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More than a feeling

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir
With the Lost Photographs of David Attie
by Truman Capote
Let this be the last election in which Republicans are allowed to vote against people voting. To win office, you must be required to win more votes, rather than suppress or decrease the number of voters. The only way to be prepared to govern – not reinforce your advantages, not reward your nests or feather your friends, however the saying goes. Unfettered capitalism has done more to undermine capitalist systems than an army of Engelses and a brigade of Marxes. Speaking of whom, To the Finland Station:

“To the Finland Station” is different. The structure is simple: the decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition after the French Revolution, as Wilson sees it reflected in the writings of Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Anatole France; the emergence of revolutionary socialism, seen through the writings of Saint-Simon, the communitarians Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and Marx and Engels; the triumph of Communism, illustrated by the careers of Lenin and Trotsky. There are things Wilson minimized that would have complicated this narrative: the persistence of a non-Communist socialist ideal in Western Europe; the liberal tradition in Russian politics (to which Nabokov’s father belonged); the success and failure of the Mensheviks, of whom Wilson did not make much. And, of course, if the book were being written now, the vicious side of Marxist and Leninist thought, mostly a subtext in Wilson’s account, would guide the narrative, and the story would touch down in Siberia or Berlin rather than at the Finland Station.

But we don’t read “To the Finland Station” as a book about the Russian Revolution anymore. What draws us now is the subtitle: “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” History is the true subject of Wilson’s book, and what he evokes is what it felt like to believe—as Vico and Michelet, Fourier and Saint-Simon, Hegel and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky all believed—that history holds the key to the meaning of life. The evocation is successful because when Wilson began writing “To the Finland Station” he believed in history, too. He thought that history had a design, and that the Depression was an event fully comprehensible within the context of that design: it was the long-predicted collapse of the capitalist order. “To the Finland Station” is valuable as a window on the nineteenth century, but it is also a poignant artifact of the nineteen-thirties, a time when many people thought that history was something you could get on the right side or the wrong side of. It was an idea indistinguishable from faith, and Marx was one of its prophets.

It’s a dirty foul that American school kids don’t learn about Jules Michelet. We must get beyond this aversion to learning about certain histories, be it socialism or the 1619 project, whatever. The less you know, well, the less you know and suddenly another Trump falls off the turnip truck yesterday and the corporate types get summoned to the cut of his jib, obscuring the more accurate assessments, ‘something just ain’t right with that boy.’

Image by David Attie, 1959, from the NYRB

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Fracking Shrugged

trekwtfIn a measure to counteract opposition to the practice of hydraulic fracturing to exploit oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, an industry group is making an effort to reclaim the word, ‘fracking.’ I know:

“Fracking’s a good word,” says a middle-aged man collecting his mail. “Fracking’s a good word,” says a woman on her front porch. “Fracking rocks,” says a teenage girl on an elliptical machine.

The ad started running in late September, commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the beginning of a larger campaign called “Rock solid for PA.”

“Some people will try to use that word in a negative connotation,” says the group’s president, David Spigelmyer. “All we’re trying to do is shine a light on the fact that there’s a lot of good that comes out of that technology. That’s all.”

David Masur has noticed the ads. He’s director of PennEnvironment, a non-profit that opposes fracking. “It’s been highly entertaining,” he says.

Combine that with this story of pinkwashing in the fracking industry and what you have is a nice bouquet of all the modern practices of poisoning layered atop the moral numbing of continual insults refined by public relations professionals.

 

 

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Frickin’ Fracking

Via Juan Cole, Michael Klare at Tomdispatch on The Third Carbon Age:

When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems.  Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of Coal.  President Obama offered exactly this vision in a much-praised June address on climate change.  True, fossil fuels will be needed a little bit longer, he indicated, but soon enough they will be overtaken by renewable forms of energy.

Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on “clean” natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  All this sounds promising indeed.  There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down.  The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables.  Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called “unconventional” oil and gas reserves.

The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables.  Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.

That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking — the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them — is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries.  In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

It’s true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here’s the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.

Read the rest at the link.

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EPA Rolls [over]

There’s one thing about electing a progressive president, well there are many, actually. But one is that, even though media narratives coalesce around ‘a political savior’ or whatever, no one actually thinks that. It’s just a great relief not have a C-plus Augustus at the helm for a while. Otherwise, all other caveats about agitation, feet and fire hold true. You keep your expectations high, no matter what. Obama can disappoint, as can his agencies; that doesn’t mean I don’t like him or what he’s said he stands for or that his progressive stance was all a ploy all along. But some things may make you wonder.

Residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, had been complaining for years that their well water started smelling and looking foul after the oil and gas company EnCana began drilling in a previously drilled field near their homes. Some contracted weird health problems, including neurological disorders and rashes, after drinking or bathing in the stuff.

After their concerns were essentially passed over by both EnCana and the state of Wyoming, the EPA stepped in to conduct its own tests in 2008. As ProPublica and High Country News reported, the agency found suspicious quantities of hydrocarbons and trace contaminants in residents’ wells that could be linked to gas development. Then, after drilling two 1,000-foot-deep monitoring wells, the agency found high levels of benzene and other carcinogens in the deep groundwater underlying Pavillion. An EPA report released late in 2011, concluded that:

(P)ollution from 33 abandoned oil and gas waste pits – which are the subject of a separate cleanup program – (was) indeed responsible for some degree of shallow groundwater pollution in the area. Those pits may be the source of contamination affecting at least 42 private water wells in Pavillion. But the (deep) contamination, the agency concluded, had to have been caused by fracking.

Then:

On June 20, though, after vigorous complaints from industry and Wyoming that the agency flubbed its study, as well as years of delays, the EPA announced that it is abandoning the project completely.

I remember JamesWatt. And if you don’t look him up. THAT was a travesty. But this is serious. We can do better. We have to.

Via LGM.