What does green mean?

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Relationships of interest

French philosopher Simone Weil was many things at once – mystic, factory worker, activist, militant, social thinker and moral psychologist. Over the course of a very short life, she devoted great attention to the actual existence of people. The incisive trajectory of her thinking and attention produced that rarest of commodities: durable insights that have aged well.

Today’s reading is from Oppression and Liberty, a collection of essays mostly written in the 1930s that deals with sociopolitical issues that reach back to the time of the French Revolution. It may ring a bell.

Every human group that exercises power does so, not in such a way as to bring happiness to those who are subject to it, but in such a way as to increase that power; it is a matter of life and death for any form of domination whatsoever. As long as production remained at a primitive stage of development, the question of power was decided by armed force. Economic changes transferred it to the plane of production itself; it was in this way that the capitalist system came into being. The development of the system later restored war as an essential means in the struggle for power, but under a different form; superiority in the armed struggle presupposes, nowadays, superiority in production itself. If the free play of competition is the final object of production in the hands of the capitalists, its final object in the hands of technicians organized into a State bureaucracy would necessarily be preparation for war. Besides, as Rousseau had already understood, no system of oppression is interested in the welfare of the oppressed; it is on their miserable condition that oppression can rest the more easily the whole of its weight.

As for the moral atmosphere that a régime of bureaucratic dictatorship can bring about, we can realize here and now what it can be like. Capitalism is only a system for exploiting productive work; if we leave out the proletariat’s efforts at emancipation, it has given full scope, in every branch of activity, to initiative, free enquiry, invention and genius. On the other hand, the bureaucratic machine, which excludes all judgment and all genius, tends, by its very structure, to concentrate all powers in itself. It therefore threatens the very existence of everything that still remains precious for us in the bourgeois régime. Instead of the clash of contrary opinions, we should have, on all subjects, an official opinion from which no one would be able to deviate; instead of the cynicism characteristic of the capitalist system, which severs all bonds between man and man in order to replace them by mere relationships of interest, a carefully cultivated fanaticism, calculated to make poverty, in the eyes of the masses, no longer a burden passively to be borne, but a sacrifice freely consented to; a mixture of mystical devotion and unbridled bestiality; a State religion that would stifle all individual values, that is to say all real values. The capitalist system, and even the feudal system, which, through the disorder which it involved, allowed here and there individuals and collectivities to develop in an independent manner, not to mention that blissful Greek system under which the slaves were at least employed in seeing to the wants of free men—all these forms of oppression appear as forms of a free and happy existence when compared with a system that would methodically destroy all initiative, all culture, all thought.

Image: Street art image of philosopher Simone Weil in Berlin Kreuzberg, via wikimedia commons.

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Privacy Gear Checklist

Paper, notebook, pencil. The stealthy thrill of being a resistance fighter when you whip out new-fangled technology at the supermarket – a shopping list. Pre-planning a menu with specific meals you’d like to prepare optional but highly recommended.

Take the joyous route around nonsense, no software required.

The near-constant piracy privacy invasions sweeping up everything we do and all we think we want to know, primarily on our insistence of sharing, uploading, making things visible [he writes on a website], requires a kind of slow acceptance endemic to the tools. During the heady decades of the Cold War, school children would regularly have drills for what to do in a nuclear attack, so no surprise about what we can become socialized to. It’s akin to what dating apps are doing to interpersonal relations – the apps are not designed to help you find the love of your life, but to keep you using the app. Reflecting on the difference produces amazing results in less than a week.

Information intake. Reading books, for one; listening to records, for another. Sure, I have dogs in this fight. But whatever you’re reading or listening to, you can talk about it or not. I do talk and even write about some of what I read, because I am sometimes asked. But I don’t have to. Even conversations you have about what moves you can be privately maintained. They might even get more interesting. A note of caution here about building intrigue. But only a note. You’re worth it.

Can you we practice privacy? Certainly, especially while you still know how. This goes for so many things, obviously, but get this: you can also purchase bound books full of empty pages, on which you can write ideas or jokes or scandalous stories, or draw things. It sounds crazy but most paper will stand up to watercolor. Spend some time and update your own software. In order to bring the phrase ‘playing it close to the vest’ back into common parlance, some people must wear vests.

 

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Missed opportunities

So, this is clear as mud.

All the discussion amid the smoking ruins of the U.S.-Canada trade relationship (conceding how few people think about this, even as it’s happening, so deeply is it without cause or sense) the whole concept of the U.S.-backed global order provides a kind of backdrop. What was it? Why was it?

The U.S. has been a great power by various definitions for more than a century. It was one of two for most of the latter half of the 20th century and the sole one starting in the final decade of the 20th century.

To understand this now-receding era, we must recognize that U.S. power functioned differently with the relatively wealthy states primarily in the global north and those poorer states mainly in the south. Its power was based largely on two key alliance structures: One based in Europe (NATO) which is really the western fringe of Eurasia and another based on the littoral and island fringe of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, et al.

We don’t have to believe, nor should we, in the idea or reality of the U.S. as a beneficent global hegemon. But as JMM points out, its terms were generous; getting other countries to go along with you is a team sport, much more arguable for when they and their people benefit. It’s the positive sum dynamic and makes a great deal of sense while also being the golden key to soft power, the whole boring concept of pulling together to benefit everyone. You can make that argument when you’re putting your money down and can point to improvements in societies not your own.

We can and should talk about all the ways the current administration doesn’t understand military or economic power, that if you want to see the limits of either, just begin using them imprudently as they have.

But to pan out even a bit wider, though not to take away from damage being done by our current Know Nothings, the Cold War itself and its era began the unraveling process of this global order long before it actually happened. Before 1991, the collapse of the USSR or the Berlin Wall, the focus of the bi-polar (yikes – was not expecting that bit of convergence) order had begun to decay. Corporate engagement in domestic politics has long been part of the dynamic, with this or that shadow government advocating for against certain actions. Behind-the-scenes influence to protect the bottom line is as American as Apple Baseball, and these influences can be as nefarious as they are [much too infrequently] positive. However, when the corporate line is the guide, appeals to societal benefits are useless, perhaps even senseless. Like prohibiting horses from playing chess.

In my messy little history, as the focus of the global order disintegrated, multi-national business was quick to give it order, even as media and some more than few politicians crowed about the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. So quaint.

Corporations had better ideas, had identified new threats. The 1970s energy crisis was one rallying cry for better solutions and even presented a possible, new focus for the global order. By the time Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof, the global warming denial complex had gone to college, found a sweetheart, married, had kids and gotten divorced.

Exxon, Shell, Texaco, few even have the same names now. But even as they try to shirk responsibility for those now-adult children, it’s important to imagine a better, different path for global prosperity and security. Because it can all seem so fore-ordained, but it wasn’t. Even into the 1980s, the nascent environmental movement provided a powerful organizing principle for a new global order, as outgunned as it was. Why it was outgunned is important for us to understand now – not just about the money but grappling with the shortsightedness itself. It’s less an alternate history than the beginnings of a new next, because the lack of a new global focus brought us exactly to the results of a decayed one.

I interviewed a DJ from Johannesburg a few years ago, a wonderful person as well as a super sharp journalist. After we wrapped and as I drove him back to his hotel, he remarked with some wonder as we passed a sign for Baldwin Street. He thought it remarkable that a prominent street had been named to honor the great author James Baldwin; I smiled as I explained that in fact, the street was named for one of the most important white supremacists of the 18th century. A small town with a street named after James Baldwin would be in an altogether much different country.

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On inference and statistical significance

Friday rabbit hole caveats be damned healed, a reference to p-values in my readings this week struck a chord for ready digression.

I interviewed a statistics researcher [podcast versions] a few years ago who served as an co-editor on special journal issue dedicated to the (mis)use of statistical significance in research, particularly psychology research and specifically the phenomenon know as p-hacking:

a little more explanation of the null hypothesis and how it relates to other flaws in the typical way psychology researchers have handled statistical analysis over the past several decades. Roughly, our research often comes down to finding differences between groups of participants on some variable of interest (Are boys better at math than girls?) or correlations among two or more variables (Does suicide risk rise as poverty increases?). The null hypothesis is the assumption we then make that there are no such differences or correlations in the populations from which our data were drawn, and we compute the probability that we would have found data with differences or correlations as large as we actually did if the null hypothesis were true. If that probability (called a “p-value”) is less than some specified value, typically .05, then we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the differences or correlations we found are probably real. This is known as a statistically “significant” result. If the p-value is greater than .05, then we fail to reject the null hypothesis, for lack of convincing evidence otherwise.
Research that fails to reject the null hypothesis rarely gets published in scientific journals. Likewise, research that merely replicates rejections that were found in earlier research rarely gets published. As a consequence, there is a high professional premium on testing questions that have not been previously published, and on rejecting the null hypothesis.

The widespread adoption of these customs has unintentionally encouraged a whole series of inadvisable research practices, which have led to trouble. For instance, because most studies that do not find significant effects go unpublished, we don’t know whether the findings of the published research are real or just the mistakes that our chosen p-value allows to slip through (the “file-drawer problem”). This problem might be attenuated if we published efforts to replicate previous findings, but that kind of research is rarely accepted by journals.

Note the generosity embedded in the term ‘inadvisable.’ Hmm.

 

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Turnabout, meet Fair Play

On the question of which armaments are appropriate for which fight, one of the most odious of congress-critters seems to have been taken down by the renewable energy group Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC. Via TPM:

The group’s ads did not mention clean energy, instead targeting conservative voters with advertisements that boosted Hatcher’s right-wing credentials and chided Ogles for missing votes. The PAC deployed a similar playbook against Texas Rep. Chip Roy in his unsuccessful attorney general bid and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost his campaign for governor.

“The clean energy industry’s political muscle is only getting stronger and more intimidating,” said Invest in Tomorrow Coalition co-founder Michael Brune, who previously led the advocacy group the Sierra Club. “Our hope here is that clean energy will go back to being a bipartisan issue, and maybe one of the few issues that all Americans can agree on. But before we get there, we’ve got to continue our retribution tour and take out a few more members who have voted the wrong way.”

— Lawmakers like Ogles, Roy and Norman drew the ire of industry last year when they pushed Republican leaders in Congress for a quick phaseout of renewable energy incentives in what became the One Big Beautiful Bill act. Chris Larsen — the PAC’s top backer, who has contributed $6 million of its $6.8 million — has called its advocacy “political warfare.”

It’s about timely.

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Boosterism beyond critique

The irony about that headline is that athletic boosters, who actively grease the wheels if not the palms, are the most willing and ready to weigh-in and express disapproval if not remedies. Cue the irony and the facts we hate.

One thing – and reader, there are many – that you pick up from working at the interface between PR and journalism is how aware you become of the vulnerabilities of the former and constraints of the latter, the need to go right up to the line between without misleading or insulting anyone. Especially yourself. Everyone who has done this work understands it well, but can misunderstand the notion of ‘protecting the institution,’ where we internalize and suppress certain things about what we know, perhaps under the illusion of self-preservation even at the expense of the broader endeavor.* We don’t want to think this is how these things happen or how they work – a little too much agency perhaps, but we watch them unfold nonetheless.

So the image up top. Occasionally we need to detain the messenger for questioning. The boosterism of local newspapers, heightened into absurdity by conglomeration and then into farce in the role as any state’s singular media outlet, provides a hothouse for particular dragons. To maintain a hands-off approach clear of financial conflict but convenient about loyalties begs questions out into the exoplanetary realm. What are the incentives to comfort or afflict? The information plot as essentially promotional fails on its own terms. Gather at the Derrida but what tensions remain in that line, or are they bled away into headlines about headlines? Who’s headlines were these, anyway? And then the egregious mention of ‘notoriety’ as though the product of some unknown force. They’re doing us a favor by being so clumsy about it.

There’s a lot to remember, granted. But let’s do better. The extent to which the word sequence ‘data center’ is simply deployed as a political, economic, and environmental gravity unto itself would be an excellent place to start.

* one gets moved up into crisis communications and comes to understand the same problem in a different way.

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Regression to the mean

Advertising can be rude, as well as prophetic. All the clean coal and fossil fuel wishcasting propaganda (Beyond Petroleum?) leads to complacency, inefficiency, more SUVs – at least in one country – and hence greater vulnerability, whereas crisis framing of responding to climate change leads to hard-won improvements. To wit:

[In June 2026] for the first time in the U.S., solar generated more electricity than coal, a reflection of both the rapid adoption of renewable power and the declining fortunes of America’s aging fleet of coal power plants.

Solar output reached an all-time high last month, supplying 12.8 percent of U.S. electricity, with coal supplying 12.2 percent, according to an analysis from energy think tank Ember. As a share of the power supply, solar typically reaches a high in May, when longer days spur greater generation, but mild weather keeps demand in check.

Coal output continued to slump last month, reaching a new record low, according to Ember. Its decline comes despite a push by the Trump administration to extend the lives of aging coal plants. Just this week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order to keep a coal power plant in Orlando, Florida, online. The plant had been scheduled to be retired last year under a plan by the local public utility to shift to renewable energy.

Carbon emissions from power plants and vehicles , as well as methane emissions, will always and only produce more atmospheric warming. Active denial about the results of these activities belongs alongside every other institutional lie.

Do you need praise to make you do better? Or does a focus on shortcomings, mistakes, and wrong thinking begin to help turn things around?

A country named this one is stuck in a war it started, cannot end it, may escalate further for no reason or avail, has sundered its diplomatic mechanisms in favor of sycophancy, depleted its military and destroyed its credibility, all because we won’t call out an idiot’s historic strategic blunder.

The energy that has gone into denial has put off reckoning with the consequences for exactly as long as it will take to direct that energy elsewhere.

 

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The Inverse World Cup

Demonstration of the critical importance of soft power embodied in a ludicrous whimper (not a Tragically Hip song title, amazingly enough). What now? What next?

Dr. K brings the heat light:

[Europeans’] willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.

However, Europe’s turn away from Trump also reflects plummeting perceptions of his power. At one time the world feared Trump although it never respected him. The silence that met his renewed demand for Greenland shows that the world no longer takes him seriously.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

Implications of the word continue without relent. Even if even he was fit [he was not fit], hire an unprepared, incurious clown for a very complicated job and predictable results arrive only too soon. It should be noted how much he and his team make the job look so much more difficult than it already is – it’s quite the Inverse World Cup, where experienced professionals make an impossible sport look simple. So much of the grievous iniquity of ‘greatness’ had been laid bare that we would do well to lay off of it for a very long while.

Can a society beg to be humbled? The answer questions itself. Don’t be afraid of confronting faults and failings, they only wax the more dastardly. Humiliation of equality is as fake as his bluster and we’d best move on from it with some haste.

 

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American spiritual connection to scientific progress

I have likely shared versions of this anecdote, and so beg indulgence. During the economic crises of 2007-2009, GM (the carmaker) experienced trials and tribulations of their and others’ making that rattled the china in every state and quite beyond: frozen credit markets and a collapse in sales plus heavy legacy costs (debt) led to its near collapse. GM filed for Chapter 11 re-organization after a bail-out from Uncle Sam.

During this time, I met my friend the poet at our appointed hour and he re-counted a visit earlier that day to a local auto dealership where the salesman finished off his pitch on a new poet truck with the immortal words, “You can’t do anything more patriotic than buy a truck from the General.”

Of course, the poet was nothing if not patriotic.

Parallels to the far-reaching economic and spiritual destruction of that moment are afoot. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (such a sense of humor) has decimated international aid in a slashing that is already killing hundreds of thousands and now has the American scientific research  ecosystem in its crosshairs.

Climate scientists are being fired and marooned in the dark at a critical juncture.  Government climate research has resurfaced as Climate.us:

Climate.us today launched the full version of its new independent, nonprofit climate information website, creating a public-backed home for trusted climate science at a time when access to federal climate resources has become increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

This is a critical public information effort but step back and do the math on the science. It is untenable to reduce support for climate research to a bake sale. Neither can NIH or NSF survive on charity. The comprehensive network that trains the next generations, tests, trials, safeguards, and incentivizes innovation across the globe is a giant sandbox. This is not a miscalculation, as no calculating occurred. Killing USAID was a crime; this is a mistake. The destruction is not about any single scientific project – this is about killing the American project. Bad for the economy, bad for soft power and national security, a salting of the global dominance for which we stand.

Stand Up For Science.

Like GM but much more so, there is something quintessentially American about scientific progress. We might not even be sure why, and as jingoistic as the words are in sequence, it is just simple, spiritual pride. Connection, not to owning breakthroughs but fostering them, sharing them, being the spring that feeds and from which they emerge.

This is not reform, this is destruction, plain and simple. Undermining expertise by aligning it with political considerations is the very essence of fraud which, if you haven’t noticed, are variations on an old theme.

 

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Presume to consume

Given the ‘outcomes’ of various recent fiascos, the knock-on effects of re-centering global power point to less nationalism and more skepticism about tentative efforts to affect an energy transition.

The transition required is not one of energy but of consumption:

The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.

Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.

Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation .

Informative thinking from historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. In a technologically-obsessed culture, of course we focus on tech solutions. But there is no end-run around our consumptive habits and pre-supposing how we maintain those and reduce anything is simply scientism vs science. Unpacking useful vs. useless CO2 emissions, for example, opens a breach in the dimensional barrier between wishful thinking and effective action. Absolute reductions in material and energy use are inevitable; better that we unite around joys and common interests than shared crises. Consumption junction, what’s your function?

Difficult political messaging inquiries welcome.