Blame Canada  

Arrrggh !

I've just written a long angry rant about tar sands only for Blogger to eat it - so I'm going to blame California as well as Canada for all that ails the world.

Long time readers can no doubt imagine my reaction to this report at The Energy Blog talking about a Rigzone / Wall Street Journal effort which claims that peak oil is "a shattered myth". Fools. Yes - you can partly mitigate conventional oil depletion using production from tar sands (and I'll assume that they will get over the declining natural gas problem using wind and/or nukes and/or bootstrapping) - but this is still a lower EROEI alternative with massive environmental costs which simply guarantees global warming will cook the lot of us. Mutter, mutter, mutter...

Moving on, The Energy Blog also has an update on Green and Gold's Sunball, which has transmogrified into a Suncube.

Past Peak has a trio of posts on global warming - noting that the accumulating evidence is showing things are getting worse faster than modellers have predicted.

Jeff Vail has a post on restoring the balance between hierarchy and rhizome.

Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture has an outstanding post today entitled "Making Power-Down Electable: Who Will Vote for the Promise of Less?" This cuts right to the heart of the matter: there is no realistic alternative to perpetual growth, increase, and intensification of our hierarchal structures unless the subsidies that favor such a mode of organization are removed (as discussed in A Theory of Power, Chapter 7). If politicians are elected on the basis of promising the most to the voter, then who will vote for someone who campaigns for "less growth, but balance!"?? If corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder return, then when will they ever say "sure, we could do less environmental damage and undertake sustainable operations, but we will have to reduce our growth targets"?? If central bank monetary policy has an "inflation target" of about 3-4%, then who can possibly afford to invest in a static, sustainable solution?? If your money and assets aren't appreciating by MORE than 3-4%, then you're falling behind. Can't have that. If the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles don't require that all future costs of present actions are accounted for, then when will either government or corporations ever be concerned with the future impact of massive fossil fuel use or pollution? If the defense-budget subsidy artificially lowers the cost of producing and transporting oil and gas around the world, when will unsubsidized, renewable energy sources ever be competitive??

Decentralized, rhizomatic solutions ARE competitive if we would just stop subsidizing hierarchy. This would allow a return to the natural balance between hierarchy and rhizome that exists in nature. This doesn't get around the more basic problem of "who will vote for the promise of less." Unfortunately, the solution to this problem is more complicated, and requires that we frame the problem within the bounds of the human time-horizon (as discussed in A Theory of Power, Chapter 4). If the people can be convinced of the unsustainability of our current system, and that the impact of this unsustainability will lead to crisis within a time frame that matters to humans, then people will take action. There is a long record of humanity electing to sacrifice now for a better future, whether it is for the protection of our children, for a promised eternity in heaven, or just for the feeling of winning a grueling race. But in order for people to elect a present sacrifice, the problem must be suitably framed within our ontogeny.

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Take a suggestion from Austrian Economics and impose cost at the point of creation. This is the single most flagrant point of subsidy to hierarchy in modern economies. Want to buy some gas? Well, it now costs $5/gallon because we included the $300 billion a year the DoD spend to protect supply lines. Still want to buy gas? Now it costs $10/gallon because we also assess all future pollution-related costs at the pump (and put the money in a trust to improve and repair that damage). If you're really still in line at the pump, then the price is now up to $15/gallon because the costs of road construction, maintenance, and policing are now included (rather than being subsidized by payments out of income taxes). At $15/gallon--i.e. without a subsidy to driving--suddenly localization, condensed zoning, mass transportation, etc. would all be viable in the marketplace. That's a key point, because it's an uphill battle to convince people to spend more "because it's the right thing to do." But without the pervasive subsidies to wasteful, hierarchal systems, it would make the most market sense to adopt localized, sustainable solutions--and that is exactly the point that we must reach if we are to turn this ship around.

Karavans warns that the US is headed towards economic meltdown - a warning which is being heard more and more frequently.

Nixon era figure John Dean has "Returned from the 'Dark Side' to Condemn Bush" - part of the trend amongst older and wiser conservatives to disassociate themselves from the approaching train wreck.

John Dean, a key figure in the Watergate scandal who helped bring down then-president Richard Nixon, told a Senate hearing that President George W. Bush's domestic spying program was a worse abuse of power.

"I think it is important that the committee sometimes hear from the 'dark side'," the former special counsel to Nixon told a hearing on a Senate censure motion made against Bush. "No president that I can find in the history of our country has really ever adopted a policy of expanding presidential powers for the sake of expanding presidential powers. "I think that is what we have going on in this presidency."

Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat, startled the US establishment three weeks ago by laying the censure motion against Bush after it was revealed that the president had allowed the interception of domestic phone calls and email messages without a special warrant.

Apparently the delayed Iranian Oil Bourse is still on the way.

Grist notes that evangelical Christians speaking out against global warming are being declared heretics by the traditional wingnut body of the religious right, who have threatened them with wrathful acts of god like strong storms.

Responding to a February statement by a group of evangelical leaders supporting strong action to fight climate change, a separate group of Christian leaders led by James Dobson and Pat Robertson yesterday issued what amounts to a repudiation. "The so-called Evangelical Climate Initiative is an insult to God and to family values," says the strongly worded statement. It contends that the eco-evangelicals "do not speak for Christians" and that the evangelical community should "turn its back on the unproven obsessions of those who would destroy America" and refocus on "issues of real importance: gay marriage, condoms in public schools, and violent video games." At a press conference releasing the statement, Robertson warned that if churchgoers joined scientists, city and state leaders, and European governments in fighting climate change, God would punish them with stronger storms, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels. "It won't be pretty," he warned. Uh ...

For tinfoil lovers, here's a video of one of the new Halliburton detention camps in the US.

On a sad note, WorldChanging reports that Jamais Cascio is heading off to new pastures - I'll miss his informative posts, as he is one of the best writers on the web (and particularly in the Viridian world).