Curbing Energy Demand Growth

The Energy Productivity Opportunity - Energy demand growth will accelerate to 2.2 percent, driven mostly by developing markets and consumer uses such as residential, commercial and transportation. Vast opportunities exist to curb demand by improving energy productivity through investments that yield rates of return 10 percent or higher, but targeted interventions will be needed to achieve them. Capturing these opportunities would contribute up to a half of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission abatement required to cap the long-term concentration of GHG in the atmosphere at 450 to 550 parts per million (a range that experts suggest is required to prevent the global mean temperature from increasing more than 2° centigrade).

MGI offers an in-depth look at what's driving soaring global demand for energy in different countries and end users (including commercial and residential buildings, road and air transportation, energy-intensive industries such as chemicals and aluminum, less-energy-intensive ones such as food processing, and electrical generation). Using a proprietary economic model, MGI provides a glimpse into how global energy will grow to 2020 with current policies and sizes the substantial opportunity to curb this growth and, with it, GHGs. It also includes a detailed discussion of the reasons why available opportunities to raise energy productivity are not being captured and what policies are needed to ensure they are.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

If it's not easy for Mayor Bloomberg to implement greening initiatives, then you know it's going to be hell up in Harlem for many of us to navigate the labyrinthine regulatory and technical barriers to implementing increased efficiency both individually, and more importantly, collectively. I see opportunity for the enterprising artful dodger.

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his grand plan to make New York City “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city,” he offered a banquet of 127 excellent ideas. They included congestion pricing, more parks, windmills to produce energy and a promise to plant one million trees in the next 10 years. But as he has learned since that heady day more than a year ago, greening the apple is not automatic.

New York’s backward State Legislature stepped on his forward-thinking plan for congestion pricing. More recently, a federal judge blocked Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to replace gas-guzzling taxis with cleaner hybrid cabs by 2012. Congestion pricing is still worth the effort, and we expect Mr. Bloomberg to regroup and move forward on these important initiatives, even if he has to use slightly different methods.

He already has shown that he can come up with inventive ways to outwit Albany. Because it involves a fee and not a tax, his proposal to charge 6 cents for each plastic bag sold in the city would not need state approval. There may be some opposition in the City Council, but this would definitely help not only the budget but the city’s environment, since these dreadful little conveniences can last for hundreds of years, kill wildlife, clog landfills and spread litter across the urban landscape.

He’ll have to be equally creative to achieve his objective of replacing the city’s entire fleet of 13,000 yellow cabs with hybrids. These boxy new vehicles emit far fewer pollutants and use far less gasoline than the lumbering Ford Crown Victorias favored by many taxi owners (and some of their larger customers).

In response to a lawsuit from the taxi companies, Judge Paul Crotty, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, blocked the mayor’s plan. Mr. Bloomberg had sought to impose tougher fuel-efficiency standards as a way to force the owners to buy hybrids, but Judge Crotty ruled, correctly, that only the federal government can set mileage standards.

Congress could solve the problem by amending the law to allow cities to set their own fuel-efficiency standards. But since that is highly unlikely, Mr. Bloomberg will have to come at the problem from a different angle. One possibility worth exploring is to offer special incentives, like lower fees, to owners who adopt hybrids.

I believe one of the keys will be getting people to think about and become engaged with actually quantifying the amount of energy that they personally use. Kind of like calorie counting....,

Efficiency Is Still a Sound Investment

So, puttering around the NYTimes this morning, I stumbled upon the Green Inc. blog which is a continuing item in the business section. This article quickly caught my eye.

Does the financial crisis and reduced investment in transformational green technologies put energy efficiency back in vogue?

That is what a new report by McKinsey Global Institute suggests.

In the report, “Fueling Sustainable Development: The Energy Productivity Solution,” to be published Wednesday, the institute says the uncertain economic outlook and the recent period of record-high oil prices could push governments and businesses to invest more in energy productivity.

In the developed world, that could mean more money for energy-saving equipment in manufacturing and energy-saving devices when buildings are remodeled, like improved insulation and lower-energy-consuming lighting.

In the developing world — where energy demand is expected to increase by 65 percent by 2020 — these sorts of investments could be even more important. These countries already account for more than half of global energy demand, and this share is on course to rise to 60 percent over the next decade. China alone is expected to account for 34 percent of the growth in global energy demand over that period.

Interestingly, the article concludes thus - the political and economic challenges facing efficiency investments are at least equal to those confronting transformative technologies like solar and wind power.

Memo to President-Elect Obama

Falls Church News Press | Sometime during your first year in office, your new Secretary of Energy is likely to come by and lay out the problem for you - world oil production is going down - perhaps faster than imagined; world oil exports are dropping even faster; prices are rising; and new domestic supplies will never make up the difference. The bottom line will be that the country is going to have to get along with steadily decreasing amounts of oil each year for the foreseeable future and that much will have to change if the economy is to continue to function.

It may take some time before you appreciate all the consequences of oil depletion. They will be everywhere. Transportation costs will go much higher. The GDP will slide. Jobs will disappear, and shortages will develop. At some point there will be a general agreement that looking for more fossil fuels or that a large scale effort to convert coal to liquid fuel is hopeless. A massive overhaul of the U.S. economy including transportation, lifestyles, jobs, agriculture, and industrial production will be necessary if we are going to continue running a civilization with declining quantities of fossil fuel.

This national epiphany will be the beginning of the great transition that will dominate the U.S. government and the world for many decades. New governmental organizations, policies, and procedures will be necessary to effect the transition for it will involve nearly every aspect of modern life. Do not be tempted by the notion that the markets alone can deal with this transition. A few minutes' reflection on what will be involved in forced reductions in the use of fossil fuels while still maintaining social order and some semblance of 20th century lifestyles will lead to the realization that this can only be accomplished by government coordination. We are no longer in the 19th century living on scattered self-sufficient farms. There are 300 million of us in the United States today, and we are totally, utterly, completely dependent on fossil fuels for our being.

The challenge just ahead is going to be the greatest since the Republic was founded. It will dwarf the challenges of the War Between the States, the Great Depression and World War II and will test your leadership to the utmost.

What is Peak Oil?

Peak Oil is the term given for the point of maximum global production of oil, after which oil production will decline over a period of years until all recoverable oil is depleted. Peak Oil is a geological reality that is recognized by U.S. National Academy of Sciences, U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. General Accountability Office, U.S. Congressional Budget Office, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Petroleum Council, and the major oil companies. Although there is uncertainty about when Peak Oil production will occur, most independent studies conclude that oil production peaked in 2006, or that it will peak within a few years. Because the global demand for oil is increasing rapidly, a decline in oil production will generate sharp increases in the price of oil as buyers compete for decreasing oil supplies. Because oil under girds the economy, oil price increases will cause price inflation in most products and services. Due to higher prices, consumers will reduce their purchases of products and services. Unemployment and economic depression will follow. As oil production declines, the global economy will stagnate and collapse. Because the U.S. is highly dependent on imported oil, the U.S. faces severe Peak Oil impacts. This explanation is continued at Peak Oil Report.

Energy Security-11 Key Challenges

Smart Economy | President elect Barack Obama has repeatedly said that energy security is at the center of his presidential campaign and platform. However the public has been promised change. Everybody is counting on change-- change right now!!

The media today is even seriously asking: What can Congress do in the next 100 days? How naive!!!

Obama last night showed that he is not just hope-inspiring but that he’s also a realist, but I’m not sure if the jubilant crowd in Grant Park in Chicago or across the nation picked up on Obama’s insight and foresight. Here's one of the eleven challenges;

The hard truth that Obama will have to sell to the US public is that Americans are energy hogs and that they will have to learn to live with less..the era of cheap oil is over. As Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba has said:”….Americans, who consume twice as much energy per capita as rich Europeans (and have nothing to show for it, as they are not richer, do not live longer, are not better educated and do not work less) should embark on a long road of trying to live within some sensible limits, which means less and not more. Everything else is quite secondary.”

You really should go read them all.

Something Collective...,

Huffington Post | The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me ... answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Hat tip to Submariner

Top Priority Is Stabilizing the Patient

NYTimes | “Unfortunately, the next president’s No. 1 priority is going to be preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the last century from turning into the next Great Depression,” says Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser. “That has to be No. 1. Nobody ever wanted that to be the priority. But that’s clearly where we are.”

Throughout the campaign, whenever Mr. Obama was asked about the financial crisis, he liked to turn the conversation back to his long-term plans, by saying that they were meant to solve the very problems that had caused the crisis in the first place. Back in January, he predicted to me that the financial troubles would probably get significantly worse in 2008. They had their roots in middle-class income stagnation, which helped cause an explosion in debt, and the mortgage meltdown was likely to be just the beginning, he said then.

His prognosis was right — and the pundits now demanding that he give up major parts of his economic agenda in response to the financial crisis are, for the most part, wrong. When you discover that a patient is in even worse shape than you thought, you don’t become less aggressive about treatment. But you do have to deal with the most acute problems first.

What Now? - Goal State - The 2000 Watt Society

originally posted 11/08/07 - reposted in January 08, and now reposted for the third time with updated links in the context of discussion of "what now?" change agency and coalition building:

The "2000 Watt Society" is a radical model of efficient, high-quality living being pushed by the Swiss Council of the Federal Institute of Technology. Worldwide average energy consumption per capita is about 17,500 kilowatt hours, working out to a continuous consumption of 2000 watts. But as we all know, that per capita consumption is not evenly distributed. Switzerland, efficient for Europe, uses around 5000 watts per capita; Europe as a whole, about 6000 watts per capita. Developing nations use substantially less -- the average for Africa as a whole is about 500 watts per capita. The US, conversely, runs about 12,000 watts per person. The Swiss Council wants to move the nation as a whole towards a 2000 watts per person goal, not by cutting back on the Swiss standard of living, but by dramatically improving the energy efficiency of all aspects of life.

A document entitled "Smarter Living" (PDF) lays out the details of the agenda:

What Now? (Originally Posted as Change What?)

OK, so we've gotten what we asked for and some of the hitters have already been through asking the hard kwestin, what now? I originally posted this in January of this year addressing what specific things would have to be at the top of the new president's agenda. Submitted once again for your consideration and commentary.

Right off the top, this post should not be mistaken as a criticism of Obama. It's not. I sincerely believe that we American people will absolutely elect the leadership that we deserve.

That said, let's be serious as in E.C. Hopkins class seriousness about the scope of what has to be addressed by all levels of leadership at the twilight of industrial civilization. This means not only the elected administrative manager of political governance, but the proprietor class which sets policy, funds, and directs administrative management embodied in the office of the president.

At the beginning of November I tried to enjoin this type of discussion with the post Goal State - How Do We Get There. (I also reposted this article in January) The current uncritical excitement surrounding Obama's win in the Iowa caucus brings me back to the article that inspired that post in early November. Hoping for a New Deal which paints the problem from the perspective that E.C. labored to get us all to consider. In my opinion, this article gives us a very concrete and constructive place to temper our political expectations for Obamian change agency.

Richard Heinberg's current Museletter consists of a thoughtful essay ("Big Melt Meets Big Empty") concerning the alternative realities of science (physical reality) and politics (political reality). Heinberg identifies the opposition between these two as the key cause of the seeming inability of political institutions in the US and elsewhere to constructively respond to the twin threats of climate change and resource depletion. He advocates working toward overcoming this opposition, to whatever degree that is possible. His key suggestion is that interested groups of citizens develop realistic assessments of the efficacy of various potential policy responses, and that they then use these assessments to create an advocacy program to push for the enactment of desired policies.

Looming in the background for Heinberg, however, are two critical and related specters, either of which would likely doom any constructive initiatives that might be developed: 1) resource wars; and 2) implacable opposition on the part of elites. It seems to me that a fruitful way of looking at these twin threats, is to see resource wars as, in a sense, the bitter consequence of elite opposition to ameliorative policies. That is to say, if, faced with energy scarcity, elites succeed in blocking serious consideration of "powerdown" approaches (like the oil depletion protocol), resource wars become the likely outcome - - the "default" option, as it were. Conversely, if ameliorative policy options are viable, resort to "last one standing" warfare can hopefully be avoided. If this is so, then the question of the potential for elite acceptance of some such policies seems to be the key factor in assessing the possibility of a hopeful outcome to energy transition.

Ultimately, power holders must be convinced that [energy transition] policies, if obnoxious to them now, will be far less destructive to their interests than a complete breakdown of society and biosphere - which is the very real alternative. For a historic example of a similar conversion of elites think of the 1930s New Deal: then the titans of industry had to sacrifice some of their financial power in order to keep from losing it all. Many wealthy individuals never forgave Franklin Roosevelt, whom they regarded as a "traitor to his class," but most of them reluctantly agreed that redistribution represented the lesser of evils.

The analysis offered is original, detailed, and very well worth your perusal. Here's the thing, we're not simply talking about temporary wealth redistribution as a stopgap in order to ensure continuity of the governance status quo. Instead, we're talking about what will be required to transition our entire way of life (or more accurately what remains of it) into an entirely new modus operandi. The plans that have been operationalized under the Bush administration for the transition suggest some rather draconian designs on the future of Americaness - frankly at this juncture - I haven't heard any serious counterproposals to those plans and their continuing unfolding.

Atlanta? Drought anybody? - Is there a single candidate who has shown the perspicacity or gumption to even mention the slow motion catastrophe unfolding in the southeastern U.S.? That's pretty much minimum baseline for a serious operator. That said, I don't see a single serious change agent operator on the presidential event horizon. What I see is a collection of opportunistic faces that will be applied to pre-existing plans and narratives much as lipstick might be applied to a pig or frosting to a turd.

What Now? - Systemüberwindung - II

Originally posted in January `08.

"Materialism is to ill-being what smoking is to lung cancer."

To follow James's analogy with smoking: it took roughly 50 years from the first serious evidence of its harm to health to the point last year when smoking in public places was banned in the whole of the United Kingdom. We are now at the beginning of the cycle and James has played a major part in popularising vital ideas; but ahead lies a long, slow slog against powerful vested interests to win the battle.

The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza

The single most important idea to which James needs to apply all his missionary zeal is that mental well-being is a public health issue. Happiness is not a matter of personal performance and effort ("I've achieved it" or "why have I failed?") but a product of a set of environmental - social, economic and cultural - circumstances. The highly unequal, competitive, materialistic and individualistic cultures of neo-liberal economies produce emotional distress; they cultivate the insecurities which drive hyper consumerism ... and thus they make us ill. In the most telling analogy of the book, James argues that materialism is to ill-being what smoking is to lung cancer.

Drawing extensively on the work of American psychologist Tim Kasser, James argues that our recent increased wealth has come at the cost of the emotional well-being of a large proportion of the population; rates of distress among women in the UK almost doubled between 1982 and 2000. This is true of New Zealand and Australia as well as the UK and the US, in striking contrast with more egalitarian and collectivist countries such as Denmark or Germany. He tracks how "selfish capitalism" generates insecurity and inflates comparisons; how a winner-takes-all competitiveness merely creates losers and a pandemic of low self esteem, with its compensatory pathologies around celebrity and status.

Remarkably, Erich Fromm, the Marxist psychoanalyst and Buddhist writer, foresaw much of this half a century ago and James quotes his prescient analysis of the "passive, empty, anxious, isolated person for whom life has no meaning" and who compensates through "compulsive consumption". There are interesting issues to draw out of Fromm's work about how our mass consumer societies, ironically, cripple personal agency despite their avowals of individual choice, but James doesn't dwell on this. In fact, agency remains a confused thread in his argument: exactly who is the selfish capitalist? And is there a hint of a conspiracy theory as to how selfish capitalism has "hijacked" the English-speaking world to establish a political economy which benefits only a wealthy elite? He refers to an "invisible hand" which suppresses those ideas which challenge selfish capitalism, lulling us all into a false consciousness, but one wishes he would come clean, name the culprits and provide an explanation of why and how they hoodwink us.

So now what? Any proposals for system overcoming? (and no, this is not a mean liminal jab at brother Obama's nicotine jones...,)

The Next President

NYTimes | This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:

An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States.

Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.

His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.

Mr. Obama spoke candidly of the failure of Republican economic policies that promised to lift all Americans but left so many millions far behind. He committed himself to ending a bloody and pointless war. He promised to restore Americans’ civil liberties and their tattered reputation around the world.

Get t'Steppin!!!!

A brief musical interlude and well wish for all those who didn't get what they wanted last night.

Electoral Jumbotron

Change Gone Come....,

Christian Science Monitor | The notion of sacrifice – asking Americans to give something up for a greater good – appears to be coming back into political vogue after decades of being seen as a poison pill.

Both major-party presidential candidates are emphasizing the need for individuals to shoulder responsibility for changing the direction of the United States, though they do so in different ways.

Personal sacrifice and service to the nation are central themes of John McCain’s candidacy. His campaign motto sums it up: “Country First.”

On the stump, Barack Obama cites the merits of sacrifice, calling it central to patriotism and urging Americans to help change the country’s direction – whether by turning off the television so children can study or by supporting higher taxes for wealthy corporations and individuals.

Both candidates have also called for expanded national service programs and lamented the Bush administration’s failure to tap the outpouring of civic and patriotic sentiment after the 9/11 attacks.

Not since President John Kennedy urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” has the rhetoric of sacrifice sat this well with the public. Concern that the US confronts a huge crisis in the form of a global financial meltdown, plus an untapped desire since 9/11 to help the nation more, makes the public more receptive to the idea that sacrifice can be noble instead of just inconvenient.

What will defeat do to the Republicans?

NYTimes | You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place. [...] But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

Nationalizing Critical Technologies

Washington Post | In two recent speeches that have attracted little notice, Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, has called for a radical new relationship between government and the private sector to counter what he called the "malicious activity in cyberspace [that] is a growing threat to everyone."

One approach would have the government take equity stakes in companies developing technical products, in effect expanding the practice of In-Q-Tel, the CIA entity that invests in companies.

Another proposal is to provide the same protective capabilities applied to government Web sites, ending in .gov and .mil, to the private industry's sites, ending in .com, which Kerr said have close to 98 percent of the nation's most important information.

He also suggested that the government ask insurers whether they cover "a failure to protect intellectual capital." That way, Kerr said, the insurers, through their premiums, "provide an incentive for companies, in fact, to pay attention to protecting their intellectual property."

In the past, Kerr said, when the director of central intelligence or the FBI chief faced similar problems, they would meet privately with leaders of companies involved in new technologies, seeking cooperation and perhaps access to their products. "What's the modern equivalent of what used to be done?" Kerr asked.

"We have a responsibility . . . to help those companies that we take an equity stake in or those that are just out there in the U.S. economy, to protect the most valuable assets they have, their ideas and the people who create them," he said.

Peak Capitalism

Peak Capitalism: Our Opportunity to Choose Between Survival and Collapse (27-page PDF) Lionel Orford

Our World is beset by a Sustainability Emergency.

Maintaining Essential Services

Governments throughout the developed world will probably need to directly intervene to create a command economy to ensure that the economic collapse does not cause the breakdown of essential services. It is important to understand that this is a failure of our economic system rather than a failure of the actual means of production of our essential goods and services.

Many millions of people who have lost their incomes will need to be provided with food, water, housing, medical care, electricity and sewage treatment. It is proposed that this be achieved through government issued ration system that provides every person with their essential needs. Such rations would need to be non-transferable so that a no black market in rations is possible.

A system of fuel rationing will be required to ensure that the available fuel is dedicated to the production, processing and distribution of food and other essential services as the supply of oil dwindles. This will entail a progressive shutting down of as many non-essential commercial and private activities as required to reserve sufficient fuel for essential services.

The end of deflationary trade

From the AU Business Spectator;

The global shipping crash continues to get worse and this morning’s GDP data shows the US recession is already deeper than 2001 and probably 1990-91 as well.

Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund seems determined to make the whole thing worse by imposing the most ruinous strictures on supplicant nations.

Yesterday the Baltic Dry freight rate index fell below 1000 for the first time in six years and last night it fell another 40 points to 885. In June the index was 11,900, so it has fallen 93 per cent in a few months – a crash far worse than anything ever seen in the stockmarket.

The spot daily rental for a Capesize ship is now $6365, down from $234,000 per day over the space of a few weeks. Maybe that previous price was absurdly inflated, but at $6365 it is just $365 above the average daily cost of crews and fuel.

As a result the world’s ports are filling with empty ships because shipowners can’t afford to run them, as well as some full ships because the owners of the cargo won’t unload without a bank letter of credit, which banks are refusing to supply.

Shipping companies are starting to file for bankruptcy in increasing numbers as they breach loan covenants, and a shipping researcher, Andreas Vergottis of Tufton Oceanic has told Bloomberg that a fifth of the world’s dry bulk companies may soon have negative net worth because the market for second hand ships has collapsed and the value of their fleets is below outstanding debt.

Like property-based loan agreements, shipping companies’ debt covenants have loan to value ratios that are typically 70 per cent. As the value of their fleets decline, banks are making margin calls.

If you think it's bad for global shipping, (and I know, you weren't thinking about this topic at all, despite what I told you some weeks ago about grain shipments), just think about what a hellified effect the current financial crisis must be having on airlines and air-based cargo transport!!!!

Beyond Voting

From the Bureau of Public Secrets;

THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:

(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token
democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials. The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues — apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician. Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in “democratic” regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don’t even know who they are. . . .

In itself, voting is of no great significance one way or the other (those who make a big deal about refusing to vote are only revealing their own fetishism). The problem is that it tends to lull people into relying on others to act for them, distracting them from more significant possibilities. A few people who take some creative initiative (think of the first civil rights sit-ins) may ultimately have a far greater effect than if they had put their energy into campaigning for lesser-evil politicians. At best, legislators rarely do more than what they have been forced to do by popular movements. A conservative regime under pressure from independent radical movements often concedes more than a liberal regime that knows it can count on radical support. (The Vietnam war, for example, was not ended by electing antiwar politicians, but because there was so much pressure from so many different directions that the prowar president Nixon was forced to withdraw.) If people invariably rally to lesser evils, all the rulers have to do in any situation that threatens their power is to conjure up a threat of some greater evil.

Even in the rare case when a “radical” politician has a realistic chance of winning an election, all the tedious campaign efforts of thousands of people may go down the drain in one day because of some trivial scandal discovered in his (or her) personal life, or because he inadvertently says something intelligent. If he manages to avoid these pitfalls and it looks like he might win, he tends to evade controversial issues for fear of antagonizing swing voters. If he actually gets elected he is almost never in a position to implement the reforms he has promised, except perhaps after years of wheeling and dealing with his new colleagues; which gives him a good excuse to see his first priority as making whatever compromises are necessary to keep himself in office indefinitely. Hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he develops new interests and new tastes, which he justifies by telling himself that he deserves a few perks after all his years of working for good causes. Worst of all, if he does eventually manage to get a few “progressive” measures passed, this exceptional and usually trivial success is held up as evidence of the value of relying on electoral politics, luring many more people into wasting their energy on similar campaigns to come.

As one of the May 1968 graffiti put it, “It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them!”