Category: Government

TomDispatch – The Great American Carbon Bomb.

A powerful and insightful essay from Bill McKibben about our love affair with carbon-based energy.

Introduction

I subscribe to a number of Blogs and one of them is TomDispatch.  Here’s how Tom describes what the writings are all about.

Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.

Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

I read the TomDispatch essay from Bill McKibben on the 14th.  It caught my eye, not only because of the power of Bill’s conclusions, but also because I was deeply impressed with Bill’s book ‘eaarth’, which I reviewed on Learning from Dogs here and here.

Tom Engelhardt has given written permission for that TomDispatch to be re-published in full on Learning from Dogs.  It now follows.

First the introduction by Tom Engelhardt,

The Great American Carbon Bomb

These days, even ostriches suffer from heat waves.  More than 1,000 of them reportedly died from overheating on South African farms during a 2010 drought.  As for American ostriches, the human variety anyway, at the moment it should be increasingly hard for them to avoid extreme-weather news. After all, whether you’re in sweltering heat, staggering drought, a record fire season, or a massive flood zone, most of us are living through weird weather this year.  And if you’re one of the lucky few not in an extreme-weather district of the USA, you still won’t have a problem running across hair-raising weather stories, ranging from the possible loss of one out of every ten species on this planet by century’s end to the increasing inability of the oceans to soak up more atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Then, of course, there are those other headlines.  Here’s a typical one: “As Water Rises, Florida Officials Sit on Their Hands” (a former member of the just abolished Florida Energy and Climate Commission points out that, thanks to Republican governor Rick Scott and the legislature in the part of the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels, “there is no state entity addressing climate change and its impact”).  And here’s another: “Economy Keeps Global Warming on the Back Burner for 2012” (American climate-change “skeptics” are celebrating because “the tide of the debate — at least politically — has turned in their favor” and “political experts say that… concerns over global warming won’t carry much weight in the 2012 election”).   And then there are the polls indicating Americans are confused about the unanimity of the scientific consensus on climate change, surprisingly dismissive of global-warming dangers, worry less about it than they did a decade ago, and of major environmental issues, worry least about it.

It’s true, of course, that no weird-weather incident you experience can definitively be tied to climate change and other factors are involved.  Still, are we a nation of overheating ostriches?  It’s a reasonable enough conclusion, and in a sense, not so surprising.  After all, how does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?

TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a man deeply committed to transforming us from climate-change ostriches to climate-change eagles.  Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, for the environmental movement to get one heck of a lot blunter. Tom

Here’s the essay from Bill,

Will North America Be the New Middle East?
It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline — and Obama Gets to Make the Call 
By Bill McKibben

The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months.  Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire.  First Pakistansuffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States.  Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history.  Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”

There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutions to the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010.  These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations.  They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.

Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so — for the moment anyway — the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!

Two weeks ago, for instance, a few veteran environmentalists, myself included, issued a call for protest against Canada’s plans to massively expand oil imports from the tar sands regions of Alberta.  We set up a new website, tarsandsaction.org, and judging from the early response, it could result in the largest civil disobedience actions in the climate-change movement’s history on this continent, as hundreds, possibly thousands, of concerned activists converge on the White House in August. They’ll risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.

Forget the abstract and consider the down-and-dirty instead. You can undoubtedly guess some of the reasons for opposition to such a pipeline.  It’s wrecking native lands in Canada, and potential spills from that pipeline could pollute some of the most important ranchlands and aquifers in America. (Last week’s Yellowstone River spill was seen by many as a sign of what to expect.)

There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb.  Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.

If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature. It won’t happen overnight, thank God, but according to the planet’s most important climatologist, James Hansen, burning even a substantial portion of that oil would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate of this planet.

Halting that pipeline wouldn’t solve all tar sands problems.  The Canadians will keep trying to get it out to market, but it would definitely ensure that more of that oil will stay in the ground longer and that, at least, would be a start.  Even better, the politics of it are simple. For once, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t get in the way.  The president alone decides if the pipeline is “in the national interest.” There are, however, already worrisome signs within the Obama administration.  Just this week, based on a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Timesreported that, in 2009, the State Department’s “energy envoy” was already instructing Alberta’s fossil-fuel barons in how to improve their “oil sands messaging,” including “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.” This is the government version of Murdochian-style enviro-hacking, and it leads many to think that the new pipeline is already a done deal.

Still, the president can say no.  If he does, then no pipeline — and in the words of Alberta’s oil minister, his province will be “landlocked in bitumen” (the basic substance from which tar-sands oil is extracted). Even energy-hungry China, eager as it is for new sources of fossil fuels, may not be able to save him, since native tribes are doing a remarkable job of blocking another proposed pipeline to the Canadian Pacific.  Oil, oil everywhere, and nary a drop to sell. (Unfortunately that’s not quite true, but at least there won’t be a big new straw in this milkshake.)

An Obama thumbs-down on the pipeline could change the economics of the tar sands in striking ways. “Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary.

Faced with that prospect, Canada’s oilmen are growing desperate. Earlier this month, in a classic sleight of hand, they announced plans for a giant “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme at the tar sands. That’s because when it comes to global warming, tar sands oil is even worse than, say, Saudi oil because it’s a tarry muck, not a liquid, and so you have to burn a lot of natural gas to make it flow in the first place.

Now, the oil industry is proposing to capture some of the extra carbon from that cooking process and store it underground.  This is an untested method, and the accounting scheme Alberta has adopted for it may actually increase the province’s emmissions.  Even if it turns out to work perfectly and captures the carbon from that natural gas that would have escaped into the atmosphere, the oil they’re proposing to ship south for use in our gas tanks would still be exactly as bad for the atmosphere as Saudi crude. In other words, in the long run it would still be “essentially game over” for the climate.

The Saudis, of course, built their oil empire long before we knew that there was anything wrong with burning oil. The Canadians — with American help, if Obama obliges the oil lobby — are building theirs in the teeth of the greatest threat the world has ever faced. We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle. What we can still do, though, is prevent North America from becoming the next Middle East.

So there will be a battle, and there will be nothing complicated or abstract about it.  It will be based on one question: Does that carbon stay in the earth, or does it pour into the atmosphere?  Given the trillions of dollars at stake it will be a hard fight, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But at least there’s no fog here, no maze of technicalities.

The last climate bill, the one the Senate punted on, was thousands of pages long. This time there’s a single sheet of paper, which Obama signs… or not.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben

Final note from yours truly.

Guess what I read about on the BBC News website on the 15th, the day that I put this article together?  I read about a fabulous new ship about to start construction at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea.  When launched and loaded, at 600,000 tonnes, it will be the world’s largest ship.  Wow that’s impressive!

Now read here as to what is the purpose of this ‘ship’.  Here’s a flavour of that BBC news item,

Shell has unveiled plans to build the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform. The 600,000-tonne behemoth – the world’s biggest “ship” – will be sited off the coast of Australia. But how will it work?

FLNG project in figures

Deep beneath the world’s oceans are huge reservoirs of natural gas. Some are hundreds or thousands of miles from land, or from the nearest pipeline.

Tapping into these “stranded gas” resources has been impossible – until now.

At Samsung Heavy Industries’ shipyard on Geoje Island in South Korea, work is about to start on a “ship” that, when finished and fully loaded, will weigh 600,000 tonnes.

That is six times as much as the biggest US aircraft carrier.

By 2017 the vessel should be anchored off the north coast of Australia, where it will be used to harvest natural gas from Shell’s Prelude field.

Yes, it’s more technology to enable us to use more carbon!  As the article (just) touches on,

But there has been opposition from environmentalists. Martin Pritchard from Environs Kimberley says he is concerned about the potential for “oil leaks and spills”.

WWF Western Australia, [my inserted link, Ed.] meanwhile, argues that the underwater wellheads and pipelines will harm the tropical marine environment, and estimates the project will emit more than two million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.

Sort of reminds me of that old Devonshire saying (and you need to imagine hearing it in that wonderful dialect that just still exists in this far part of SW England)

“All the world’s a little queer except thee and me …. and I have me doubts about thee!”

We are all very ‘queer’ indeed!

Two years today!

Learning from Dogs first saw the light of day two years ago.

It all started on July 15th, 2009, during a very hot summer down in San Carlos, Mexico where I was first living with Jean.

Now, some 1,000 posts later life is very different.  Jean and I are now married and living incredibly happily, with our twelve dogs and six cats, in Payson, Arizona, some 80 miles NE of Phoenix, up at 5,000 feet on the fringe of the world’s largest Ponderosa Pine forest.

Ponderosa pine forest

So apologies if today’s Post is partly reflective on the last two years.  It also seems appropriate to revisit the reasons why so many articles on the Blog aren’t about dogs.

I feel the need to do that because the number of new readers now is just staggering.

The first full month was August 2009.  Wordpress stats reveal that there were 1,172 unique viewers of the Blog.  The last full month was, of course, June 2011.  Wordpress figures were 31,664 unique viewers!  That’s over a 1,000 viewers a day, and the trend is still upwards!

I am, of course, deeply moved by this response.  Thank you, one and all!

In writing Learning from Dogs, I have tried to stay close to the theme that dogs are a metaphor for change for mankind.  But that doesn’t mean that this is a doggy Blog.

As I wrote on the Welcome page, “Dogs live in the present – they just are!  Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value.”

Learning from Dogs is a Blog about the fundamental truths that we need to be reminded of, for our long-term survival. Dogs teach us the importance of integrity, of faith and loyalty and of unconditional love.

But just as importantly, dogs are a reminder that our evolution to Neolithic man may have been an evolutionary mistake.  Stay with me for just a while.

Dogs were domesticated a mind-numbing number of years ago.  There is good evidence that dogs were co-operating with man 30,000 years ago.  However, one might speculate why the DNA of the dog separated from the grey wolf approximately 100,000 years ago.  Was it because they evolved even that far back as domesticated companions to man?  Science can’t tell us that yet.

But 30,000 years ago man was most definitely a hunter-gatherer.  Archaeologists have pondered whether the domesticated dog allowed man to be so successful as a hunter-gatherer that, in time, man was able to evolve into farming which, of course, we describe more accurately as the Neolithic Revolution.

Here’s an extract from WikiPedia,

The “Neolithic” Revolution is the first agricultural revolution—the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicate that various forms of domestication of plants and animals arose independently in six separate locales worldwide ca. 10,000–7000 years BP (8,000–5000 BC), with the earliest known evidence found throughout the tropical and subtropical areas of southwestern and southern Asia, northern and central Africa and Central America.

However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history, into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production.

These developments provided the basis for concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing).

There’s one sentence that just jumps off the ‘page’.  It’s this one. “During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history”

Here’s a quick bit of history about Homo Sapiens, from here,

Neanderthal man: from 230,000 years ago

Around 250,000 years ago Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record, to be followed in the Middle Palaeolithic period by humans with brains which again have increased in size. They are the first to be placed within the same genus as ourselves, as Homo sapiens(‘knowing man’).

By far the best known of them is Neanderthal man — named from the first fossil remains to be discovered, in 1856, in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, in Germany. The scientific name of this subspecies is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The Neanderthals are widely spread through Europe and the Middle East, and they thrive for an extremely long period (from about 230,000 to 35,000 years ago). Bones of animals of all sizes, up to bison and mammoth, and sophisticated stone tools are found with their remains.

Thus as a species we, as in H. sapiens, survived for approximately 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers!

Now after just 12,000 years, give or take, as ‘farmers’ we are facing the real risk of extinction. Go back to that WikiPedia extract above and re-read “concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing)“.

If you want to fully comprehend the mess we, as in man, have got ourselves into, then watch the stunning movie What a Way To Go: life at the end of the empire.  That movie website is here or you can watch it from here.  (I will be reviewing the film on Learning from Dogs in the next couple of weeks.)

The filmmakers, Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, towards the end of the film muse if mankind must go back to some form of hunter-gatherer society, not literally, of course, but ‘back’ to a form of society that is fundamentally sustainable with the world upon which we live.  As successful as Neanderthal man.  Here’s where dogs may have critically important lessons for mankind.

  • Dogs form small packs, up to a maximum of 50 animals
  • They have a simple hierarchy within the pack; the alpha female (who has first choice of breeding male and makes the very big decisions about whether the pack should move to a better territory), the beta male (always a dominant male that teaches the young pups their social skills and breaks up fights within the pack – my Pharaoh, as seen on the home page, is a beta GSD), and the omega dog (the clown dog, male or female. whose role is to keep the pack happy through play).
  • They survive through an extraordinary relationship with humans but if they have to revert to the ‘wild’ they survive as hunter-gatherers.

Maybe humans, at heart, also share certain similar characteristics:

  • We are happiest in social groups of less than 50
  • We much prefer simple methods of group order, where rules and discipline are managed within the group.  (Think about how easily we form all sorts of local clubs and groups.)
  • A ‘local’ approach to survival through deep and extensive group co-operation would be so much more effective than what most of us presently experience in our societies.

That’s why so many of the articles that appear on Learning from Dogs focus on the madness of what we experience so often in our present enormous, faceless, distant societies.

Back to Sally Erickson, one of the film makers mentioned earlier.  Here’s what she wrote in her Blog

Our world is in need of healing at every level. We as a species aren’t going to survive, the way we are going. If we don’t heal ourselves, evolve a new consciousness, and fundamentally change the way we live, human beings won’t make it.

Where’s it all heading?  Who knows?  I am reminded of that wonderful quote attributed to Niels Bohr but, more likely, from an unknown author (although Mark Twain is often suggested), “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Happy Birthday, Learning from Dogs.  Thank you to all of you that have supported this venture over the last two years.

The peculiar nature of H. sapiens

Just a few recent items to underline what a strange species we are!

This is being written on the 8th, not too many hours after the successful launch of the very last Shuttle space flight.  Forget the [valid] question of cost, this launch sufficiently inspired nearly a million people to travel to the Kennedy Space Center to watch this historic flight.  That adventuring drive is a wonderful aspect of mankind.

Now to another view of mankind.

Washington’s Blog of the 3rd July, 2011 has an in-depth review of how “the Japanese government, other governments and nuclear companies have covered up the extent of the Fukushima crisis.”  In that excellent piece, there is a reference to material in the British Guardian newspaper (I’m taking the liberty of re-publishing quite a long extract from Washington’s Blog).

British Shenanigans

It’s not just the Japanese. As the Guardian notes:

British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.

Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse…

Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power.

***

The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who sits on the Commons environmental audit committee, condemned the extent of co-ordination between the government and nuclear companies that the emails appear to reveal.

***

The official suggested that if companies sent in their comments, they could be incorporated into briefs to ministers and government statements. “We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public.

***

The office for nuclear development invited companies to attend a meeting at the NIA’s headquarters in London. The aim was “to discuss a joint communications and engagement strategy aimed at ensuring we maintain confidence among the British public on the safety of nuclear power stations and nuclear new-build policy in light of recent events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant”.

Other documents released by the government’s safety watchdog, the office for nuclear regulation, reveal that the text of an announcement on 5 April about the impact of Fukushima on the new nuclear programme was privately cleared with nuclear industry representatives at a meeting the previous week. According to one former regulator, who preferred not to be named, the degree of collusion was “truly shocking”.

The Guardian reports in a second article:

The release of 80 emails showing that in the days after the Fukushima accident not one but two government departments were working with nuclear companies to spin one of the biggest industrial catastrophes of the last 50 years, even as people were dying and a vast area was being made uninhabitable, is shocking.

***

What the emails shows is a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media.

***

To argue that the radiation was being released deliberately and was “all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation” is Orwellian.

And – as the Guardian notes in a third article – the collusion between the British government and nuclear companies is leading to political fallout:

“This deliberate and (sadly) very effective attempt to ‘calm’ the reporting of the true story of Fukushima is a terrible betrayal of liberal values. In my view it is not acceptable that a Liberal Democrat cabinet minister presides over a department deeply involved in a blatant conspiracy designed to manipulate the truth in order to protect corporate interests”. -Andy Myles, Liberal Democrat party’s former chief executive in Scotland

“These emails corroborate my own impression that there has been a strange silence in the UK following the Fukushima disaster … in the UK, new nuclear sites have been announced before the results of the Europe-wide review of nuclear safety has been completed. Today’s news strengthens the case for the government to halt new nuclear plans until an independent and transparent review has been conducted.” -Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament

It’s us, all of us, that create the systems, the political and government systems that are at the heart of this approach to life.

But it’s also us, all of us, that ‘write’ such beautiful stories as this one from NPR Music.

Paul Simon has brought joy to so many for so long, but on this night he made Rayna Ford’s dream come true. During a show in Toronto on May 7, Rayna Ford, a fan from Newfoundland, called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” and said something to the effect that she learned to play guitar on the song. In a moment of astonishment and disbelief, Paul Simon invited her on stage, handed her a guitar and asked her to play it for the crowd. When she strapped on the guitar, the audience went crazy. In a few strums, the band played along, tears ran down Rayna Ford’s cheeks and Simon stood by her side in smiles.

It was an absolute moment of sobbing joy for Ford and for the crowd. It was a moment so beautiful, so human, it could almost be a story in a Paul Simon song. Excuse me while I wipe my own tears. Go Rayna and all the Raynas out there with dreams. As the song says:

Oh, oh, what a night
Oh, what a garden of delight
Even now that sweet memory lingers
I was playing my guitar
Lying underneath the stars
Just thanking the Lord
For my fingers,
For my fingers

What a strange lot we are!

What exactly is the truth?

What makes an open society function healthily?.

I suspect very few of you regular readers will recall that in 2009 (24th June to be precise) I ran a very short article under a similar title.  This is what was published.

A simple heading but, in truth, a very complex subject.  This was brought home by a recent article in The Economist by Bagehot.  That is “Politicians frequently lie. So does everyone else. Why all the fuss?”

Bagehot writes a Blog so those who don’t read the newspaper can read the rest of his thesis here.

Here’s some of that essay by Bagehot,

On lying

Jun 30th 2009, 14:43 by Bagehot

THE WORD “lie” means something very specific. It doesn’t mean a misleading statement, or an exaggeration, or a half-truth: it is a falsehood advanced intentionally and knowingly. That is why, in my column last week, I wrote that probably only Tony Blair and his crew could know whether they “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Only they can know what was in their heads, and how far their public utterances diverged from their inner convictions. For that reason the question of lying over Iraq seems to me a bit of a red herring and distraction. What can be proved about their sloppiness and embellishments, and has been, is bad enough.

Lying is back in the news this week. Gordon Brown stands accused by various newspapers and columnists of deliberately misleading the public about the government’s fiscal position. Ditto Ed Balls, the prime minister’s henchman, who evidently doesn’t take kindly to having his integrity impugned in this way. David Cameron is a bit more periphrastic, knowing that in political parlance the “l” word is a nuclear accusation; but he came pretty close to it yesterday with his talk of “a thread of dishonesty” running through Mr Brown’s premiership.

There are (at least) two big questions provoked by this revived interest in lying. First and most obviously, are Mr Brown, Mr Balls and others really and indisputably liars? Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.

Just re-read those last few sentences, “Do the fiscal figures they cite and twist in any way support the interpretation they put on them–at least enough to make it credible that they believe what they are saying, even if no-one else does? If so, they may not be lying. They may be over-optimistic, incompetent or deluded. But they are not obviously liars.”

Delay your judgement for just a few minutes while we go to this next item.  This next item is a recent essay from John Maudlin, the financial expert, about the latest jobs report in the US.

What Happened to the Jobs?

By John Mauldin

July 7, 2011

The US jobs report came out this morning, and it was simply dismal. This week we look at not only the jobs report but also “what-if” proffers for the US and global economies. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.

First, there were only 18,000 jobs created in June, the lowest since September 2010. While private employment rose by 57,000, government workers dropped by 39,000, continuing a trend as governments at all levels work to cut their budgets. Long-time readers know I think it is important to look at the direction of the revisions, and we got no help. May was revised down by 29,000 jobs and April a further down 15,000.

I saw some headlines and talking heads in the mainstream media saying the poor number was due to “seasonals,” and I just shook my head. If you are that reflexively bullish when presented with what was clearly a bad report, how can you be taken seriously? You know who you are. And then Philippa Dunne of the Liscio Report sent the following note. She is one of the best data mavens there is on jobs and employment.

John M. then includes quite a long extract from Philippa’s note. You can read it and the rest of John’s article here.  Here’s how that extract from Philippa Dunne ends,

Also, there is no adjustment to the headline number – the sectors are adjusted separately (96 different industries at the 3-digit NAICS level, to be precise) and the total is the sum of those components. The whole argument is bogus.

Notice that last sentence, “The whole argument is bogus.” [My emboldening, Ed.]

OK, clearly not lying, in the strict definition of the term.  But still delay your judgement.

Back on the 25th June this year, I wrote a piece with the title of Lying is OK, that’s official! Duh!  I stated very clearly that lying is wrong!  Mind you, one could at least congratulate Jean Claude Juncker for honestly admitting being a liar. (Jean Claude Juncker is the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and the head of the Eurogroup council of eurozone finance ministers.)  Here’s that video clip with Juncker admitting that when it’s serious one has to lie!  (Listen carefully, the words are quietly spoken.)

Finally, I have long followed Yves Smith’s excellent Blog, Naked Capitalism. Just yesterday, Yves wrote a powerful piece,

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2011

More Proof That Obama is Herbert Hoover

Not only is Obama assuring that he will go down as one of the worst Presidents in history, but for those who have any doubts, he is also making it clear that his only allegiance is to the capitalist classes and their knowledge worker arms and legs.

It’s an angry essay that has, at it’s heart, an anger at the lack of true representative government, remember the one that Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he wrote, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Yves concludes in that article thus,

Even knowing how dedicated to bad ends Obama is, I still feel like I’ve walked into a parallel universe. He’s now determined to make these horrific entitlement cuts a sign of his manhood. This is “Change” for sure, to a more brutal, grasping, dog eat dog society, all administered by self serving elites. They will in the end reap the whirlwind they are creating, but not before it mows a path of destruction through our social order.

Right, time to draw it all together.

Despite my chest-beating on the subject of politicians and leaders deliberately lying in that recent piece about Juncker, there’s something much more fundamental.  What defines lying is really not that important.  It’s whether or not we trust that our leaders are doing their best for their constituents, to the best of their abilities.

Whether you support left-leaning or right-leaning policies is unimportant; indeed political differences and the ability to vote for one’s beliefs is at the heart of an open democracy.

But if we don’t trust that our leaders are doing their best for our country then that causes the destruction of faith.  If we do not have faith in those that lead us then the breakdown of a civilised social order becomes a very real risk.

These are such difficult times impacting us across so many fronts. Scarily, one seems to find many who have lost much faith in their leaders.

That, my friends, is the truth.

What is freedom? Part Three

The Trap – 3 – We Will Force U 2 Be Free

[Note: Part Two of The Trap is available to watch in my post of the 7th where one can also link back to Part One. Ed.]

This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. What is discussed in this episode is the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.

What is freedom? Part Two

The Trap – 2 – The Lonely Robot

Part One of The Trap is available to watch in my Post of the 4th, US Independence Day.  It also provides some background thoughts.  It really is a most powerful set of programmes so, if you haven’t already done so, best to watch Part One first.

This is Part 2 of the brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. This episode focuses on the 1990’s and how the politicians decided to apply the model of a free market economy to the rest of society and consequences of these actions being felt all over the world in western democracies.

What is freedom?

As a US resident since just mid-April, perhaps no better day than July 4th to pose this question.

As a British citizen, born in London towards the end of WWII, I am well aware that Britain has had a long tradition of ‘owning’ colonies.  In 1770 explorer James Cook charted the East coast of Australia and returned to Britain recommending colonisation in the area that became known as Botany Bay, now part of Sydney.  Britain’s response was to set up a penal colony in 1778.

In 1617 the British East India Company was given permission by an Indian rajah to trade in India.  Via lots of convolutions that I don’t understand, that led to the British Crown taking over in 1857.

So far as America is concerned, the British ended up with 13 colonies along the Eastern seaboard during the period 1607 to 1733.  Then we had the British West Indies and Canada and …… well, you get the message!

Wikipedia has a summary of the US independence timetable,

During the American Revolution, the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain occurred on July 2, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence that had been proposed in June by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia.  After voting for independence, Congress turned its attention to the Declaration of Independence, a statement explaining this decision, which had been prepared by a Committee of Five, with Thomas Jefferson as its principal author. Congress debated and revised the Declaration, finally approving it on July 4. A day earlier, John Adams had written to his wife Abigail:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Adams’s prediction was off by two days. From the outset, Americans celebrated independence on July 4, the date shown on the much-publicized Declaration of Independence, rather than on July 2, the date the resolution of independence was approved in a closed session of Congress.

Thomas Jefferson April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826

Thomas Jefferson became the third President of the United States of America.  As one of the founding fathers, Jefferson envisioned America as an “Empire of Liberty”.

So it came to pass that Independence Day is annually celebrated on July 4.   The celebrations have deep roots in the American tradition of political freedom.

Reflect then on that notion of liberty and freedom as you watch the first episode from a most compelling series from Adam Curtis that was broadcast by the BBC in 2007. The series is called The Trap, the first programme entitled “F**k You Buddy” (11 March 2007)

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It’s what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behavior of the Soviet enemy.

Part Two of this article is being published on the 7th, next Thursday, and Part Three next Monday, the 11th.

The Trap, Adam Curtis

This coming next couple of weeks is going to see me reflecting on some of the powerful messages that flow from three one-hour documentaries by Adam Curtis during a series of programmes for the BBC in 2007.

For today, just enjoy the BBC trailer. (Assuming ‘enjoy’ is the right expression!)

Global climate confusion, ongoing

Herman Daly, Ph.D, makes some very powerful points at his keynote address to the AMS workshop on Federal Climate Policy, 13th November, 2007.

Note: This video is only the first 8 minutes from what is clearly a longer address.  I have struggled to find the subsequent parts of this address, although there appear to be other versions of the address on YouTube.  However, the points raised in these first few minutes are compelling,

  • Complexity stifles policy
  • The danger of overwhelming the decision of what to do now
  • Leave it until it’s perfectly clear and the likelihood is that it will be too late
Enjoy this most stimulating speech.
If you are stimulated to dig a little deeper into Hermon E. Daly here are some snippets I came across.

Herman Daly’s Ecological Economics – An Introductory Note

By John Attarian

Mainstream opinion has it that economic growth, the democratization of affluence, and ever-increasing consumption are the formula for individual and social happiness. A thoughtful and well-informed minority emphatically disagrees. Few have contributed more to this dissent than Herman E. Daly, widely regarded as the founding father of ecological economics.

Born in 1938, Daly earned his B.A. at Rice University (1960) and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University (1967). From 1968 to 1988 he taught economics at Louisiana State University. Then he served as Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Environmental Department until 1994, when he became a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs, his current position.

As a graduate student, Daly believed that growth would solve mankind’s problems, but three experiences radically transformed his outlook. He studied under the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), whose book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) explained the decisive economic importance of the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) in a closed system, the availability of useful energy always declines. Georgescu-Roegen argued that the economic process transforms natural resources into waste — that is, transforms matter-energy from a state of low entropy into a state of high entropy. Georgescu-Roegen’s great contribution, Daly observes, was “reuniting economics with its biophysical foundations.” Teaching in Brazil in the late 1960s, Daly observed explosive population growth firsthand. Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was also influential.

Wrong to publish more but if this catches your eye, then the full article is here.  Oh, perhaps I can just include the last two paragraphs of John Attarian’s fine piece ….

Daly co-founded the scholarly journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and still serves as an associate editor. His thought is slowly attracting appreciative notice, and some honors have come his way. For the Common Good won the 1991 Grawenmeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and in 1996 Daly received the Honorary Right Livelihood Award and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Heineken Prize for Environmental Science.

Integrating theology, ethics, science, and economics, Daly’s ecological economics is the kind of comprehensive vision we too seldom see, and one of the most important and promising intellectual developments of our time. Our selection of Daly’s works is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to his thought. May he find the audience he deserves.

The Winston Churchill effect?

Forgive me for making this a much shorter contribution but the efforts of the previous two posts took rather a long time!

This is about the debt situation in the United States of America and, as always, Learning from Dogs trying to get to the underlying truth.

It’s from the BBC and it’s a radio programme that is included in this Post.

But why the headline referring to Churchill?  Well in the programme Justin Webb, of the BBC, reminds the world of a characteristic of the American Nation noted by Sir Winston Churchill, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”  (But caution about the precise wording of that quote – see here!)

Here’s the article that accompanied the BBC broadcast, the radio programme is after this article,

Is the US in denial over its $14tn debt?

Is America in denial about the extent of its financial problems, and therefore incapable of dealing with the gravest crisis the country has ever faced?

This is a story of debt, delusion and – potentially – disaster. For America and, if you happen to think that American influence is broadly a good thing, for the world.

The debt and the delusion are both all-American: $14 trillion (£8.75tn) of debt has been amassed and there is no cogent plan to reduce it.

The figure is impossible to comprehend: easier to focus on the fact that it grows at $40,000 (£25,000) a second. Getting out of Afghanistan will help but actually only at the margins. The problem is much bigger than any one area of expenditure.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, is no rabid fiscal conservative but on the debt he is a hawk: “I’m worried. The debt is large. It should be brought under control. The longer we wait, the longer we suffer this kind of paralysis; the more America boxes itself into a corner and the more America’s constructive leadership in the world diminishes.”

The author and economist Diane Coyle agrees. And she makes the rather alarming point that the acknowledged deficit is not the whole story.

The current $14tn debt is bad enough, she argues, but the future commitments to the baby boomers, commitments for health care and for pensions, suggest that the debt burden is part of the fabric of society:

“You have promises implicit in the structure of welfare states and aging populations that mean there is an unacknowledged debt that will have to be paid for by future taxpayers, and that could double the published figures.”

Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges that this structural commitment to future debt is not unique to the United States.  All advanced democracies have more or less the same problem, he says, “but in the case of the States the figures are absolutely enormous”.

Mr Haass, a former senior US diplomat, is leading an academic push for America’s debt to be taken seriously by Americans and noticed as well by the rest of the world.

He uses the analogy of Suez and the pressure that was put on the UK by the US to withdraw from that adventure. The pressure was not, of course, military. It was economic.

Britain needed US economic help. In the future, if China chooses to flex its muscles abroad, it may not be Chinese admirals who pose the real threat, Mr Haass tells us. “Chinese bankers could do the job.”

Because of course Chinese bankers, if they withdrew their support for the US economy and their willingness to finance America’s spending, could have an almost overnight impact on every American life, forcing interest rates to sky high levels and torpedoing the world’s largest economy.

Not everyone accepts the debt-as-disaster thesis.

David Frum is a Republican intellectual and a former speech writer to President George W Bush.

He told me the problem, and the solution, were actually rather simple: “If I tell you you have a disease that will absolutely prostrate you and it could be prevented by taking a couple of aspirin and going for a walk, well I guess the situation isn’t apocalyptic is it?

“The things that America has to do to put its fiscal house in order are not anywhere near as extreme as what Europe has to do. The debt is not a financial problem, it is a political problem.”

Mr Frum believes that a future agreement to cut spending – he thinks America spends much too big a proportion of its GDP on health – and raise taxes, could very quickly bring the debt problem down to the level of quotidian normality.

‘Organised hypocrisy’

I am not so sure. What is the root cause of America’s failure to get to grips with its debt? It can be argued that the problem is not really economic or even political; it is a cultural inability to face up to hard choices, even to acknowledge that the choices are there.

I should make it clear that my reporting of the United States, in the years I was based there for the BBC, was governed by a sense that too much foreign media coverage of America is negative and jaundiced.

The nation is staggeringly successful and gloriously attractive. But it is also deeply dysfunctional in some respects.

Take Alaska. The author and serious student of America, Anne Applebaum makes the point that, as she puts it, “Alaska is a myth!”

People who live in Alaska – and people who aspire to live in Alaska – imagine it is the last frontier, she says, “the place where rugged individuals go out and dig for oil and shoot caribou, and make money the way people did 100 years ago”.

But in reality, Alaska is the most heavily subsidised state in the union. There is more social spending in Alaska than anywhere else.

To make it a place where decent lives can be lived, there is a huge transfer of money to Alaska from the US federal government which means of course from taxpayers in New York and Los Angeles and other places where less rugged folk live. Alaska is an organised hypocrisy.

Too many Americans behave like the Alaskans: they think of themselves as rugged individualists in no need of state help, but they take the money anyway in health care and pensions and all the other areas of American life where the federal government spends its cash.

The Tea Party movement talks of cuts in spending but when it comes to it, Americans always seem to be talking about cuts in spending that affect someone else, not them – and taxes that are levied on others too.

And nobody talks about raising taxes. Jeffrey Sachs has a theory about why this is.

America’s two main political parties are so desperate to raise money for the nation’s constant elections – remember the House of Representatives is elected every two years – that they can do nothing that upsets wealthy people and wealthy companies.

So they cannot touch taxes.

In all honesty, I am torn about the conclusions to be drawn. I find it difficult to believe that a nation historically so nimble and clever and open could succumb to disaster in this way.

But America, as well as being a place of hard work and ingenuity, is also no stranger to eating competitions in which gluttony is celebrated, and wilful ignorance, for instance regarding (as many Americans do) evolution as controversial.

The debt crisis is a fascinating crisis because it is about so much more than money. It is a test of a culture.

It is about waking up, as the Americans say, and smelling the coffee. And – I am thinking Texas here – saddling up too, and riding out with purpose.

NB: Copyright BBC © 2011 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

Here’s the 30 minute broadcast under the Analysis series from Radio 4 on the BBC.(Just click on this link) analysis_20110628-1024a