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Misleading Investors

gas-pump-climate-changeI guess if that’s how we’re going to see things. But it would be better to state at the outset that every instance of disbelieving, climate change skepticism rises from the deliberate misinformation campaign devised by fossil fuel extraction companies when their own research began to tell them that the delicious smell from the kitchen was their own bacon frying:

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released the results of an investigation that found one of the world’s largest coal companies had misled the public and its shareholders about the risks climate change could pose to its bottom line.

After several years of investigations, Schneiderman reached an agreement with Peabody Energy that won’t require the company to admit it broke the law and does not entail a fine or other penalty. Instead, Peabody must file revised shareholder disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission with new language acknowledging that “concerns about the environmental impacts of coal combustion…could significantly affect demand for our products or our securities.”

…

The agreement comes just days after Schneiderman issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, kicking off an investigation into whether the oil giant has misled investors and the public about the basic science of climate change for decades. Exxon has denied any wrongdoing. While the two investigations have some similarities, Exxon could face tougher penalties than Peabody, said Andrew Logan, director of oil and gas programs at Ceres, an investor advocacy group. The allegations against Exxon stretch back much further in time and could potentially be more serious, so the attorney general could pursue more aggressive action against the company, Logan said.

The Exxon practice is the actual real story here, one that goes back to the late seventies. The companies were no fools; they invested their own money in real research because they wanted to know the truth. They just decided that it was more important that you didn’t know. And that you questioned any attempts by the government to reign in your freedom. They even gave you a few things you could say.

Framing the practice of climate deception as ‘no duty’ to be truthful with investors may make it seem like a victimless crime, we’re all adults here and all’s fair in love n’ bidness, but c’mon.

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Green Opposition

Keystone-PipelineIt is enough to say that economics and environmental opposition have made building the Keystone XL Pipeline impractical. What this outcome may portend for the fates of other fossil fuels as the economics change may bare a little more fleshing out:

The company behind the Keystone XL pipeline has asked the US government to put its review of the controversial project on hold.

TransCanada says the pause is necessary while it negotiates with Nebraska over the pipeline’s route through the state.

The move came as a surprise as TransCanada executives have pushed hard to get approval.

Environmental groups oppose the 1,179-mile (1,897km) pipeline, saying it will increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Maybe they’re pulling it until President Carson can approve the travesty project. But perhaps the reckoning is that neither version of green opposition is sufficient to turn the tide against an legacy energy source – that the power of both and maybe every meaning of green is necessary to make the difference

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RankBrain

File this under “cabbage truck,” “born” and “yesterday:”

Salish-language-signsArtificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.

For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.

RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.

Key quotes from the Bloomberg article:

“Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing,” said Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai on the company’s earnings call last week.

Unironically, we’ll assume. And

“It’s very carefully monitored,” Corrado said, nothing that Google periodically updates the system by feeding it a load of new data to help it better reason with new concepts.

Here’s a guess: A new, highly valued skill set becomes communicating with language and word combinations that the computer cannot understand. Weird, constantly changing pigeon combinations develop that mimic and often include the use of dying and/or dead languages. But this development coincides with the mass extinction of any ability to communicate, “search,” think or anything else with any language other than what the computer can understand. The race is on to talk and write beyond the reach of the learning machines. Think of it as sort of a dystopian, 1984-esque, Escape from Jeopardy-Humanities-Terminator cauchemar (see what we did there?), that I am not going to write but on the film about which I would like to have points.

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Alice

Alice WThe great American novelist and poet Alice Walker was in town the last two days, and I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at her public event last night at the Morton Theatre. It was a conversation with a great and generous soul, who reminded us to be kind, generous, curious and grateful to the wonder of which we are all a part, and to which we are ever-present witnesses. She instructed us to read, read, read, and to be aware of all that we allow into our consciousness via the invasive nature of electronic and broadcast media. We should be mindful of our ancestors and their suffering, because of which we should work to alleviate all suffering that we are aware of and encounter. Truly amazing and inspiring. She even read a couple of pages of dialogue between Shug and Celie talking about God from The Color Purple. I hope your Thursday night was good, too.

But here, I’ll share a poem from her website [yes, she blogs]. This is The Future Captured in A Heartless Fist by Alice Walker:

Somehow it is left to us

This most hopeful of generations

To bear

The unbearable.

We do not need to have given birth

To the children

Who are being destroyed

To know they are our children

Not only in the present and the past

But certainly in the future.

All children are connected at birth

To all the others ever to arrive.

Their faces turned upward

Toward the parents all grown-ups were meant to be.

How can you separate your child

From mine?

Little one, they have captured you

And placed you in a cage.

What are we to make of this?

Are we supposed to see you

As an animal?

Though animals also do not deserve

This fate.

Are we supposed to think

That you are, at five years old,

Already a “terrorist”?

Are we to believe you deserve

To stand alone in this tiny jail

Obviously constructed with you in mind

While grownups stand around

And frighten you?

Who paid for this cage

Anyway?

Whose taxes?

Whose labor?

Whose sweat?

Little One,

You are Palestinian

You are also Earthling,

You are Every Child.

By most humans of this planet

You are beloved.

But in this moment,

So hard to own

As what any parent or grownup

Anywhere

Could desire or wish

You are The Future

Captured in a heartless

Fist.

Image from last night, stolen without permission from fB.

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Capacity Factor

That’s the percentage of a power plant’s maximum potential actually achieved over time. And Bloomberg reports that wide spread adoption of renewables is lowering the hitherto incomparable capacity factor for fossil fuels. This begins the virtuous cycle.

wind_provence

That’s because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you’re a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time.

It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.

Again, no use getting all Pollyannish about any of this. But the business news only reports the business view and it doesn’t really care if renewables are more profitable than fossil. Business only cares about that middle part – the profit.

So, BFD.

Image: author photo, near Valreas, France.

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What Exxon Knew

Consider the names we’ve had for it already: the greenhouse effect. Global warming, and it’s corollary, AGW. Climate change. Treating a planet warming from CO2 like a parlor game, and especially by using the tobacco industry, to see how long we can maintain our ignorance up to and even about whether anything can be done about it takes special effort. And Exxon has had their best people on it since the 70’s:

There’s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years later—after a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping “global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”—that NASA scientist James Hansen took climate change to the broader public, telling a congressional hearing, in June of 1988, that the planet was already warming. And how did Exxon respond? By saying that its own independent research supported Hansen’s findings? By changing the company’s focus to renewable technology?

That didn’t happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns.

It’s not enough to know this, nor to merely compare it to the efforts of Big Tobacco. It will require a systematic dismantling of Big Oil because as presently organized, only it will decide when or if anything is to be done. Listen to the presidential candidates on the right. Big Oil’s work has been done and done well. The best tactic – accuse your opponents of what you yourself have been doing – remains operable. The charge that scientists support climate science because it brings in big grant money is not only laughable in terms of the profits realized by research scientists in the energy companies employ, not to mention by candidates for higher office.coalcan2

As much as they blame other forces, it is rapacious capitalists that threaten capitalism, though the misery is amplified by the fact that so many canaries will have to be tried and executed before we understand how dangerous the mine is.

Via Erik at LGM.

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What does Project Greenlight mean?

Good grief. As a writer and filmmaker, I’ve got at least two dogs and three cats in this fight (never attempted to get on this show, but all other conflicts apply). But still, come on:

Last night was the fourth season premiere of HBO’s Project Greenlight—a Matt Damon and Ben Affleck passion project where they give first time filmmakers the chance to make a movie. It also provided a platform for Matt Damon to deliver a masterclass in whitesplaining—a whitesplaining sermon, if you will.

They enlist a group of producers to help them choose their finalists—the group included a bunch of white guys and one white woman.

The finalists are flown to Los Angeles to meet in person with the producers. At these meetings, they introduce Effie Brown, an experienced Hollywood producer and a black woman. She has produced seventeen feature films, including Dear White People and boy, the Irony Gods are working overtime today.

As the only person of color in the group, Effie clearly understands that any attempt at diversity will be on her shoulders. She recalls growing up in the 1970s where most of the time when she saw black people in films, they were playing gangsters, criminals and prostitutes. She also explains that she is passionate about making films where marginalized people are recognized.

You would have to buy a Brooklyn Bridge-sized benefit of the doubt to just turn around and give them in order to believe this sequence was included in the episode to show the transparencies of inherent bias in Hollywood. No, I don’t believe that either. Come on, Matt. This is embarrassing.

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Arendt: on Violence

Arendt_stampMy summer reading fling with Hannah Arendt is showing some signs of making the turn into fall – weather willing. Something I had not seen yet but offer here is from Arendt’s Reflections on Violence from the Feb. 27, 1969 issue of the NYRB. Writes one of the 20th century’s most brilliant thinkers about lessons we refuse to learn:

No one concerned with history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs; and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has so seldom been singled out for special consideration. This shows to what extent violence and its arbitrary nature were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all. Whoever looked for some kind of sense in the records of the past was almost bound to look upon violence as a marginal phenomenon. When Clausewitz calls war “the continuation of politics with other means,” or Engels defines violence as the accelerator of economic development, the emphasis is on political or economic continuity, on continuing a process which is determined by what preceded violent action. Hence, students of international relations have held until very recently that “it was a maxim that a military resolution in discord with the deeper cultural sources of national power could not be stable,” or that, in Engels’s words, “wherever the power structure of a country contradicts its economic development” political power with its means of violence will suffer defeat.

Today all these old verities about the relation of war and politics or about violence and power no longer apply. We know that “a few weapons could wipe out all other sources of national power in a few moments,” that biological weapons are devised which would enable “small groups of individuals…to upset the strategic balance” and be cheap enough to be produced by “nations unable to develop nuclear striking forces,” that “within a very few years” robot soldiers will have made “human soldiers completely obsolete,” and that, finally, in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are “underdeveloped” and because technical superiority can “be much more of a liability than an asset” in guerrilla wars.

What all these very uncomfortable novelties add up to is a reversal in the relationship between power and violence, foreshadowing another reversal in the future relationship between small and great powers. The amount of violence at the disposal of a given country may no longer be a reliable indication of that country’s strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power. This again bears an ominous similarity to one of the oldest insights of political science, namely that power cannot be measured by wealth, that an abundance of wealth may erode power, that riches are particularly dangerous for the power and well-being of republics.

 

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Old Times There

Is New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta a microcosm of environmental catastrophe? If you are paid per word, it may be more remunerative to try to describe why it isn’t:

NASA_neworleansExtensive studies done after Katrina verified what lifelong residents of southeastern Louisiana already knew: Unless the rapidly disappearing wetlands are made healthy again, restoring the natural defense, New Orleans will soon lay naked against the sea (see satellite image, below).

So, how does one reengineer the entire Mississippi River delta—one of the largest in the world—on which New Orleans lies?

Three international engineering and design teams have reached a startling answer: leave the mouth of the Mississippi River to die. Let the badly failing wetlands there completely wither away, becoming open water, so that the upper parts of the delta closer to the city can be saved. The teams, winners of the Changing Course Design Competition, revealed their detailed plans on August 20. Graphics from each plan are below.

Scientists worldwide agree that the delta’s wetlands disintegrated because we humans built long levees—high, continuous ridges of earth covered by grass or rocks—along the entire length of the lower Mississippi River. The leveed river rims the southern boundary of New Orleans and continues another 40 serpentine miles until it reaches the gulf. The levees, erected almost exclusively by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, prevented regular floods from harming farms, industries and towns along the river’s course. However those floods also would have supplied the brackish marshes with massive quantities of silt and freshwater, which are necessary for their survival.

Good grief. Emphasis mine because they mean that so literally, when we throw around all kind of colorful euphemisms to describe and debate I guess after a while we return to original meanings again. What the miles of levees have wrought, let now engineering decisions and new diversion structures put asunder. Or let the delta die. May 1,000 new songs be written, though immaculate recordings and an army of busking crooners still won’t dull the pain of the [algal] bloom.

Via LGM.

 

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Enhanced Logo Techniques

plantNikeThese embroidered sportswear logos are a good reminder about all the personal space we willingly hand over to corporate advertising, and that we have the ability to take some of it back. Reclaim – hey, we’re into vintage!

The willingness to advertise products and brand loyalties needs some thoughtful push back. Adbusters is still around, but less manifesto and more creativity is what’s called for, not telling people what to think or do – but to think and do. And maybe that’s a contradiction. Maybe those are one and the same. The freedom to do nothing, to not vote, not participate, remains one of our most powerful. But it is also can be powerfully turned against the interests of a free society. The ‘freedom fetish’ itself is a good example of this.

Art is still more powerful than vandalism, but just as threatening to the status quo.