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Today in Incoherence

So Newscorp declares its global operations to be carbon neutral. The question is, why?

The News Corporation, the media conglomerate and parent company of Fox News Channel, has gone carbon-neutral, fulfilling a goal set four years ago, Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman, announced this week in a companywide memo.

“We have become carbon-neutral across all of our global operations, and we are the first company of our kind to do so,” Mr. Murdoch wrote. “We made a bold commitment in 2007 to embed the values of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability into all of our businesses — for the benefit of our communities and our bottom line.”

Mr. Murdoch added that improving the energy efficiency of the company’s day-to-day operations had not only curbed emissions but also “saved millions of dollars.”

Meanwhile its most visible media properties continue to serve as a refuge for climate change deniers and carbon trading skeptics. Someone is being played here – Newscorp understands that renewable energy and reducing their carb on footprint is smart business, as is publicly trashing environmental concerns – at least for a while longer. My guess is that if you surveyed the most successful multinational corporations, you’d find most of them doing the same thing, even as they continue to support rightwing causes like the Tea Party and the Chamber of Commerce. It’s all good. Business.

Next up: Liberty University to provide same-sex partner benefits.

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I’ll Be Your Mirror

Act I. Scene II of Julius Caesar, after the soothsayer brings the heavy and these two are left alone.

BRUTUS
I am not gamesome: I do lack some part
Of that quick spirit that is in Antony.
Let me not hinder, Cassius, your desires;
I’ll leave you.

CASSIUS
Brutus, I do observe you now of late:
I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have:
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand
Over your friend that loves you.

BRUTUS
Cassius,
Be not deceived: if I have veil’d my look,
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which give some soil perhaps to my behaviors;
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved–
Among which number, Cassius, be you one–
Nor construe any further my neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.

BRUTUS
Cassius,
Be not deceived: if I have veil’d my look,
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which give some soil perhaps to my behaviors;
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved–
Among which number, Cassius, be you one–
Nor construe any further my neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.

CASSIUS
Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion;
By means whereof this breast of mine hath buried
Thoughts of great value, worthy cogitations.
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

BRUTUS
No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself,
But by reflection, by some other things.

CASSIUS
‘Tis just:
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow. I have heard,
Where many of the best respect in Rome,
Except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus
And groaning underneath this age’s yoke,
Have wish’d that noble Brutus had his eyes.

BRUTUS
Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
That you would have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me?

CASSIUS
Therefore, good Brutus, be prepared to hear:
And since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of. And be not jealous on me, gentle Brutus:
Were I a common laugher, or did use
To stale with ordinary oaths my love
To every new protester; if you know
That I do fawn on men and hug them hard
And after scandal them, or if you know
That I profess myself in banqueting
To all the rout, then hold me dangerous.

Flourish and Shout, indeed.

Read the whole thing. Aloud.

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Dark Green

Cue the rollout for the new Lexus Wagon:

Lexus is embarking on one of the largest marketing campaigns in the brand’s history to launch this new vehicle. The multi-faceted campaign, which breaks today, features pioneering computer-generated imagery (CGI). Only the interior shots are real time video.

Our favorite of these shows tree-lined pedestrian promenades opening into tree-lined avenues as the car nears them. The city opens before you as you drive through in a scene seemingly inspired by the imaginative film Inception. Actor and best-selling author Hill Harper appears in the spot and provides the voiceover. He declares the CT to be, “Just what you need to forge your own path.”

Okay. 42 mpg, got it. presumptuous Green attitude: slightly offensive, but okay. Wedding the the conservation mindset with “enrich, empower, escape” triumvirate was always going to be entertaini- oh crap:

They have also joined forces with Microsoft in an entertainment series entitled, Fresh Perspectives. The documentary series focuses on six artists, each commissioned to create three original pieces in 24 hours, inspired by the themes of Enrich, Escape and Empower.

Why does ‘entertainment series’ sound so purposefully euphemistic, like something one would be subjected to in a prison camp?

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Peephole to the Future

An interesting side point:

Consequently, in the short term the demand for oil isn’t very elastic. That means that if you brought oil up to $200 a barrel by raising taxes you’d generate a bunch of revenue that could be offset with lower income taxes or what have you. But if oil goes up to $200 a barrel because of supply constraints, then that entails a rise in America’s net imports and therefore a drag on GDP. In the long run, I’m sure we can adjust to high oil prices the same as we’d adjust to anything else.

Tangential to his larger point there, but in fact you can imagine a future with $200 a barrel oil that people reconcile themselves to and curse the Saudis or Venezuela or whomever our media mavens signal we should divert our rage – and then people would just find a way to deal. But can you see the same price per barrel brought on voluntarily as a pre-emptive step? Not at all. We could never reconcile ourselves that sort of planning, even in the face of a strict inevitability.

So the thing is, peer into the future through this fence and what do you see? Pain and insult or progress? Because finding a way to cope anyway in the face of $8 -$10/gallon gas is an insult to any kind of hopeful future, low-oil or no. It means we are capable, though not amenable, to changes in habits, lifestyle and consumption. We choose to do nothing until we are forced, then we will anyway?

Nothing limits your choices quite like flaunting them.

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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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Pluto-cracy

Is not democracy on the star formerly known as Pluto, no matter what controversy your school district may decide to teach you.

Kevin Drum’s excellent piece on what Wisconsin is all about:

If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they’ve enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you’re not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it’s an economic problem because it’s siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

It’s Friday, so read it all.

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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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Laboring

Whether it’s the right to pollute or the right to exploit workers, our modern oligarchs want it. And they want it for free. Do your kids’ teachers have the right to collective bargaining? Your firefighters? Here’s a map.

bargaining

Hmm… Notice anything?

And here’s a label, one among many, to look for.

fedora hats

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Crushing Necessity

Okay… it’s Friday. Time for your medicine, all you busy people.

This is from that studied misanthrope, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, somewhere about page 170. Translation by Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 1983)

What horrified me most was all of that Elevated Railway. On the other side of the court, which was more like a well shaft, the wall began to light up, first one, then two rooms, then dozens. I could see what was going on in some of them. Couples going to bed. These Americans seemed as worn out as our own people after their vertical hours. The women had very full, very pale thighs, at least the ones I was able to get a good look at. Before going to bed, most of the men shaved without taking the cigars out of their mouths.

In bed they first took off their glasses, then put their false teeth in a glass of water, which they left in evidence. Same as in the street, the sexes didn’t seem to talk to each other. They impressed me as fat, docile animals, used to being bored. In all, I only saw two couples engaging, with the light on, in the kind of thing I’d expected, and not at all violently. The other women ate chocolates in bed, while waiting for their husbands to finish shaving. And then they all put their lights out.

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.

I’d seen too many puzzling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how much I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.



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Building (-v.t.)

RSF1.14-199x300

Nice piece in the NYT about the NREL research center in Colorado, especially on the architectural consequences of energy efficiency:

The $64 million Research Support building opened last year as a kind of physical assertion by the Energy Department, the lab’s parent agency, that office space can be driven down to zero net energy use through a combination of on-site energy production (rooftop solar) and fanatical attention to detail everywhere else in how the building saves and sips energy as a workplace for 800 engineers, managers and support staff members.

The resulting mix is meant to inspire builders and architects around the idea that net zero energy use is not only attainable but also affordable and even elegant. And that presents a new palette for architectural criticism.

How, for example, should one assess what seems at first to be an interesting sculpture in the building’s courtyard that in fact turns out to be a cleverly disguised fresh-air intake device for natural cooling of the basement data center? Extra points for form, or for function?

It’s getting to be a really weird thing to see vast new buildings, with square footage north of 100K, that leave these efficiencies on the table. They might use passive solar or have a giant cistern buried on site, but still have enormous shingled roofs that just sit there for decades without doing anything. It’s this expectation that needs ramping up. Instead the fossil dead-enders are looking to let the carrots rot and burn the sticks so as to finance for tax relief for the prosperous. We need to be asking more of architecture than just being structural remedies for various activities; double- and triple-purposing is the order of 2001… so you can, see we’re behind. And I would wager that architects generally would be willing and able… especially if hyper-efficiency came with built-in permission for the ugly buildings many seem to adore. Could be a decent trade (that we’re already making in exchange for bupkis).

But asking architects and engineers to fight clean energy battles against the folks who get elected is, well… probably too innovative.