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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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Reflections on the Passing of a Car

Value – noun, verb, -ued, -u·ing.

A colleague used this term in a written draft recently and it immediately triggered in me the impulse for the equivalent of an electronic scratch-through; so much do I detest the term as generally construed but especially in the context of quantifying the benefits of something that should be considered in terms of quality.

So, given such a distaste and allergy, the sensible thing is to turn sharply back into the term, which I did on my walk this morning.

One of the qualities still heartily propping up Our Way® is the skewed preference we preserve for the wrong things – wrong in the context of resource depletion and ghg generation, the burning of coal and general wasting of essentials that is the chief characteristic of 1st world progress. We’re not that far away from being able to shift our priorities – the rank of what we value. But we’re also not close to actually doing it, either. We basically market ourselves vis-à-vis that transition as far into the future as possible, so much so as to make the possibility appear remote and implausible, and largely making this so, as well.

Why this disconnect between capability and action? Value (n.,v.) seems to be the culprit.

An example close to home, pun intended: We could value the ability to commute to work on foot more than the ability to drive that Porsche or BMW we cannot afford anyway. Now this one statement is chock-full of some of the neat contradictions that define us. But we do reserve a high degree of importance for the kind of car we can drive, not in any way comparable to that which we attach to walking – which we associate with drudgery as well as a kind of personal failure on the part of the walker. It takes excessive time and energy. But the car, its excessive costs and energy externalities, delivers a kind of status walking cannot touch. The qualitative difference at the center of our ability to value one over the other, despite the terrible quantities of money and energy demanded to hold this equation in place – not to mention the quantities of time and health extracted from us in the exchange – make the arrangement appear permanent and intractable. That’s not even considering the marketing to which we voluntarily submit ourselves and our consciences. Until we realize how we are not the ultimate beneficiaries of this arrangement and attach status value with being able to go car-less, indeed we are trapped within this tight little circle.

Yet it is easy to comprehend: were we availed of it, walking has just as much status potential, with the ability to do it everyday far superior to being trapped in a personal automobile.

Even supposing a person could conquer the desire to drive a Porsche or BMW and replace it with a preference for walking to the same destination, what would a person have to do in order to close the distance. The first order would be actually closing the distance, creating a real choice between the two modes of transportation. Granted, this is not the option for most people, and makes the question moot. But how to move the window? You would have to put value on living with proximity to work, food, school and play, with the ultimate prize being the ability to walk. In-town neighborhoods would be the most desirable (and most highly-valued, touché!); once they are fully occupied, demand drives development at the edges of walkable distances; to remain carless at these edges, public transportation infrastructure crops up to facilitate access to proximity – convenience, but not prioritized for personal automobiles. With this, a cascade of other values fall into place. You suddenly began to value other things that end with you/yours and quality re-enters the picture whereas before only quantity was considered: how many miles to work? How long will it take with traffic? How fast can we eat? How long can he wait at school for me to pick him up? How much does gas cost now? How much for new tires? Repairs?  A tune-up? There is no end to these questions. Their answers may change subtly but their nature does not. They worry and weigh upon us, but these questions are essential trivial – which itself worries and weighs on us, re-enforcing the circle.

We need the slippery slope of weightier issues and topics. Compare to: what is the walk doing to my weight? Am I feeling better with a little more exercise? What should we eat tonight? Is that new book store open? What should I read? What should I write? What new music would I like? Should we get the band back together? Could I learn Italian listening to a podcast five minutes a day? What is Coriander for? These questions are also endless, in a good way as you can see.

Which set of questions do you prefer?

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Lest We Forget

People continue to make things. Even in this head-y time of worry and recession, big-projects jam up the pipeline, small projects simmer on eternal hold while the pipeline gets dug up and re-routed… whatever. Some people aren’t waiting around. And I don’t write that to be hopeful.

It just is. Ignore it if you want to, in favor of the tired tried, if not true. The dependable is always and only just that. But the power to ignore it and move forward with your ____ is the fecund gear, the lean for the green that happens not just every spring but every day. And many nights.

And it’s one thing to do this when and if you’re being rewarded for it. And another thing again if you aren’t. What’s the motivation, then? You hold out that they’ll catch up to you, but that doesn’t last very long. Best forget about them, even as you put together that something special, something better than us because it’ better than we’ll ever be. So, who is it for? The things that last are for us all, which means they were probably meant for none. They just had to come into existence, then they just were. They fought the crushing momentum not to exist, not come into being at all, against the very inclination to even consider… what? Making something new? No. Just making something. Ignoring the fright of silence and empty reception. Sometimes, that’s the best laboratory in the world. We just forget that sometimes.

So don’t.

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A Female Deer (reprise)

We’re the world’s biggest polluter who has no idea what to do about it – can’t use less, absolutely cannot tax ourselves more. Meanwhile, our best and brightest have been working nights and weekends:

The Justice Department is investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company that later hired her, according to officials in federal law enforcement and the Interior Department.

The criminal investigation centers on the Interior Department’s 2006 decision to award three lucrative oil shale leases on federal land in Colorado to a Shell subsidiary. Over the years it would take to extract the oil, according to calculations from Shell and a Rand Corp. expert, the deal could net the company hundreds of billions of dollars.

…

Norton, 55, was President Bush’s first Interior secretary. She had worked as an Interior Department attorney before being elected Colorado’s attorney general. Later, as a private lawyer, she represented mining, timber and oil companies.

As Interior secretary, she embraced an industry-friendly approach to environmental regulation that she called “cooperative conservation” and pushed the department to open more public land for energy production.

I hear people say, quite frequently, that corruption in the US isn’t as bad as it is in Europe and elsewhere. If that’s somehow true, it must be a comment on the failings of our system of government. And media. And embarrassment. Norton’s alleged traverse is all too common, and when that’s the case, who needs other forms of corruption? We seem to have found the sweet spot. The revolving door that lets foxes traipse into and out of the hen house with impunity, all the while castigating government as ineffective and ‘the problem’ would be the height of contempt were it not for the self-lubricating irony with which we find no bounds to our amusement (nor depths of silent admiration for these guileful players and their cunning stunts), even as we free ourselves from all possible insult. And this is not to single out literary critics for special abuse. In medicine, they induce this kind of insentience with anesthesia.

And what will it take for this to be reported with the relentless scorn given to ACORN, Van Jones or Henry Louis Gates yelling at that cop not to arrest him in his own house? Wait… those stories had black people in them! Wait… there’s a black guy in the White House!

This Norton thing hardly compares.

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“Busy”

How often do you hear that in response to the question, “How’s it going?” or “How are you?” As a signifier busy has replaced doing well – equal parts occupied and honest, abandoned of concern for quality or well-being. And we all understand what it means: harried, overworked, over-scheduled, stretched thin. And we all can sort of commiserate about the state of affairs that deposits us there, short for time and ill-nourished by several easily quantifiable measures. What was once friendly advice after a trauma or tragedy (try to stay busy [and not think about it]) has become the price of admission to this grand life of convenience with which we’ve surrounded ourselves. We have connected affluence and worth to a high volume of activity, heedless even of the nature of that activity.

But when someone is actually engaged in some thing or activity that might produce actual fatigue or absent-mindedness, they don’t report being ‘busy’ but most likely just share what it is they’re doing and allow a conversation to bleed out from there. The importance of the activity, in other words, would take precedence over anything for which ‘busy’ could be a placeholder or substitute for conversation. So we also kind of know that for which ”busy’ stands: quotidian, not quite meaningful but necessary, a function of several levels of overlapping obligations and commitments intended to keep our daily lives moving, with no regard for moving us, or it or anything, forward. It’s hamsterwheel-y.

And it’s not just moving kids around, paying bills or buying groceries that applies here. Even our work can and often does take on the characteristic of motion instead of movement, to the extent that we lose track of the distinctions and forget it’s even happening, and soon the elements of life all run together into an endless stream of commitments we’re merely rushing around to fulfill. We openly admit to ‘staying busy’ as though that is something to be admired and not the minimum-level activity it infers; it certainly saves us from accusations of harboring the evil dread of free and open time, from which surely nothing good can come. And we’re not even appalled by this anymore, if we ever were. We just add another errand to list, get our prescriptions filled and try to… stay busy.

But this is our lives we’re talking about here, and merely being busy should be considered a kind sentence, a punishment for not being engaged in worthwhile activity – whether that activity is writing sonnets or selecting the near-perfect tomato. Actually, especially if it’s about shopping or anything related to cooking or any time-intensive activity ‘Busy’ simply doesn’t begin to cover nor would we want it to. Many things we might do are just more important than that. So we should frown upon and stop allowing ‘busy’ as a kind of lame stand-in for living. Every element of transitional (nee sustianable) living will flow out of that. It won’t be seamless and will take time. But the best things often do.

Because I’ve seen so little reference to it anywhere, here’s a link to the best op-ed in the Times/IHT this week.

Image by my daughter, taken at our vet’s office, of self-rescued chickens that plunged from a transport truck and towards a, um, different fate.

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Managing the Advantage

I bring your attention to that least-sympathetic subset, the born rich. That would be you.

There is a difference between earning your living and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, e.g., that which challenges you and brings fulfillment while affording bread and shelter. This is a touchy subject, and many no doubt confuse one with the other. After all, aren’t we only meant to provide for ourselves and our children? For much of the world, securing this line of provisions is a great challenge. But just like finance, debt, food choices and room colors, we have expanded the meaning of this concept to cover much more than the essentials. Or rather, we have re-defined the essentials to include things and people other than those specifically ours.

Like it or not, this is a society characterized by distinct advantage, and advantage comes at the expense of someone or some thing. We get more food, more education, more attention as children, more time with family, more opportunity to pursue what we want than we likely deserve, especially in relation to people who happen to be born other places. And what do we do with all this advantage? Mostly waste it, zapping pixel spacemen and frightening ourselves that someone’s going to take something away from us, snorting garbage, building walls, worrying about taxes going for welfare (but not war). Expensive educations that only teach us how to make more money are a useless fraud and undermine our innocence at its most vulnerable point. We systemically remove that which is our only hope, and hence must fall back to dismal goals like mere sustainability.

I bring up the art of living very often on this site for a reason – its inescapable importance to contributing to some kind of forwardly manageable society – including its natural environment. You can learn how to do it but the window is tiny and requires a lot of unpleasantness like history, literature, science, philosophy, aesthetics and language. Relative unhappiness in your work might be the operative predicate for an effective sale pitch, but it’s a lousy reality. The backside of the Puritan work ethic on which this country was ostensibly built is that we come to naturally despise work – the implication being that if you love what you do, you’re not really working. If you doubt this, consult our lust for lotteries and other avenues to unearned riches. These are heinous and self-administered tricks, designed, like so much, merely to separate you from your money, and the cause of no small amount of suffering. Having the laugh on that count should be the whole point; revel in a seamless transition between work and life.

If we have to sell ourselves on a concept like altruism, enact laws – or worse, dangle the carrot of eternal salvation – just to get us to do the right things, we might as well just set the blender to puree, devolve into anarchy and start over again. There is a blatant self-interest in living well and actively supporting the same for others as a constituent part thereof. But it’s decidely not the self-interest we’ve been taught to admire and protect. The point is to expand the advantage. Do you know what that means?

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Simon says

Businesses with vested interests tell us what we want. SUVs with abstract names, extra large lattes, suburban barracks with manicured lawns, sugary donuts instead of good bread… whatever it is, beneath the illusions of freedom and choice we labor under the tyrannical hand of focus groups and placebo-addicted control platoons calibrated to adjust even for random reactions to an array of product possibilities. The feedback provides direction; but we should remember, the tests are rigged.

This is not to darken your Wednesday, only to point out that a good deal of reality is circumscribed by conflicted interests, i.e., being made up anyway, only to the advantage of certain parties. What’s keeping you from making it up based on your own set of priorities? Only the minor discomfort of swimming against the tide for a little while. But you’ll get used to this as it makes you stronger, carving your own opinions and putting them into practice. You’ll even lose a few friends. Much of this is quite dangerous, as it puts an enormous responsibility on you to know what you’re doing/buying/eating/reading/taking/saying/believing and otherwise allowing some space inside that head of yours. But look at it this way – Simon says you have that responsibility anyway.

Green means calm in the face of cowardice, turning the good faith paradigm on its head; be skeptical, get critical. Before we internalize truths, be open to lies. Refuse to be mocked; admit when you’re wrong; keep digging when you’re right.