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2012, R.I.P.

Look back, look ahead. It proves difficult to do with much accuracy, or honesty. We reach for the rose-tinted glasses first, and in this way have learned well.

Humans are fragile, vulnerable, to wreckage of the physical body but vulnerable also to flattery, then to the higher beliefs in our better selves (let’s call them b.s. for short). In part we owe our fellows at least that, and it smoothes the way for beauty, when and wherever it may arise. But it also lays us low for the wiles of corporate propaganda and short-term myth, professionally designed to appeal not to our better selves but the rosier view of our b.s.

When, in the course of human events (love the poetry of that assumption), the consequences of which we now must absolutely extend to the planet, this rosy view becomes the prime facilitator to the shattering – of our environment as well as our human decency – wait: have you ever experienced the horrifying if inconvenient search for glasses that were simply and already perched upon your head? Glasses you may be already wearing can be similarly [mis]placed.

The point is, and it is here somewhere, that we must first realize that we’re wearing the glasses. That is, most of what we see, we view through this filter. Hence appall waits beyond our grasp for a host of terrific insults on our way to the store. How far we had to drive, what we bought, how much it costs, what we do with it, the packaging it came in and what we do with that… the list goes on and on from that one simple trip and much is required to secure the lid that keeps all these questions from ruining our trip. If you cut down on any aspect of the errand, the insults change somewhat. There; we felt the glasses for a moment. Maybe it was enough, maybe I’ll let them slip, even take them off for a while, and re-adjust my vision toward my own, actual b.s.

All the best to you in the New Year, including a sustained view in the direction of your better self.

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The Big Shrug

Hurrah for the rabid ferrets!

Though what feeds them and oils the treadmill that powers the cage is detailed in this Guardian piece by Carl Bernstein. Cartoon-esque media baron Rupert Murdoch really did offer to let Fox News and the WSJ become a political party for David Petraeus and it’s all on tape. Not sure what’s worse – that he thought he could do this, that they pulled the trigger and sent an emissary to make the offer, or that nobody really cares. Might be a three-way tie:

Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch’s centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News’ inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama’s expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense “analyst” and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.

All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus’s meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in the Washington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.

Indeed, almost as dismaying as Ailes’ and Murdoch’s disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country’s political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch’s, Ailes’ and Fox’s contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process.

The tone of the media’s reaction was set from the beginning by the Post’s own tin-eared treatment of this huge story: relegating it, like any other juicy tidbit of inside-the-beltway media gossip, to the section of the newspaper and its website that focuses on entertainment, gossip, cultural and personality-driven news, instead of the front page.

“Bob had a great scoop, a buzzy media story that made it perfect for Style. It didn’t have the broader import that would justify A1,” Liz Spayd, the Post’s managing editor, told Politico when asked why the story appeared in the style section.

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‘Humility’

Many kids, when they first go off to college, are considered green in a way. But what if you went off to college just o be lucky enough to sit in a class taught by genius NYT columnist David Brooks?

According to its description, the course promises to explore “The premise that human beings are blessed with many talents but are also burdened by sinfulness, ignorance, and weakness,” as demonstrated by men such as Moses, Homer, and “others,” like maybe Paul Krugman. “I taught at Yale about six or seven years ago and at Duke since and really enjoyed it,” Brooks told Intelligencer, “so I was pleased to be able to do it again. I’m going to commute up Mondays and Tuesdays each week.”

But yes, he knows how it sounds. “The title of the Humility course is, obviously, intentionally designed to provoke smart ass jibes, but there’s actually a serious point behind it,”

I wish I was kidding about this, and I bet many of the kids at Yale do to. Brooks is the conservative many liberals love to love. But they should get real; Brooks is a tool. And probably a more dangerous one in that his rabid foam comes in colors and flavors that so many people find acceptable. Caveat discipulus.

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Grrr… utilities

Investor-owned utilities, that is. It remains an outrage that power utilities continue to tout their efficiency in delivering us as much power as we want to use, when we want to use it. That’s it. That’s where the conversation is and that’s why nothing about our carbon output changes, except for its ever-upward trajectory. But there is much more they/we can do, because the government sets their rates and other guidelines. Charge us for using more. create incentives for power companies to get us to use less energy. Loosen Pry them/us from the reality that solar is bad for profits:

Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states. So why isn’t there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?

First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. Today, navigating the regulatory red tape constitutes 25 percent to 30 percent of the total cost of solar installation in the United States, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and, as such, represents a higher percentage of the overall cost than the solar equipment itself.

In Germany, where sensible federal rules have fast-tracked and streamlined the permit process, the costs are considerably lower. It can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany. In the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days. More than one million Germans have installed solar panels on their roofs, enough to provide close to 50 percent of the nation’s power, even though Germany averages the same amount of sunlight as Alaska. Australia also has a streamlined permitting process and has solar panels on 10 percent of its homes. Solar photovoltaic power would give America the potential to challenge the utility monopolies, democratize energy generation and transform millions of homes and small businesses into energy generators. Rational, market-based rules could turn every American into an energy entrepreneur. That transition to renewable power could create millions of domestic jobs and power in this country with American resourcefulness, initiative and entrepreneurial energy while taking a substantial bite out of the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases and other dangerous pollutants.

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Brasilia

brasilia7

It was a low and high moment this week with the passing of Mr. Shankar – low because he died, high because he lived, and then some.

But another low/high moment passed last week with no notice here, and I think Oscar Niemeyer’s death at 104 is more than worthy of mention.

His Brasilia, the cathedral of which is featured above, is now more than 50 years old and the consensus on its lifelessness as a city is questionable, though not without its instruction. A good, brief discussion of grand architectural theory at LGM brings up a few of the people-related problems we should think about when considering what green design means. It’s too bad we have such a problem with communism in American society, not for the sake of communism itself per se, but because the ideas of thinkers like Niemeyer are always colored by the notion that he was one. It’s an adolescent tendency and we should get over it.

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Trashed it

Jeremy Irons, talking about the new feature-length documentary on trash he produced:

San Francisco has actually reached 80% diversion or Zero Waste this year. New York, which creates 1.5% of total global waste, currently recycles only 15% of it. State and federal government should provide legislation which designs a waste management policy right across the country. In the UK there is a similar situation in that, depending where you live, the waste management policies and goals differ greatly. I believe that most people would like to cooperate in reducing waste, but to encourage them the national policy should be clear, well advertised and consistent. Even within Greater London there is a huge discrepancy between council policies. I believe a national waste management initiative should be designed and implemented by government. Not to burn it or bury it, but to design and encourage its reduction and recycling. This time of rising unemployment seems ideally suited to the creation of a new and forward-thinking industry that could be profitable and create new jobs. If we became world leaders in recycling technology, then that expertise could be exported around the world.

I like the concept of zero waste, and/but it’s going to take a while to get it into the zeitgeist-y lexicon all the kids are slinging these days.

And it’s hard to believe we’re still talking about incineration – I was canvassing for MassPIRG on that issue in 1988.

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The Ocean-Carbon Cycle

I just heard about this yesterday, from a marine scientist working on modeling the associated feedback loops as the pace of climate change alters the extent to which giant green zones in the deep ocean are sucking up some of our bulging CO2 inventory. Because of the ‘nature’ of our stupid discourse about climate change, no one hears about this at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t, you know, still happening:

Evidence suggests that the past and current ocean uptake of human-derived (anthropogenic) CO2 is primarily a physical response to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Whenever the partial pressure of a gas is increased in the atmosphere over a body of water, the gas will diffuse into that water until the partial pressures across the air-water interface are equilibrated. However, because the global carbon cycle is intimately embedded in the physical climate system there exist several feedback loops between the two systems.

So this is different from hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico, as the shelf there is so shallow that the giant algal blooms just take up all of the oxygen, from everything. At greater depths, the rot has the chance to sink to the bottom and be absorbed by phytoplankton, eventually becoming some form of poop, settling to the bottom and working its way into the system (explanation below). This is why these giant expanses of green water in the open ocean are good things, even as they emanate from the Amazon River and cloud the pristine Caribbean. They are caused by the same forces that create biological dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico – the spewing of nutrient-rich effluent into ocean. But the rate they are changing from other forces, like the changing hydrologic cycle (warning: giant pdf) in the Amazon basin*, must go un- or under-discussed all because of the issue which must not be named, per the above mentioned discourse stupidity, which is more like cupidity than anything.

*The Amazon basin has experienced its worst droughts and its worst flooding in the last five years. Talk about naturally alarming. This is the kind of thing that needs to be reported on with the seriousness given to the pregnancy of a titular princess, mailed out and extensively unpacked, where you are left with the realization that you need to start walking to work now and forever more, saving your car trips for something special-er than buying lottery tickets or browsing at the mall. I have intentionally tried to offer a cursory explanation of the ocean-carbon cycle to demonstrate about how difficult it is to talk, which is one of the lower reasons that we don’t know more about it. No excuse, though it remains.

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The Environmental Cliff

Title coined by Pierce; this is just a riff on it.

All of the talk about deficits is just that – talk. To distract any who might be concerned that anything is in the offing but cuts to so-called entitlements. Get insulted about that word. It’s a pejorative for the idea of taking care of old and poor people, whom we should feel ashamed for caring about or fretting over. The word is meant to do exactly that, make us think others feel entitled to something not theirs. With them undeserving, we can feel justified in cutting the programs that keep taxes low for the extraordinarily wealthy.

And speaking of, we need better rich people, better educated with better parents who birth in them at least the semblance of a conscience for the world. Our current crop are inadequate and will not do. We need better politicians who are not afraid to talk about gun violence or climate change, who are not so craven as to use all available oxygen in the media hothouse to grow concern about a non-existent problem. We need better doctors, physicians who have gone into medicine for some reasons other than making as much money as they can. Sorry, the truth hurts. But it’s why our conversations about health care are as contorted and unrecognizable as they are. They aren’t talking about helping people, or healing sick people. And these are personal failings of the people who have chosen to become doctors. We need one more question on the test, one that lets them off the ride, with dignity if need be, before it ends.

Because these issues won’t go away any other way. Bradbury was being precise when asked whether he was trying to change the future: “No, I’m trying to prevent it!”

Spiritual, not religious.

Loves, not wars.

Open, not resigned.

Passionate, not passive.

Giving, not trading.

Attentive, not grating.

Elevated like consideration, a discussion or even a plain, from where we all might see.

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Intoxicating Jibberish

Jimmy_Carter_Andy_Warhol_1977

That would be Warholism, as such. And the “Regarding Warhol” show currently being inflicted on [mostly]innocent visitors to the Met is not about the art world per se, but the art market and the our powerlessness at the whims of its savvy. Jed Perl:

Half a century after he became the artist of the moment, Warhol is more with us than ever, now the throwaway with a takeaway in which many see the key to the art of our time as well as the art of the future. Warhol has become his own ism. Warholism is the dominant ism of our day, grounded as it is in the assumption that popular culture trumps all other culture, and that all culture must become popular culture in order to succeed, and that this new high-plus-pop synergy relieves everybody of the responsibility to experience works of art one on one.

You could pick out any number of things on which to construct your finger-temples, this for example:

As for visitors to “Regarding Warhol,” they are given nothing but foregone conclusions—Warholism as a faith in a particular artistic future that eliminates any of the risk-taking involved in individual judgment.

Image: Jimmy Carter, noted not-Warholian.