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Canary in a (Saudi) Coal Mine

Not a perfect analogy, I’ll admit. But something huge seems to be brewing in the tiny island nation of Bahrain.

The king of Bahrain declared a three-month state of emergency on Tuesday as more than 10,000 protesters marched on the Saudi Arabian embassy here to denounce a military intervention by Persian Gulf countries the day before.

The entrance of foreign forces, including Saudi troops and those from other Gulf nations, threatened to escalate a local political conflict into a regional showdown;

As vulnerable as any modern dictatorship and perhaps more, Saudi Arabia welcomes no semblance of the regional revolutions that have swept away the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. The royal family may see the writing on the wall, but sending in 1,200 troops to the tiny country with a Shia’a majority, governed by a Sunni minority and historically a part of Iran… they may need to call in a translator. The thing is, with Bahrain as longtime host to our own Navy’s Fifth Fleet, the U.S. may not have any better advice to offer. Which is awful.

The Saudis may be trying to nip this unrest in the bud, but they are just as likely to escalate it with these actions. It’s a test case/ microcosm of the situation in Saudi Arabia itself. We have armed them to the teeth over the years, sure, but made (nor attempted) few inroads with regard to Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes… much less the case of King Juan Carlos of Spain.

And this is no pass-the-popcorn moment; just go fill your car up and see.

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Interested Parties

It’s a big news day, many things with which to keep up, what with all the Oscar speeches and all.

But some events are not so fantastically immediate – or their impacts and causes are more indirect, slow moving and perhaps irreversible within the time frames we now perceive everything.

Take, for example, this green versus green pseudo argument, which is no doubt real, though perhaps over-articulated:

The legal tussle over putting large solar power plants in often-fragile desert landscapes underscores the difficulty of pushing forward projects crucial to fighting climate change and meeting California’s ambitious renewable energy mandates.

The five lawsuits currently pending against five solar thermal projects licensed by the state and approved for construction on federal land represent a multiplicity of interests.

Now, I might ask whether any landscape could be less often-fragile than a desert, but the fact is that big solar projects are dropping like final-consonant g’s in a Republican prime time Deebate. The same massive solar projects that desperately need to break ground because they take years to build instead spend their first couple of years of existence as a case in a court docket, doing no one any good except for those who don’t want solar projects or much of anything else to change and I’ll stop right there. Any aspersions cast are your own.
In other, perhaps related news, Juan Cole has the latest updates on the rapidly churning oilpacoplypse.

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On The Table

Leaving it on the table, that is. A chart from the Economist, via Yglesias. Interactive even.

Everyone who doesn’t watch Fox News knows that gas prices in the U.S. are the lowest in the 1st world; what might be less appreciated is how little we tax this precious little commodity. Like R.A. says in the original, the ultra low prices fuel the dependency – we can’t get off the stuff. And then we have to castigate any ideas for getting onto trains or sidewalks. And vociferously defend… the obscene oil company profits that are a result. It’s a thoroughly embarassing state of affairs.

Except we’re not embarrassed. Power of Pride, I guess.

But hey… pssst: gas is getting more and more expense anyway. And as it does, we’re still not diverting any of the money to other services or incentivising better habits or planning for the $5 $7 gas that is as sure of a thing as the drink in my hand right now.

Bumper sticker idea of the day: More expensive lessons, please.

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New Dual Suspension, Now with More Disbelief

The Economist, today:

By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn’t prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it’s also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope!

Complete with a nice graph. But is this thing settled? Far from it apparently. Can’t begin to do anything that might be too expensive until every last numb-nut is convinced, every last remote possibility that nothing is happened vanquished. Then what? A study group? They don’t believe in human-caused global warming because of the same reason they don’t believe in making Medicare universal – it’s un-American. Yes, it’s that incoherent. If you think you’re reasoning with people who can be convinced, you haven’t been listening to what they have been saying. And so amateur deniers and professional politicians continue to propose cuts to clean energy, yell about business regulations strangling growth and about how the debt is the evil to end all evils.

I think Republicans believe that we can keep doing things the way we always have (only with way lower taxes) and get much the same wholesome results. It’s this point that is already frustrating them in ways, besides race, that I don’t believe have actually set it in with the folks who carry the water. And until they can openly say they don’t like the results without another of their team calling them America-haters, they just have to keep professing to love the results.

Meanwhile, ticktock… and the incremental, practically unnoticeable damage will continue until it becomes more noticeable and there’s a special Fox News report on the real news that global warming actually hurts liberals and helps Republicans. And so it must be real and irreversible. And then it finally will be.

Yay?

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Self-Sanctioning

$5 per gallon gasoline is still in your future.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) isbeing chaired by Iran at the moment. And Iran thinks the run-up of the price of crude to over $90 a barrel is just dandy and requires no new OPEC meetings or adjustment of production quotas among members.

Meanwhile, the US is back to using 20 million barrels a day of petroleum, an increase of 4.4 percent over last year this time. The US, the superhog of gas hogs, uses nearly a fourth the world’s daily petroleum production despite having only a twentieth of the world’s population. Increased US demand, along with rapidly growing demand in Asia, helps account for the relatively high petroleum prices. Some analysts think you could see another big run-up in oil prices in 2011 reminiscent of 2008, with gasoline prices going to $4 a gallon by this summer and then ultimately going on up to $5 a gallon.

That and everything that goes with it will be re-run from 2008. You remember that time, when the whole country gathered around the national dining room table to contemplate living closer to work, buying lighter cars and building trains? Me neither.

And good to remember that as some will scream bloody murder at $4 gas, others would be relieved at such a bargain. Evil relativism. Good thing we just elected a bunch of know-nothings deciders to lead us on all this important stuff, i.e., we’re so screwed.

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Oldspapers

Critical piece by David Cay Johnston on why reporting is so bad, getting worse and going away, all at the same time.

This problem is not with the breakdown in the centuries-old economic model, a simple model that many journalists do not really understand. Connecting buyers and sellers who are in search of one another pays the bills. What draws them is a desire to find out that which is important but that they did not know. We call this information the news.

Far too much of what we produce today is already widely known. We fill so many pages with rehashed or known information that on many days these publications could properly be called oldspapers. It’s not like there isn’t important and revealing news all around us. There is. It’s just that we seem swept up in a herd mentality with too narrow a focus and too much eagerness to rely on what sources tell us rather than asking these same people to address important facts that lie in plain sight in the public record.

Lazy, incurious, often-times just plain dumb… know anybody like that? Relying on them for your world view?

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The Next Great Consumer Society

One of these words does not belong. David Leonhardt’s NYT magazine article on China offers a lot to digest over a week heavily gilded with L-tryptophan, so take it slowly and don’t miss the subtext – what’s wrong with the entire formulation: mainly that the hope of all humanity and the fate of the known universe rests upon China kicking some old-school lavish consumption into high gear.

The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.

Okay, it’s sounds good, especially with sprinkles of harmony, but which of these ideas don’t go together? I know – the whole idea that there can be anything but a continuation of the way things have been is nothing but hippie. But that’s why this whole thing is so difficult and you need to get off the baby sitter, Joel, and figure out something new besides the old brand of consumption. Buy and save the world. You see how incoherent that sounds? well, that’s this plan in its entirety. Read the article – the best case scenario, that China props up the world economy by engaging some kind hyper-consumption mode, is absolutely bleak. How long will that last? Then what? Remember: closed system. Whatever else it is, another fossil-fueled buying spree that lets us all hang on a little longer is not enough… is not it, as the kids say. This is not anti-growth, it’s just a realization that we can no longer see everything only through the prism of growth – as important as that is. So, it’s really a comment on the weakness of this response, if we can even still call it one, of framing the next last best hope on China going down the path we have used to get where we are, which is turning them into us so that we can… what?

remember, also, cycles are for pedaling. In some ways, this is the story of China’s decline before it even starts, and in this way can be instructive. Our future is linked – there are no separate dimensions for prosperity and decline. It is this we will choose/fail to reckon with until we no longer cannot.

May you enjoy your bird with family and friends.

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When We Ask Not What

Reminiscent of this,

Is this darling little site.

Really, I’m fine with Boehner becoming speaker; it will be infuriating for a while, but he certainly should be able to spout his nonsense from the highest tree, as should Cantor and Pence. They’re complete fools and should be allowed to advertise their ignorance as loudly as possible so they and the pseudo-ideology they represent can more properly be sent packing. If given the opportunity – they’ll do most of the work themselves to convince a supermajority that,

Republican leadership has no future – except for the coming spike in bullet-resistant shoes of all styles.

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Windy names for fun

Why can’t the pharmaceutical companies

The United States is on the verge of a solar boom that could provide 4.3 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There’s just a 12-figure catch: Investors need to put $100 billion into the solar industry to keep the generation of solar electricity growing by 42 percent a year for the next decade to expand capacity from the current 1.4 gigawatts to 44 gigawatts

directly fund sponsor desert wind farms?

Federal prosecutors in Boston yesterday said British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC agreed to pay $750 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it made and sold adulterated drugs, including the antidepressant Paxil, to Medicaid and other government payers

The settlement, one of the largest ever in a health care fraud case, burnished the reputation of the US attorney’s office in Boston as the premier federal office for investigating health care fraud. It has been responsible for recovering about $6 billion in health care fines and claims in the past decade, about 25 percent of all recoveries nationally.

If you think I’ve got it backwards, GlaxosmithKline’s share price only went down .14 (fourteen cents!) on news of the settlement.

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How Slow Can You Go?

This Wall Street Journal article uses an example I’ve brought up before to say that guilt is the route to greener behavior. No, it isn’t.

Washington, D.C., imposed a five-cent tax on every disposable bag, paper or plastic, handed out at any retail outlet in the city that sells food, candy or liquor, effective Jan 1. But more important than the extra cost was something more subtle: No one got bags automatically anymore. Instead, shoppers had to ask for them—right in front of their fellow customers.

The result? Retail outlets that typically use 68 million disposable bags per quarter handed out 11 million bags in the first quarter of this year and fewer than 13 million bags in the second quarter, according to the district’s Office of Tax and Revenue. That may help explain why volunteers for the city’s annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup day in mid-April pulled 66% fewer plastic bags from the Anacostia River than they did last year.

District Councilman Tommy Wells doesn’t believe it is the nominal cost that’s keeping shoppers from using bags, but rather the expectation—made clear in a very public way in every transaction—that they could make do without. “It’s more important,” he concludes, “to get in their heads than in their pocketbooks.”

This is a decent example that draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there are measurable returns from using pricing to effect behavior – and we definitely should use them. But the green aspect of this is about as lame as you can possibly expect. Using guilt isn’t the best way to get anyone to do anything and so should be given no quarter here. Peer pressure is perhaps a different story. But invoking guilt makes this just another marketing campaign destined to lose steam after a while – or worse, avail people of a work around. Because we will find ways to feel good about who we are and what we do, even if denial is one of them. And this is a far more powerful force than any guilt that can be summoned to make you use less, walk more, take a train, turn someone instead of something on at night.

Here is our greatest possibility. We’re interested in sexy and are powerless before it. So when slow is sexy (deja, already!), and the two get connect (Hook up!*) in people’s minds, we’ve got a renewable hold on being green. We just don’t yet think about it that way.

But, take your time, fer chrissakes. With everything.

* Good grief – the  bus and billboard campaigns literally write themselves – a young man, a nipple: “Turn it off – and Turn her On!”