Willful Deception

When I was young, and George Will was too, I used to think that even though he was a conservative R, Will was a special kind of thinker, more like the Father of the Conservative movement, William F Buckley.

For it was George Will who once said that here in the US, we privatize profits and socialize losses. We might conclude that this kind of honesty must reside in a man of integrity and enlightened intellect.

Apparently it does not.

George Will is willfully deceiving the American public about Climate Change, and his credentials as a thoughtful and considerate observer of Public Affairs are now not just in question, they have been drowned in his sea spittle of misrepresentation and literary guile.

This issue of course is his two recent opinion pieces in the Washington Post on Climate Change; however, Will has been saying lazy stuff about climate change for many years.

I can imagine Will himself speaking to his own behavior:(if it were not Will)

Will: One of the most important freedoms we have in this country and one of the most important freedoms for any functioning democracy is the right of the people to speak their mind. It is essential.

However, suppose a fire starts in a theater in one of the dressing rooms, and the manager of the theater comes from behind the curtain and appears before the audience to inform them that, it fact, there is a fire in the back; and, even though there is no smoke in the theater at this moment, there surely will be soon, so please begin now to calmly remove yourselves from this building.

And suppose that a well respected Theater goer stands up and tells one and all, that he has been to this theater hundreds of times and never before has there been a need to head for the exits due to some rumor of fire.

.

Moreover, this well respected citizen further urges everyone to stay in their seats and to demand that the play resume, and this hoax perpetrated by the officials in charge of the theater be revealed as some play for publicity or monetary gain.

And there in disbelief, the manager of the hall watches as this well educated, well regarded patron of the arts convinces the crowd to not only not leave, they begin to demand that the play resume.

.

The manager screams to his patrons, "Believe me, I know of what I speak, this man speaks only from his mind, not with his senses."

Yet, the crowd remains, still demanding that the show resume.

Moments later, a dark curl of smoke glides up to the fine chandelier, and within moments the maroon velvet curtain on the back stage entrance suddenly burst into flame.

"Fire" yells the well dressed woman in row B. In moments, there is panic as the room fills with smoke, and evening dresses are soon trampled as the exits are overrun.

In such a situation, Will would eloquently argue, the Rights of the uninformed, overly confident citizen to speak his mind in the face of overwhelming evidence presented by the professionals in the field are abridged by the nature of the danger and the urgent need to act immediately to prevent unnecessary death and suffering.

Will would argue that the uninformed rube who endangered his fellow citizens should be held accountable for the deaths that ensued from his improper and uninformed behavior.

He would argue that such an individual should be put on trial for such nonsense... not only in the name of justice, but more importantly, in the cause of providing useful guidance to those who might consider repeating such behavior.

And in this case, he would be absolutely right.

Willful deception in a time of public endangerment

Is not just wrong,

it's a crime.

And Will should be fired.

"There's nothing like a good public hanging to focus the mind. "
Somebody

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The Joint Session

I'm not so sure that Fat Tuesday was the right context for the President's speech before the joint session of Congress last night, but the first day of Lent probably is. I missed the speech because a favorite Aunt was in town ,and even though she is going to be 80 soon, we still managed to walk the town and check out the energy on the street after dinner. And, as you might imagine, there was a lot.

Here's what Obama had to say about energy:

"the budget I submit will invest in the three areas that are absolutely critical to our economic future: energy, health care, and education.

It begins with energy.

We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century. And yet, it is China that has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient. We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. New plug-in hybrids roll off our assembly lines, but they will run on batteries made in Korea.

Well I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders – and I know you don’t either. It is time for America to lead again.

Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.

We have also made the largest investment in basic research funding in American history – an investment that will spur not only new discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine, science, and technology.

We will soon lay down thousands of miles of power lines that can carry new energy to cities and towns across this country. And we will put Americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions of dollars on our energy bills.

But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.

So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America." more

Except for asking for a carbon tax or fee, there is little here that I don't agree with. And if all the carbon emission caps are auctioned, and not given away to industry, (which seems to be gaining support) a market based trading system can act very much like a tax or a fee on the emission of carbon into the biosphere.

Later this afternoon, a fellow colleague asked me if I had watched the speech last night. I told him I had not. And then he offered what a joy it is to have a President that you can enjoy listening to, who is articulate, and who is smart.

Knowing my pal as I do, I suspect he watched from his own joint session.

Here's the full speech from White House. gov.



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The Love of Green

You've got to hand it to the Rs. They have discipline and they have focus. They love their money, and they don't mind telling a little story every now and then if it helps get the point over. Take the bowtie wearing baseball loving conservative George Will. His editorial on climage change in the Washington Post this week is a good example.

The column is mostly opinion, and the two facts he uses to bolster his opinion aren't bad. Unfortunately, they aren't true.

According to TPM, both of Will's major "data points" fall apart after a moment's scrutiny. Here's the first:

"According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

But within hours of Will's column appearing, the ACRC had posted the following statement on its website:

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined."

As for Will's second claim, he writes:

"According to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

Yet, The WMO writes:

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record."

Another big story telling R has now changed his tune:

Greenspan says recession will be 'longest and deepest' since '30s
Jeremy Gantz
Tuesday February 17, 2009

Eight months after he predicted the worst was over and the threat of recession receding, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said the current global recession will "surely be the longest and deepest" since the 1930s.

And, in comments to the Financial Times, he said he backed bank nationalization: "It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do." Nationalizations would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them." clip

"I see no alternative to a set of heightened federal regulatory rules for banks and other financial institutions," Greenspan said in a Tuesday evening speech to the Economic Club of New York, Reuters reported. He said he was "deeply dismayed" to realize in mid-2007 that the premise that firms were enlightened enough to monitor their own risks had "failed." more

Meanwhile another storytelling R has her own money issues:

Palin must pay income taxes on thousands taken for expense money

It's not just Obama administration nominees who have tax issues."Gov. Sarah Palin must pay income taxes on thousands of dollars in expense money she received while living at her Wasilla home, under a new determination by state officials," the Anchorage Daily News reports.The paper adds, "The governor's office wouldn't say this week how much she owes in back taxes for meal money, or whether she intends to continue to receive the per diem allowance. As of December, she was still charging the state for meals and incidentals."

All of these folks have one thing in common.

Their love of green energy.

And it's not the green energy that will ultimately rebuild

our world and the new economy we must envision.

No, their Green is the color of money.

And in these days when our global community life is threatened,

their mantra is moronic.

.

And their species is specious.

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cartoon courtesy of R.J. Matson and Crooks and Liars

Jubilation

I heard Cyril sing this at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar in a few years ago when he played there with Tribe 13. Jay knew at least one of the guys in the band, Papa Mali, and gave him several of our New Orleans books to give to Cyril. Later Cyril came to our booth and we talked for a time – he was fascinated by our icons and picked an Ethiopian Cross, which he wears much of the time, along with other sacred pieces he finds or that find him. Yesterday, at the airport in Chicago, we talked briefly. I told him he would love the Asian Exhibit at the Institute of Art. I’ve been listening to his music today. Amazing! The refrain above – I want my money back! struck me deeply when I first heard it. “You send my money to Iraq! I want my money back!” Yesterday he wore a big Obama button on the back of his leather cap.

Jubilation

There is a strawberry, red, jubilant, a burst of sweet summer sunlight, ripe, like the ones Mother grew in our backyard up the bluff from Lake Michigan, a few miles from the Wisconsin border of Illinois, in America, in the nineteen fifties. I want it, really want it, even though I know it won’t, can’t, could never be as good as the ones we grew back then, mixed with sugar and pectin, left out in summer sunlight to cook. It is necessary to buy what we have forgotten how to make, or grow. The strawberry today is huge, covered with chocolate, skewered on a stick — complicated but irresistible now that Mother is gone, the house on Longview Street gone, along with the back yard garden. I pull out my debit card. I can’t buy the strawberry I want, the one Mother grew in the flower bed we thinned out every spring to make room for a new crop. So I buy this new, complicated one — bulging with union busting, undocumented worker abuse, juicy with chemical inducements, fortified by bank loans, foreign investment and farm subsidies, coated with chocolate, cheap labor, drug wars, bad government and empire. I pull out my debit card, swipe it, punch in the pin number that unlocks my money. The strawberry is mine. Or is it? If the bank came after it, would I have to give it up? Could I give them just the skewer? Or part of the chocolate? And once they got their piece, where would it go? To Chinese investors in the bank, as collateral for a dead car loan in Cleveland, or Tokyo? Would I have to give them the whole thing — red fruit, tiny dots, seeds spots, the green ruffle? How long before it perished, poof, was absolutely gone — like everything attached to money, tossed into the black hole of funny accounting, fractals of annuities, hedge funds, halls of mirrors reflecting images of value where none has been for years, the rasping appetite of the giant that devours anything, even itself, even my strawberry. How angry would it make me that they disappeared my money, my strawberry, my delectable, complicated strawberry? Mad enough to vote? Mad enough to start a garden of my own, in my front yard, remember how to grow things, how to make compost? Mad enough to float another theory, another way of living in the world, without money, with real strawberries that are delicious but not complex. When I moved to Austin in the seventies, there was a women’s band called Jubilation. They were a radical, feminist band and named themselves after an economic theory — the idea was to forgive the colossal debt owed to the United States, to Europe by governments in Africa, for instance, who paid more for debt service than schools for their children, than health care, infrastructure, countries held in indenture for the cost of planting cash crops that left the country before people at home were fed — strawberries that, poof! disappeared the instant debt infected the food chain. Jubilation. Think about it. What if we just zeroed it out. Zero times any number equals zero. What if we disappeared the debt instead of the strawberry?

©Susan Bright, 2009

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published two-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh

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Our Place in Space

As the House and Senate come to an agreement on their respective stimulus plans, and Obama prepares to get his signing pen out, it's instructive to at least consider the possibility that our economy is not just faltering, it is dead.

Everything has a life, bugs live a few days, dogs are lucky to live a dozen years, and humans get to live 7 dog lives if they are lucky. Larger living systems, like nations and civilizations live much longer , sometimes a thousand years, but they do die. Rome lived for 600 or 700 hundred years, depending on how you figure it, and the Egyptian world lasted four times longer than that.

So, it should be no surprise that an economy could actually pass away.

Thanks to friend and reader JG, here's part of a piece by James Howard Kunstler that begins to make the point:

"Venturing out each day into this land of strip malls, freeways, office parks, and McHousing pods, one can't help but be impressed at how America looks the same as it did a few years ago, while seemingly overnight we have become another country.

All the old mechanisms that enabled our way of life are broken, especially endless revolving credit, at every level, from household to business to the banks to the US Treasury.Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted "way of life" -- the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or negotiate.

So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine?

Or do we start behaving differently?

The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional debt at any level without causing further damage, additional distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too).

We can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability to make monthly payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes.

Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete "growth" cycle of "economic expansion." clip

If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time.

We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations.

But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. (clip)

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going.

Kunstler finishes with this:

Nobody in either party -- including supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to mention President Obama -- has a position for directing public resources and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security, future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable, walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic interdependency.

This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change that will tear the nation to pieces."

Curiously, Kunstler is showing his own poverty of imagination here. He fails to forward imagine what we can do, and must do to face the critical issues that are before us. And he fails to imagine a humankind that can quickly leap well beyond its present embodiment.

If the world economy and the capitalist model is truly on the way to the coroner, we'll all know soon enough.

Funerals have their value.

They force you to move on

in ways you never imagined.

And we will move on towards a new model,

with our advanced tools of communication,

with a richness of imagination,

and a refined knowledge of ourselves,

in our place in space.

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VOOM and pop

We spent part of the weekend with our cartoonist friend Charlie Loving, deep in the Texas Hill Country. He and his wife Ray live just outside of Deer Corn a few miles from Falling Rock. Here's a sample of some of his recent editorial cartoon work. I particularly like the editorial content of the last one. The difference between "VOOM" and "pop" says in two words what so many of us feel and so many reporters fail to report.
















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By the way, it did rain a little today.

I wish it would rain

We've had a really nice winter. It's gets a little cold for a few days, then it warms right up. The nights are nice and cool, and the days are practically perfect. Only problem is...no rain. We're getting drier and drier here in Central Texas. In fact we are officially in extreme drought right now. And we're not the only ones.

Here's a China story from the WSJ.

China Battles Worsening Drought
Wall Street Journal
By SHAI OSTER

BEIJING -- China's leaders ordered emergency measures to battle one of the country's worst droughts in decades, which is threatening to damage nearly a fifth of China's wheat harvest and millions of livestock.

Underscoring the government's concern, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao ordered the State Council, China's equivalent of a cabinet, to make "all-out efforts to combat the severe drought," the official Xinhua news agency reported Thursday. (clip)

China often battles droughts in its parched north, but meteorologists say the current one is, in some areas, the worst since 1951. It has left 3.7 million people across eight provinces facing water shortages and has damaged 9.3 million hectares of farmland, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, cited by state-run media. clip

The affected area is primarily in central and eastern China, covering the country's breadbasket where much of the winter wheat crop is raised. The area also includes the region surrounding Beijing, the capital, which hasn't had precipitation in more than 100 days. In all, 1.85 million livestock are short of water. more

And then there is Australia

This drought may never break
Sydney Morning Herald
Richard Macey

IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation's most senior weather experts warned yesterday.

"Perhaps we should call it our new climate," said the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones.

He was speaking after the release of statistics showing that last year was the hottest on record in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT.

NSW's mean temperature was 1.13 degrees above average. "That is a very substantial anomaly," Dr Jones said. "It's equivalent to moving NSW 150 kilometres closer to the equator."
It was the 11th year in a row NSW and the Murray-Darling Basin had experienced above normal temperatures. Sydney's nights were its warmest since records were first kept 149 years ago.

"There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming," said Dr Jones. "It is very easy to see … it is happening before our eyes." more

And California certainly has it's water issues:

Water watchers cast a wary eye
Sacremento Bee
By Matt Weiser

Water experts are having a hard time finding the right words to describe what lies ahead, after recording a dismally dry January in California.

"Scary," "grim," and possible "conservation mandates" are offered up.

Yet it's easy for the experts to sound out a clear warning: This may become, simply, the worst drought California has ever seen.

"Our worst fears appear to be materializing," said Wendy Martin, drought coordinator at the state Department of Water Resources. "It's going to be a huge challenge."

The bottom line, water officials said, is that right now, everyone must start using less water. The public can expect higher water bills and fines if they don't, because the alternative is a real water shortage – one that is threatening tens of thousands of Valley jobs.

"It's pretty scary," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, who has more than three decades in the water-supply business. "The public needs to tighten their belts. You have to rearrange all the molecules in your brain to think about using water differently." more

We're going to have to rearrange all the molecules in our brains about a lot of things. As the economy, the climate, and our belief systems continue to fall all around us, we are going to have to totally rethink our ideas about full employment, competition, and consumption. And we're going to have cooperate with other, and with the world.

Right now everyone in Washington is talking about how we stimulate the economy to get consumption up again. Ironically, Americans are actually saving for a change.

What we really need is less consumption and more efficiency.

But not just electrical efficiency, or MPG efficiency. We need to think about our overall economic system efficiency. We need more teletransportation, more virtual conferencing, and more locally grown food.

Our little city has been somewhat immune from the problems we see else where.

That's getting ready to end.

Oh I wish it would rain.
The Temptations

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Babies Know

AND -----




Here's something you can do for our children and grandchildren with MoveOn —

This was sent to us by California poet, Lauren Rusk. Author of Pictures In the Firestorm. Thanks!

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Children know too

Thanks to DS for this:

Good, Bad, the Ugly

I've always been nervous about lighting laws. You know, ones that require us all to use compact florescents or even one that makes incandescents unavailable. First of all, I like low watt incandescents and the quality of light they give. Furthermore, a super well insulated house can pretty much be warmed quite efficiently simply with bright incandescent spot lights that flood the inside walls.

.

Moreover, CFCs rarely last as long as the manufacturers claim. Perhaps more importantly, CFC's have all kinds of waste problems which make them less than an idea solution to reducing our lighting loads.

Here's a good story you may have missed last week in the Telegraph that confirms to me why we need to exercise caution when it comes to light bulb legislation. (these are actually LED's):

Scientists invent £2 energy saving lightbulb that last for 60 years
The Telegraph
By Louise Gray
29 Jan 2009

A £2 energy-saving lightbulb that lasts for 60 years has been developed by scientists at Cambridge University.

The researchers have designed a bulb that is three times more energy efficient than today's best offer and can cut lighting bills by 75 per cent.

The bulbs are made using Gallium Nitride (GaN), a man-made substance used in LEDs (light emitting diodes). It is routinely used in bike lights, mobile phones and camera flashes.

The bulbs are 12 times more efficient that conventional tungsten bulbs and three times more efficient than compact fluorescent "energy efficient" bulbs.

They can burn for 100,000 hours and they illuminate instantly and can be dimmed, unlike energy efficient bulbs. (more)

And here is 2008’s top 10 climate stories from Joe Romm's Climate Progress.

"What events, actions, and findings had the most positive or negative impact on the likelihood that the nation and the world will act in time to avoid catastrophic warming?"

Clearly the most positive is the election of Obama/ Biden:

Obama: “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Why Biden is such an important pick for those who care about the climate

As far as bad stories go, I guess its a tie between:

Conservatives go all in on climate denial and delay.

While the grim implications of the science and observational data discussed above have become painfully obvious to everyone else, conservatives simply refuse to accept reality. For instance, even though a very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far — and even though 2008 was about 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole (even with a La-Niña-fueled cool winter) for some deniers, “2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved.” Seriously.

and,

Gas Pains.

.

As NOAA reported, levels of methane rose sharply in 2007 for the first time since 1998. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, especially over the near term. And the tundra has as much carbon locked away in it as the atmosphere contains today. Scientific analysis suggests the rise in 2007 methane levels came from Arctic wetlands. The tundra melting is probably the most worrisome of all the climate-carbon-cycle amplifying feedbacks — and it could easily take us to the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm.

But by far the Ugliest story out there right now is the new improved back yard nuclear generator that has been making the rounds, thanks to Sandia and Toshiba. Toshiba is truly talking about making their 4 S available. Here's a a description from Atomic Insights:

As currently envisioned, the Toshiba 4S (Super Safe, Small and Simple) nuclear power system would be able to supply about 10 MW of electrical power for 30 years without any new fuel. It could be transported in modules by barge and installed in a building measuring 22 meters by 16 meters by 11 meters with an excavation for the reactor core and primary cooling system of about 30 meters deep. (Nishi Feb 2005)

Compared to the alternatives, the small nuclear plant would almost disappear into the background and would have little effect on the environment. Depending on a variety of assumptions, the cost for power could range as low as 6 cents per kilowatt hour. Unfortunately, there are scenarios where the cost per kilowatt hour could approach infinity."

When I first read about this new nuclear technology that was safe, was buried, and required no maintainance or security, I was a bit more than sceptical. After researching it last week, I now see it as a something close to lunacy.

The reason this little closet sized core is supposedly so safe is due to a nifty design which gives the system a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity". Simply put, that means that an increase in core temperature will cause a decrease in core power. If the temperature increases too much, the core will shut down. Therefore, it can be buried safely 100 feet below the ground right?

All the rest of the plant is a straightforward steam turbine with all the piping and controls of any small steam turbine. And the building that houses all of this is not a farm shed, it is 70 by 50 by 30 feet. It is not some kind of new nuclear battery as some have reported. It's basically the same technology that is used in our nuclear submarine fleet.

Sandia Labs is also in the technology by licencing a company called Hyperion. And according to them, their technology is Safe...the most controlled and regulated type of power on the planet, Affordable....the cheapest in terms of dollars & environmental impact and Reliable....Available 24 /7 rain or shine, windy or calm, and it will someday power the world.

A really smart investor type asked me about this technology last week and I told him I had noticed the stories that had come out of Sandia, but I wasn't even sure exactly how they worked, since there were claims of no moving parts. He seemed excited about the potential of Toshiba and Hyperion getting into the business.

My boss asked me a few days later if I was following these developments.

So now I have.

And man,

it is ugly.

Better to stick with the good,

before the bad comes.

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