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Around to See It

Whether it’s color, cash, inexperience or the ins and outs of renewable energy development in general, I often find myself tacking away from the original intent of the meaning of the essence of this site. But then some new article comes out to bring it all back around:

Another conclave of the global great and good is looking at what should be done in the much trickier area of climate change. The premise of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is that nothing will be done unless finance ministers are convinced of the need for action, especially given the damage caused by a deep recession and sluggish recovery.

Instead of preaching to the choir the plan is to show how to achieve key economic objectives – growth, investment, secure public finances, fairer distribution of income – while at the same time protecting the planet.

The author provides us the Kennedy space-race analogy as an illustration of the kind of efforts and leadership needed to curtail the effects of climate change, which is fine and well-meaning enough. But then he drops the second Pop-Tart® by suggesting that we need first to show/guarantee business the long-term benefits of greening the economy. I have one: how about you get to still have an economy?

That’s what the whole question is about: do we have enough greed to stifle the impulse toward self-preservation?

Okay – no one can use Enough Greed as a band name or an album title, because I just thought of it and realized its multitudes. Individual songs are fine as long as WDGM is ID’d in the bridge someplace.

 

 

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Operation Free

lavender_windmillIt’s the best use of either word I’ve seen or heard in a while:

Ohio’s clean energy law has come under attack by a lawmaker affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the group funded by fossil fuel companies, corporate interests and the ultra-conservative billionaire Koch brothers — but local vets are taking a stand.

…

Despite failing in its previous effort to repeal any state renewable energy standards, ALEC convened for its 40th annual meeting in late July and leaked documents show the organization has no intention of backing down from its attacks on popular clean energy laws.

But in Ohio, a group of 2,000 veterans, military family members and supporters is pushing back against Seitz’s effort and other bills aimed at weakening Ohio’s renewable energy standard. Zach Roberts, a National Guard veteran and the Ohio director of Operation Free, a national campaign that gathers veterans and national security experts to advocate for clean energy policies, told Climate Progress that S.B. 58 would, “radically change the state’s clean energy standard,” and it ultimately “weakens Ohio’s energy security.”

The law in question, passed in 2008, requires Ohio to generate 25% of its electrical supply through alternative energy sources by 2025. Half of that must be from renewables and 0.5 percent specifically from solar. Is that too much? What are goals, enforced by law in this case, designed to achieve? A perfunctory ratio would have been 5%; a quarter is going to cause some pain but show people (and companies) how to move forward. Freedom, indeedom.

Image: Author photo, not from Ohio but just a bit east of that.

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Good faith vs. Bad

Sometimes, within the context of a supposed competition and especially one between competing ideas, it’s instructive to remember that the two sides might not even be playing the same game. One example.

Students at Harvard and other universities are agitating for the university to divest themselves of investments in the fossil fuel industry. Last week the President of Harvard Drew Faust issued a statement saying thanks but no thanks harvard will no do no such thing. Here’s a response from Divinity School student and climate activist Tim DeChristopher (who served a two-year federal sentence for civil disobedience):

Drew Faust seeks a position of neutrality in a struggle where the powerful only ask that people like her remain neutral. She says that Harvard’s endowment shouldn’t take a political position, and yet it invests in an industry that spends countless millions on corrupting our political system. In a world of corporate personhood, if she doesn’t want that money to be political, she should put it under her mattress. She has clearly forgotten the words of Paolo Freire: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain neutral.” Or as Howard Zinn put succinctly, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

She touts all the great research on climate change that is done at Harvard, but she ignores the fact that the fossil fuel industry actively works to suppress or distort every one of those efforts. To seriously suggest that any research will solve the climate crisis while we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain a stranglehold on our democracy is profoundly naive.

Emphasis mine. One side is trying to convince the public that climate change is real, the other is working, and largely succeeding, at stifling debate. Climate change denialists aren’t even that – they can’t and won’t debate the issue on the merits, and the public should take note. What they choose to do is attack the open system whereby society can debate what is happening to it and decide what to do. This course is at least as pernicious as the effects of the dirty energy of which it is service, as it provides for a comprehensive anti-democratic attack on the objective of self-government itself.

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London Takes Crap Crown

Crap Towns Returns by Sam Jordison and Dan KieranWhile often associated with envy, green is also the color of certain kinds of motion sickness. But the opposite of envy is, I guess, pity? A kind of misery? All of these are summed up in the new survey of crappiest towns of Britain, of which London is newly reigning, um, queen?

London was catapulted to victory by multiple nominations for its dismal suburbs, murder miles, high house prices, City bankers and a transport system that abandons late-night revellers to the mercy of rickshaws, minicabs or night buses, “a must for all fans of vomit, paranoid schizophrenics and R&B played through tinny mobile-phone speakers”.

The city’s trump card was undoubtedly its most affluent parish, Mayfair: “Its inhabitants are virtually without exception the biggest shower of needy, self-important bumwipes in London, with a self-pity complex and misplaced sense of entitlement to match. The architecture is either dull west London stucco or a twattish approach at some kind of meaningful landmark building. Either way it’s rubbish. Most importantly the pubs are shit. And full of people who live in Mayfair.”

Who are we to argue? Don’t miss the slideshow that accompanies the article – England at its remarkably dreadfulest. Maybe it’s a sly campaign to get people not to go there. A lot to work with either way.

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Some sun, some dough

Mrs. Green snapped this on a drive through the southern part of the state yesterday. This is what may happen when people figure out they can profit from captured non-fossil energy.

Georgia_solar

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Two centrist, nonpartisan organizations walk into a pension

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone brings some light to the sad, frustrating, infuriating story of how public pensions have been invited to a dinner where they are the main course:

There’s an arcane but highly disturbing twist to the practice of not paying required contributions into pension funds: The states that engage in this activity may also be committing securities fraud. Why? Because if a city or state hasn’t been making its required contributions, and this hasn’t been made plain to the ratings agencies, then that same city or state is actually concealing what in effect are massive secret loans and is actually far more broke than it is representing to investors when it goes out into the world and borrows money by issuing bonds.

Read the whole thing. Green has made (some of) us very mean.

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Begin with an Individual

Today is the birthdate of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, born in 1896, whom I have always held in dear affection and esteem.

Here’s an excerpt from The Rich Boy (1926), which has that quote that is so well-known, and by which we may feel we know him well and may well even believe he knows us, as well as so many other things. Thanks, Francis:

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves — such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost — I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

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Meanwhile

Back on the clean energy front – which is all across the world, just not within the borders of its remaining superpower®:

Also, bonus track: the proper pronunciation of TanZAHNia.

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Forever changing

the climate.

It seems that potential new Shale oilfields in Argentina, Russia and Algeria also hold giant reserves of expensive, hard-to-get, difficult-to-refine, sludge to pout in our gas tanks.

Analysis by IHS published on Tuesday morning suggests fields including the Vaca Muerta of Argentine, the Bazhenov shale of Siberia and the Silurian shales of north Africa could produce more than the Bakken shale of North Dakota and the Eagle Ford of Texas.

However, the research group’s findings also show that costs for extracting “tight oil” reserves, held in shales and other challenging rocks, are significantly higher in other countries than in North America, suggesting they will need a higher oil price to be commercially viable.

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The origins of social protest

On this Labor Day, an ode to utilizing art to raise social consciousness. It is odd, though perhaps fitting, that Hugo’s Les Miserables is best known today as a musical. Upton Sinclair included it in his 1915 Anthology of Social Protest. From its debut, the book that is still one of the half-dozen greatest novels in the world struck a tone of moral redemption and social revolution that resonated with the common populace, with a literary style that appealed to intellectuals. It is a rare instance of the joined interests of working people with the aristocracy – one we would do well to remember and hopefully one of the reasons, beyond the singing, that it lives on today. Here’s Hugo’s author preface:

SO long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.