Glen Beck doesn’t know jack about science

September 10th, 2009

The resignation of Van Jones from his post as green job advisor to the White House this past weekend was both cheered and lamented this week by various champions of reinvention of the building, energy and transportation sector. Arianna Huffington thanked Beck for freeing Jones to, like Sarah Palin aspires, do better more important work outside of government.

In attacking Jones on his past, Beck reveals his preference for ideology and history over economics and the future. The question I would ask Beck is whether or not he thinks the laws of economics trump those of physics and chemistry. Economists tell us that since the industrial revolution humans have burnt coal and oil in amounts that have changed the proportion of carbon dioxide in the oceans and atmosphere. The increase is calculated to be about 35% more. Physics tells us that CO2 retains heat disproportionate to its volume and chemistry that CO2 proportions impact the PH of a fluid. These repeatable testable laws are what informs the basis of climate change science. Well before most of us had any idea about global cooling or warming, scientists predicted numerous changes in our world based upon these laws. Today observation confirms those predictions.

The future of the economy – something Beck does seem to care about- derives from those changes. Beck, and others who have focused upon ideology and referencing the laws of economics while ignoring those of physics and chemistry, are missing the emerging theme of the 21st Century – clean technology leadership in energy, transportation and building is going to translate to leadership in banking, employment, foreign exchange, and probably military might as well.

So it isn’t just science Beck doesn’t know about, but economics as well. In going after a leading author and hands on leader in putting people to work in green building, Beck and others have done damage to investors in the US economy. As pointed out by Thomas Freidman this week, China, by virtue of a mono party government, has been able to make the longterm policy choices to invest in the markets that are clearly driving this century’s development. Those busy distracting this administration instead of engaging in the discourse to find the best practices to answer the challenges that will not only secure our energy independence, reverse our balance of trade, and most immediately important, put our population to work, are betraying their claim to capitalism.

At it’s simplest level, capitalism values self interest. On a societal level, that self interest is served in serving the needs as defined by others. And the global need, where willing buyers are standing by right now, is for clean sustainable energy at or near the coal price of a kilowatt. Again chemistry and physics point to plentiful ubiquitous sources that are free, above ground, and need technology developed to be converted cost effectively. Silicon Valley, with a rich deep vein of talent, experience and cash, is eager to dive in.

But even the most liberal of investors wants to know that the rules are going to be before getting in the game. Until the energy and climate legislation gets done, they won’t. And getting Van Jones out of the jobs position means that one component of the recovery stimulus will be further delayed. Until building and home owners get the word on federal tax credits for upgrading energy efficiency, those installation jobs won’t be posted in the want ads.

Conservatives of the country are getting shortchanged. Instead of having a place at the table, making sure that the regulations are the best least practice, yet also stable and securing the place of capital in the societal investment, they are left out of the discussion. Those representing conservative thought who are engaged are being vilified by those crowing about socialism and job killing.

Meanwhile the self proclaimed communists of China have positioned themselves to out invest the US in critical growth areas. They have an even bigger number of people to put to work. There are populations in China greater than the US just striving to achieve running water and electrification. Yet they have the political will to invest in the future and the US doesn’t. Makes one wonder what was so bad about Jones having identified with communism.

The fact is that Beck doesn’t know jack about any of this, and doesn’t care either. His self interest is in that extremely short term commodity known as ratings. Serving up Van Jones as communist boogie man to his audience seems to have been the racist play that has made his calling the President a racist old news. He can be ‘hot’ again, and we can count on him to be even more hyperbolic in finding his next mark.

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‘Cash for Clunkers’ and Climate

August 10th, 2009

As widely printed and reported by Seth Borenstein of the AP, the “Cash for Clunkers” program is a wildly successful program for individuals that isn’t going to do much about the climate. The estimated impact being the equivalent of the country’s CO2 output each hour of the day, every day of the year. Nor is it much of a benefit in terms of our energy dependence. The amount of gasoline saved annually by all the new better mileage vehicles being bought is about what we gulp in an afternoon- or four and a half hours.

So just like the cap and trade proposed legislation, the two extremes in the climate discourse are predictably critical of this for their own reasons. For those who favor more aggressive changes in our society, this bill does too little, and at too great a cost. For those who favor no changes, the bill is just a waste of money adding to an already intolerable deficit.

However there is a math that says this will pay off. Joseph Romm at Grist.com -  points out the fuel savings alone will pay taxpayers back in five years. Not really. Those savings will be in the pockets of the people who can afford to buy the discounted new car today. Still there is a payoff as one can expect that those savings will get spent here rather than become deposits in a Saudi accountt.

On many levels, we have been here before. These are the first small steps toward a reinvention of our economy.  First any reduction is at least a change in direction from our previous decades of practice in either carbon generation or oil consumption. Second, unlike the first or second round of OPEC induced oil embargoes, more efficient cars in terms of fuel use are not just econobox deathtraps. Every level of automotive product is being reconfigured, if not outright redesigned to reduce its consumption. Third, the purpose of the program was a short term support of the auto industry in which we are all partners. Seeing it as cost ineffective in reducing carbon is ignoring the program’s priorities.

And that is significant part of the larger issues facing us today. Addressing any longterm issue, be it health care, water supply or climate, will always need to address human nature and its focus on immediate security and prosperity. Regardless of our personal values, our traction in the greater society will always be conditional on our understanding of the majority’s short term thinking, and positioning whatever change we advocate within these.

“Cash For Clunkers” resonated with individuals sense of personal benefit, and that’s why Congress took two more billion dollars from the renewable energy fund to extend it ( keeping these additional billions from adding to the deficit). It is a success based upon its priority goal- stimulus.

That is what the second half of “Proof or Propaganda” is full of – people who have found ways to prosper while addressing the issue of climate.

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21st century capitalists rejoice

July 12th, 2009

News from the G8 talks this last week was dominated by the lack of consensus action.

With the main three developing nations balking at restricting their own burning of fossil fuels, supposed champions of capitalism were heard carping at China, India and Brazil’s leaders failing to commit to standing side by side with the far richer more established nations in addressing our collective atmospheric imbalance.

Among my favorite examples was Bill O’Reilly, who claimed to have spent his most recent vacation in Switzerland so he could learn how the Swiss do sustainable. But he also used the developing three’s reticence as his reason for the US to not attenuate our own burning ways. This is so 20th century thinking, conservative, capitalist or otherwise.

Let me point out that none of those three developing economies has sufficient coal or oil reserves to make it out of the 21st century burning fossil fuels, given their current rates of economic growth, even assuming population stasis mid century. All of them have significant toxic air pollution and related health issues to address, to say nothing of smog in the air right now. These three countries have as much at stake in arriving at the solution to the world’s sustainable clean coal priced energy generation problem as any of the G8, plus they have to raise the standard of living for the majority of their populations.

Thus all three are, like all the G8 nations, future customers of whoever does solve that problem. I say, thanks guys, for not being more focused on the key economic opportunity of our times- that being the leader in developing the solution. The country that is home to the inventor/company/coalition that brings forth that solution instantly wins the 21st century leadership economically. Probably the 22nd century too.

If you are under the age of 30, that means that in your lifetime the country that has this solution will see all the dollars China currently holds, shift there. That country will have the leverage for good or evil that OPEC has had over the last 50 years.

So rejoice 21st Century capitalists. Three emerging powers won’t be in the race, because they have decided to focus their resources on feeding and housing more and more of their people. That leaves the game more open to those countries that do pursue this.

Remember, when you hear someone complaining about what China or India aren’t doing you are listening to someone who: 1) is not a 21st Century capitalist 2) is not aware of what leadership in this issue or time is and 3) hasn’t watched “Proof or Propaganda” where why we want to lead the world in reinventing energy among other things, is explained in clear terms.

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Climate, Coal, Corn and Culligan- power and policy collide in Congress

June 29th, 2009

The passage by the house of what is widely called the climate bill illustrates a number of the challenges faced by American society in addressing any of its problems.

The bill, historic (“revolutionary” was Massachusetts’s Democratic Congressman Ed Markey’s assessment) in its creation of the first carbon regulations in the country, was a far cry from what many had called for as necessary to address the need to reduce greenhouse gas generation over the next few decades. So much so that some Democrats opposed it as not tough enough.

At the same time there are voices decrying it as a radical job killer, a shift of wealth to foreign nations or just too much government. West Virginia Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito criticisms covered a wide range of her own constituents concerns, “”It is a national energy tax that will burden consumers, burden businesses, and particularly burden the lower-income families in this country — particularly the lower income. It picks regional winners and losers, with coal-dependent states like mine, West Virginia, bearing the brunt of this bill,”

So what do you make of this? Well let me suggest that what we have here is the result of democracy, as currently constituted and practiced in the United States. Those with power and influence, which is mostly derived from how things have been done, are doing their best to maintain that income producing advantage by shaping and eroding the aspects of the bill while those who see their interests served best by “a fundamental change” in our energy generation and use fight to change them.

Examine for instance the coal state concerns. If your livelihood has always been based in taking something out of the ground and selling it around the nation, hearing about how its base costs are going to be assessed and the price raised in a manner that will cost your customers more, your business will be dealing with such impacts. If you are a coal miner, you are among the lower income families and the idea that you will pay more for heating your house while the value of the element you extract will be made less is threatening.

At the same time, coal states have enjoyed a century of tax revenues and stability thanks to geographical accident. Nobody in West Virginia worked to make it the Saudi Arabia of coal, and while one can say it hasn’t’ made the state rich, it has made some people very wealthy, and no doubt that wealth has helped elect Capito.

Another big influence in this bill’s evolution was big agriculture, namely corn producers. Corn, which has gone from being a key product in our diets to being a major component of a number of industry sectors including energy, generates sufficient profit that it was able to get the administration of carbon dioxide emissions in the bill shifted from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Agriculture. The EPA, which even under the Bush administration was perceived to be less business friendly than the DOA, at least has experience monitoring atmospheric gases. The DOA has experience generating them.

Other changes to the bill included dropping the goal from a 20% reduction over the next decade to 17% in the same time frame. And there is plenty of debate among those who are fully committed to control of CO2 as a means to defer or mitigate a crisis whether or not even the upper number is sufficient to do so.  What comes through any such process today is, as one elected representative labeled it, ‘a product’. Indeed a product of compromise, which is one definition of politics- “the art of compromise”.  And compromise has produced most of the results we like to think of as the best nation on earth.

The bigger picture is actually illustrated by the case of water softeners in California, and personified in the Culligan International, best known for the “hey Culligan man” ad campaigns from the last century. Water softening uses salt to change the characteristics of the water people get from the taps in their homes. That salt ends up in municipal sewer lines, making the waster water more difficult to reuse, eroding the infrastructure as well as eventually raising the salt level in the aquifer. Regulations in number of California communities are impacting the water softening business. Controlling the output of the devices, or shifting to other technologies or services to eliminate the downstream costs all threaten the existing businesses.

It is a classic case of externalities not being accounted for in our society, either in legal or economic systems. The same is at issue for the coal and corn related segments of our society. Successful capitalism has expanded itself right up to the boundaries of the closed system that is water, air and climate. Whether it is mothers wanting milder acidity in the water they wash their families clothes and faces in, or the price of keeping our homes comfortable, the larger systems and patterns of cause and effect have taken a back seat to the immediate and personal ones.

So whether or not the bill becomes law, is mutated further by whatever the Senate passes, and then is ‘reconciled’ by joint committee, is not as significant as the fact that in spite of overwhelming public opinion, national security and prosperity issues related to our current way of generating and using energy calling for change, existing cash flows are being directed to influence Congress to sustain those cash flows.

Should a climate bill be passed, its impacts upon the price of energy may be secondary to the number of jobs it will facilitate in alternative research and implementation. Those jobs may or may not be in West Virginia, and therefore Congressperson Capito will need to adapt as much as the current participants in coal mining. Coal won’t go out of business in even the most radical climate legislation discussed. Neither will oil or gas. But the statements of their lobbyists and elected spokespeople will make it seem that the price of energy was just fine until this law was proposed.

We all know that isn’t true. We know that we need to address our security in sending billions to the middle east for oil. We know that we need to support our long term future prosperity by ending our dependence on finite energy sources. And doing both of those will also address what is within our control in the area of climate.

The advantages that coal, corn and Culligan have had in establishing their places in the economy were the results of what was known then. What we know now is that all of those activities take place at a scale and scope that is difficult for those of us living today to grasp, much less those who made the choices and decisions about accounting for and assigning responsibility for ‘externalities’ in centuries past. We can’t know all the results of any course of action we take in a large complicated system, be it the economy or the climate. But that is no reason to not take any action.

I recommend- Paul Krugman in the NYTimes

Josef Hebert with AP

and for those with a big appetite- all the analysis in detail you can possibly absorb from The Breakthrough Institute.

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Lies, Damn Lies and Lies the speaker believes

June 15th, 2009

Somewhere it has been said that the way you can tell a politician is lying is to watch and see if their lips are moving.

That’s one of those generalizations that go too far, but still don’t hurt you. Why not be cynical and then get pleasantly surprised from time to time?
As the Cap and Trade debate starts to unfold, it is important to realize just how much of what is said will not be true or false, but could be.  For instance, already we have heard that the Cap and Trade legislation will make energy more costly for all Americans. Well that is probably true. Adding a new cost to the system to say nothing of another layer of stuff to measure and then the oversight required to allocate ‘credits’ and the resulting markets will undoubtedly be passed on to the public both in purchase costs and administration.

But the fact that is unsaid, the context that makes the call for Cap and Trade compelling is that energy will cost more no matter what is done or not done to address the full costs of burning fossil fuels.

Another statement that can’t be either true or false is that such a system won’t work. Defining the end goals of Cap and Trade of carbon isn’t going to bring out honesty statements from either side of the debate. Cap and Trade isn’t another attempt to destroy Capitalism any more than it is a solution to Global Warming.  Neither statement is honest or true, but yet these are the best statements the partisans have to bring to the fight.

FYI- Cap and Trade is at best a begining in the process of addressing the common values of commonly held assets being affected by privately held activity. It won’t stop climate change, and it can’t be said. even decades from now, just how much difference it will or has then made in the matter. What it does do is implement the beginning of a system to assign market costs to the burning of fossil fuels. Based upon the scheme which solved the problem of acid rain, Cap and Trade can be seen as a first attempt to bring market ideas to the issue of CO2 proportion in the atmosphere.

Looking from the middle of the bell curve, we need to appreciate what a long journey resolving the failings of Adam Smith to address the difficult question of common assets. Because it was, and remains, a very difficult challenge. What is the value of a mountain top? Of maintaining the natural balance of atmospheric gases( what ever ‘natural’ is defined as)? Of keeping edible fish in useful populations in the oceans?

For once we have arrived at a global economy, clearly we have to address the fact, as Bill McDonough points out, that there is no ‘away’ to throw to. We’re there, for quite awhile now actually. And if you want to be informed as well as involved, you have to accept that the public debate on many issues, as well as the promotion of ‘green’ products and ‘green’ companies, is for quite some time going to appear much like the over generalization stated earlier. If their lips are moving, they are probably lying.

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