Fuel is a Feminist Issue

Fascinating column in the Times Online;

Fuel duty is not just a political deal-breaker for Gordon Brown; it is a genuinely feminist issue. Without the short cuts afforded to women by cheap, flexible, personal transport, many working mothers would simply not be able to honour their various commitments to home, children and employer. Until someone can arrange the establishment of a Utopian Britain, where children cycle half a mile to school down empty, safe country lanes and mums work just around the corner, the car, for better or for worse, is going to remain king - and fuel duty an issue that affects even those sections of society without tattooed forearms.

Amanda Kovatanna put it best;

Along the way, he reveals pithy insights to explain how the American system works in contrast with the Russian one. For instance the story of the classless society is exemplified by the concept of a middle class — something Americans have proudly espoused — which he points out is held together by the common denominator of everyone owning a car. That's right, not education, not equal opportunity, or equal rights but the one-ton behemoth that we must have to get around the wasteful geography created by suburbia.

We know about this waste from the film The End of Suburbia and James Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere and all the other peak oil fellows, but Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the middle class.

And there it is in a nutshell. Few national politicians dare give voice to what's just beyond the signpost up ahead. Being unwilling and unable to discuss reality, how then could they ever go about proposing, much less implementing, any of the radical engineering redesigns required to genuinely rebuild along viable and sustainable lines? The patient is as yet utterly unwilling to hear an objective and accurate diagnosis. With no diagnosis, how can she participate in her own treatment, much less get on board with the radical measures required to effect an actual cure?

Airline Deathwatch

Also in the Times Online;

Airlines are being forced to pay cash in advance for jet fuel as the major oil companies tighten the screws on an industry that is being crushed by an extraordinary surge in the price of crude oil.

Sources within the airline industry indicate that credit is being denied to most of the leading American carriers and the practice is moving to Europe and Asia. So uncertain is the cash solvency of the industry that jet fuel suppliers insist on prepayments into special bank accounts.

A credit controller at a leading European multinational oil company told The Times that the oil industry was moving to jet fuel prepayment. “It’s common in the US and it is moving to Europe. We have been moving to prepayment since Swissair went bust.”

The need to put up money before delivery of fuel is a huge financial burden that has been shifted from the oil companies to the airlines. According to John Armbrust, a US jet fuel consultant, the oil industry had $5 billion (£2.5 billion) of jet fuel credit outstanding to airlines before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now they are demanding that airlines leave cash on deposit.

You Are On Your Own!!!

Three days late, and three dollars short is all that the government is capable of being in response to the massive issues du jour. Neither presidential candidates or the deliberative body of congress is up to the task at hand. Given that all the candidates are from the deliberative body, well......,

The possible economic cost of confronting global warming — from higher electricity bills to more expensive gasoline — is driving the debate as climate change takes center stage in Congress.

The Senate will begin considering legislation Monday that would mandate a reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants, refineries, factories and transportation, cutting heat-trapping pollution by two-thirds by mid-century.

The debate opens as Americans are reeling over $4 gasoline and soaring expenses to heat and cool their homes. That's making it all that harder to sell the merits of a bill that would transform the nation's energy industries and — as its critics will argue — cause energy prices to increase even more.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., one of the chief sponsors of the bill, says computer studies suggest the overall impact on energy costs could be modest with several projections showing overall continued economic growth. The measure calls for tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks to offset higher energy bills, its sponsors say.

Returning from the Memorial Day recess, lawmakers also have to fix the international food aid and trade components of a farm bill that, through a printing error, were left out of the parchment version that President Bush signed into law last month. And the House and Senate are still working on a bill to fund the Iraq war another year, expand G.I. Bill college benefits and strengthen New Orleans levees.

While this week's Senate debate on global warming is viewed as a watershed in climate change politics, both sides of the issue acknowledge the likelihood of getting the bill passed is slim, at least this year.

Speaking of 3rd Rails - Legitimizing Marijuana

In today's NYTimes online;

Medical marijuana is legal in California, but federal law still bans sales. Amid the uncertainty that this creates — including the occasional raid by federal agents — a full-fledged industry has blossomed, taking in about $2 billion a year and generating $100 million in state sales taxes, CNBC reported.

Setting up a clinic “can cost as much as a hundred grand,” Ms. Wells reports. The equipment, the cuttings from which plants are grown and office space all tend to be expensive. And from there, the costs only grow, mostly in the form of legal fees. Many clinics keep lawyers on retainer.

Nonetheless, “this is the business model of the future,” says JoAnna La Force of Farmacy, an herbal remedy shop in Southern California. Ms. LaForce says her business is close to breaking even (medicalmarijuanafarmacy.com).

The business model of the future won't just be about folks in California who want to self-medicate or even just to get high, rather, it'll be about locally cultivated and utilized Food, Fuel, and Fibre.

Energy - THE Political Third Rail

OK, so this one comes directly out of the twilight zone. I can't believe I missed it last week, but then again, it WAS strategically placed in the Religion section of the Sunday Washington Post. James Howard Kunstler was one of the first non-petroleum hitters to write a book and participate in a documentary intended to colorfully and accessibly communicate the challenges aborning from Peak Oil.

Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

So those are the facts and they comprise a lot of the grist we mill hereabouts.

In any discussion of political "third rail" issues, it's meet and right to talk about the climate setting that takes place in the mainstream media, given the media's role in defining normative discourse. I mean, there's gotta be a reason they call it "mainstream" right? Kunstler goes there, and I guess thereby provided the WaPo with all the reason it needed to bury this column in its religion section;

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.

So here's our catch-22 in all its bizarre magnificence. Because it's been ignored, and all mainstream policy and praxis, including corporate for-profit policy and praxis has been driven in the absence of knowledge about Peak Oil, everyone is essentially unprepared for the massive changes at hand.

Because no one is prepared to deal, nobody of consequence in the public sphere is empowered to responsibly broach the central issue facing the American polity, i.e., the end of the era of cheap energy and all that that entails for the end of the American "way of life". Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, but you're gonna catch unheard of political hell if you're a presidential candidate and you try to light that bad boy up in a public space.

Kent WA Joins the $4.00 Gas Club

Courtesy Big Don - Today in Kent Washington

Zbig....,

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, said that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism was too readily used whenever its power was called into question.

Presenting a solution for the Middle East, he listed historical compromises that had to be made by Israelis and Palestinians but accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – the largest and most influential Jewish lobby group – of obstructing peace efforts.

He said: "Aipac has consistently opposed a two-state solution and a lot of members of Congress have been intimidated and I don't think that's healthy." Full Monty in the UK Telegraph.

Father Pfleger

Obama said he was "deeply disappointed" by Pfleger's comments. "As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us," he said in a statement. "That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause."

Where is the Outrage?

Robert Scheer at TruthDig; Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.[...]

Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.

Global Rorschachian

In english Al-Ahram, Gamal Nkrumah writes one of the strangest, most disjoint assessments of a political figure that I've ever seen. It's a mess which perfectly exemplifies the unique rorschachian qualities that Baraka Obamamandius brings to the face of global hegemony.

Barack Obama is a deft politician. He makes sure that all and sundry understand that there is much to be gained from peering into the deep recesses of his mind. Obama is not, contrary to what many of his detractors would have us believe, about obscurantism. There is a world of difference between an obscurantist attitude and a multifaceted and manifold mind.

There is nothing nebulous about Obama. He is also a heart-throb with a head for political foresight. He is not about entertaining his audience, as many American politicians, particularly black ones, have been prone to do. The phenomenon of a magnetic politician driving America in a new direction is nothing new. Comparisons have been made between Obama and John F Kennedy. However, steering America away from the warpath is no walkover task, as the latter learned the hard way.

However, the political climate in America today appears to be ready for change, even though those who espouse anachronistic opinions hold out.

"...And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat between you and me -- us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand."

"Ask not what your country can do for you"

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Cult of Personality

Global Scenario Planning

From the dystopian management consulting files, i.e., the stories used to rationalize operational changes, rather than the substantive changes in how we do what we do, "Future scenarios is intended to help both policy makers and activists come to terms with the end of the era of growth."

While the end of growth is so unthinkable to many policy makers and economists that they use the term ‘negative-growth’, we now face less and less available energy each year, coupled with a destabilized climate. The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other.

Future Scenarios uses a scenario planning framework to bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change. Scenario planning uses stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail or be transformed. Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Scenarios range from the relatively benign Green Tech to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

Cerritos Joins the $4.00 Gas Club

Courtesy Rembom - May 28, 2008, at Bloomfield and Artesia, in Cerritos, CA

The Genetic Determinism Open Thread

quoth Big Don;

You can't debate with folks who won't even believe mountains of undisputed peer-reviewed research and related supporting statistics from a multitude of respected sources that all point to the same conclusions.

responded Submariner;

What exactly are those conclusions? Do they confirm preexisting bias on the part of the investigator or advance the agenda of the study's underwriter? Are the categories value laden or truly random assignments, like one's Zodiac sign, which don't confer or denote advantage?

Now somewhere in there, I got in it for half a hot second. Okay, twice actually and once with an uncivil dose of mean-spirited ridicule, not exactly a gracious host. My bad. Everytime I try to get out, they pull me back in!!!



quoth rembom, "Ah'm yo huckleberry";

BD, 17,000 goes to basic principles, combinatoric explosions, and such. Pretty obvious...to anyone who has done even a modicum of homework on the fundamentals of the theories at issue with this genetic determinacy of yours.

What is to be said of people who are provably mistaken, and yet actively resist knowledge or understanding of the proof? I call that willfully ignorant. If you want to call it ad hominem, I suggest you look the word up.

So here's where we're at. If you search eugenics or IQ on this blog, you'll pull up pretty much the lion's share of my thoughts on the subject. I'm not really feeling the urge to debate what for all intents and purposes, (my intents and purposes at least), is a settled matter. However, since the spirit seems to be moving folks, I thought I'd go ahead and dedicate a post and associated open comment thread to scrip-a-scrapping about the heritability of IQ.

I'm going to stay out of it. My point of departure on this theme was nicely summed up by the autocratic Abiola Lapite. Four of whose treatments of the issue;

Genetic Determinism
Population Genetics
Quantitative Traits
IQ Genes

I linked in a post last year - at the peak of my own multi-front debates on the subject. If you feel so moved to enter the fray, and you're more than welcome to bring reinforcements, by all means do so here, on this thread, dedicated to that purpose.

Iran Air Strike by August?

Rumors of the impending attack on Iran have been rife for three years now. Here's the latest in Tuesday's Asia Times online.

The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.

An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration's declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that "all options remain on the table".

Worldwide Energy Costs Increased $6 TRILLION by War in Iraq

The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.

The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

He spoke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two weeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002, compared with the fourfold increase of the 1973 and 1974 "oil shock" that ended the world's long postwar boom.

Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities.

Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq 's oil, said it is the only one of the world's biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow.

Production in eight of the others -- the US, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico -- has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just two million barrels.

Dr Salameh told the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil last month that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. "This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."

Gas Jacking?

So a month ago, it was about construction site and abandoned house copper jackings. Now it's down to straight up gas jackings. I don't mean the tried and true drive-offs no, that's a dignified old-school method for uncompensated fuel appropriation.

And it's not about siphoning either. With locked caps and sensor balls in the tank, those are increasingly difficult to accomplish. This new maneuver is straight out of the methhead's cookbook of high-risk, low thought, low yield hardscrabble crime and criminality. Gas thieves puncture tanks, steal fuel; SUVs easier targets;

"What made this particular method so dangerous and concerning for us was the way in which they were doing it — using cordless drills to puncture holes in these tanks," he said of the rash of cases his department has investigated this spring. "The heat, friction generated could have easily sparked a fire. It just made for a dangerous situation for the suspects and the community."

Tank puncturing has yet to reach the radar screens of law enforcement organizations such as the National Sheriffs' Association, or the Automotive Service Association, a group that represents independent garage operators.

If you're still rolling around in a big old gas guzzling truck, best to check underneath on the regular and keep your eyes peeled for scurvy looking types roaming the neighborhood with gas cans....,

ExxonMobile Shareholder Activism

So I've been tracking the theme of responsible corporate governance for a minute or two. Starting with the hopeless, let's boycott ExxonMobile hoax, on to the Rockefeller family shareholder resolutions, and then the likely real threat to reptilian supremacy in the executive suite, bounty-hunting trial lawyers.

Wednesday is showtime, when the potentially rancorous shareholder meeting will take place in Dallas. Comes now to the fray a new entrant, this one on the side of the dragons vs the would be dragon-slayers;

It could be the nuclear option to silence rebellious investors. A libertarian activist has hit back at ExxonMobil's environmental critics by tabling a resolution that would outlaw shareholder social activism.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund, which controls $11m (£5.5m) of assets, has proposed amending Exxon's articles of association to prevent the oil company's shareholders from putting forward advisory resolutions at annual meetings.

The fund's managing partner, Steven Milloy, opposes a coalition led by the Rockefeller family that is calling on Exxon to pay more attention to global warming. "They're not bona fide shareholders," Milloy says. "They're not shareholders who are invested in Exxon because they think it's a good investment - they're shareholders who want to use Exxon to advance their social and political agenda."

Libertarian? Not so much. Looks for all the world to me like a corporate political action committee - which instead of working the public polity, is focused on political action within the ranks of voting shareholders. Interestingly, the Fraternal Order of Police has also sided with the reptilians, as well;

The National Fraternal Order of Police, which represents public safety officers who have pensions invested in Exxon Mobil, has publicly opposed the shareholder effort to change company policy.

"By splitting the jobs of chairman and chief executive officer, by imposing rigid, ideologically based conditions on the company's future operations," the organization wrote in a letter to Tillerson, the reform effort "would hamstring Exxon Mobil's profitability and growth."

Law and order every time....,

Warsocialism and the Price of Oil

Oil Wars - Not only are the raging wars in the Middle East responsible for energy price inflation, they are also responsible for price inflation of many other commodities, especially grains and other foodstuff, whose production and transportation depend on fuel. According to the World Bank, food prices have more than doubled over the past three years. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147% over the past year alone. The mounting food prices have caused hunger and deadly violence in many countries, including Haiti, Egypt, Thailand, Indonesia, Senegal, and Malaysia.[...]

Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends—wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices—tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets.[...]

It is not surprising, then, that many elected officials with input or voting power in the process of the appropriation of the Pentagon budget find themselves in the pocket of defense contractors. Neither is it surprising that these dubious relationships should serve as breeding grounds for the near legendary levels of waste, inefficiency, and corruption that surround the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Two major conclusions follow from this discussion. The first is that, as pointed out earlier, war and political instability in the Middle East are the major driving forces behind the soaring price of oil; and that, therefore, to contain or reverse the rising trend of energy prices requires bringing U.S. troops home. The second conclusion is that achievement of this goal, the goal of ending U.S. wars of aggression, is possible only if (a) money or profits are taken out of war, and (b) money is taken out of elections.

Micro-Insurgencies.....,

Came across a very interesting group blog this weekend, called we can do better. The post quoted here is a translation of a french news story about the U.S. housing foreclosure crisis. With amazement in his voice, the French newsreader announces the gruesome details of homelessness in the United States: "During the US election campaign the number of evictions continues to rise, even to double, as the credit crisis affects more and more people. In the American way, unfeelingly, the bailiffs arrive, put the furniture on the footpath, and the only thing left for the evicted families is their eyes to weep with."

A woman interviewee says, "When I telephoned the credit society, they said, "Well, if you can no longer pay, just leave the keys for us and go outside."

But finally people are beginning to revolt against these insane impositions by their mere fellows in a financial system which is no longer serving the community!

Although so many more people are returning their keys, they are first "meticulously vandalising" the houses they are forced to leave. "Systematic destruction of walls, toilets, electrical wiring, decorations - they destroy everything, with rage in their hearts to avenge themselves."

A bailiff describes his experience: "We have found toilets destroyed by sledge-hammers. People have disemboweled pipes to make them leak; they have cut the wires to the air-conditioners and pulled wiring out of the light fittings."

And it's working: these vandalised properties become unsaleable, even at half-price. Of course this means that cancelling mortgages is costing the banks a lot of money. So now they have begun to pay people bonds if they leave their houses in good condition.

Commentary from newsreader: "Yet the simple solution of renegotiating credit simply doesn't seem to occur to anyone!"

Report based on "Etats-Unis : la crise des subprimes poussent les Américains à quitter leur maison et parfois à la saccager" 20h15m32s, from France2 News 25-5-08, 20h15m32s