The Thirteenth Tipping Point  

Dave Roberts at Grist has more on the "Coal is the enemy of the human race" concept.

A few times now John has made a point I have made in the past and now shall make again (how's that for a self-referential intro?). To wit:

"Energy security" is a lopsided way of framing our energy problem, and left un-balanced, will do more harm than good.

Why? Because the shortest, cheapest route to energy security (or "independence," if you like) is through coal, and coal is ... wait for it ... the enemy of the human race. This is not just true for China and the U.S.; Germany, Britain, and even France are planning a slew of new coal plants.

For more on this crucial point, see this fantastic post from Jerome a Paris

Jerome's post notes (go and read the whole thing - the notes on the Chinese coal industry and its contribution as the world's largest energy producer are very interesting):

For those of us that care about energy policy, it is clear that there are two approaches to grab political attention on the topic these days: the dependence-on-nasty-strangers scaremongering ("they're responsible for these high prices" - don't bother with resource depletion, that just draws a blank), and the global climate change we'll-all-drown-or-burn angle.

Both could be solved at the same time by focusing first on the demand side of the energy balance (conservation, efficiency, public transport, ...), and second by switching energy generation from fossil fuel burning to renewables and, to some extent, nuclear.

While global climate change is recognised as a political reality (i.e. voters care, and one must show that one cares as well), it is clearly less sexy than the other option: blaming evil foreigners (whether Iran, Russia, Venezuela or even China on the consumer side) with the accompanying macho populist posturing and the more substantive support for the corporate friends that provide an easy out: the military-industrial complex on the one hand, and the coal burning industry on the other.

Global warming from carbon dioxide was an esoteric topic 15 years ago, unknown to most of us. But in a few years, helped along by some hot summers, it has climbed to the top of the international agenda. Cabinets, Parliaments, and heads of government have issued pronouncements on reducing carbon emissions (...) And at the center of these issues will be the phenomenon that has come to be known as the "greenhouse effect."

The greenhouse effect itself is simple enough to understand and is not in any real dispute. What is in dispute is its magnitude over the coming century, its translation into changes in climates around the globe, and the impacts of those climate changes on human welfare and the natural environment.

The above was written by Thomas Schelling (last year's Nobel prize, and one of the most interesting writers all around). Sadly, this was written in 1992 and not this year, and we seem to have made little progress in the intervening 14 years, quite the opposite:

Carbon emissions show sharp rise

Dr Mike Rapauch of the Australian government's research organisation CSIRO, who co-chairs the Global Carbon Project, told delegates that 7.9 billion tonnes (gigatonnes, Gt) of carbon passed into the atmosphere last year. In 2000, the figure was 6.8Gt.

"From 2000 to 2005, the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions was more than 2.5% per year, whereas in the 1990s it was less than 1% per year," he said.

Despite years of dire warnings, despite the first, timid, attempt at doing something via the Kyoto Treaty, the problem has only gotten bigger, and our carbon emissions are not only growing, but growing increasingly fast.

Note this: the important number is how much carbon there is in the atmosphere. That number has grown massively in the past century, from around 280 ppm (parts per million) to above 380 ppm last year. We need to get that number down, or at least stabilize it. The problem is that our emissions contribute every day to make it grow. Even if we stopped our emissions, we would not easily get it down. But we're not stopping our emissions, we're not even reducing them - we're increasing them. and worse than that, the increase is higher than it used to be, which means that our emissions are accelerating instead of stopping.

We have a big red light in front of us, and we're stomping hard on the gas pedal.

And worse, we're stomping harder than ever, because that appears to be the easy way out of the other problem: increasingly expensive (in monetary terms) energy, caused by our insatiable appetite for it.

Amongst the articles that Jerome points to is this one from the New York Times on "Taming King Coal".

China will surpass the United States as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009, a decade ahead of previous predictions. A big reason is the explosion in the number of automobiles, but the main reason is China's ravenous appetite for coal, the dirtiest of all the fuels used to produce electricity. Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal- fired power plant opens somewhere in China.

What's frightening about this for those worried about the long-term consequences of warming is that nearly all of these plants are being built along traditional lines, burning pulverized coal to make electricity. And what's sad about it is that there's a much cleaner coal-burning technology available. Known as IGCC - for integrated gasification combined cycle - this process coverts coal into a gas before it is burned.

These plants produce fewer of the pollutants that cause smog and acid rain than conventional power plants do. More important, from a global warming perspective, they also have the potential to capture and sequester greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide before they enter the atmosphere.

This new technology is not readily available in China, but it is available to utilities in the United States. TXU, a giant Texas energy company, intends to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, plus another dozen or so coal-fired monsters elsewhere in America. All told, this would be the largest single U.S. coal-oriented construction campaign in years.
Click here to find out more!

Is TXU availing itself of the cleaner technology? No. TXU will use the old pulverized coal model. The company says the older models are more reliable. But the real reason it likes the older models is that they are easier to build, cheaper to run and, ultimately, much more profitable. So, like the Chinese, TXU is locking itself (and the United States) into at least 50 more years of the most carbon-intensive technology around.

Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who will shortly assume command of the Senate environment committee, believes that America should impose a price on carbon emissions (as Europe has done) so that companies like TXU will begin to think about investing in cleaner technologies - technologies that China could then use in its power plants.

New Zealand researchers are warning that the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica could collapse suddenly.

The Ross Ice Shelf, a massive piece of ice the size of France, could break off without warning causing a dramatic rise in sea levels, warn New Zealand scientists working in Antarctica. A New Zealand-led ice drilling team has recovered three million years of climate history from samples which gives clues as to what may happen in the future. Initial analysis of sea-floor cores near Scott Base suggest the Ross Ice Shelf had collapsed in the past and had probably done so suddenly.

The team's co-chief scientist, Tim Naish, told The Pressnewspaper the sediment record was important because it provided crucial evidence about how the Ross Ice Shelf would react to climate change, with potential to dramatically increase sea levels. "If the past is any indication of the future, then the ice shelf will collapse," he said. "If the ice shelf goes, then what about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? What we've learnt from the Antarctic Peninsula is when once buttressing ice sheets go, the glaciers feeding them move faster and that's the thing that isn't so cheery."

Antarctica stores 70 per cent of the world's fresh water, with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet holding an estimated 30 million cubic kilometres. In January, British Antarctic Survey researchers predicted that its collapse would make sea levels rise by at least 5m, with other estimates predicting a rise of up to 17m.

Dr Naish, a sedimentologist with the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, said one day the drilling team retrieved a core of 83m, far greater than expected, which contained climate records spanning about 500,000 years. "We're really getting everything we've dreamed of. What we're getting is a pretty detailed history of the ice shelf," he said. "You go from full glacial conditions to open ocean conditions very abruptly. It doesn't surprise us that much that the transition was dramatic. Scientists knew from the collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf in 2002 that expanses of ice could collapse "extremely quickly

Mother Jones has an article on the "13th tipping point" - shifting people's perceptions to personal responsibility.

IN 2004, JOHN SCHELLNHUBER, distinguished science adviser at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom, identified 12 global-warming tipping points, any one of which, if triggered, will likely initiate sudden, catastrophic changes across the planet. Odds are you've never heard of most of these tipping points, even though your entire genetic legacy—your children, your grandchildren, and beyond—may survive or not depending on their status.

The 12 tipping points are:

1. Amazon Rainforest
2. North Atlantic Current
3. Greenland Ice Sheet
4. Ozone Hole
5. Antarctic Circumpolar Current
6. Sahara Desert
7. Tibetan Plateau
8. Asian Monsoon
9. Methane Clathrates
10. Salinity Valves
11. El Nino
12. West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Why is this? Is it likely that 12 asteroids on known collision courses with earth would garner such meager attention? Remarkably, we appear to be doing what even the simplest of corals does not: haphazardly tossing our metaphorical spawn into a ruthless current and hoping for a fertile future. We do this when we refuse to address global environmental issues with urgency; when we resist partnering for solutions; and when we continue with accelerating momentum, and with what amounts to malice aforethought, to behave in ways that threaten our future.

A 2005 study by Anthony Leiserowitz, published in Risk Analysis, found that while most Americans are moderately concerned about global warming, the majority—68 percent—believe the greatest threats are to people far away or to nonhuman nature. Only 13 percent perceive any real risk to themselves, their families, or their communities. As Leiserowitz points out, this perception is critical, since Americans constitute only 5 percent of the global population yet produce nearly 25 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions. As long as this dangerous and delusional misconception prevails, the chances of preventing Schellnhuber's 12 points from tipping are virtually nil.

So what will it take to trigger what we might call the 13th tipping point: the shift in human perception from personal denial to personal responsibility? Without a 13th tipping point, we can't hope to avoid global mayhem. With it, we can attempt to put into action what we profess: that we actually care about our children's and grandchildren's futures.

Science shows that we are born with powerful tools for overcoming our perilous complacency. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the inclination. The truth is we can change with breathtaking speed, sculpting even "immutable" human nature. Forty years ago many people believed human nature required blacks and whites to live in segregation; 30 years ago human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff. Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.

The 18th-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, from the Latin sapiens, meaning "prudent, wise." History shows we are not born with wisdom. We evolve into it.

EISEROWITZ'S STUDY OF risk perception found that Americans fall into "interpretive communities"—cliques, if you will, sharing similar demographics, risk perceptions, and worldviews. On one end of this spectrum are the naysayers: those who perceive climate change as a very low or nonexistent danger. Leiserowitz found naysayers to be "predominantly white, male, Republican, politically conservative, holding pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, and anti-egalitarian worldviews, anti-environmental attitudes, distrustful of most institutions, highly religious, and to rely on radio as their main source of news." This group presented five rationales for rejecting danger: belief that global warming is natural; belief that it's media/environmentalist hype; distrust of science; flat denial; and conspiracy theories, including the belief that researchers create data to ensure job security.

We might wonder how these naysayers, who represent only 7 percent of Americans yet control much of our government, got to be the way they are. A study of urban American adults by Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies of Cornell University sheds some light on environmental attitudes. Wells and Lekies found that children who play unsupervised in the wild before the age of 11 develop strong environmental ethics. Children exposed only to structured hierarchical play in the wild—through, for example, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, or by hunting or fishing alongside supervising adults—do not. To interact humbly with nature we need to be free and undomesticated in it. Otherwise, we succumb to hubris in maturity. The fact that few children enjoy free rein outdoors anymore bodes poorly for our future decision-makers.

Another study, this one from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, found an ominous silence when it comes to educating American K-12 students on the relationship between our personal behavior and our environment: that the size and inefficiency of our cars, homes, and appliances, our profligate fuels, our love of disposables, and the effects of buying more than we need actually undermine our prospects on earth. Slightly more time is spent teaching kids how the environment can affect us, overpowering humanity with floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes, climate change. But in our overall failure to illuminate the interdependence between Homo sapiens and earth we withhold critical knowledge from those whose lives depend upon it most.

Bruce's latest Viridian Note is up (480) on "The Algae Hummer" with a host of good links within.

There are tropical ibises nesting in New York.
Not fifty years from now. Now.
http://nymag.com/news/features/24364/index.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061201-super-typhoon.html
Monster typhoon clobbers the Phillipines.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061201-india-monsoon.html
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39260/story.htm
The Indian monsoon is acting up. Imagine a 21st
century nuclear India with a 19th century massive
Indian famine.

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39256/story.htm
Australia is having its worst drought in a thousand years. It's a continent much given to climate change.

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39262/story.htm
Green Revolution veterans struggling to create new
crops for a global climate-crisis.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2482390,00.html
No snow in the Alps for ski season. A few years
of this, and these airy enclaves of the rich will
go broke. They'll be as deserted as the Ninth Ward
of New Orleans.

(((Reducing today's carbon emissions isn't going to
work. We've clearly got too much carbon in the sky
already. The climate is destabilizing year by year
at today's levels of pollutant. Sooner rather than
later, we'll have to bend our attention to removing
the carbon that's already up there. That's not a
"non-carbon economy" or "post-carbon economy" but a
carbon-removal economy, an anti-carbon economy))).

(((Likely methods for accomplishing this would be
found in the same industries that put the carbon up
there in the first place == lighting, heating and
transport tech that fixes CO2 rather than emitting it.
Instead of seeking a lighter "environmental
footprint," these industries would have a
deliberate environmental "handprint.")))

(((That's not impossible. Cellulosic ethanol would
do that == it would pull some CO2 out of the sky
and fix it as topsoil in the biofuel fields.
That sounds counter-intuitive, but even
GM finds it thinkable. They just proposed a Hummer
that improves the environment. A car that is
better when bigger. Imagine a world where you
couldn’t call yourself a serious environmentalist
without a huge car. You'd drive a Hummer and hope
for snow.)))

Link:
http://www.laautoshow.com/show/tabid/83/Default.aspx
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=motoringNews&storyID=2006-12-01T110633Z_01_NOA139876_RTRUKOC_0_GM-HUMMER.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsLanding-C10-Motoring-3


GM contemplates the living, breathing Hummer
Fri Dec 1, 2006 11:05 AM GMT


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) == In the corporate imagination
of General Motors, Hummer could be transformed from
the SUV that environmentalists love to hate to an
algae-infused, oxygen-exuding buggy that would open
up like a flower.

GM's sketch for the "Hummer O2" was named the winner
on Thursday of a design contest at the Los Angeles
Auto Show that challenged major automakers to design
a vehicle with a five-year life span that could
be fully recycled.

The GM vision for the futuristic Hummer concept
includes an algae-filled body shell, designed to
shed oxygen, that also opens up like leaves on a
stem to catch sunlight when parked.

The concept sketch, which was produced by GM's
West Coast Advanced Design Studio, shows the
Hummer riding on an aluminum shell and powered
by a hydrogen tank and fuel cells.

"This design team said, 'We've done hybrids. We're
doing fuel cells. What's the next step that
actually improves the environment?'" said Frank
Saucedo, director of GM's California design lab.
Saucedo said the GM team had deliberately chosen
the polarizing Hummer brand for its imagined
environmental remake.

"People think of it as a military vehicle, as a
suburban SUV, but really these types of vehicles ==
the SUVs and the early Jeeps == were for people
who worked in the outdoors, environmentalists,
naturalists and outdoorsmen," he said. "This is
just us coming full circle."

GM said this week that its entire Hummer lineup
would offer biofuel engines, capable of running
on renewable fuels such as biodiesel, over the
next three years.

The GM entry in the Los Angeles Auto Show Design
Challenge won out over a number of equally
ambitious vehicle sketches from other automakers.
None of the sketches are even close to the full-blown
concept cars that automakers roll out at the
industry's major trade shows to generate buzz for
their brands.

Toyota suggested an electric-powered, tandem-style
vehicle with wicker seats that the occupants could
opt to pedal through stop-and-go Los Angeles
rush-hour traffic.

DaimlerChrysler's luxury Mercedes-Benz unit suggested
a diesel-burning convertible with wood panels that
could be easily replaced and recycled.

In other car news, there is a report that a vehicle using an EESTor ultracapacitor as the battery will be released imminently up at EV World.

Diminutive ZENN microcar is manufactured in France. Canadian company ZENN imports it as an engine-less "glider" that it equips with electric drive, making it one of the most car-like EV's available in North America. It is currently powered by conventional lead batteries, but the company has a agreement in place to install the EEStor "super-battery" when it becomes available. According to company president Ian Clifford, a five hundred pound EEStor power pack will give the car 100 miles+ range. He is confident that EEStor will pull the wraps of their mysterious "battery" very soon; his exact word was "imminent" and that I could, in fact, hold my breath for their announcement.

The Christain Science Monitor has an article on the value of energy efficiency and the huge gains that can be made via conservation.

When high school science teacher Ray Janke bought a home in Chicopee, Mass., he decided to see how much he could save on his electric bill.

He exchanged incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, put switches and surge protectors on his electronic equipment to reduce the "phantom load" - the trickle consumption even when electronic equipment is off - and bought energy-efficient appliances.

Two things happened: He saw a two-thirds reduction in his electric bill, and he found himself under audit by Mass Electric. The company thought he'd tampered with his meter. "They couldn't believe I was using so little," he says.

Mr. Janke had hit on what experts say is perhaps the easiest and most cost-effective place to reduce one's energy consumption: home.

Moving closer to public transportation or riding a bike instead of driving is not an option for many, but changing incandescent bulbs for fluorescent and buying more efficient appliances is not only possible, it quickly pays for itself with savings.

In the end, not-very-glamorous changes like these as well as obsessively sealing and insulating your home will save more than, in the words of one expert, "greenie weenie" additions like green roofs and solar panels. Twenty-two percent of all energy in the United States is used for residential purposes. (Transportation accounts for 28 percent.) And although residences consume only about two-fifths of this as electricity, because electrical generation is inherently inefficient, it accounts for 71 percent of household emissions. A home's electrical use may be responsible for more CO2 emissions than the two cars in the driveway. Ultimately, changes made at home may be the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to reduce one's carbon footprint.

The CSM also has an article on micro wind turbines in the UK.

Amid the rooftops and chimneys of this seaside town south of London spins a solitary symbol of Britain's growing devotion to green energy. Usually relegated to windy plains or planted offshore, a wind turbine has sprouted on the roof of Daren Howarth's terrace house.

While it is Brighton's first, miniature windmills have suddenly become the latest "must have" accessory among Britain's eco-conscious city dwellers.

Yet even as Mr. Howarth's wind turbine has begun to generate modest levels of energy, debate swirls across the country over whether these small turbines are nothing more than a fashionable folly. Not all homes are structurally sound enough to support them. And some question whether the power these turbines generate will offset installation costs. Wind speed and direction vary widely in urban settings where buildings and other landmarks pose interference.

But more homeowners like Howarth seem willing to test the turbines even while regulations and improved designs are being hammered out.

"The key thing with these technologies is to start using [them] and start generating power yourself," says Howarth, who is still getting used to the rising and falling whine of the blades above his bedroom window. "It is making me extremely aware of what I'm using in the house ... and how hard it is to generate a little bit of power."

Standing inside the door to his roof deck, Howarth points to a black box on the wall that shows the number of kilowatts the steadily churning turbine is producing at that moment: about 0.8 kilowatts, enough to power a small hair dryer. Howarth has had his wind turbine operating for less than a month, but even without a substantial savings in his monthly energy bill, he's already convinced that it is a worthwhile investment.

"If people have a few thousand pounds in the bank making 5 percent interest, they are going to make that same rate of return installing these systems," he says. "And that's including the CO2 benefit, so there's no excuse in not doing it if you can access the capital." His total cost was about US$3,900.

With or without personal wind turbines, British citizens in urban areas are growing all too conscious of their carbon emissions. A steep "congestion charge," which was first introduced in 2003, requires that anyone driving into London pay the equivalent of $15. There is talk of a green tax on energy consumption, and homeowners and businesses alike are encouraged to take advantage of government grants to install these microgeneration wind-turbine systems.

By some measures, Britain's environmental efforts are succeeding. The United Nations reported last month that the country is only one of a small number of industrialized nations whose greenhouse-gas emissions have fallen in the past 15 years.

Stuart Staniford has reappeared at The Oil Drum with a post looking at flat Saudi oil production in spite of the massive increase in the number of drilling rigs active there.

I was awoken from my peak-oil slumber by this fairly extraordinary oped in the Washington Post. It consists of a series of threats by Nawaf Obaid, a "an adviser to the Saudi government", who is expressing opinions that are "his own and do not reflect official Saudi policy", but nonetheless speaks in short clear declarative sentences about what the Saudi government will do if the US withdraws from Iraq.

Some choice grafs:

Just a few months ago it was unthinkable that President Bush would prematurely withdraw a significant number of American troops from Iraq. But it seems possible today, and therefore the Saudi leadership is preparing to substantially revise its Iraq policy. Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance -- funding, arms and logistical support -- that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years.

Another possibility includes the establishment of new Sunni brigades to combat the Iranian-backed militias. Finally, Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high prices. The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere.

So, is this last threat credible? Well, I updated my graph of Saudi oil production and rig count, added the IEA estimates to those of EIA and JODI. The result is above, and detail showing the production slide this year more clearly is below. How many rigs is Obaid proposing that the Saudis now rent, I wonder?

Past Peak points to a Washington Post article on how free copies of An Inconvenient Truth have been turned down by schools fearful of their evil lysenkoist corporate overlords at Exxon Mobil. This sort of politicisation of science didn't work well for the Soviets and it won't work out well for the US either.

Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", should be seen by as many Americans as possible. That includes kids. Especially kids. The film's producers thought so, too, so they offered 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association. The NSTA declined. Why? They don't want to piss off Exxon Mobil. WaPo:

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's "Building a Presence for Science" program, an electronic networking initiative intended to "bring standards-based teaching and learning" into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education.

So much for special interests and implicit endorsements.

In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school.

And Exxon Mobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.

Stirling Newberry has a long post at TPMCafe, mostly on economics and rent seeking behaviour, which touches on the Iraq war, peak oil and global warming, along with our key challenge - electrifying the transport system and ridding ourselves of the oil barons.

One of the most important skills in political economy to learn is the skill of finding out who is really paying for something. Whose "entitlement bundle" is being reduce to pay for whose increase in an entitlement bundle. Adam Smith, again, noted the non-monetary nature of benefits when he observed that those who controlled trade would engage in fraud and price fixing. The ability to reduce the risk of competition is a benefit, one that people want. It isn't bought directly, but instead indirectly. One can't tax rent seeking behavior directly, because it isn't just in the profits of a monopoly, but in the wasted activity used to get that monopoly, or to try and get it.

I'd like to point to Iraq as a perfect example: the purpose of Iraq is to shift the control of oil and of the consumption of its profits, from one group to another. The war in Iraq is rent seeking behavior. Merely taxing the profits, if any, of the companies who do business because of the Iraq war would not recapture the real loss to the economy. Some of the economic loss is in the form of the dead and wounded, and in the decision to build swords rather than plowshares.

What this means is that we can't tax "profits" because the profits are fictional, they come from inflationary assets, and from activity which is already water over the dam. Instead, what we have to do is shift rent seeking behavior to productive behavior, we have to remove the top down nature of money creation, and we can then use Keynesian tools to spread demand and prosperity. However, the order is important, as is the method. Since profits don't represent consumption by corporations which can be shifted as consumption by individuals, but instead control over the economy, the way to prevent Social Security from becoming mired in economic difficulty is to shift control from the people who are currently running around the world executing $50 Billion dollar buyouts, as a play against Bernanke's inflationism – to a different group of people. Control is the issue, not consumption surplus. One can't tax ones way into control, but, instead, must create a mandate for change which forces those who have control to cede that control to others. Here is where realities such as global warming and peak oil come in, the plutocratic right hates them, because they are exactly the kind of national rent which the public, through its arm, the government, can force a change in the control of investment.


The running out of the "trust fund" is, by comparison, meaningless. This is because we have been squandering the excess revenues of Social Security on tax breaks for the wealthy and the Iraq War. If we had, instead, used it as national savings to invest in production enhancing investment above and beyond what we were otherwise spending, it would have meant something. But as it is, all it was was an excuse for one generation of wealthy people to loan other people's money back to them. It had a minor disinflationary effect, and it reduced borrowing costs – which were increased by continued deficits.

The problem then isn't that the wealthy are going to be taxed, it is that to effectively change the dynamics of the system, there has to be a way of taxing all of the world's wealthy simultaneously. It doesn't really matter if that money goes to the US, though it would be nice to recapture some of it, just so long as the total quantity of investment demand goes down, and the total of public investment goes up.

This is where global warming and peak oil come in. Changing the energy basis of the global economy allows this shift to take place, since it removes the marginal barrel of oil problem, and it is something that everyone, logically, has an interest in.. Global warming is the global rent which allows the publics of the world to behave as one public, and demand that the control over the global economy be shifted back to the public and away from the globally wealthy.

So what is my policy outline?

1. Improve the quality of productivity.

Since the first problem is that there are only a limited number of activities that improve productivity, and many of these activities are explicitly about reducing wages, the first goal must be to broaden the technological advantages that generate productivity,

2. Tax Rent

It doesn't get any clearer than this, as the cost for a dollar of future earnings has gone up, there has been a demand to take revenue out of the public domain and put it into private hands. The copyright industry's quest to both lengthen and make more virulent the power of copyright control is a case in point. Oil is rent, land is rent, copyrights and patents are rent, brand names are rent, the high level of credit card interest rates are rent. Profits that do not come from rent are not the problem.

3. Increase investment supply.

Where as for the last 25 years we have not really increased investment supply, but, instead, have taxed the public domain to pay for the private, we must, instead, create new categories of good that will return money.

4. Accessible money

One of the reasons for studying the late 19th century is that it featured 2 non-solutions to their problems – the gold standard and free coinage of silver. The real problem was that money creation was centralized, it was in the hands of those who could get gold, generally governments, and those who could concentrate enough of it to build large, impossible to duplicate, capital. Railroads, large mils, factories, big mines.

Free coinage of silver would have expanded the number of people who could create money, but there is still no organic relationship between the common good and people digging up silver. This is why asset based money – the New Deal solution – was so brilliant, even if it was to a great extent an accident. Anyone can build a house or a business, and as the community they are in grows in size and prosperity, the value does. This is Adam Smith's taxing of ground rents in reverse – give people an incentive to create ground rents, and reward them with some of the profits of their efforts.

Our current problem is that this once democratic means of wealth creation is becoming top down again. It relies on oil. Oil is in the hands of a few. Instead of money going to wages, it goes to those who sell the oil to create the asset money. This is why shifting the transportation grid to electricity – which can be created in a host of ways – is so crucial to our future.

Alternet has an article on Keith Olbermann that notes that dissent sells. In some ways this might be a reversal to the Fox News phenomenon of the past decade (which might be best termed "fear and hate sells").

If you picked up the New York Times on October 18, you'd have had little reason to think it was a particularly significant day in American history. While the front page featured a photo of George W. Bush signing a new law at the White House the previous day, the story about the Military Commissions Act -- which the Times never named -- was buried in a 750-word piece on page A20. "It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill he knows will save American lives" was the first of several quotes of praise from the President that were high up in the article. Further down, a few Democrats objected to the bill, but from the article's limited explanation of the law it was hard to understand why.

But if you happened to catch MSNBC the evening before, you'd have heard a different story. It, too, began with a laudatory statement from the President: "These military commissions are lawful. They are fair. And they are necessary." Cut to MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann: "And they also permit the detention of any American in jail without trial if the president does not like him."

Olbermann first cast off the traditional reporter's role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, delivering a powerful indictment of the government's handling of the rescue effort. "These are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping this country safe," he said bitterly. The government "has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water."

At the time, other newscasters, most famously CNN's Anderson Cooper, also unleashed their outrage, spawning speculation that the natural disaster might also become a watershed event for broadcast news. But most anchors quickly returned to business as usual, censoring their own criticisms no matter how bad the news continued to be. Not Olbermann. Encouraged by rising ratings, he's since turned his distinctive take on the government's incompetence into a regular part of his show.

Last August he took the tone up a notch when he aired the first of his hard-hitting Special Comments. Regularly invoking some of the most shameful examples of American history to frame the Bush Administration in historical perspective, he's likened the President's recent acts to John Adams's jailing of American newspaper editors, Woodrow Wilson's use of the Espionage Act to prosecute "hyphenated Americans" for "advocating peace in a time of war" and FDR's internment of 110,000 Americans because of their Japanese descent. Ours is "a government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from," declared Olbermann the day after the President signed the Military Commissions Act.

"Keith is a refreshing change from most of the coverage of civil liberties since 9/11," says Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and frequent guest on Olbermann's show. "Reporters tend to view these fights in purely political terms, so the public gets virtually no substantive analysis. As long as two people disagree, reporters treat it as an even debate. They won't say that the overwhelming number of constitutional and national security experts say this is an unlawful program -- they'll just say experts disagree. It's extremely misleading."

Olbermann, who denies any partisan leanings and whose background doesn't suggest any, insists his job is to report on what's really going on -- even if the public is loath to believe it. "We are still fundamentally raised in this country to be very confident in the preservation of our freedoms," he said in a recent interview. "It's very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live." Olbermann credits sportscasting for his candid and historical-minded approach. "In sports, if a center-fielder drops the fly ball, you can't pretend he didn't," he says. "There's also an awareness of patterns, a relationship between what has gone before and what is to come that is so strong in sports coverage that doesn't seem to be there in news reporting."

"The rise of Keith's skeptical or pointed comments are the mood of the country," says Bill Wolff, MSNBC's vice president for prime-time programming. "He has given voice to a large part of the country that is frustrated with the Administration's policies."

In a pre-election Special Comment about the Republican National Committee's campaign ads featuring menacing images of Osama bin Laden and associated terrorists, for example, Olbermann declared: "You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee." Invoking FDR for contrast, he added: "Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. His distant successor has wasted his Administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself."

Billmon noted the same thing a little while back - and pointed out that Rupert might find negotiating the switch a little tricky.

Roger and Rupert can't be too happy about this:

Fox News’s total audience fell 24 percent in the past year, to 1.3 million viewers from 1.7 million, and its key primetime audience, viewers ages 25-54, was down 7 percent in October on a year-to-year basis, to an average 363,000 viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research data.

In third quarter, Fox News suffered a 38 percent decline in 25-54s, to 409,000.

One explanation would be that Fox's mindless shilling for the Bush administration has finally turned off enough Democrats (21% of Dems polled in a June 2004 Pew survey listed Fox as their primary news source) and Independents (22%) that they're finally tuning out. Another, however, would be that Fox's trademark frantic flashing format and conservative ideological bias are both now the norm in the cable news universe -- giving viewers who wish to be ignorant and confused a much larger menu to choose from.

It's a little bit of both, I suspect, plus perhaps a general loss of interest in the news as we (minus Rick Santorum) exit the post 9/11 era of hyper-adrenalized fear and media panic.

If the trend continues, and starts to bite into the Fox News revenue stream (I assume it already has, but I don't know enough about the cable TV biz to say how much that's hurting NewsCorp's bottom line) then you have to wonder what the Awful Australian (no disrepect, etc.) is going to do about it -- particularly if the Dems take Congress and thus move into a position where they might be able to threaten his far-flung business interests. (Not that the odds are very high that the whimps would actually do such a thing, but a corporate robber baron like Murdoch has to operate on the basis of capabilities, not intentions.)

It appears that in the US some terrorists are more equal than others.

On September 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.

No national newspaper, magazine, or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women’s Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism — even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they’re fighting a holy war.

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.

Slashdor has a post wondering if authorities can listen in on switched off mobile phones (which also includes a repeat of a rumour about car onboard navigation systems that I once noticed at the impressively titled De Doc's Institute of Memetic Engineering).

We already knew the FBI can secretly listen in to car conversations by activating microphones of systems like OnStar. A new Mafia court case suggests that the FBI can do the same thing to cell phones. The judge's opinion and some background information are available for reading online. The most disturbing thing? According to the judge, the bug worked even if the phone appeared to be 'powered off.' Anyone up for an open-source handset already?"

From the article: "This week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that the 'roving bugs' were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and alternatives probably wouldn't work. The FBI's 'applications made a sufficient case for electronic surveillance,' Kaplan wrote. 'They indicated that alternative methods of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance.'"

Following on from my link to 10 Zen Monkeys article about fascism in the US, here's one from Douglas Rushkoff.

It all became blindingly clear to me the morning I found out Ken Lay was dead. I was listening to the radio – to a friend of mine, actually, reading the news report on NPR. He was explaining how the dishonored corporate elite criminal, the former CEO of Enron, had a fatal heart attack before he had the chance to spend the rest of his life in jail. Because of certain technicalities in the law, this also meant Lay’s family would in all likelihood be able to keep the millions of dollars that would have otherwise been paid back to Enron employees and shareholders in court fines.

The newsreader opined that Lay’s death might have been suicide, and not just for the money. Lay was in on those early secret energy industry meetings with Dick Cheney – the ones where they figured out oil prices and the Iraq War and other matters of state – and, facing prison, the fallen corporate superstar could have posed a security risk if he had leaked information about what had transpired to other prisoners or, worse, the FBI in trade for better living quarters.

But, given all that, I couldn’t bring myself to believe Lay was dead at all. If you’re that rich and powerful, why die? Why not just get a hold of some corpse, pay-off a coroner, move to an island and call it a day? This is no grassy knoll feat. It’s not even CSI, but early 90’s Law & Order. No big deal for a guy intimately connected with one of the most actively clandestine administrations in US history.

That same July morning, when news of North Korea’s failed nuclear test launches were broadcast, I didn’t feel sure I was being told what was happening, either. Not that news agencies can really know, either. Did they launch? Were they thwarted by a US counterstrike, or by their own ineptitude? Do they even know? Do we?

I’m not saying one thing or the other happened - just that I stare at the news and don’t believe anything they’re saying. I’ve got no idea. And it feels really weird.

I find I can trace this sense of uncertainty to the 2004 election. The 2000 election was crooked, but the fraud was rather out in the open. We watched hired thugs stop the Florida recount by trying to break into the room where the counting was happening - and thus delay the process long enough for the Supreme Court to choose Bush as the President. But the 2004 voter fraud in Ohio, fully documented by Robert Kennedy Jr., among others, was an entirely more hidden affair. Diebold voting machines, teams of fraud squads, and election officials too afraid that disclosure of what happened will turn people off voting forever.

Those of us who try to stay even remotely connected to what is going on in the world around us have enough hard evidence to conclude with certainty that voting in America has been systematically and effectively undermined by the party currently in power. In an increasing number of precincts, how people vote – if they are even allowed in - no longer has a direct influence on how their votes are tallied.

It’s sad and confusing not to live in a democracy, anymore. And while it’s quite plainly true, it’s a bit too unthinkable for most sane people to accept. It goes in the same mental basket as more outlandish (if not unthinkable) thoughts — such as dynamite on the WTC or no airplane crashing into the Pentagon — even though, in this case, it’s not conjecture, it’s just plain real.

So what I’m coming to grips with is accepting that I don’t live in a democratic nation, and that the propaganda state attempted in 1930’s Europe did finally reach fruition here in the U.S., just as Henry Ford and those of his ilk predicted.

Maybe I’m just old, and have a very idealistic view of democracy. When I was a kid, we were all told that this is a government of the people, and that our votes provided a check on the power of our leaders. That’s why we called them “elected.” Or maybe it’s just naïve to think that representative democracy could have worked the way it was presented to us.

The other side – the fascist side – does have an argument to make, and they’ve been making it since Woodrow Wilson was president. Having run on a “peace” campaign, Wilson later decided that America needed to get involved in World War I. So, with the help of one of the great Public Relations masters of all time, Edward Bernays, he created the Creel Commission, whose job was to change America’s mind.

Bernays, like the many political propagandists who followed, honestly believed that the masses are just too stupid to make decisions for themselves – particularly when it involved global affairs or economics. Instead, an enlightened and informed elite (corporate America) needs to make the decisions, and then “sell” them to the public in the form of faux populist media campaigns. This way, the masses feel they are coming up with these opinions, themselves.

Truly populist positions, on the other hand - such as workers’ rights or minority representation – must be recontextualized as the corruption of the public by elite “special interests” or decadent social deviants. Throughout most of history, these scapegoats were the Jews, but now it’s mostly gays and liberals. By distracting the masses with highly emotionally charged issues like flag-burning or gay marriage, those in power consolidate their base of support while developing a new mythology of state as religion.

As long as they do all this, they don’t have to worry about how people vote, or what might be happening on the ground. “Unregulating” the mediaspace turns the fourth estate (the news agencies) into just another arm of the corporate conglomerates that fascism was invented to serve. (Mussolini called it “corporatism,” don’t forget.)

The last and most crucial step in creating a truly seamless fascist order, though, is to frighten the intellectuals, students, and artists from seeing the world as it is and sharing their sensibilities with one another. Hell, calling America’s leaders “a fascist regime” can’t be good for business. The only place I’m allowed to write this way is on my blog or here in Arthur – and neither pays the bills.

Besides: why rock the boat? I may not have the right to vote, anymore, but I’m being kept comfortable enough. Like others of my class, I have a roof over my head. I’m crafty enough to get paid now and again for a book or talk or comic series. And the state is functioning well enough that I can afford a tuna sandwich and walk around my neighborhood eating it without getting whacked with a rock or a grenade. As far as history goes, that’s pretty good.

So was democracy a failed experiment? Should we just let these guys run the country as long as they let us eat? Clearly, they’re not scared of us or what we might be saying about them. In fact, their best argument that we haven’t descended into fascism is the fact that we’re allowed to distribute columns like this one. How could we be living in a totalitarian propaganda state if there are articles pronouncing the same? Because fascism looks different every time around. 1930’s fascism failed because it was too obviously repressive. Today’s fascism works because it has turned the mediaspace into a house of mirrors where nothing is true and everything is permissible. The fact that there are plenty of blogs and even major books saying what’s happening and still it doesn’t matter is proof that it has worked.

But there is hope. It’s not just the radicals and militias who are alarmed, but mainstream congresspeople and government wonks. I, myself, have been approached by two separate government intelligence agencies and three members of congress (of both parties) for help understanding what they already deem to be actionable offenses against the American people by some of our leaders. They are disturbed by the disinformation campaign leading up to the Gulf War, voter fraud, and the way Americans have been frightened into supporting the curtailment of civil rights.

Surprisingly, most of my conversations with these patriotic people involve two main concerns. First, they have been ostracized by their peers for their views. This has created some urgency, for they fear they will not get enough party support for re-election if they don’t succeed in their efforts in the next few months. Second, and more troublingly, they are afraid to disillusion America’s youth. Isn’t there a way to fix this problem, they wonder, without raising an entire generation of Americans in environment of acknowledged voter nullification? And what of our reputation in the world? Which is more damaging to democracy: voter fraud, or the public awareness of voter fraud?

To this, we simply must conclude that the reality of voter fraud is more dangerous than any associated disillusionment. To worry about the impact on public consciousness is to get mired in the logic of public relations – and that’s what got us into this mess to begin with.

Whether or not the US can remain a democracy (or become one, depending on your point of view) seems to be in doubt, but there seem to be few doubts that Bush is its worst President ever.

Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past.

Changes in presidential rankings reflect shifts in how we view history. When the first poll was taken, the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War was regarded as a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting black men the right to vote. As a result, President Andrew Johnson, a fervent white supremacist who opposed efforts to extend basic rights to former slaves, was rated "near great." Today, by contrast, scholars consider Reconstruction a flawed but noble attempt to build an interracial democracy from the ashes of slavery -- and Johnson a flat failure.

More often, however, the rankings display a remarkable year-to-year uniformity. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt always figure in the "great" category. Most presidents are ranked "average" or, to put it less charitably, mediocre. Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon occupy the bottom rung, and now President Bush is a leading contender to join them. A look at history, as well as Bush's policies, explains why.

At a time of national crisis, Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years preceding the Civil War, and Johnson, who followed it, were simply not up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues). Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush's presidency certainly brings theirs to mind.

Harding and Coolidge are best remembered for the corruption of their years in office (1921-23 and 1923-29, respectively) and for channeling money and favors to big business. They slashed income and corporate taxes and supported employers' campaigns to eliminate unions. Members of their administrations received kickbacks and bribes from lobbyists and businessmen. "Never before, here or anywhere else," declared the Wall Street Journal, "has a government been so completely fused with business." The Journal could hardly have anticipated the even worse cronyism, corruption and pro-business bias of the Bush administration.

Despite some notable accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, Nixon is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.

Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national defense. The court's unprecedented rebukes of Bush's policies on detainees indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.

Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.