane Sandy sent a storm surge to sink lower Manhattan, even the moneychangers are beginning to understand this is the existential choice.

Sado-Monetarism

When a guy named Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph starts using a term like Sado-Monetarists, it is time for the rest of us to play attention.  It is no accident that the very kinky best-selling book "50 Shades of Gray" was written by a British woman because apparently, these folks have turned the combination of pain and sex into an art form.  So when someone with a British boarding-school background (where the ritualized beatings often combined with buggery continue to this day) argues that the ideas about money that are currently guiding public economic policy are no more than just twisted ways of causing pain, you may be reasonably sure he has a point.

USA military on climate change

It has been my experience that there is literally no group more institutionally insensitive to environmental concerns than the military.  There are exceptions, of course, but when you have an organization designed as its primary function to kill and destroy, you tend not to attract too many circle-of-life types.  The military locates its bases to meet its mission needs—not at avoid disrupting some fragile habitat.  If the choppers need a solvent to keep flying, no one is especially concerned what happens when those solvents get into the water supply. Weapons production sites like Hanford Washington are notorious for their toxic brews that have seeped into surrounding soils and waters. Etc.

But because the military has access to big money budgets, an intimate working knowledge of some of the most serious environmental problems, and long-standing relationships with highly skilled scientists, it has long seemed to me that they are the ones who would be best qualified to address some of the biggest environmental dilemmas.  And why not?  After all, if an enemy had inflicted the damage to this country that the military has done by doing nothing more than its routine operations, we would consider it an act of war.  Bingo!  We should give the task of saving the planet to our armed forces.

Right!  When Elegant Technology was first published in Finland, word got back to me that many reviewers found my book to be funny.  Truth be told, I was sort of insulted by this because except for a couple of sentences, everything was written to be as serious as a heart attack.  Finally one reporter who had written a LONG review tried to answer why folks may have found it funny.  The best example she could think of was my suggestion that the armed forces should be tasked with environmental clean-up.

With this in mind, try to understand my amused reaction to the following story.  It has taken a generation but it seems there are folks in the military who now believe they should at least understand threats to the environment.  They are still a long way from beating their swords into plowshares, but its a start.

The sorrow of empires

Or, Why we can't afford nice things.

As the celebration of Armistice Day rolls around again, the tiny fraction of the population that has any idea what is being remembered grows ever smaller. The argument that World War One was the greatest act of human insanity evah is actually pretty easy to make.  All that was amazing about European civilization came together in a spasm of violence and terror.  Millions died to prove that the great advances of scientific rationalism only exacerbated the savage nature of human violence.  Germany gets blamed (with some justification) for starting this outburst of madness but the same institutional forces sucked in damn near everyone on the planet before it was over.

When Veblen tried to describe how Germany had become this über-villian he in fact gave the world its first great demonstration of Institutional Analysis.  He claimed that Germany's role in starting WW I was driven by two powerful cultural currents.  There was "genius" Germany which had by 1900 become the technological leader of Europe (if not the planet).  If a country can make the best steel, it will certainly soon have the best guns if that is what she wants to have.  Which leads to the other cultural current—that Prussian need to go around kicking your neighbor's butt.  Germany had become a major nation under the leadership of the Prussians who liked to plan battles for their own amusement.  She had the ability to mass-produce world-class guns.  With those elements in place, the triggering mechanism for war was irrelevant.

And oh the excitement of war!  This was going to fun!  In Britain, young men at fancy colleges marched down to recruiting offices as a class.  In Germany, Social Democratic parliamentarians who had only weeks before passed a resolution condemning war as a tool for worker-class oppression, signed up for the war as a group.  And who could blame them?  War for Europeans had for a couple of generations meant these lopsided affairs where they would kill 20,000 natives armed with slingshots at a cost of a tiny handful of men.  Unfortunately for these Europeans, both sides now had machine guns and an industrial system that allowed them to keep firing until there were no more fools to shoot.  The result was Verdun and the Battle of the Somme and over 16 million murdered.

And when the armistice was put into effect, the same forces of predatory greed that had enabled the Europeans to involve the rest of the world in their calamity came together to forge a treaty so vile, it would trigger another war even more murderous only one generation later.

The casualties of World War One did not all pile up at Verdun.  Here in the American midwest, war fever was used to crush the progressive movements.  A serious historical case can be made that USA was well on its way to becoming the glorious republic its founders wanted it to be—until it was sidetracked by the temptations of the disintegrating British Empire.  In Minnesota, most of the senior leadership of the Non-Partisan League found themselves under arrest.   Their publications were deemed subversive so they lost their ability to use the mails.  Of course, the repression had to be severe because entering the Great War on the side of UK made no sense whatsoever. The largest single ethnic group in Minnesota were the Germans.  The USA had been formed by people who violently objected to British colonialism and the primary aim of the Brits in WW I was to keep their empire.  It required a LOT of lying, propaganda, and physical intimidation to get USA to sign up for that war on the side of the Brits.

British propaganda is still amazingly successful.  Read what the inimatable war nerd has to say about the Brits.

Saturday toons 10 NOV 12

When is Obama going to learn?

gloriasb on DailyKos points to the a buried paragraph in a New York Times article:

After his speech, Mr. Obama tried to call both Mr. Boehner and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, but was told they were asleep. 

Well, duh! The President should have said it was Davey or Chuckey Koch calling! With new ideas for seizing control of the Senate in 2014! 

Ole' Boner and McCuckle would've sprung out of bed like a teen-aged recruit at Marine boot camp.