It seems the Japanese government is using up a lot of diplomatic chips trying to take down Paul Watson, leader of the Sea Shepard Society. For nearly a decade, Watson and his band of whale defenders have been a massive thorn in the side of the Japanese whaling fleet in Antarctic waters.
There is an international ban on commercial whaling. The Japanese have finessed the ban by conducting what they characterize as research whaling. Of course, it's a sham. The Japanese whaling is commercial, covered by a fig leaf with the words research printed on it. Over the past eight years, Watson and his Sea Shepard band have seriously disrupted the Japanese 'Southern Ocean' whaling operation. They have made it a big time money loser for the Japanese, while documenting their campaign as a reality TV offering on the Animal Planet Cable Channel.
The Japanese government is now trying to get the governments of Costa Rica and Germany involved in an extradition process that would deliver Watson, a Canadian citizen, into Japanese hands. Thus far, it hasn't worked. What it has done is prevent Watson from rejoining his crews for another season of disruption of Japan's whaling agenda.
I first wrote about Whale Wars in a blog dated July 12, 2012. I applaud Watson and his crews for their tenacious defense of whales from Japanese harpoons. What the Japanese are doing is not research. It's commercial killing designed to turn a profit. Few Japanese people actually eat whale meat. The whale slaughter is not about feeding people. It has one purpose: making money. Watson and his whale defenders have killed that prospect. What we have now is the Japanese government pumping millions in subsidies into their sham research whaling operation in order to save face. They have unleashed a diplomatic shit storm against Paul Watson. What they cannot and never will get around is the fundamental decency of Watson's relentless defense of whales.
Here is a piece penned by Paul Watson that just appeared in the Guardian (U.K.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/31/paul-watson-clients-whales
Friday, August 31, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Mostly Vegetarian Fifty Years From Now
Some consequences of unchecked human population growth are becoming ever more apparent. World population exceeds seven billion, with the total increasing about 70 million annually. That's, in effect, the addition of six more cities the size of Los Angeles every year. At least two billion more people will be on Earth by 2050.
An article in the Guardian (U.K.) reports that the current portion of human food consumption from animal protein is about twenty percent. Given the planet's increasing water and food scarcity, the only way to feed a human population expanded to nine billion would be to reduce consumption of animal protein to about five percent of total food intake.
It takes about ten pounds of grain and a huge amount of water to produce one pound of meat for human consumption. The Guardian article quotes Malik Falkenmark at the Stockholm International Water Institute , "There will be just enough water if the proportion of animal-based foods is limited to 5% of total calories and considerable regional water deficits can be met by a … reliable system of food trade."
Eating lower on the food chain allows water and grain resources to be used much more efficiently. It's the only way to avoid mass starvation in the poorest parts of the world. Beyond that, a transition to a mostly vegetarian lifestyle would have substantial health benefits. It would also mean that the slaughter of literally billions of animals raised now as industrial commodities would be dramatically curtailed. The latter consequence, in itself, is reason enough for me to embrace this inevitable change in human lifestyle.
Here is the link to the article in the Guardian newspaper...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/aug/26/food-shortages-world-vegetarianism
In the Absence of the Sacred
Years ago, I read a book by Gerry Mander, titled, In the Absence of the Sacred.
One story I remember from that book troubles me to this day. It focused on the tribes of the first nations (indigenous Indians) living in what was the Northwest Territory (NWT) at that time, but is now called Nunavut Province in Northern Canada.. Since the stone age, these people had maintained their cultural bonds through the sharing of oral history. They entertained themselves and their children by telling stories about their ancestors, and by doing so, keeping their cultural roots strong while teaching the young important life lessons. After the second world war, the government run, Canadian Broadcast System wanted to bring television to the Northwest Territories. Local indigenous leaders resisted, but eventually in the 1960s, TV arrived in the NWT. After that, within one generation, television became an addiction that destroyed the tradition of indigenous oral history from one generation to the next.
Jerry Mander's book is about the power of the media to corrupt and numb minds when used with banal purpose. The mass media is the nervous system of humanity. It should be used with noble propose to educate, inform, and galvanize the masses in service of the public interest. With the exception of some of the programming on PBS, very little of what we get on television has that kind of redeeming value. These days, what we get, particularly in primetime, are mindless reality shows and six variations on crime scene investigation.
Broadcast television, much like newspapers, magazines, and radio, is not structured to serve its audience, but instead to manipulate it. The real customers for commercial broadcast media are the advertisers, the corporations that sell us their goods and services. Television is not about educating, informing, and inspiring public awareness. It's about demographics - delivering the specific audience most likely to be customers for a certain brand of coffee or car insurance.
The broadcast networks depend on corporate customers for their advertising dollars. To keep those customers happy, broadcasters purposely shape their programming to fit the conservative corporate world view. Take climate change for example. The reason why there is little or no thoughtful discussion of climate change on television is the people behind big coal and oil don't want the media focusing on the massive pollution of the atmosphere that their products create. There is little discussion on TV of clean, renewable sources of energy because big coal and oil want to suppress those alternatives.
In virtually every social, environmental, and economic arena, the mass media memes that shape public opinion are designed to serve the profit motive of big corporate advertisers and to discourage ideas that threaten their conservative agenda.
These days, the influence and reach of television, radio, and the commercial print media are waning. The internet is rapidly evolving and eventually will largely replace these older forms of mass media outreach. As this happens, massive political influence is being directed at the rules that govern the internet. Conservative corporate interests want to control the net so they can manipulate it for their own interests just as they already do with TV, radio, and the print media.
Jerry Mander's book, In the Absence of the Sacred, came too late to make a difference with the traditional media, but it's warning also applies to the still evolving internet. Every citizen has a stake in making sure the internet is not co opted by the same corporate forces that ruined TV, radio, and the print media by putting their profit-driven, self-interest before the common good.
One story I remember from that book troubles me to this day. It focused on the tribes of the first nations (indigenous Indians) living in what was the Northwest Territory (NWT) at that time, but is now called Nunavut Province in Northern Canada.. Since the stone age, these people had maintained their cultural bonds through the sharing of oral history. They entertained themselves and their children by telling stories about their ancestors, and by doing so, keeping their cultural roots strong while teaching the young important life lessons. After the second world war, the government run, Canadian Broadcast System wanted to bring television to the Northwest Territories. Local indigenous leaders resisted, but eventually in the 1960s, TV arrived in the NWT. After that, within one generation, television became an addiction that destroyed the tradition of indigenous oral history from one generation to the next.
Jerry Mander's book is about the power of the media to corrupt and numb minds when used with banal purpose. The mass media is the nervous system of humanity. It should be used with noble propose to educate, inform, and galvanize the masses in service of the public interest. With the exception of some of the programming on PBS, very little of what we get on television has that kind of redeeming value. These days, what we get, particularly in primetime, are mindless reality shows and six variations on crime scene investigation.
Broadcast television, much like newspapers, magazines, and radio, is not structured to serve its audience, but instead to manipulate it. The real customers for commercial broadcast media are the advertisers, the corporations that sell us their goods and services. Television is not about educating, informing, and inspiring public awareness. It's about demographics - delivering the specific audience most likely to be customers for a certain brand of coffee or car insurance.
The broadcast networks depend on corporate customers for their advertising dollars. To keep those customers happy, broadcasters purposely shape their programming to fit the conservative corporate world view. Take climate change for example. The reason why there is little or no thoughtful discussion of climate change on television is the people behind big coal and oil don't want the media focusing on the massive pollution of the atmosphere that their products create. There is little discussion on TV of clean, renewable sources of energy because big coal and oil want to suppress those alternatives.
In virtually every social, environmental, and economic arena, the mass media memes that shape public opinion are designed to serve the profit motive of big corporate advertisers and to discourage ideas that threaten their conservative agenda.
These days, the influence and reach of television, radio, and the commercial print media are waning. The internet is rapidly evolving and eventually will largely replace these older forms of mass media outreach. As this happens, massive political influence is being directed at the rules that govern the internet. Conservative corporate interests want to control the net so they can manipulate it for their own interests just as they already do with TV, radio, and the print media.
Jerry Mander's book, In the Absence of the Sacred, came too late to make a difference with the traditional media, but it's warning also applies to the still evolving internet. Every citizen has a stake in making sure the internet is not co opted by the same corporate forces that ruined TV, radio, and the print media by putting their profit-driven, self-interest before the common good.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Historians, social scientists, and economists see patterns in the way civilizations and societies have evolved. I recently read about a social scientist who had determined a roughly fifty year cycle between social unrest and relative cultural harmony. The unrest generally seems to coincide with times when a small cabal of the rich and powerful use their leverage to introduce unsustainable imbalances in the culture. At this time in history in the U.S., we have the 99% lined up against the one percent fraction of society that controls the nation's wealth and public policy.
A Nobel Prize winning chemist named Ilya Prigogine came up with what is now coined a Theory of Dissapative Structure, which was first applied to chemistry. It was later seen to have application to life in general as an adjunct to General Systems Theory to provide some sense of how cyclical dynamics work. Born in Russia, Prigogine is refered historically as being Belgian because he spent most of his life there, became a Belgian citizen, and did his most important work there.
When Prigogine's 'Disspative Structure' ideas are blended with Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's 'General Systems' view of biology, the result is a view of human life that constantly cycles between chaos and good order. In rough parlance, Prigogine's view is that living systems deal with a relentless introduction of new possibility by stacking on ever more complexity as a means of maintaining order. Eventually, the sheer weight and scale of that complexity causes the system to collapse, with a new harmony emerging, built on a simplified structure that accounts for all the complexity previously introduced. It sounds more complicated than it is.
I have my own way of characterizing this cyclical collapse and reordering. In looking at history, the pattern I see boils down to 'two steps forward- one step back'. Sure, it's an oversimplification, but it does provide useful perspective.
World War Two amounted to chaos on a global scale. Afterward, human societies quickly reordered themselves. The post war years in the U.S. were relatively calm. Since then, we have endured a near constant barrage of social, economic and political turmoil. Each step taken to deal with one of these cultural scale conflicts - racial prejudice, for instance - required additional layers of complexity as a means of restoring order.
To use an analogy, if the Golden Gate Bridge were required to carry ever more, and ever heavier vehicles, with ever greater frequency, and with windstorms and earthquakes acting on its aging structure, the expected response would be to add more steel to strengthen the bridge. Eventually, the sheer weight and complexity of the bridge would cause it to collapse. At that point, what would likely emerge is a new bridge with a simplified design that allows for an ordered management of all the added variables in traffic and other factors affecting the bridge's function.
Okay, so where do we stand right now as humans if we apply this 'two steps forward- one step back' logic to events shaping our lives and the lives of future generations? My view; as a human society, we are caught up in some deadly serious backsliding. Just think of the global scale challenges we are faced with, then consider how we are dealing with most of them. Overpopulation: as a society we mostly remain in denial. Resource overexploitation: many of us sense that we are dangerously depleting our fresh water resources, our top soil, our forests, and the living biology of our oceans. Yet, we allow our society's 'foxes to remain in charge of our henhouse'. Public policies on energy, on banking, and pretty much any other area of consequence have been shaped and are controlled by rapacious insiders. Money and power become the chief arbiter rather than enlighened public interest. The weight of this has become an unprecidented burden on the collective human culture.
The step backwards that we are now fully caught up in is global in scale. Layering on ever more complexity will not fix the problem. The damage we are doing to our biosphere is massive and, in too many cases, irrepairable. The way we respond over the next decade or so will determine how hard and how far we will fall. New technologies and new progressive ideas are emerging that promise the possibility of evolving into a way of living that is sustainable. We must sweep away the detritus of the old ways and embrace a new cultural paradigm designed on nature's model. That is the only life-affirming way forward.
A Nobel Prize winning chemist named Ilya Prigogine came up with what is now coined a Theory of Dissapative Structure, which was first applied to chemistry. It was later seen to have application to life in general as an adjunct to General Systems Theory to provide some sense of how cyclical dynamics work. Born in Russia, Prigogine is refered historically as being Belgian because he spent most of his life there, became a Belgian citizen, and did his most important work there.
When Prigogine's 'Disspative Structure' ideas are blended with Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's 'General Systems' view of biology, the result is a view of human life that constantly cycles between chaos and good order. In rough parlance, Prigogine's view is that living systems deal with a relentless introduction of new possibility by stacking on ever more complexity as a means of maintaining order. Eventually, the sheer weight and scale of that complexity causes the system to collapse, with a new harmony emerging, built on a simplified structure that accounts for all the complexity previously introduced. It sounds more complicated than it is.
I have my own way of characterizing this cyclical collapse and reordering. In looking at history, the pattern I see boils down to 'two steps forward- one step back'. Sure, it's an oversimplification, but it does provide useful perspective.
World War Two amounted to chaos on a global scale. Afterward, human societies quickly reordered themselves. The post war years in the U.S. were relatively calm. Since then, we have endured a near constant barrage of social, economic and political turmoil. Each step taken to deal with one of these cultural scale conflicts - racial prejudice, for instance - required additional layers of complexity as a means of restoring order.
To use an analogy, if the Golden Gate Bridge were required to carry ever more, and ever heavier vehicles, with ever greater frequency, and with windstorms and earthquakes acting on its aging structure, the expected response would be to add more steel to strengthen the bridge. Eventually, the sheer weight and complexity of the bridge would cause it to collapse. At that point, what would likely emerge is a new bridge with a simplified design that allows for an ordered management of all the added variables in traffic and other factors affecting the bridge's function.
Okay, so where do we stand right now as humans if we apply this 'two steps forward- one step back' logic to events shaping our lives and the lives of future generations? My view; as a human society, we are caught up in some deadly serious backsliding. Just think of the global scale challenges we are faced with, then consider how we are dealing with most of them. Overpopulation: as a society we mostly remain in denial. Resource overexploitation: many of us sense that we are dangerously depleting our fresh water resources, our top soil, our forests, and the living biology of our oceans. Yet, we allow our society's 'foxes to remain in charge of our henhouse'. Public policies on energy, on banking, and pretty much any other area of consequence have been shaped and are controlled by rapacious insiders. Money and power become the chief arbiter rather than enlighened public interest. The weight of this has become an unprecidented burden on the collective human culture.
The step backwards that we are now fully caught up in is global in scale. Layering on ever more complexity will not fix the problem. The damage we are doing to our biosphere is massive and, in too many cases, irrepairable. The way we respond over the next decade or so will determine how hard and how far we will fall. New technologies and new progressive ideas are emerging that promise the possibility of evolving into a way of living that is sustainable. We must sweep away the detritus of the old ways and embrace a new cultural paradigm designed on nature's model. That is the only life-affirming way forward.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Divorce for the U.S. and Pakistan
I just read an article about the very sensible outlook of former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. In 65 years of trying to be allies, the U.S. and Paksitan have failed miserably, says Mr. Haqqani. Right now, at a time when the U.S. is funneling billions of aid to Pakistan, three in four Pakistani people consider America an enemy.
We sell or give the Pakistanis fighter jets and modern weaponry. Their military and intelligence agencies work actively against our interests. For years, they harbored Osama Bin Laden down the road from their equivalent of our 'West Point' military training academy. They harbor the Taliban, and look the other way as the Taliban conduct cross border raids into Afghanistan. We use our UAV spy aircraft to seek out the Taliban in their Pakistani hiding places and end up recklessly dropping 'smart' bombs on innocent Pakistani civilians. Yes, sometimes we hit the right targets, but when we miss, it does serious damage to our relationship with the Pakistani people. They hate us. Should that be a surprise? If the Pakistanis were flying UAVs over our cities and dropping bombs around us, how would we react?
Pakistan is a very dangerous country. It is a Muslim nation of nearly 200 million people that possesses nuclear weapons. It suffers from runaway population growth. It can barely feed its own people. It has a long standing, unresolved conflict with the even bigger nation next door, India.
For decades, the U.S. has tried to have it both ways with Pakistan and India, whose natural enmity is based mostly on religious differences. As a consequence, America does not enjoy a comfortable relationship with either country.
Former Ambassador Haqqani suggests that we should drop the pretentions. The U.S. and Pakistan should 'divorce' and learn to get along, understanding that there are many areas where cooperation makes sense, and also some areas where we must acept that our interests are not going to coincide. Seems like that's the kind of relationship we already enjoy with China and Russia. We get along reasonably well with Russia and China these days, even though we have no illusions that they will ever reinvent themselves in our image.
While we're getting practical about Pakistan, let's focus on keeping their nuclear capability out of the hands of those who would really like to hurt us.
Here is an article reporting on Ambassador Haqqani's practical assessment of how best to manage America's relationship with Pakistan.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13428824-us-pakistan-should-divorce-ex-ambassador-to-washington-says?lite
We sell or give the Pakistanis fighter jets and modern weaponry. Their military and intelligence agencies work actively against our interests. For years, they harbored Osama Bin Laden down the road from their equivalent of our 'West Point' military training academy. They harbor the Taliban, and look the other way as the Taliban conduct cross border raids into Afghanistan. We use our UAV spy aircraft to seek out the Taliban in their Pakistani hiding places and end up recklessly dropping 'smart' bombs on innocent Pakistani civilians. Yes, sometimes we hit the right targets, but when we miss, it does serious damage to our relationship with the Pakistani people. They hate us. Should that be a surprise? If the Pakistanis were flying UAVs over our cities and dropping bombs around us, how would we react?
Pakistan is a very dangerous country. It is a Muslim nation of nearly 200 million people that possesses nuclear weapons. It suffers from runaway population growth. It can barely feed its own people. It has a long standing, unresolved conflict with the even bigger nation next door, India.
For decades, the U.S. has tried to have it both ways with Pakistan and India, whose natural enmity is based mostly on religious differences. As a consequence, America does not enjoy a comfortable relationship with either country.
Former Ambassador Haqqani suggests that we should drop the pretentions. The U.S. and Pakistan should 'divorce' and learn to get along, understanding that there are many areas where cooperation makes sense, and also some areas where we must acept that our interests are not going to coincide. Seems like that's the kind of relationship we already enjoy with China and Russia. We get along reasonably well with Russia and China these days, even though we have no illusions that they will ever reinvent themselves in our image.
While we're getting practical about Pakistan, let's focus on keeping their nuclear capability out of the hands of those who would really like to hurt us.
Here is an article reporting on Ambassador Haqqani's practical assessment of how best to manage America's relationship with Pakistan.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13428824-us-pakistan-should-divorce-ex-ambassador-to-washington-says?lite
Sunday, August 26, 2012
A New Kind of Pipeline
Ever thought about pipes? We depend on pipe, millions of miles of buried pipe, in every town and every city to deliver water to the tap, and to conveniently carry our sewage out of sight, out of mind. We use pipes as conduits throughout buildings to carry heat and cool air, and to protect electrical and computer wiring. We use pipe to move liquid and gaseous fuels from well head to refinery, then on to distribution centers across the nation. Pipelines are part of society's crticial infrtastructure. They are indispensible.
Most sub-surface pipe is made of metal or reinforced concrete. There are millions of miles of pipeline running underground across America, and in every developed nation on Earth. A lot of the piping we depend on in the U.S. is aging. Much of it needs to be replaced. Because traditional metal and concrete piping is heavy and is fabricated in short sections, it is very labor intensive and expensive to replace.
Now, there is a better and much cheaper way of building or replacing an existing pipeline.
Civil Engineering Professor Mo Ehsani from the University of Arizona has developed a system that allows the fabrication of lightweight piping on site using a combination of honeycombed aerospace plastic and resin-impregnated, carbon fiber wrap. Ehsani's new technology - he calls it InfinitiPipe - can be scaled to produce piping of the size and strength needed to meet different applications. Because the process can go on more or less infinitely, the joints that cause traditional piping infrstructutre to breakdown are mostly eliminated.
Ehsani invisions mounting the machine that synthesizes the Infiniti pipe on a trailer truck, allowing the piping to be produced right on site, when and where needed.
The issue now is whether or not the government agencies in charge of ovcerhauling our crumbling sewage and potable water systems will embrace this new technology. The people that make concrete and steel pipe will likely resist such change, despite the cost and safety benefits InfinitiPipe could bring to every community.
Most sub-surface pipe is made of metal or reinforced concrete. There are millions of miles of pipeline running underground across America, and in every developed nation on Earth. A lot of the piping we depend on in the U.S. is aging. Much of it needs to be replaced. Because traditional metal and concrete piping is heavy and is fabricated in short sections, it is very labor intensive and expensive to replace.
Now, there is a better and much cheaper way of building or replacing an existing pipeline.
Civil Engineering Professor Mo Ehsani from the University of Arizona has developed a system that allows the fabrication of lightweight piping on site using a combination of honeycombed aerospace plastic and resin-impregnated, carbon fiber wrap. Ehsani's new technology - he calls it InfinitiPipe - can be scaled to produce piping of the size and strength needed to meet different applications. Because the process can go on more or less infinitely, the joints that cause traditional piping infrstructutre to breakdown are mostly eliminated.
 |
| Professor Mo Ehsani with InfinitiPipe |
Ehsani invisions mounting the machine that synthesizes the Infiniti pipe on a trailer truck, allowing the piping to be produced right on site, when and where needed.
 |
| Truck mounted InfinitPipe synthesis |
The issue now is whether or not the government agencies in charge of ovcerhauling our crumbling sewage and potable water systems will embrace this new technology. The people that make concrete and steel pipe will likely resist such change, despite the cost and safety benefits InfinitiPipe could bring to every community.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Gunslingers on Campus
Gun violence is a deeply disturbing part of life in America. A person is twenty times more likely to get shot in the U.S. versus the rest of the developed world. Mass murder by gun toting mental deficients has become a regular part of the news cycle in this country.
Now, we have states like New Hampshire, Colorado, and Arizona passing laws that allow college students to come to campus packing heat. College is a place where immaturity, poor judgement, and boorish behavior are the rule rather than the exception. A few years ago, a student went nuts at Virginia Tech University and killed 32 people.
I don't own a gun. I have no wish to own one. In principle, I don't object to people owning guns as long as they are subject to a reasonable level of regulation. Of course, no such thing exists in the United States. The NRA has politicians scared shitless about supporting any kind of gun control.
I enjoyed my time as a college student. With one exception, I was never aware of or even thought about the threat of gun violence while at Kansas State or the University of Washington, the two places I spent my college days. What I do remember about those days, particularly as a college freshman away from home for the first time, was a lot of stupid, even reckless behavior, and a lot of emotional immaturity. In that atmosphere, ready access to a gun opens the window to easy solutions to conflicts with other students or even within one's self. Add a lot of drinking and drug experimenting to the mix, having ready access to a gun just makes no sense.
I would never attend a university where students were encouraged to come to campus armed wth handguns; any kind of gun for that matter. I would not feel safe in such circumstances.
In 2012, the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado ruled that students must be allowed to come on campus armed, overturning a ban put in place by the regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder. More recently, a dropout from the University of Colorado shot up a movie theater, killing seven peiople and wounding many more.
A gun can be lethal in an instant. College is supposed to be about learning, not gunslinging.
Here is a link to an article by a University of Texas student that reflects on guns on campus...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-grant/keep-colleges-free-from-g_b_1733198.html
Now, we have states like New Hampshire, Colorado, and Arizona passing laws that allow college students to come to campus packing heat. College is a place where immaturity, poor judgement, and boorish behavior are the rule rather than the exception. A few years ago, a student went nuts at Virginia Tech University and killed 32 people.
I don't own a gun. I have no wish to own one. In principle, I don't object to people owning guns as long as they are subject to a reasonable level of regulation. Of course, no such thing exists in the United States. The NRA has politicians scared shitless about supporting any kind of gun control.
I enjoyed my time as a college student. With one exception, I was never aware of or even thought about the threat of gun violence while at Kansas State or the University of Washington, the two places I spent my college days. What I do remember about those days, particularly as a college freshman away from home for the first time, was a lot of stupid, even reckless behavior, and a lot of emotional immaturity. In that atmosphere, ready access to a gun opens the window to easy solutions to conflicts with other students or even within one's self. Add a lot of drinking and drug experimenting to the mix, having ready access to a gun just makes no sense.
I would never attend a university where students were encouraged to come to campus armed wth handguns; any kind of gun for that matter. I would not feel safe in such circumstances.
In 2012, the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado ruled that students must be allowed to come on campus armed, overturning a ban put in place by the regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder. More recently, a dropout from the University of Colorado shot up a movie theater, killing seven peiople and wounding many more.
A gun can be lethal in an instant. College is supposed to be about learning, not gunslinging.
Here is a link to an article by a University of Texas student that reflects on guns on campus...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-grant/keep-colleges-free-from-g_b_1733198.html
Friday, August 24, 2012
How to Buy Happiness
Having money can make you happy... when you spend it on someone else. That's the message of psychologist Michael Norton, based on how we feel about what we buy and how we spend.
Norton, an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School, studied how people feel when they spend money on themselves vs how they feel when they spend on others.
What he found is happiness comes from spending on someone other than yourself, but not nearly as much when spending on ones self.
Here is a link to Michael Norton's inspiring TED presentation...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness.html
Norton, an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School, studied how people feel when they spend money on themselves vs how they feel when they spend on others.
What he found is happiness comes from spending on someone other than yourself, but not nearly as much when spending on ones self.
Here is a link to Michael Norton's inspiring TED presentation...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness.html
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Who Are These People?
Have you heard of the Westboro Baptist Church? Chances are, if you pay attention to the media, you have heard of them and their disgusting protests. This so called church is located in Topeka, Kansas. It's members have become famous for traveling around the country, agitating at the funerals for American solders killed in Iraq and now Afghanistan. Why? Because they see these deaths as God's punishment for allowing gays to live openly in society. Being gay is the devil's work according in their boneheaded version of Christian theology. These folks raise a stink with signs that say ugly things like, 'God Hates Fags' and 'Too Late to Pray'
After hearing about this group time and again in the media, I had to ask the question, 'Who are these people?' The media reports on them like they're a ubiquitous presence all over the country, at every funeral of a soldier slain in a war zone.
Some localities have passed laws forbidding Westboro's ugly brand of protesting. The US Supreme Court then affirmed their freedom to protest. The Foo Fighters, a big time rock band, produced a song ridiculing the church. When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, a church leader called the media and announced their intention to protest at his funeral. Moreover, she made the announcement from her iphone.
We go back to the question, 'Who are these people?' It turns out most of them - about forty total - are relatives of the group's founder, Pastor Fred Phelps. Amazing. How could such a small number of zealots, mostly from one family, cause so much discord and ill will? There seems to be only one concievable answer to that question. The Westboro Baptist Church has a public presence and an impact that is way out of proportion to its actual size and reach because the media enables them. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church have been elevated to a ridiculous extreme by a ratings driven media that loves controversy and conflict, any kind of controversy or conflict, if it helps fill the 24 hour news cycle and delivers an audience.
It would be so much better if we just ignored them.
After hearing about this group time and again in the media, I had to ask the question, 'Who are these people?' The media reports on them like they're a ubiquitous presence all over the country, at every funeral of a soldier slain in a war zone.
Some localities have passed laws forbidding Westboro's ugly brand of protesting. The US Supreme Court then affirmed their freedom to protest. The Foo Fighters, a big time rock band, produced a song ridiculing the church. When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, a church leader called the media and announced their intention to protest at his funeral. Moreover, she made the announcement from her iphone.
 |
| Paster Fred Phelps |
We go back to the question, 'Who are these people?' It turns out most of them - about forty total - are relatives of the group's founder, Pastor Fred Phelps. Amazing. How could such a small number of zealots, mostly from one family, cause so much discord and ill will? There seems to be only one concievable answer to that question. The Westboro Baptist Church has a public presence and an impact that is way out of proportion to its actual size and reach because the media enables them. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church have been elevated to a ridiculous extreme by a ratings driven media that loves controversy and conflict, any kind of controversy or conflict, if it helps fill the 24 hour news cycle and delivers an audience.
It would be so much better if we just ignored them.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
My Niece, the Harvard Girl
Lindsey Dunn, my niece, is a lovely girl. She's also now a Harvard girl. She is starting work on a Masters Degree in Education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lindsey's husband, Chris Dunn, at the same time, is beginning work on his Masters in International Business at Tufts University, just down the road from Harvard.
Lindsey and Chris are good souls and it's good to see them headed in such positive directions. I wish them all the best.
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| Chris and Lindsey |
Lindsey and Chris are good souls and it's good to see them headed in such positive directions. I wish them all the best.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Great White Versus Orca
This incident happened a few years ago. National Geographic later did a one hour piece on the whole relationship between orca, aka killer whales, and great white sharks in the Farallon Islands, off San Francisco.
In this video, a tourist boat comes across an orca swimming with its calf. Then, a great white shark came along. The next thing the tourists saw was the orca coming to the surface holding the shark upside down in its jaws. The shark never had a chance.
Two interesting bits of understanding emerged from this incident.
Interesting bit #1 - Researchers have long known that turning a shark upside down induces a form of torpor, rendering the shark totally defenseless. The scientists knew this, but this incident appears to prove that at least some orcas know it as well and use it in their hunting technique with sharks.
Interesting bit #2 - The orca killed the shark at a time of year when there were a lot of seals in the area. Because of that, lots of great white sharks were also there, looking to score a seal for dinner. Some scientists were working in the Farallons with tagged great whites at the same time the shark was killed by the orca. The scientists recorded some totally unexpected behavior. The great whites took off. In one case, a radio tagged shark dove deep and fled the area. It didn't stop until it was thousands of mles away. Somehow, the sharks seemed to know one of their own had been killed. The mechanism remains unknown, but, at a time of year when the waters around the Farallons are normally teeming with great white sharks feasting on seals, there were no sharks to be found.
I just thought this whole episode was fascinating. If the tourist boat hadn't been on scene when the orca killed the shark; if that incident had not been witnessed, shark researchers would still be trying to figure out why all the other great whites in the area suddenly dissappeared.
Here is the link to the video that shows the orca dispatching the Great White Shark..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQ5qCJEEwc&feature=related
 |
| Orca dining on a Great White |
In this video, a tourist boat comes across an orca swimming with its calf. Then, a great white shark came along. The next thing the tourists saw was the orca coming to the surface holding the shark upside down in its jaws. The shark never had a chance.
Two interesting bits of understanding emerged from this incident.
Interesting bit #1 - Researchers have long known that turning a shark upside down induces a form of torpor, rendering the shark totally defenseless. The scientists knew this, but this incident appears to prove that at least some orcas know it as well and use it in their hunting technique with sharks.
Interesting bit #2 - The orca killed the shark at a time of year when there were a lot of seals in the area. Because of that, lots of great white sharks were also there, looking to score a seal for dinner. Some scientists were working in the Farallons with tagged great whites at the same time the shark was killed by the orca. The scientists recorded some totally unexpected behavior. The great whites took off. In one case, a radio tagged shark dove deep and fled the area. It didn't stop until it was thousands of mles away. Somehow, the sharks seemed to know one of their own had been killed. The mechanism remains unknown, but, at a time of year when the waters around the Farallons are normally teeming with great white sharks feasting on seals, there were no sharks to be found.
I just thought this whole episode was fascinating. If the tourist boat hadn't been on scene when the orca killed the shark; if that incident had not been witnessed, shark researchers would still be trying to figure out why all the other great whites in the area suddenly dissappeared.
Here is the link to the video that shows the orca dispatching the Great White Shark..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQ5qCJEEwc&feature=related
Monday, August 20, 2012
A Book Literally About Assholes
Look up an old movie, titled Flesh Gordon. It was a really cheesy sex farce in which the principle force for evil was the Emperor Wang, who gloated as his fawning subjects addressed him most deferentially as, 'Your Assholiness.'
There are more than a few high flying players in public life these days who have very much earned the distinction of being referred to with the same contemptible scorn.
Do we really need a book that tells us the accumulated knowledge on the subject of assholes? University of California, Berkeley linguist, Professor Geoffrey Nunberg has done just that with his new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, The First Sixty Years.
Here's what Booklist had to say about it...
“Only an asshole would say this book is offensive. Sure, it uses the A-word a lot, but this is no cheap attempt to get laughs written by a B-list stand-up comic. The author … undertakes a serious examination of not just the word, but also the concept surrounding it (known as assholism, a type of behavior with, it seems, pretty clear markers)…. An intelligent and wide-ranging study of linguistics, ideas, and social trends."
Nunberg says an asshole is someone capable of cultural obtuseness. Assholes act with a sense of entitlement. There are plenty of people in public life who fit that description. Their attitude seems to be, 'I got mine, so F*** you.' Assholes carp about all the taxes they're paying; They hate regulations that force them to adhere to a reasonable societal standard. They want to strip away the social safety net that protects those less fortunate than they are.
Selfish, arrogant, self-absorbed, delusional; these are some other words that fit nicely in giving an asshole real definition.
I probably won't read Geoffrey Nunberg's book of Assholes, but I'm glad it's here. It just seems fitting that we now have a book that shines a glaring light on the brain dead self-absorption that characterizes so many business and political leaders across America.
Here is an article Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about assholes...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-nunberg/asshole-history_b_1819872.html#slide=more246095
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Bubba
My brother Jay had a crazy cat. His name was Bubba. He was very mellow and friendly, but he also was into adventure.
Bubba liked to get on the roof of Jay's house. One day Jay was napping on his sofa a few feet from the fireplace. He was awakened suddenly when he heard something. Then, he saw ashes falling into the fireplace pit from the flue. A moment later, Bubba dropped into the firepit. He was covered with soot from his exploration of the chimney.
My brother's wife Jeannine told me that another time, she and Jay were awakened in bed to find Bubba staring at them a foot away from their faces with a live mouse in his jaws. They were startled. Bubba dropped the mouse and it went scurring away. Jay later caught it and released it outside of the house. The whole thing was Bubba being a cat. The sweet thing about this is that Bubba was gifting his catch to his co-habitors in the house.
Bubba is long gone now. He died of old age. He had a good life with Jay and Jeannine. He brought them a lot of joy as well, just by being the kitty personality that he was.
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| Me and Bubba |
Bubba liked to get on the roof of Jay's house. One day Jay was napping on his sofa a few feet from the fireplace. He was awakened suddenly when he heard something. Then, he saw ashes falling into the fireplace pit from the flue. A moment later, Bubba dropped into the firepit. He was covered with soot from his exploration of the chimney.
My brother's wife Jeannine told me that another time, she and Jay were awakened in bed to find Bubba staring at them a foot away from their faces with a live mouse in his jaws. They were startled. Bubba dropped the mouse and it went scurring away. Jay later caught it and released it outside of the house. The whole thing was Bubba being a cat. The sweet thing about this is that Bubba was gifting his catch to his co-habitors in the house.
Bubba is long gone now. He died of old age. He had a good life with Jay and Jeannine. He brought them a lot of joy as well, just by being the kitty personality that he was.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Cockpit Video - Airbus A380
I have found a new guilty pleasure. There's a German video production company that is making very high quality videos, recording the cockpit activity for various airline flights, most of them Lufthansa and other European airlines.
The A380 is the largest commercial airliner ever built. It has 50% more cabin space than the next largest ariliner, the Boeing 747-400. The only airliner with two decks that run the entire length of the fuselage, the A380 can carry 500 plus passenger in three class configuration. It has a range of over 9,000 miles at a cruising speed of 560 mph, allowing it to fly nonstop from New York to Hong Kong. Takeoff weight is nearly 1 3 million pounds. If you wanted to buy one new, it would cost you in the neighborhood of $400 million. Only twenty airports in the world have runways certified to handle the weight and sheer size of the A380.
Here is a link to a very cool A380 cockpit video...
http://www.videoaround.com/cockpit/airbus-a380-cockpit-tour.html
Here is another video that features Lufthansa chief pilot, Juergen Rapp in an A380 cockpit, explaining its flight control and flight management systems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oa6kRkyyIo&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJylJWwe1h0&feature=relmfu
 |
| A380 |
The A380 is the largest commercial airliner ever built. It has 50% more cabin space than the next largest ariliner, the Boeing 747-400. The only airliner with two decks that run the entire length of the fuselage, the A380 can carry 500 plus passenger in three class configuration. It has a range of over 9,000 miles at a cruising speed of 560 mph, allowing it to fly nonstop from New York to Hong Kong. Takeoff weight is nearly 1 3 million pounds. If you wanted to buy one new, it would cost you in the neighborhood of $400 million. Only twenty airports in the world have runways certified to handle the weight and sheer size of the A380.
 |
| A380 Cockpit |
Here is a link to a very cool A380 cockpit video...
http://www.videoaround.com/cockpit/airbus-a380-cockpit-tour.html
Here is another video that features Lufthansa chief pilot, Juergen Rapp in an A380 cockpit, explaining its flight control and flight management systems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oa6kRkyyIo&feature=relmfu
 |
There was a time when I wanted very much to have a career as a pilot with the airlines. Color acuity deficiency killed that idea. Anyway, the A380 is the top of the mountain for a passenger aircraft pilot.
The following link is a very cool cockpt video of an A380 pushing back from the gate and departing London Heathrow Airport.
The following is a cockpit video of an A380 arriving at Heathrow.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Claire de Lune
Claire de lune is a wonderful piece for piano created by the great, 19th century French composer, Claude Debussy.
I'm no expert, but I do find Debussy's compositions to have come from a place separate from the fountain that yielded earlier forms of classical music.
Here is a wonderful video rendition for piano...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKOrtDRnGMY&feature=related
If you liked that, try this one on for size. It's the same piece performed exquisitely by the Philadephia Orchestra...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElTKhbnQxU&feature=related
I'm no expert, but I do find Debussy's compositions to have come from a place separate from the fountain that yielded earlier forms of classical music.
Here is a wonderful video rendition for piano...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKOrtDRnGMY&feature=related
If you liked that, try this one on for size. It's the same piece performed exquisitely by the Philadephia Orchestra...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElTKhbnQxU&feature=related
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Adolescent Humpback Does an 'In Your Face'
This is an amazing photo shot by some guys out fishing in a small boat off the coast of British Columbia. This young humpback whale suddenly breached exactly wherer the camera was pointed.
Even more remarkable is the video that was shot on an iphone at the same time. Look for the surprise just over thirty seconds into the video.
http://youtu.be/B10rHSW4OIA
Here's another video that has the same kind of unexpected excitement...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udm2YjKPKsE&feature=related
Here's yet another very cool close-up whale video...
http://now.msn.com/humpback-whale-surprises-two-kayakers-in-viral-video
Even more remarkable is the video that was shot on an iphone at the same time. Look for the surprise just over thirty seconds into the video.
http://youtu.be/B10rHSW4OIA
Here's another video that has the same kind of unexpected excitement...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udm2YjKPKsE&feature=related
Here's yet another very cool close-up whale video...
http://now.msn.com/humpback-whale-surprises-two-kayakers-in-viral-video
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The First Rule of Holes
The first rule of holes; when you're in one, stop diggin'.
So said the great journalist and wit, Molly Ivins. In fact, Ms. Molly was an original; a truly bright light as human beings go. Her feisty brand of humor is legendary. At one time, her column was carried by over 400 newspapers across the United States.
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| Molly Ivins |
Molly Ivins was fearless in calling out those in politics and in corporate America whose behavior was less than ethical. She was raised in Texas and spent most of her life there, reserving her sharpest wit and ridicule for that state and its shady brand of conservatve politics.
Practice. Practise. Practice. That's what Texas provides when it comes to sleaze and stink.
On George W. Bush, whom she nortoriously dubbed, 'Schrub"...
Everyone knows the man has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as he always has been: barely adequate.
Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.
On Former Texas Congressman and Tea Party founder, Dick Armey...
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drillin' rights on that man's head.
On America's #1 conservative radio talker...
I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.
On Bill Clinton...
If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal
Molly's Mantra...
...keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
Molly Ivins passed away in January, 2007 from breast cancer. She was only 62 years old. I miss reading her columns. I get a kick out of thinking about what Molly would have to say about the tea party and other political insanities that have come to roost in America since the Obama era began.
Molly's mantra works for me. She admired honesty and decency. I am inspired to be a force like she was, and like her, I want to have a good time doing it.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Hanging with the P.M. in Vanuatu
In 2003, I traveled to Vanuatu in the South Pacific to shoot a video segment for the documentary we were shooting at that time. It was titled, The Hydrogen Age. This was the same trip that included the hairiest airliner approach and landing I have ever experienced. See my blog entry dated, 8/7/12.
We choose to do this segment in Vanuatu for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is an independent nation that suffers in the strangle hold of big oil. Like the rest of the world, Vanuatu is dependent on oil. In Vanuatu, that dependence is total and unequvocal. There are only two or three power stations in the entire country. They all run on imported fuel oil brought in by tanker. The capitol, Port Vila has electricity. There is also a power station on Espirito Santo, which incidentally is the island where James Michener was stationed during World War Two. It was there, that he wrote his famous novel, South Pacific. Anyway, Vanuatu spends abiout 80% of its national budget buying fuel oil for it's power stations. There is no money for roads; no money for lighting in rural schools; no money for any kind of big intiative that would advance the welfare of the Vanuatuan people.
My friend, marine biologist Richard Chesher, was spending alot of time in Vanuatu at that time. He was acquainted with many of that nations's prominent government officials. I talked to Rick about my media work focused on renewables and hydrogen in particular. Almost immediately, he saw the impact it could have on that nation.
Vanuatu has an abundance of renewable energy resources including a lot of wind, solar, tidal, and perhaps most important, significant untapped geothermal potential. If Vanuatu could tap that energy and find a way to store it for use on demand, they could end their dependence on oil. Not only that, they could become a net energy exporter. What hydrogen provided was the means to take Vanuatu's captured renewable energy potential into a clean, storable form of energy that could be used on demand, when and where needed. Hydrogen was the key. It was a gamechanger.
Rick Chesher began talking up hydrogen and renewables to his friends in government. He formed a company with some prominent local leaders. They got the Prime Minister, Eduard Natapei, interested. The P.M. saw that his nation's renewable energy potential combined with hydrogen's ability to be used as a clean energy currency, could have a profoundly positive impact on the future of his people.
My co-producer on The Hydrogen Age, Bill Hoagland, and I decided that Vanuatu's potential with renewably produced hydrogen was a story that should be included in our documentary.
Within a few weeks, I was on my way to Sydney, Australia, and from there, it was on to Vanuatu, where I experienced the white knuckle arrival of my life. See blog entry dated 8/7/12.
Rick had friends at Vanuatu's national television station. It's called TV Blong Vanuatu. They wanted replacement lithium batteries for their field ENG video cameras. We made a deal. I brought some of the new batteries for them; they provided one of their video crews to me.
The day after I arrived in Vanuatu, Rick Chesher and I went to meet the Prime Minister, Eduard Natapei, at his office.
The P.M. was a very affable fellow. It was no wonder he was a successful politician. I was prepared to conduct the interview with him in his office. Instead, he says, let's go and see some things. So, we headed out in a couple of cars. Vanuatu is a friendly place. No big security detail. As soon as we left Port Vila, the roads turned from asphalt to gravel. There was no money in the government treasury to pave roads outside of the capitol. Halfway around the island, we stopped . The P.M. led us on foot off the road to an unndeveloped meadow very close to the ocean. We were on top of a massive geothermal site. There were pools of boiling hot and steaming water scattered about. At that location, I conducted the interview with the P.M. We later visited a village that had no electricity or running water. Every one there subsisted off the land and the sea. In was in that village, surrounded by the locals, that I gave the Prime Minister a copy of the book, Natural Capitalism. I had interview one of the book's co-authors, Amory Lovins, at his home in Old Snowmass, Colorado a month or so before my trip to Vanuatu. Amory gave me an autographed copy of Natural Capitalism that was to be given to the P.M. That was pretty cool; being the link between the great energy guru, Amory Lovins and the Prime Minister of Vanuatu.
All told, I spent about five hours with the P.M. that day. He was very gracious, and I left Vanuatu a few days later, hoping very much that a start on a new and better future for Vanuatu would soon come in the form of developemnt support for that country's geothermal resource. It was exciting to think that my friend Rick Chesher, and I, and my associates working on The Hydrogen Age, might have played a significant part in creating a new energy paradigm for that small island nation.
Unfortuantely, the outcome was not what we had hoped for. The government of Vanuatu was unable to generate any financial support for developing their indigenous renewable energy resources. Big Oil's political muscle blocked any such possibility. To this day, Vanuatu remains economically crippled by its total energy dependence on imported oil.
We choose to do this segment in Vanuatu for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is an independent nation that suffers in the strangle hold of big oil. Like the rest of the world, Vanuatu is dependent on oil. In Vanuatu, that dependence is total and unequvocal. There are only two or three power stations in the entire country. They all run on imported fuel oil brought in by tanker. The capitol, Port Vila has electricity. There is also a power station on Espirito Santo, which incidentally is the island where James Michener was stationed during World War Two. It was there, that he wrote his famous novel, South Pacific. Anyway, Vanuatu spends abiout 80% of its national budget buying fuel oil for it's power stations. There is no money for roads; no money for lighting in rural schools; no money for any kind of big intiative that would advance the welfare of the Vanuatuan people.
My friend, marine biologist Richard Chesher, was spending alot of time in Vanuatu at that time. He was acquainted with many of that nations's prominent government officials. I talked to Rick about my media work focused on renewables and hydrogen in particular. Almost immediately, he saw the impact it could have on that nation.
Vanuatu has an abundance of renewable energy resources including a lot of wind, solar, tidal, and perhaps most important, significant untapped geothermal potential. If Vanuatu could tap that energy and find a way to store it for use on demand, they could end their dependence on oil. Not only that, they could become a net energy exporter. What hydrogen provided was the means to take Vanuatu's captured renewable energy potential into a clean, storable form of energy that could be used on demand, when and where needed. Hydrogen was the key. It was a gamechanger.
Rick Chesher began talking up hydrogen and renewables to his friends in government. He formed a company with some prominent local leaders. They got the Prime Minister, Eduard Natapei, interested. The P.M. saw that his nation's renewable energy potential combined with hydrogen's ability to be used as a clean energy currency, could have a profoundly positive impact on the future of his people.
 |
| Port Vila, Capitol of Vanuatu |
My co-producer on The Hydrogen Age, Bill Hoagland, and I decided that Vanuatu's potential with renewably produced hydrogen was a story that should be included in our documentary.
Within a few weeks, I was on my way to Sydney, Australia, and from there, it was on to Vanuatu, where I experienced the white knuckle arrival of my life. See blog entry dated 8/7/12.
Rick had friends at Vanuatu's national television station. It's called TV Blong Vanuatu. They wanted replacement lithium batteries for their field ENG video cameras. We made a deal. I brought some of the new batteries for them; they provided one of their video crews to me.
The day after I arrived in Vanuatu, Rick Chesher and I went to meet the Prime Minister, Eduard Natapei, at his office.
 |
| Eduard Natapei |
The P.M. was a very affable fellow. It was no wonder he was a successful politician. I was prepared to conduct the interview with him in his office. Instead, he says, let's go and see some things. So, we headed out in a couple of cars. Vanuatu is a friendly place. No big security detail. As soon as we left Port Vila, the roads turned from asphalt to gravel. There was no money in the government treasury to pave roads outside of the capitol. Halfway around the island, we stopped . The P.M. led us on foot off the road to an unndeveloped meadow very close to the ocean. We were on top of a massive geothermal site. There were pools of boiling hot and steaming water scattered about. At that location, I conducted the interview with the P.M. We later visited a village that had no electricity or running water. Every one there subsisted off the land and the sea. In was in that village, surrounded by the locals, that I gave the Prime Minister a copy of the book, Natural Capitalism. I had interview one of the book's co-authors, Amory Lovins, at his home in Old Snowmass, Colorado a month or so before my trip to Vanuatu. Amory gave me an autographed copy of Natural Capitalism that was to be given to the P.M. That was pretty cool; being the link between the great energy guru, Amory Lovins and the Prime Minister of Vanuatu.
All told, I spent about five hours with the P.M. that day. He was very gracious, and I left Vanuatu a few days later, hoping very much that a start on a new and better future for Vanuatu would soon come in the form of developemnt support for that country's geothermal resource. It was exciting to think that my friend Rick Chesher, and I, and my associates working on The Hydrogen Age, might have played a significant part in creating a new energy paradigm for that small island nation.
Unfortuantely, the outcome was not what we had hoped for. The government of Vanuatu was unable to generate any financial support for developing their indigenous renewable energy resources. Big Oil's political muscle blocked any such possibility. To this day, Vanuatu remains economically crippled by its total energy dependence on imported oil.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Happiness Comes From Respect, Not Riches
This piece was published originally by the folks at YES! magazine...
________________________________
A series of studies shows that wealth doesn’t make us happier—but the respect of others does.
Money really can’t buy happiness, research shows. Instead, a new study suggests, those pursuing a happier life would be smart to sharpen their social skills.
In a series of four experiments, researchers found that it is the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers—not overall wealth or success—that more likely predicts happiness. They refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status (SES).
In one experiment, 80 college students from 14 different student groups rated how much they respected and admired the other people in their group, and how respected and admired they felt themselves; they also answered questions about their family’s income and their own level of happiness.
The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, show that people with higher sociometric status reported greater happiness, whereas their socioeconomic status was not linked to their happiness.
In a similar experiment, more than 300 people answered questions about the respect and admiration they received within their friends, family, and work circles. They also reported their personal sense of power in those social circles, and how liked and accepted they felt, along with their income and happiness.
Again, people of high sociometric status were much more likely to be happy than were people of high SES. Through their data analysis, the researchers also found that these people were happier because they felt a greater sense of power and acceptance within their groups.
“Where people stand in their local hierarchy matters to their happiness,” they write.
But does feeling respected and admired actually cause people to be feel happier—or could it be that people admire peers who project happiness?
The researchers addressed that question in two additional experiments. In one, they manipulated people’s sense of status by asking them to compare themselves to people who were much more or much less respected and admired than they were. Other participants had to compare themselves to people who had much more or much less wealth, education, and professional success. Then all participants had to think about how their “similarities and differences” might come into play if they were to interact with these imaginary others.
In this case, people temporarily made to feel like they were of higher sociometric status were happier than people made to feel like they were of lower sociometric status, regardless of their actual status outside of the experiment. By contrast, people made to feel like they had high socioeconomic status were not happier than people made to feel like they had low SES. The results strongly suggest that feeling respected and admired can actually cause our happiness to increase, whereas feeling wealthy (without also feeling respected) doesn’t carry the same effect.
In the final part of the study, the researchers tracked 156 MBA students, following them from shortly before their business school graduation through nine months after graduation. For many of these students, their graduation brought a change in sociometric status—someone admired on campus, for instance, could be disrespected at his or her post-graduate job, even if his or her income went up.
The results show that as the students’ sociometric status rose or fell, their happiness level rose or fell accordingly; in fact, changes to their sociometric status were much more strongly linked to happiness than were changes to their socioeconomic status.
The findings echo past research finding that income has surprisingly little effect on happiness, says Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the lead author of the study.
Instead, Anderson and his colleagues’ research suggests that what really matters is the respect, admiration, and feelings of power we get from others within our face-to-face groups.
“You don’t have to be rich to be happy, but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups,” says Anderson. “What makes a person high in status in a group is being engaged, generous with others, and making self sacrifices for the greater good.”
 |
| Jiri Kabele |
Money really can’t buy happiness, research shows. Instead, a new study suggests, those pursuing a happier life would be smart to sharpen their social skills.
In a series of four experiments, researchers found that it is the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers—not overall wealth or success—that more likely predicts happiness. They refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status (SES).
In one experiment, 80 college students from 14 different student groups rated how much they respected and admired the other people in their group, and how respected and admired they felt themselves; they also answered questions about their family’s income and their own level of happiness.
The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, show that people with higher sociometric status reported greater happiness, whereas their socioeconomic status was not linked to their happiness.
In a similar experiment, more than 300 people answered questions about the respect and admiration they received within their friends, family, and work circles. They also reported their personal sense of power in those social circles, and how liked and accepted they felt, along with their income and happiness.
Again, people of high sociometric status were much more likely to be happy than were people of high SES. Through their data analysis, the researchers also found that these people were happier because they felt a greater sense of power and acceptance within their groups.
“Where people stand in their local hierarchy matters to their happiness,” they write.
But does feeling respected and admired actually cause people to be feel happier—or could it be that people admire peers who project happiness?
“You don’t have to be rich to be happy, but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups."
In this case, people temporarily made to feel like they were of higher sociometric status were happier than people made to feel like they were of lower sociometric status, regardless of their actual status outside of the experiment. By contrast, people made to feel like they had high socioeconomic status were not happier than people made to feel like they had low SES. The results strongly suggest that feeling respected and admired can actually cause our happiness to increase, whereas feeling wealthy (without also feeling respected) doesn’t carry the same effect.
In the final part of the study, the researchers tracked 156 MBA students, following them from shortly before their business school graduation through nine months after graduation. For many of these students, their graduation brought a change in sociometric status—someone admired on campus, for instance, could be disrespected at his or her post-graduate job, even if his or her income went up.
The results show that as the students’ sociometric status rose or fell, their happiness level rose or fell accordingly; in fact, changes to their sociometric status were much more strongly linked to happiness than were changes to their socioeconomic status.
The findings echo past research finding that income has surprisingly little effect on happiness, says Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the lead author of the study.
Instead, Anderson and his colleagues’ research suggests that what really matters is the respect, admiration, and feelings of power we get from others within our face-to-face groups.
“You don’t have to be rich to be happy, but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups,” says Anderson. “What makes a person high in status in a group is being engaged, generous with others, and making self sacrifices for the greater good.”
_____________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Portland
My parents moved our family to Seattle from Kansas City when I was a senior at Kansas State University. That was my first introduction to the Pacific Northwest. When I got out of the Army, I returned to Seattle and enrolled at the University of Washington. Seattle was a great place to live. Still is, except that it's become a lot more crowded since I was there as a student.
Much later, after many years of life in Southern California, my wife and I decided it was time to pull the plug and return to the Northwest. He decided to resettle in Oregon. Our first stop was in Salem, the state capitol. We liked Salem, but life was kind of quiet there after spending many years in the bustle of SoCal. When my wife got an opportunity to take a job at the Portland V.A. Medical Center, we sold our house in Salem and moved to Portland. We found a home we liked near the Sunset light rail station on the West Side. After four years of living in Portland, I am happy to say it is the best place I have ever lived.
Here are a few of my photos of the city...
Much later, after many years of life in Southern California, my wife and I decided it was time to pull the plug and return to the Northwest. He decided to resettle in Oregon. Our first stop was in Salem, the state capitol. We liked Salem, but life was kind of quiet there after spending many years in the bustle of SoCal. When my wife got an opportunity to take a job at the Portland V.A. Medical Center, we sold our house in Salem and moved to Portland. We found a home we liked near the Sunset light rail station on the West Side. After four years of living in Portland, I am happy to say it is the best place I have ever lived.
Here are a few of my photos of the city...
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| Downtown with Mt. Hood in background |
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| Downtown at night |
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| Mt. Hood from Janzen Beach |
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| Downtown, looking North |
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| Steel Bridge, Rose Garden |
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| Hawthorne Bridge |
Saturday, August 11, 2012
A Reaction to Some Nauseating Tripe
My friend Roger Gerber sent me an email with this bit of wisdom.. It's a poignant and appropriately cynical response to some pernicious pontification from self-absorbed radio personality, Laura Schlesinger.
__________________________________
On her radio show, Dr. Laura stated that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Schlesinger, written by retired university professor, James Kauffman, and posted on the Internet.
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have
learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as
many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle,
for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be
an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however,
regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female,
provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims
that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I
own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7.
In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period
of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I
have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing
odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor
is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly
states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or
should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination,
Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can
you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision
have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around
their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How
should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me
unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops
in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different
kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme
a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the
whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to
death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their
in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable
expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your adoring fan,
James M. Kauffman,
Ed.D. Professor Emeritus,
Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia
P.S. (It would be a damn shame if we couldn't own a Canadian.)
Friday, August 10, 2012
Curiosity
It's an absolute marvel what NASA accomplished with it's latest Mars exploration mission. The process of sending an unmanned spacecraft 350 million miles to a celestial object hurtling through three-dimensional space at nearly 25 kilometers per second is wonder enough. NASA's navigation was thread-the-needle perfect. They landed their Curiosity Mars surface explorer exactly where they intended. The way they did it was incredibly complex. The explorer itself weighs almost a ton. Previous methods of depositing an unmanned explorer rover on the planet's surface couldn't work. So, they engineered a complex plan to make it happen. Amazingly, it worked.
So, now NASA has a new car-sized rover named Curosity on the surface of Mars. It's loaded to the gills with cameras, and instruments, and systens for carrying out complex experiments.
I'm really glad we're getting access to all this new knowledge about Mars. Congratulations to all the scientists, engineers, and technicians who collaborated on this achievement. Awesome job.
So, now I keep going back to the same thought. We are seriously screwing up our own planet. The only one we have. Why aren't we applying the same level of intellect and intense focus on the global scale challenges we have right here on Earth? It's not because we don't have good science, or because we don't have enough smart scientists and engineers. They are doing their job. We understand our problems. We know what global climate change is, and we know what we must do to fix it. The science is already in place. What we don't have here on Earth is the political will and the public policy to make things right.
Anyway, here is a wonderful piece of NASA animation that shows how they managed to land the Curiosity rover on Mars...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw
So, now NASA has a new car-sized rover named Curosity on the surface of Mars. It's loaded to the gills with cameras, and instruments, and systens for carrying out complex experiments.
I'm really glad we're getting access to all this new knowledge about Mars. Congratulations to all the scientists, engineers, and technicians who collaborated on this achievement. Awesome job.
So, now I keep going back to the same thought. We are seriously screwing up our own planet. The only one we have. Why aren't we applying the same level of intellect and intense focus on the global scale challenges we have right here on Earth? It's not because we don't have good science, or because we don't have enough smart scientists and engineers. They are doing their job. We understand our problems. We know what global climate change is, and we know what we must do to fix it. The science is already in place. What we don't have here on Earth is the political will and the public policy to make things right.
Anyway, here is a wonderful piece of NASA animation that shows how they managed to land the Curiosity rover on Mars...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Almost Half of All Americans Die Penniless
A new study published by the National Bureau for Economic Research reports that 46% of all Americans that die have less than $10,000 in total financial assets at the end of life. Most of them are entirely dependent on govenment programs like social security and medicare. That percentage is staggering.
Even more alarming; the fact that a large percentage of those in that group tend to vote for politicians whose politics are about eroding the 'New Deal' social safety net even further.
Even more alarming; the fact that a large percentage of those in that group tend to vote for politicians whose politics are about eroding the 'New Deal' social safety net even further.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Kitty Kills
I just read an article about domestic cats. Turns out when they roam free, they generally revert to their feline instincts and become very efficient predators.
University of Georgia researcher Kerry Ann Lloyd looked at cat behavior closely and what she found wasn't pretty. When they are prowling freely around the neighborhood, domestic cats are often doing what comes naturally.
In an article just released by USA Today, George Fenwick, head of the American bird Conservancy, is quoted as saying that cat predation is a significant reason why one in three American bird species are in decline.
There are about 74 million house cats in the US. Of that total, according to Kerry Ann Lloyd's findings, about 30% kill prey - two animals per week on average.
My wife and I have a home in an area that should attract a lot of birds. We have feeders out for them and a pond and a bird bath with water for them. We just don't see them. I'm hardly suggesting that house cats are the principle cause of song birds being absent in a place where one would expect to see alot of them. Loss of habitat is probably the biggest factor. But cats will be cats. And if one in three of 74 million cats are out hunting and killing two critters a week, that translates to about 50 million kills every week. In a year, we're talking about 2.6 billion birds, rodents, and other prey species that are lost to the world, just from house cats.
Again, I want to affirm that I really like cats. I'm not suggesting that people should get rid of their cats. They can be wonderful pets. I am suggesting that responsible cat ownership means taking steps to limit the cat's ability to hunt successfully. One way would be to keep them in the house more often than not. That would make a difference. Another way could be as simple as putting a bell around the cat's neck. That would make it harder for the cat to stalk its prey successfully.
Here is a POV video from University of Georgia researcher Kerry Ann Lloyd that shows some cats wearing tiny 'kitty cams', doing their thing while on the prowl.
http://bcove.me/zks50jd1
University of Georgia researcher Kerry Ann Lloyd looked at cat behavior closely and what she found wasn't pretty. When they are prowling freely around the neighborhood, domestic cats are often doing what comes naturally.
In an article just released by USA Today, George Fenwick, head of the American bird Conservancy, is quoted as saying that cat predation is a significant reason why one in three American bird species are in decline.
There are about 74 million house cats in the US. Of that total, according to Kerry Ann Lloyd's findings, about 30% kill prey - two animals per week on average.
My wife and I have a home in an area that should attract a lot of birds. We have feeders out for them and a pond and a bird bath with water for them. We just don't see them. I'm hardly suggesting that house cats are the principle cause of song birds being absent in a place where one would expect to see alot of them. Loss of habitat is probably the biggest factor. But cats will be cats. And if one in three of 74 million cats are out hunting and killing two critters a week, that translates to about 50 million kills every week. In a year, we're talking about 2.6 billion birds, rodents, and other prey species that are lost to the world, just from house cats.
Again, I want to affirm that I really like cats. I'm not suggesting that people should get rid of their cats. They can be wonderful pets. I am suggesting that responsible cat ownership means taking steps to limit the cat's ability to hunt successfully. One way would be to keep them in the house more often than not. That would make a difference. Another way could be as simple as putting a bell around the cat's neck. That would make it harder for the cat to stalk its prey successfully.
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| Kittycam |
Here is a POV video from University of Georgia researcher Kerry Ann Lloyd that shows some cats wearing tiny 'kitty cams', doing their thing while on the prowl.
http://bcove.me/zks50jd1
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Hairiest landing ever
Ever been on a plane at night, on final approach for a landing in a driving thunderstorm, with almost no visibility?
In 2003, I was on a flight from Sydney, Australia to Port Vila, the capitol of the island nation of Vanuatu. I was headed there to produce a segment for the documentary I was working on at that time. It was called, The Hydrogen Age. More about that part of my Vanuatu adventure on another day. This entry is an account of the craziest, most scary approach and landing I have ever experienced.
Vanuatu is 1500 miles Northeast of Sydney. I was traveling aboard an Air Vanuatu 737 turbojet. After just over three hours flight time, we began our descent into the airport at Port Vila on Efate, the main island of the Vanuatu island group.
As we descended in the darkness, the ride became decidedly more bumpy. I was in an aisle seat, but I could see lightning flashing below and ahead. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing. As our descent continued, we soon found ourselves immersed in thunder, lightning, and driving rain. The turbulence was pretty extreme. The general feeling in the passenger cabin was unsettled to say the least.
Up front, the flight crew were Qantas veterans. I recall hearing one of the pilots come on the plane's PA system. He said something like, "No worries, folks. A bit of bad weather here. Hang on, we'll be on the ground in about ten minutes." His calm voice provided scant reassurance.
The next few minutes were seriously scary. The rain and lightning were with us all the way down. Water was flowing over the windows as the landing gear was deployed. Except for frequent lightning flashes, it was still pitch black outside. Still plenty of buffeting. Finally, the 737 touched down. It was carrying extra speed, the thrust reversers came on and stayed on as the aircraft slowed.
At that point, our brush with terror was over. Minutes later, as I headed up the aisle to deplane, I came on the two Aussie pilots. They were heroes to the passengers. I said to them, "Nice work." The captain smiled, "Day at the office, mate."
Here is an interesting cockpit video of an Air Vanuatu 737 flight from Port, Vila, Vanuatu to Sydney, Australia....
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/fly-low-and-fast-180956560/?utm_source=airandspacenewsletter&no-ist
In 2003, I was on a flight from Sydney, Australia to Port Vila, the capitol of the island nation of Vanuatu. I was headed there to produce a segment for the documentary I was working on at that time. It was called, The Hydrogen Age. More about that part of my Vanuatu adventure on another day. This entry is an account of the craziest, most scary approach and landing I have ever experienced.
Vanuatu is 1500 miles Northeast of Sydney. I was traveling aboard an Air Vanuatu 737 turbojet. After just over three hours flight time, we began our descent into the airport at Port Vila on Efate, the main island of the Vanuatu island group.
As we descended in the darkness, the ride became decidedly more bumpy. I was in an aisle seat, but I could see lightning flashing below and ahead. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing. As our descent continued, we soon found ourselves immersed in thunder, lightning, and driving rain. The turbulence was pretty extreme. The general feeling in the passenger cabin was unsettled to say the least.
Up front, the flight crew were Qantas veterans. I recall hearing one of the pilots come on the plane's PA system. He said something like, "No worries, folks. A bit of bad weather here. Hang on, we'll be on the ground in about ten minutes." His calm voice provided scant reassurance.
The next few minutes were seriously scary. The rain and lightning were with us all the way down. Water was flowing over the windows as the landing gear was deployed. Except for frequent lightning flashes, it was still pitch black outside. Still plenty of buffeting. Finally, the 737 touched down. It was carrying extra speed, the thrust reversers came on and stayed on as the aircraft slowed.
At that point, our brush with terror was over. Minutes later, as I headed up the aisle to deplane, I came on the two Aussie pilots. They were heroes to the passengers. I said to them, "Nice work." The captain smiled, "Day at the office, mate."
Here is an interesting cockpit video of an Air Vanuatu 737 flight from Port, Vila, Vanuatu to Sydney, Australia....
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/fly-low-and-fast-180956560/?utm_source=airandspacenewsletter&no-ist
Monday, August 6, 2012
Jeff Koons
I first heard about Jeff Koons about twenty years ago. I watched a segment on the 60 Minuites TV journal show about him. All I can say is, 'What an operator.'
Koons has become a huge name in the art world. Before he was an 'artist', he was a commodities broker. What qualifies him to carry the label artist? In fairness to him, he apparently did attend art school. Having said that, he seems a lot more like P.T. Barnum than Salvadore Dali.
The wikipedia entry on Koons calls him "an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects." That seems an apt description.
Koons doesn't even do any of his "art" himself. He employs artists to come up with ideas. He employs artisans to do the fabrication for him , then he applies his name to the finished work. In some cases, his art amounts to things he buys retail like the piece below.
I haven't fully formed an opinion on Jeff Koons. You can't help but admire what he manages to create, at least a little...but it sure seems like he's gaming the system and laughing all the way to the bank.
Here is a link to the original 60 Minutes segment on Koons that I saw in 1993.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403564n
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| Jeff Koons |
Koons has become a huge name in the art world. Before he was an 'artist', he was a commodities broker. What qualifies him to carry the label artist? In fairness to him, he apparently did attend art school. Having said that, he seems a lot more like P.T. Barnum than Salvadore Dali.
The wikipedia entry on Koons calls him "an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects." That seems an apt description.
Koons doesn't even do any of his "art" himself. He employs artists to come up with ideas. He employs artisans to do the fabrication for him , then he applies his name to the finished work. In some cases, his art amounts to things he buys retail like the piece below.
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| Basketballs Floating in Water |
I haven't fully formed an opinion on Jeff Koons. You can't help but admire what he manages to create, at least a little...but it sure seems like he's gaming the system and laughing all the way to the bank.
Here is a link to the original 60 Minutes segment on Koons that I saw in 1993.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403564n
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Baby Hedgehog Snoozing
Hedgehogs are very cute, especially when they are babies and they are snoozing...
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Here's a wonderful sleeping baby hedgehog video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_0DcrDYmd0
Here's a wonderful sleeping baby hedgehog video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_0DcrDYmd0
Saturday, August 4, 2012
My Pix - Sunflowers
Like many photographers learning their craft, I spent a lot of time early shooting photos of flowers. I particularly like sunflowers. They are big, bright, and eager to please. There are always bees dancing over them, getting dusted up with pollen.
The first four sunflower pix were taken in our backyard. The rest on a farm in the Hood River Valley.
The first four sunflower pix were taken in our backyard. The rest on a farm in the Hood River Valley.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Terrifying New Math on Climate Change
The article that follows appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in August 2, 2012. It paints a very unsettling picture of where the earth is headed because of human induced global climate change...
________________
See:
________________
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
See:
If the pictures of those towering
wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this
summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied
3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest
May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in
which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average,
the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number
considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this
spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation - in fact, it crushed the
old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature
departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi
authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109
degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to
notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary
reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike
George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even
attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,"
the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention,
footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes."
Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global
warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working
ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're
losing the fight, badly and quickly - losing it because, most of all, we remain
in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
When we think about global warming
at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to
grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math.
For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first
published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of
environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the
larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking
about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious - our
almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless - position with three simple numbers.
The First Number: 2°
Celsius
If the movie had ended in Hollywood
fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the
culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations
had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading
climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most
important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake."
As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference,
declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take
years before we get a new and better one. If ever."
In the event, of course, we missed
it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which
between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was
prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly
for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid
considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving
"Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements
committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions
to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen
is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared,
"with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline
writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.
The accord did contain one
important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the
scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two
degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that
"we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold
the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting
on two degrees - about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit - the accord ratified positions
taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It
was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained
prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel,
then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor
of the nation.
Some context: So far, we've raised
the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that
has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer
sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since
warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a
shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given
those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is
far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,"
writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the
odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas
Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this:
"If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two
degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's
most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been
talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is
actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit,
a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a
two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When
delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent
a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started
chanting, "One degree, one Africa."
Despite such well-founded
misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on
the two-degree target - indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about
climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible
for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the
Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries
have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United
Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on.
The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the
temperature more than two degrees Celsius - it's become the bottomest of bottom
lines. Two degrees.
The Second Number: 565
Gigatons
Scientists estimate that humans can
pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by
midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees.
("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat
worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)
This idea of a global "carbon
budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how
much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the
Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to
the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped
increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8
degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.
That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.
How good are these numbers? No one
is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right.
The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated
computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around
the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed
by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of
the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking
at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an
Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
"There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But
so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I
don't think much has changed over the last decade." William Collins, a
senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees.
"I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite
similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional
understanding of the climate system."
We're not getting any free lunch
from the world's economies, either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at
the height of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of
carbon into the atmosphere, year after year. In late May, the International
Energy Agency published its latest figures - CO2 emissions last year rose to
31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before.
America had a warm winter and
converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell
slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed
the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes
post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been
efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said
Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been
marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will
keep growing by roughly three percent a year - and at that rate, we'll blow
through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's
preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide
further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to
close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he
continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with
a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees
Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.
So, new data in hand, everyone at
the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious international action
to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in
November, when the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 - COP 1 was
held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially
nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out, are
slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide data. "The
message has been consistent for close to 30 years now," Collins says with
a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation and the computer power
required to present the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our
present course of action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the
evidence the scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly
conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of
the evidence."
So far, though, such calls have had
little effect. We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century:
scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking
off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me,
"You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a
picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have
something like that."
The Third Number: 2,795
Gigatons
This number is the scariest of all
- one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions
of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker
Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who
published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks
that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the
amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves
of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait)
that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're
currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number - 2,795 -
is higher than 565. Five times higher.
The Carbon Tracker Initiative - led
by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting
giant PricewaterhouseCoopers - combed through proprietary databases to figure
out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in
reserve. The numbers aren't perfect - they don't fully reflect the recent surge
in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately
reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting
requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are
quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and
America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas
companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
Which is exactly why this new
number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the
legal drinking limit - equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which
you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you
could have and still stay below that limit - the six beers, say, you might
consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the
fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.
We have five times as much oil and
coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd
have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that
fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some
massive intervention, it seems certain.
Yes, this coal and gas and oil is
still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground - it's
figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations
are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It
explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the
regulation of carbon dioxide - those reserves are their primary asset, the
holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard
these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or
how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that,
in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves,
the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing
director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at
today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about
$27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept
80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The
numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing
bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst - we might well
burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the
planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a
relatively healthy planet - but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you
can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story
ends.
So far, as I said at the start,
environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's
emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries
emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries,
small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status
quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one of
the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy mix;
on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated
nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small
miracle - and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our
problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is
ever more carbon.
This record of failure means we
know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have
spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty
light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of
energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about
going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not
going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us
are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change
has been like trying to build a movement against yourself - it's as if the
gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers,
or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
People perceive - correctly - that
their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric
concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while recycling is
widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in
order to save paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and
only three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could
conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter - but time is precisely what we
lack.
A more efficient method, of course,
would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried
that, too, with the same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders,
trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed
the warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance,
campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him
- the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would
mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began
to heal." And he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in
the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted
a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the
numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.
At this point, effective action
would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry
wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which
it's burned. And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry
of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine.
His secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder
River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5
gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric
space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact,
as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my word that we will keep
drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next
day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to
work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel
development: "Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will
continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy."
That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton
inventory of unburned carbon.
Sometimes the irony is almost
Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled
on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from
climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are
being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as
"sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have
with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations
get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90
billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the
Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would
give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic.
Almost every government with
deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a
liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism - no wonder, then, that it
signed on to the Kyoto treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions
substantially by 2012. But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands
of Alberta economically attractive - and since, as NASA climatologist James
Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or
almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that
meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian
government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet
its commitments.
The same kind of hypocrisy applies
across the ideological board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference,
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
"Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate change is
undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century."
But the next spring, in the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he
signed an agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the
vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive
development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco
deposits are larger than Alberta's - taken together, they'd fill up the whole
available atmospheric space.
So: the paths we have tried to
tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A
rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements
require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement
should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham
Lincoln." And enemies are what climate change has lacked.
But what all these climate numbers
make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy -
one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this
hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has
become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public
Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of
companies do rotten things in the course of their business - pay terrible
wages, make people work in sweatshops - and we pressure them to change those
practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work
on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that
with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model.
It's what they do."
According to the Carbon Tracker
report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven
percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two
degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron,
ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four
percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon
Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree
budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies,
followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply
staggering - this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change
the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.
They're clearly cognizant of global
warming - they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and
they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of
Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons - in early
March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans
to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching
for yet more oil and gas.
There's not a more reckless man on
the planet than Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado fires
reached their height, he told a New York audience that global warming is real,
but dismissed it as an "engineering problem" that has
"engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes to weather patterns
that move crop-production areas around - we'll adapt to that." This in a
week when Kentucky farmers were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting"
in record heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear
factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,'
I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of course not - if he did accept it,
he'd have to keep his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's
not an engineering problem, in other words - it's a greed problem.
You could argue that this is simply
in the nature of these companies - that having found a profitable vein, they're
compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons than people with
free will. But as the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort.
In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far
more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist in a
world whose hungers they fulfill - they help create the boundaries of that
world.
Left to our own devices, citizens
might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a
recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international
agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to
our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50
billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans.
They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to
regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as
much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National
Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of
the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of
global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA
urging the agency not to regulate carbon - should the world's scientists turn
out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations
can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and
technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our
physiology seems right up there.
Environmentalists, understandably,
have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its
political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should
turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into
"energy companies." Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working -
emphasis on appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a
brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a
logo that looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas
stations. But its investments in alternative energy were never more than a tiny
fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a few years, many
of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on returning to the company's
"core business." In December, BP finally closed its solar division.
Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil
companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium -
there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing
after zephyrs and sunbeams.
Much of that profit stems from a
single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is
allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that
break - if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your
trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel
industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a
quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we
understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its
price becomes the central issue.
If you put a price on carbon,
through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight
against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is
doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would
get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel - every time they stopped at the
pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to
the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for
nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting
citizens - a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty
tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone
in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon.
By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out
ahead.
There's only one problem: Putting a
price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry.
After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon
be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us
past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon,
the more of those reserves would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about
whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution
break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the
economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.
It's not clear, of course, that the
power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote
the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively
modest goal - they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses
a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big
finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out
Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is
inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly
those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank.
Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their
exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.
"The regular process of
economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the
time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre.
"Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this
will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit
crunch. They'll be hit by this." Still, it hasn't been easy to convince
investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason
you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the
best analyst - that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when
everyone else goes over."
So pure self-interest probably
won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just
might - and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give
rise to a real movement.
Once, in recent corporate history,
anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the
1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It
rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state
governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade,
more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding
economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The
end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past
century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have
succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from
"the divestment movement of the 1980s."
The fossil-fuel industry is
obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of
particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing
with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies.
But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their
college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are
being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet
on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's
largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in
the future - that's when their members will "enjoy their
retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable
demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the
planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a
former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate
Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties
with those who profit from climate change - now."
Movements rarely have predictable
outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political
standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider
President Obama's signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase
he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and
engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit came under
severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough to fend them off.
If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth - that the
fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical
systems - it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk
might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even
decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.
Even if such a campaign is
possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real
difference - to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees - you'd
need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to
leverage similar shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the
U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where
emissions are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China
has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The three
numbers I've described are daunting - they may define an essentially impossible
future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest
challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know
who's planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and
time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you
do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral
issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.
Meanwhile the tide of numbers
continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic
sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a
single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on
Florida - the earliest the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At
the same time, the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most
destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado Springs -
breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins. This month, scientists
issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased
the likelihood of severe heat and drought - days after a heat wave across the
Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl,
threatening this year's harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this
month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt,
something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us,
our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic
stability we're now leaving... in the dust.
This story is from the August 2nd,
2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719#ixzz22DDOZ18w
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