My Summer Wish List

Given the widespread and stubborn refusal by most Americans to accept the eventualities of climate change disaster and the more immediate peaking of global oil production, I have found myself wishing for clear signals from nature and the market that would bolster the arguments of myself and others who appreciate the implications of such things. My wish springs from the frustration I feel as I observe the national "discussion" and my desire for it to transcend the "discussion's" most moronic elements to something more urgent. Seeing as the people who make the "discussion" especially moronic are the very same people who seem to base their opinions about these two subjects on whether or not they personally experience hot or cold weather or high gas prices I have come to hope for events that will force the issue and change the "discussion". My modest summer wish list therefore is based on what I believe is needed to jar my thicker headed compatriots enough to get them to realize that which is a clearly demonstrated reality.

The first wish I have is that this summer will be so hot that multiple high temperature records across the continental United States are smashed to pieces. It should be hot enough to make most anyone very uncomfortable but not so hot to cause anyone to die. Many Americans alive today need to feel very uncomfortable; to feel hot, sweaty, and perturbed, coupled with a sense of dread as the unpleasantness of the heat seems to have no end. All Americans should feel as northerners do in January who long for the end of winter and respite from the cold. Autumn should be embraced the way spring is embraced after winter.

My second and final wish is for gasoline prices to pole vault $3.00 a gallon and perhaps land somewhere in the $3.30-50 range in early summer then stay there. You're likely to hear many voiced and/or muttered expletives referring to the excretory functions, the sexual organs or sexual activity, or using the lords name in vain, which means you should cover your children's ears when getting gasoline this summer if this wish of mine comes to pass.

These two wishes in fact have pretty good chances of coming true. Oblivious to the heat waves that struck the southern hemisphere during it's summer, the northern hemisphere saw some cold but generally unremarkable winter temperatures, over a thirty year average, due to the Arctic Oscillation having entered it's negative phase. The Arctic Oscillation is a normal occurrence that effects weather patterns in the northern hemisphere so should not be seen as evidence of global warming. However, arctic temperatures were anywhere from 9-13 degrees F above normal this winter, which is a lot, and should be seen as evidence of global warming. The result of all of this is that the northern hemisphere really got screwed out of a globally warmed winter because of the Arctic Oscillation and were left wondering about the reality of global warming.

As for the coming summer, the main driver of temperature will be El Nino. The Pacific Ocean entered the El Nino phase last fall and will probably make this summer very hot and wet. As of last November (I haven't looked recently) surface temperature readings in the Pacific were some of the highest ever recorded. The worrisome part about this is that the bigger and more destructive storms over the continent that accompany El Nino years will probably be a constant news feature. Not to make this a farmer's almanac or anything, I'd say that folks living in the middle of the continent and in the deep South should make sure the tornado shelter is ready to roll.

The price of gas is likely to go up because of the actions of refiners. Whether the price of oil goes up or not, the refiners are in serious need of profit. The $70-80 a barrel range for the price of oil doesn't seem to support the $2.50 or so per gallon gasoline that most Americans have been paying for the past several months. Or the $2.72 I saw earlier today. Another reason is that there is a gasoline glut in the market because demand in the U.S. has fallen so much. So refiners seem to be in a strange supply-demand situation. There is too much gas on the market, forcing prices down, but the price of oil is high. It should be interesting to see how people interpret this. Will they call the speculators before congress to explain themselves? Will they clamor for new refining capacity? Or will they see it as a new normal that Americans will have to adapt to? The lesson I would like for them to get is this: If Americans want to drill for more oil they will pay more for gas, and if they want cheap gas they will have to use less. That sums up the predicament we find ourselves in.

This summer, then, whenever you hear someone swearing through his teeth about high gas prices, turn to him or her and say "Hey, if you want cheap gas, then you gotta stop usin' it". It might help if you say it in your best Jeff Spicoli imitation to add insult to injury. Likewise, when temperatures have reached unbearable levels, track down you're favorite global warming denier and ask "how's that global cooling treating you?"

Stand Up and Get Real

American politics has become terminally warped by the influence of money infused into the system by corporate self-interest and disinformation campaigns funded by them through "think tanks" who only think about how dish up a distorted reality for popular consumption. Primarily, almost exclusively, the seizure of political power by corporations, particularily Wall Street but really by any of the major industries, has been paved by Republican ideology and actions. The drive to deregulate industry, the gutting of any measure taken to make corporations responsible for the negative impacts of their activities, through litigation or through pricing, and to strengthen corporate influence over the political sphere have all been championed by Republicans. The Republican Party represents the core obstruction to doing what is necessary for this country to avoid an epochal shitstorm.

Given this, whatever adaptations people may take over the coming years are not likely to have much assistance from the Federal government, at least in the near term. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Until there is a dramatic change in how the American people and the political leaders view our present situation as a nation, constructive action by governments is likely to come mainly from state and local governments based on whatever circumstances they find themselves facing. This is likely to be limited, too, given the severe budgetary problems of almost any government you can think of. But at least the smaller governments will be more responsive to the needs of their people and will be better able to guide a transition from the global to the local economies I see happening now and continuing for decades into the future.

Having said that, I understand the political impossibility at this juncture for my views to be aired before the political establishment. No politician that I know of has gotten elected holding the bummer views I have regarding the material impossibilty of the future most Americans regard as normal. Nonetheless, I'd like to provide two criticisms of the Democratic Party positions which I think are no longer viable or are otherwise counterproductive and may be a way to break the political logjam with conservatives. I won't hold my breath on that one.

The most immediately controversial subject on which I disagree with most Democrats is immigration. The U.S. is projected to reach somewhere around 450 million people by mid-century. We should not celebrate this. Immigrants seeking the American dream will wind up creating a whole new army of American consumers and suburban inhabitants. This cannot be allowed to happen. The population globally is already too large by a factor of at least three for reasons I've touched on in previous posts. Trying to extend our way of life to other nations will hasten an ecological disaster. Also, the United States should not attempt to relieve population pressures in other countries by taking on immgrants but instead should throw our effort exclusively into assisting these other nations attempts to reduce fertility rates through family planning programs and reduce poverty. Democrats should recognize that we as a nation will not be richer, stronger, or happier with more people.

Democrats should also recognize that some sizable proportion of the relative largesse that the U.S. currently possesses is based on the bubbled valuation of the economy and the drawing of resources and labor of other countries and cannot be counted on to fund large projects. This translates to a broad diminishment of our expectations due to what is possible financially. I don't mean to say that programs like a national health insurance program funded by taxpayers isn't the best idea. It is. What I have in mind is infrastructure. We will have to make some trade-offs regarding transportation, among other things, that will require political courage like they've hitherto been unwilling to demonstrate. A serious response to global warming and energy security requires that ultimately we give up the automotive way of life. I realize Americans love their cars, but Americans have to be realistic, and some frank and honest leadership has to be tried to lead or drag Americans into the future. The hidden cost of the GM bail-out is that we effectively chose cars over trains. It was an opportunity cost.

What these two critiques have in common is that they both pertain to growth. As time goes on, it is more apparent that the U.S. is, and has been, putting more effort into maintaining our global position than we are benefitting from it. Extending our presence around the world, growing the empire, so to speak, will only make it worse. On balance, we are spending more than we earn. That much is obvious. But to disengage from the effort to globalize the American system means that we would have to accept a reduced geopolitical and economic situation and all the dislocation, power vacuums, and loss of status that goes along with it. This is the consensus reality Americans will ultimately have to face. It'll happen one way or another and we should embark on a policy of managed decline.

There's more I'd like to say on this. One point that I didn't include is on tramsportation and how we should spend our money. Instead of building one or two high speed rail lines between amjor cities, we should electrify the entire rail system for passenger trains that top out at 80-100 mph. The cost of high speed rail is much greater than slower rail, and the energy use follows an exponential curve upwards starting at around 100 mph. Money we use for highways should be transferred to this purpose. The system of roads will have to be scaled down and made cheaper. Michigan has already begun this process by converting several paved country roads to gravel. From where i'm sitting in Minneapolis, the streets are as bad as I've ever seen them. A resurfacing of my street, Xerxes, done last summer is already wearing away. It needed to be repaved but apparently that's not in the cards. Xerxes is a quite busy two-lane through street to the freeway. My suspension is killing me.

In general, I think Democrats, and perhaps most Americans, hold the view that the U.S. shouldn't try to extend it's reach into more and more regions of the world. At the same time, I think that the benefits of our global reach feeds the expectations of liberals like they do anyone else and should be taken into account. The Democratic party has to find a way to get out from under the thumb of big money and special interests that favors whichever party is more willing to do something for them. Beyond the question of whether Democrats can compete with Republicans if the party eschews corporate money for the sake of integrity, it is the only way for us to act on what needs to be acted on. But Americans also need to appreciate that if we do so, it will not be all good. It will mean a wholesale scaling down of the entire American enterprise to something much more modest and much less complex.

The Politics of Decline

It's not a mystery to anyone who watches the political goings-on in Washington D.C. and elsewhere that the two parties are in terminal gridlock over not only what to do but over what is the reality we should be doing something about. Perhaps the only consensus to be found is that the position of these United States is very tenuous. I call the gridlock "terminal" because as each party is prevented from putting forth any program based on it's version of reality in a meaningful way, the efficacy of the differing programs can never be fully measured. The result is a stasis at a time when the systems that the country have operated by for decades are showing their age and in serious need of a revamp. But rather than plumb the depths of the revamping I would like instead to survey the two parties basic assumptions as I understand them currently and argue why I believe a fundamental clearinghouse of many of these assumptions is in order.

Again, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Democrat who has never voted for a Republican ever. And, if it matters, I supported Hillary Clinton in the Minnesota Caucus in 2008. As far as what I think is real I'll refer you to the 20-odd blog entries I've posted below. It is a Leger of what people are not talking about.

Republicans and Democrats are not, I believe, two sides of the same coin. The fights, the antagonism, the bodily loathing and disgust with one another are all real enough. The two parties represent different beliefs, understandings, values, attitudes, and whatever else that are often irreconcilable. In good times, that can be an amusing sideshow to the work that is done in Washington, as long as things are moving forward.

Now things are very different. The two parties are, and have been, polarized to the point of this terminal gridlock and it's hard to say how that could be broken. It's possible that a third candidate from a third party, probably someone claiming the center, will come in 2012. This could begin the breaking down of the two party duality and perhaps providing a voice for the disenchanted voter. If the Republican Party continues it's purification efforts, then it would be the far right party. The Democrats, on the other hand, are primarily centrist as it is, the way I see it, and it's difficult to see how it would play out if someone claiming the center challenged Obama.

Given my grim outlook generally, events are likely to be the driving factor in determining what voters will be looking for in a candidate. If the economy doesn't produce jobs, or, as is equally likely, begins a debt-deflation brought on by a massive and rapid deleveraging of assets, something that surely must happen, then people will lose confidence in the two parties. In fact, the economy could go south for so many reasons beyond the control of the government that the chance of a prolonged recession or a depression is highly likely. A property bubble in China, sovereign debt in a dozen or two countries, derivative market meltdown, or the strong probability of a multitude of asset bubbles created by all the cheap money in the system popping all at once as soon as interest rates rise or demand continues to drop could take down the tightly wound and interconnected global economy. Or, closer to home so to speak, the second wave of housing bubble craziness, this time in the form of option ARM mortgages resetting starting in earnest in the second half of 2010, will cause prices to drop and defaults on derivatives, causing a meltdown like that of 2008.

In the midst of all of this turbulence, the parties will be seen to have no explanation, at least one which has been presented in the lead-up to the land mine laden future we are entering. Trust in government could plummet in such a scenario. If no third party candidate emerges, then people might try the Republicans for another round. This is likely to be short lived. The Republicans have no positive program for government. The free market, limited government belief, emphasizing self-reliance and chastising the welfare state as having instilled moral weakness in society might not please the ears of the formerly employed without the prospect of finding a job and sound callous to those who still have one. It also precludes making reasonable investments by the government in the physical and social infrastructure based on an outsized belief in the ultimate futility of those investments by virtue of their having been made by government. We will see how this belief stands up in the face of the capital destruction that occurs in a deflation.

The popular will during the 1930's led, in effect, to the rejection of unfettered capitalism. The modus operandi for the next five decades was to share broadly the gains made through economic growth. The Republicans have, as a part of their political agenda, dismantled to the extent possible the New Deal reforms made under Roosevelt that sought to correct the economic imbalances of the time. To the extent the Republicans were successful, we have seen a corresponding increase in the amount of wealth rise up to the already rich. Rhetorically, the main claim is that individuals earn their money, not the government, and individuals should keep what they earn. The effect has been to enable the wealthy to dominate the political sphere. Up to about 2008, the decline of the middle class had been relative. Now it is absolute. The justification for megariches in the hands of experts, and the conspicuous consumption as a mode of social interaction, should become an embarrassment of riches , an uncouth display of fabulousness that won't likely be stood for by the folks dropping out of the broad middle class. It will be hard for Republicans to convince voters that they are better off by letting the rich keep their money when so many others are suffering.

There is more to say about the Republicans on the question of the ideological positions they take. In the spirit of fairness I will take on the Democrats in the next post and what I think are the unteneble positions to take in a resource constrained world.

An Armchair Diagnosis

It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I would like to add another aspect to this which is that insanity is also doing and saying things for the absolute hell of it and expecting a good result. The United States of America seems to suffer from both of these forms of insanity all at once at the current moment in it's history. One doesn't have to look very far to see these two types of insanity at play since most everyone has access to a television or two. But it isn't enough to point out the obvious (that the country has gone mad), though it often helps to do so to people who manage to miss it or to cause it. The people who miss and cause it do so because they are swimming in it. It is all around them and they live it and breath it and eat it for breakfast without providing themselves the opportunity or the means to take the long view. Seeing as the long view is one of the main features of this blog I will take a swing at what I believe is going on.

It's hard for me to imagine someone taking an optimistic view on the present situation. Maybe I'm jaded but whenever someone declares him- or herself an optimist, I see a person in denial. One can be an optimist once one has taken a full accounting of the circumstances and sees bad outcomes as not only possible, but even likely, and then finding the best outcome from what is possible. It is only in this way that I can see myself as an optimist. But a survey of the political discourse in this country, the realm in which the two forms of insanity are made most public, shows me and many others that there is little reason to be optimistic.

Of recent events, the one most emblematic of the first form of insanity is the bail-out by the government of the banking system. Certainly, the banking system needed saving as we would be in the throes of the sequel to the Great Depression right at this moment. No elected official would have allowed that to happen if they could, though the right wing of the political spectrum talks as though they would indeed be willing to let that happen. But I digress. What this has become in practice thus far is to restore the same system that existed before the meltdown. Some reforms have been proposed but so far not much that will lead to the complete restructuring that would be in the offing if we had a responsive government. The attempt to modify the health care system falls into this catagory of insanity as well.

The second form of insanity manifests itself largely in the form of the popular media and right wing media in particular. For the sake of full disclosure, I am an ideological big government liberal, a disenchanted Democrat who is perhaps a former Democrat. I may even just be a democrat, one who believes that rule by the people is best and however that is realized is better than any alternative. The particulars are too many to go into here, but whenever a right wing screamer can call health care reform a Nazi scheme then this alone may suffice to say that any two words can be put together and made sensible to large numbers of people. But more seriously, it points to a true attempt by the right to undermine demonstrable reality for the purpose of destroying attempts at confronting a failing status quo.

The Grand Unified Cause (GUC) for the two forms of insanity spring from the same purpose. It is to keep the American power machine running for a little while longer. The stage we are in is retrenchment by the ones who benefit from the system, e.g. the bankers and the health insurance industry, to keep the system going. Necessarily, predictably, it will come at the expense of the citizenry as the pie grows smaller and the fraudulant practices by which our corporate elite generally operate are used to maintain the flawed growth model of our contemporary capitalist scheme.

I will return to this subject later. Next weeks post will be nonexistent, or will become the post of a week after that as I will be visiting my brother in Houston and drinking little amber beverages.

Evidence for Anthropogenic Climate Change

Here is a presentation by Dr. Richard Alley, a geologist at Penn State University on the evidence for global warming caused by CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. Gets a little technical at times but friendly to non-scientists.

http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml

He demonstrates, though it is not his purpose, how a true empirical skeptic views the evidence. In my view, in order to disprove that increased CO2 concentration is the cause of the current warming you'd have to show some other cause or show that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. The question of higher concentrations of CO2 is not controversial, it is simply a fact. To believe otherwise is akin to denying any scientific understanding of chemistry and physics.

The Deflation Monster

Seeing that it is already pretty late, this will wind up being a short post. My thoughts want to go to the economic situation, which is the most immediate crisis we face. Several signs right now point to a new crunch and a debt deflation, which means that parties will scramble to cover debts and bets as the economic performance fails to impress. When these parties scramble to cover, they have to sell something else that has value, like stocks or property. When a party can't find a buyer, or a potential buyer smells desperation, then the seller has to settle for less. Generally speaking, the price will drop, which is one measure of deflation. Worse, many will be unable to cover their debt and will default on the loan, setting off a chain reaction of defaults on money borrowed to buy assets. When everyone does this at once, as sometimes happens, like in 2008, then the value of everything drops and most involved lose lots of money. In fact, money itself is destroyed because much of the money used in transactions never left the idea stage.

There's good reason to believe that something like this will happen again, maybe this year or next year. There are many signs pointing to this, as I said, but the reason is a pretty simple one: There is too much stuff and not enough buyers. Economists call this problem over-capacity and it isn't going away any time soon. It means that a whole lot of businesses who sell things will go out of business. It also means that a whole lot of businesses will not be taking on new credit to invest in new production because they don't see it paying off. The last crisis of over-production was called the Great Depression. It is not by accident that it has been cited so often these days because the causes are very similar. It is what happens when wealth becomes concentrated into so few hands and when there is too much money floating around the system to begin with.

The Market (I capitalize because it is like a god) is saying that money must disappear from the system. Bernanke and the Fed, in an effort to stem the tide of losses, has guaranteed somewhere around $13 trillion dollars in asset values for the banks so that they can continue lending money. The purpose of the stimulus is to create demand, indirectly, for new loans. This is largely a vain effort, though it is impressive what can be done when $13 trillion dollars is thrown at a problem. What this reveals is the magnitude of the crisis. What always happens after a burst credit bubble is a dearth of new demand. The Fed is trying to uphold the value of assets (read debt) for the banks so the banks don't have to write them off. The Fed didn't need to uphold the value of good loans, only the bad, and it is most likely the case that these assets guaranteed by the Fed are worthless because the Market has already said so. The effort to shore up these values is vain because of the sheer size of the problem and of the pre-existing debt load built in to the government's balance sheet, and ultimately because there are no good investment prospects for businesses.

So the case for another meltdown looks pretty strong. What it means for us is something only the Market knows. But some practical measures to prepare yourself would be prudent, and, in case it doesn't happen so catastrophically, then at the very least you've learned a few things. First of all, pay off debt and save money. The Market doesn't recommend you do that but the Market has failed us. When you buy things, buy them with the understanding that the thing must be useful and long-lasting. Thinking about what could be traded for something else you might need in a deflated world is a good measure for deciding what to buy. Gardening is probably the most immediately useful skill to learn, though it is a skill that takes many years to develop. And then find people who already think that the future will look something like the way I and many others have outlined and try to convince others who are inclined to believe it already to prepare for harder times ahead.

The various governments in the U.S. and around the world will respond to this in any way possible. Their assumptions about what is happening will affect the response. What is important for them is to realize that the old failed system cannot be resuscitated and it will have to form new measures for dealing with higher unemployment, disappearing wealth, and the prospect of different economic arrangements based on a new set of principles. This will require persuasion on the part of the citizenry. A better informed citizenry is badly needed to mitigate the freak out which will occur when masses of uninformed Americans decide to act. It will require a new understanding of what is fair and just based on principles other than what the free market has convinced us is the case during the past decades of bubble economics.

This discussion seems like a good direction for this blog to go to over the next couple of months so that is what I'll do.

Thoughts on Quality

The relocalization of the means by which people acquire stuff is an inevitable consequense of the energy descent we will soon be facing. As I've said before, it is to be a time to reassess the value of everything we currently possess and use on a daily or weekly basis in order to determine what is to be kept and what is to be chucked. People, by and large, value things differently. This is what the free market is supposed to do by allowing consumers the power to vote with their wallets. This is certain to be the case as the individual decisions are made to buy or not to buy. With this in mind, it is also necessary to point out that collective decisions are needed to guide or to even coerce some people into recognizing that there are, or can be, particular measures of quality. That is, these decisions are made within perameters determined by groups of people that, ideally, have some qualities in mind.

The impossible situation, by any measure, is the attempt to maintain the throw away consumer economy. The reigning values which define this way of life are disposability and convenience. What has brought this about, and why it has made sense for upwards of half a century, is that it's aim was financial efficiency above all else. To be sure, it was seen as an enhancement to people's quality of life but as the half century after it's implementation has passed, we can see the fatal errors in this way of thinking. These errors are visible in the costs that are now being borne and will continue to be borne by everyone as resource constraints enter the stage. This will mean that resource efficiency and conservation will trump financial efficiency and convenience.

Two qualities I would offer, as have many others, for us to embrace to guide our decisions as the old, high entropy economy falls to ruin are durability and resilience. Things that are durable last a long time. We must design the things we use with longevity in mind as it is a sure way to reduce the materials required for the manufacture of the same thing that wears out more quickly. A question we could ask is; How can I use this thing, a broom for example, for five times longer than I might have if I were to get a new one because I am sick of the color or it has worn out because the company which manufactured it used the cheapest materials avaiable. Durability is low entropy i.e., long-lasting. Fashion is the market of personal preference. This can be very easy to manipulate for the purpose of profit and drives our current throw-away system.

Resilience describes a system able to withstand shocks. Cars can have resilience but I'm talking about societal resilience. What has happened since the advent of the throw-away consumer society is that people have forgotten the basics of what people one hundred years ago generally understood. Primarily, it is the urban culture that is least resilient in this regard. The skills the inhabitants learn and that are useful in the urban environment are those most dependant on the system run on fossil fuels. Here, the complexity of channels would have value, rather than the complexity of scale that we see in a Wall Mart system. Efficiency would give way to redundancy so that folks could rely on multiple sources for goods and that surpluses in one area can relieve deficits in others.

I will explore these qualities of society further as I go to a discussion of ideas like steady state economics, no-growth societies and other like notions.