Green Your Head

Preface to a Prelude to Peak Oil

This is my book review of Kurt Cobb's Prelude, published on Huffington Post on Friday 11, 2011 - Please visit and leave a comment.

Many green groups and other science-based analysts criticized President Obama's recent State of the Union speech for failing to mention the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Instead, the President focused on a "clean energy and jobs" message. Yet perhaps he did the best he could, given our current political reality and the extreme irrationality that infects our Tea Party nation.

Following the hideous violence in Arizona, it was a stroke of genius to call on Republicans and Democrats to sit together, pairing red and blue like a pair of those old-fashioned 3D glasses -- Obama's attempt to show us that America is much more than a two-dimensional conflict between political parties. But the State of the Union address, while considerably more three-dimensional than many I have heard, still fell far short of the reality we find ourselves in. That reality includes more than just the threat of climate change. It also encompasses the phenomenon known as "peak oil."

NPR's Crude Trashing of John Maynard Keynes

There's nothing that ticks me off more than economists who pretend that their black art is actually a science. Just because they use math, mainstream economists think we will believe that their equations describe the real world of resources and people that makes up the economy. These wizards who in actuality are nothing but casino managers, are especially concerned that we might switch allegiance to a different brand - communism, or just as bad - Keynesianism!

Last night NPR aired a totally unbalanced piece on John Maynard Keynes that proved beyond all doubt that Republicans and Wall Streeters can't come anywhere near a scientific or even an intellectual argument challenging the man's ideas, so they are left with attacking his personality. NPR commentators Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg charged that Keynes was an elitist, anti-semite, bohemian pottymouth. Why no mention of his homosexuality? Probably because the gay lobby is too powerful and easily riled. Unlike gays, bohemians still don't get any respect. And the anti-semite accusation? Remember, we are talking the 1930s here. You could tar almost any prominent person in that age with all sorts of prejudices that no polite member of society would admit to today. Does that mean that our current economic leading lights are free of all moral taint? Please, don't make us laugh. It hurts too much.

So, after nearly five minutes of simmering in Adam Davidson's ad hominem stew, did we taste any actual refutation of the Keynesian idea that government spending can help revive a stalled economy? No. After admitting that government spending worked pretty well to get us out of the depression and build the post WWII economy, one commentator said that government spending failed to revive a slowing economy in the 1970s. Therefore, Keynesianism has been discredited.

That's it. That one statement was the entire argument against government spending. That and the goofy assertion that "government consumes wealth" and "only the private sector can create wealth."

These two points reveal the two big failures of mainstream economic theory. First, the economic slowdown in the 1970s had much more to do with the rapid rise in energy costs than with government investment. And second, if, as Jimmy Carter wanted, government had spent lavishly on renewable energy, mass transit and energy efficiency, can you imagine how much better off we would be today? Infrastructure is wealth, and only government can create it.

Despite comparing economists to Einstein, as this NPR piece does, mainstream economic theorists are incapable of understanding the real world of physical resources, especially the reality that there are limits to those resources. In their model, the economy is like a carburetor. If it starts to falter, you tinker with the airflow, that is, monetary policy. There's no possibility in your mind that the fuel could run out. You can't admit that the whole machine might be obsolete and it's time to build a new one because there's no way for private industry to accomplish that feat.

Economists hate government, because in a rational economy, there would be no room at the top for the free-for-all gambling casino that makes their class rich. In their eyes, it is the casino that actually generates the wealth because it draws in the money and money is like the air in the carburetor. So when the Fed opened the throttle wide last fall with zero percent interest rates and it failed to stop the stall, then what? Why is it Keynes who is being discredited now?

When their machine models fail, economists will invoke the Invisible Hand. You can model the economy as a machine or you can model it as a body. If it is a body, then private enterprise is the many hands reaching out to grab resources. The hands don't want to be governed, but in a body, the head needs to get involved or the hands will eventually get the body into big trouble. That's what Keynesianism is, in a nutshell - using your head. And that's not science, it's just common sense.

More Good News - DeFazio Gets Bus Money

The House Rules Committee today approved a bunch of amendments to the stimulus bill for consideration. One of the amendments is Peter DeFazio's provision to increase funding for mass transit investments by 3 billion dollars. It still has to be approved by the full House and the Senate. Keep the pressure on!

Good News for LNG Opponents

Just listened in on a webinar by Platts, the oil and gas industry analysts, on Obama's new energy and climate appointments and the contents of the stimulus package. This group is fighting to get their sea legs as the new approach to energy swells around them. Noting that the stimulus package has a big zero in it for the oil and gas industries and only sequestration research dollars for coal, they remark that renewables advocates are "buoyed." In the mode of "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, they had no comment on Carol Browner as Obama's new energy and climate czar except to say that oil and gas "don't have the same ally they had in the Bush administration. They did discuss Obama's acting FERC director, Jon Wellinghoff,  an opponent of LNG (liquified natural gas). It seems they feel LNG is in real trouble because of Wellinghoff's background as a "consumer advocate." Bad news for companies like Sempra Energy that are counting on LNG for their Southern California electricity market, but good news for consumers and the environment.

I tried to send the post below as a letter to the President, but the comments at Whitehouse.gov are limited to 500 characters!!! At change.gov you could actually communicate with the team. Here's what they say on the input form: "President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history." Just don't try to tell them anything that takes more than 2 or 3 sentences.

Buy Me a Bus!

Republicans love to say that they oppose tax increases because the people should be in charge of spending their own money, not the government. But realistically, what were our spending options for that $300 tax rebate we got last summer? It did very little to "stimulate" the economy, probably because most of us used it either to pay bills or to buy some cheap imported consumer item. I don't want another silly toy, I want a bus.

By cutting taxes, government does not increase our options, it reduces them. I can't afford to buy a better transit system by myself, and that's what I most want right now. I wish I could get on a bus in my small rural town and travel quickly and safely to Portland or Seattle or beyond, but that is not an option at the moment because mass transit in general in this country is lousy. I want an infrastructure!

Unfortunately, one third of the nearly trillion dollar stimulus package now working its way through Congress consists of tax cuts. Rachel Maddow reports that this is apparently the work of Obama's economic advisor Larry Summers. According to my congressman, Peter Defazio, Summers hates infrastructure. He is after stimulating a consumer driven economy, not a public investment driven economy.

Obviously Summers needs to do the math. DeFazio says that last year's stimulus bill gave less than a one percent boost to the economy, so why are we repeating the tax rebate/cut mistake? Ironically, Larry Summers is the guy who had to leave his post as president of Harvard University for outraging female faculty members with his assertion that lack of innate math ability is a major reason women are underrepresented in Harvard’s math and science departments.

Please Mr. President, take back those tax cuts and spend it on mass transit. DeFazio says that Chicago alone has a 6 billion dollar backlog of transit improvements that are "shovel ready," but the stimulus package would provide only 2.5 billion. Hasn't Larry Summers ever heard of the multiplier effect? Not only would fully funding Chicago's transit needs provide jobs in that city, but it would immediately create 3000 new jobs in Minnesota building the buses.

Please Barack, buy me a bus, and while you're at it, please feel free to - metaphorically speaking - throw Larry Summers under the bus.

Obama's speech - 100 years from now

George Packer, in the New Yorker yesterday, praised President Obama's inaugural address, but also declared that it would not measure up to the grand speeches of history, saying: "There were echoes of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, but President Obama uttered no words today that will be quoted in a hundred years."

I can't see it. In both listening to and reading the speech, I was caught by several rhetorical hooks that penetrated deeply. Besides, words that come down through the ages have as much to do with the circumstances in which they are said as the phrases themselves. Anyone can say "I have a dream," or "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but it is the situation that makes the remark memorable.

I don't think enough media commentators realize yet how truly pivotal the times are. Obama's election is about a lot more than just healing the race wounds or even bringing back core democratic values. To maintain a habitable planet we'll have to make changes that are almost unimaginable. If Barack Obama helps us get through the hard times ahead, then his words will be remembered.

Let's start with his most important phrase: "...the time has come to put aside childish things." Sure it's a quote from the bible, not his own words, but the most important literature in the English language is full of bible quotes and allusions. This was Obama's most important phrase because it speaks most directly to our biggest weakness and the place where we need to start.

The next most important phrase echos in some ways JFK's "ask not what your country..." but with a twist that directly confronts the childish idealogues among us: "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." Truly, this is a more important question than JFK's rhetorically pleasing but vague appeal to patriotism.

The audience, from the vantage of my TV, seemed rapt and still, listening to every word, unassaulted by the crude applause lines that most politicians use. But there was one line that elicited immediate, overwhelming applause and this is a line that will be remembered: "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

Here are some more lines that will be taught to school children 100 years from now - if there are schools and if there are children:

"...a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers."

"...we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it."

"...there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

"Let it be said by our children's' children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."