This first picture is of one of my friends shooting pool.  Look for the words: Light, Shadow, Rob, Shirt, Cueball, Cue, Table and Background.

This second shot is another done from the “Dia de los Muertos” art outing we went to, thus the phrase inspiration for this piece.

Reference photo shot on the phone and all work done “in phone” using “Type Drawing”.  Yeah baby….

Rule-makers claimed that this protected European consumers from poor quality, but it is hard to argue that a lump on the side of a potato alters its flavour or nutritional value in any way.  A welcome respite came on 1 July 2009, when 36 classes of produce were deregulated.

European risk-aversion is built on the complacency that comes with good fortune. Companies have accepted high taxation, used for social entitlements, in exchange for protectionist agreements.

The credit crisis has exposed an interdependency that confounds unemployment targets, raises prices, and leaves state finances mightily exposed to the experiences of a small number of national champions.

With their political and economic support in disarray, lobbyists have had a ready ear amongst politicians.  The most successful are from the motor industry.  France, Italy, and Germany, amongst others, have all launched scrappage schemes to support the sale of new cars.

The argument for this favouritism is straightforward.  Motor manufacturers are large employers and they are in danger of collapsing under the weight of their inventories and falling consumer demand.

 With state support, car makers get to sell new cars and governments get to promote employment and investment, while also reducing carbon emissions from old cars.

There are many arguments against the subsidies.  Many people would have bought cars anyway.  The sales period has simply been compressed, leaving a precipitous drop later.  All tax payers are subsidising new cars for a few.

These are fair comments.  But they are misleading, giving the impression that supporting an economy involves supporting specific industries within that economy.

Governments are meant to be custodians of a nation’s wealth, both present and future.  An investor who only ventures his own money can take as many risks as he likes.  One who represents the multitude needs to take greater care, ensuring that their risk is evenly spread.

Unfortunately, like compulsive gamblers, governments have chosen to bet once more on a small number of industries in the hopes that they’ll recover their losses with a new throw.   By biasing their support, governments are stating, unequivocally, that they believe consumers are wrong and should be paid to keep buying things they may not want.  That Germany and France are now, tepidly, emerging from recession will only reinforce the view that such guess-work is brave leadership.

Yet the crisis is a tremendous opportunity to confront voters with the need for substantial economic restructuring.  While the crisis has focused people’s attention, politicians have the space to introduce a plethora of reforms that have been held in abeyance; from raising the retirement age, to healthcare reform, to ending innovation-sapping and trade-distorting subsidies.

Markets may fail, but their capacity for constant reinvention and experimentation ensures that new ideas can become successful as old ideas are found wanting.  The bounty coming out of the stimulus bills could have been used to gracefully collapse obsolete industries and pay for the retraining and further education of those with a chance of finding new jobs, or covering those who cannot.

By choosing a single winner, governments have yet again put off the difficult decisions for later.

In thinking about technological change, and our relative inability to often recognize the transformational technologies at the time they come along, consider the electric guitar. Particularly the solid-body electric guitar invented by Les Paul, who passed away Thursday at the age of 94. The NY Times story does him justice – he was just messing around and came up with this thing because he couldn’t find it anywhere. And I don’t imagine that in his wildest dreams he could have foreseen the impact it would have; certainly no one else did at the time.

But in retrospect, it’s clear that the electric guitar is one of those things that changed everything. First came rock and roll, which led to the sixties, when led to the breakdown of everything…. No, wait, first came rock and roll, which led to drugs, which led to the breakdown of everything…. No, darnit, let’s see, first came rock and roll, then came… I can’t remember.

But it’s true. The electric guitar changed everything. It made music more interesting, certainly, and the cultural landscape has never recovered. Actually, the US culture wars of much of the second half of the 20th century focus on rock and roll as much as anything else, perhaps more so. I remember my first (and only) visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We were on The Older Daughter’s college tour, which took us out to the Midwest – Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa – and it was a great holiday, one of the great family trips we took. And I remember insisting, over the bemused objections of everyone else in the family, that we should make a visit. Everyone was a pretty good sport about it, as I recall.

And it was worth the trip. For the rock and roll audience, it was interesting – most of the people we saw there would have looked completely at home in your standard Indianapolis 500 crowd. And the upstairs part, where the inductees have been enshrined, is a bit weird and over the top, actually. Of course, since so many of them are dead, maybe it’s a not inappropriate venue. (Les Paul was inducted in 1988.) But the really interesting part of the museum is the actual museum itself, which lays out, in a very serious but undeniably clever way, the history of rock and roll in America. And you realize, in a way that I’ve seen crystallized nowhere else, that the history of rock and roll in America is inextricably bound up with two other aspects of American life – race and censorship.

And both are still with us. The race thing is obvious – think of the South, changed on the surface but perhaps not underneath (given the racists they repeatedly elect to Congress and their local legislatures), and the outrage among a substantial part of the US population against Obama that is currently driving the tea party and healthcare protest lunacy. If America does permanently schism, as it shows every intention of doing, it will be over race. Which will be tragic, but perhaps nonetheless unavoidable. The censorship thing, too, is still around – fundamentalists of all stripes (who in the US are primarily, but not exclusively, Christian) will never stop trying to ban stuff, and if they can’t, they’ll burn stuff, and if they can’t do that, they’ll think of something else instead – as recently as a couple of years ago Dixie Chicks CDs were being bulldozed. The overlap between these two sets would make an interesting Venn diagram.

And rock and roll, for as long as it’s been around, has epitomized both of these conflicts. Early radio stations refused to play “Negro Music.” While it was on separate stations, that was fine – but as soon as white teenagers started listening in, civilization started to collapse, or something. But people really believed it then, and they still believe it now. Rock and roll in the US is inevitably political, in a way that it’s not in, say, Holland (which brought us one of the best rock guitarists, Jan Akkerman, who plays a Les Paul guitar too). Even in this day of corporate rock and roll, it’s still a principal outlet for the other, in Fanon’s framework, and always will be. Anyone can pick up an electric guitar and a bass and a drumkit and go to town. So the censorship thing will always be there. And who knows how long the race thing will still be around for – it may need for my generation to finally die out before America is mature enough to come to grips with it. Rock and roll has historically been one of the principal modes of attack on racism, ever since white boys like Carl Perkins first picked up his Les Paul Gold Top and came out with “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956. And without Les Paul, no rock and roll as we know it.

So let’s all hope that Les Paul was greeted by a heavenly choir wearing sunglasses, all strumming away on their Gibson Les Pauls to “How High the Moon.”

Wufnik is an American who lives in London, has too many advanced degrees for what he does for a living, and has strong feelings about rock and roll.

Snark aside, Bondelli does a nice job of addressing Hough, who “argues that the increase in lifetime wages for graduates no longer makes up for the financial burden of university education and the ensuing student loan burden.” He also takes on one of the GOP’s most successful and devastating canards, explaining that

In 2003 when I was lobbying against tuition increases in Arizona, a Republican state legislator argued that a college degree is a personal investment that the students are paying for their own future financial prosperity.

I second Kevin’s thoughts (and encourage you to click over and read the whole post). However, I also think the response needs to run even deeper. In truth, as stupid as that Repub legislator’s argument was (and in all likelihood, as stupid as the legislator was), it’s an argument that wins over a lot of people if you let its underlying assumption go unchallenged.

Bondelli touches on the point in quoting University of Rhode IslandVice President for Administration and Finance Robert Weygand, who explains that

Public colleges need to promote and publicize the work they do for the community and their contributions to economic development. Well-publicized proof that they make a difference to the state, and not just the earning potential of individual graduates, is meaningful to lawmakers, even in tough times.

The underlying issue that must be dragged out into the light and stomped is that somehow a nation’s education policy is all about individual investment. This is “ownership society”-style bullshit and it traces its “intellectual” roots back through the eight-year lie that was the Reagan administration and into the conservative academic framework laid in the 1960s by the likes of Daniel Bell. It culminated in rhetorical low-water marks like “government isn’t the solution to your problems – it is the problem,” and unfortunately the Newspeak linguistic cross-patch that this crowd inflicted on an easily-duped public is still working its corrosive magic today.

The answer we give when faced with this kind of cynical forked-tonguery must make clear that it’s not about Little Billy choosing whether or not to invest in his future. Instead, the question is about what’s best for the nation. In a society where only the top 5% of economic elites can afford a quality education – and we’re heading in that direction at a rapid pace – that means that 95% of the nation’s intelligence, 95% of its genius, 95% of its creativity and insight and inventiveness and problem solving capacity, 95% of its scientific potential – 95% of that nation’s possibility is at risk. It’s likely doomed to go unrealized.

Imagine that nation engaged in a highly competitive global marketplace with countries that make refining their intelligence, regardless of class or station of birth, a top priority. Imagine a nation that’s much like America in size and socioeconomic structure and overall potential. And imagine that while we’re keeping 95% of our brighest and best away from learning as best we can, they’re moving heaven and earth to get their brightest and best all the education possible.

Let’s go a step further and make this a math question. The US has a population of around 300 million. Statistically speaking, “genius” is a term that (as flawed as it may be) refers to the top 2% intellectually. So that means that America is home to roughly 6 million geniuses. Now, say we only provide quality educational opportunities to the richest 5%. That leaves us with 300,000 of our best minds honest to their sharpest potential.

Now consider that other hypothetical country, call it AltAmerica. Same numbers, only this time you educate all your geniuses. Our 300,000 is now up against their 6 million.

Which nation do you think innovates the best products? (I start with that example, because obviously nothing matters besides feeding the consumerist beast, right?) Who more quickly comes up with cures for diseases? Who creates solutions to pressing social challenges? Who is best able to provide for the common weal while preserving the environment?

Over time, which nation comes to dominate and which one fades?

A nation that adopts a “let Billy decide whether to invest in his future” policy will be, in short order, at the mercy of a nation that makes educating Billy a top priority.

If you don’t like my math, fine, adjust to your liking. But the dynamic remains (and I’m framing the discussion in a restrictive fashion, as well, because you don’t have to be a rated genius to be smart enough to change the world). And by the way, I do have a couple of specific nations in mind. Neither of them has a population of 300 million, either. Both have over a billion people, and they have more honor students than we have students.

That politician that Kevin references is either stupid or corrupt, or maybe both. But whether he’s acting out of class-based malice or simple butt-ignorance, the policy he espouses would, over time, reduce the US to the equivalent if a slobbering backwater surrounded by thrumming, intellect-powered New Atlantises. No doubt he’d like to keep the rabble in its place, educated only enough to provide unquestioning labor for the power elite’s enterprises, but the dangerous fact is that he hasn’t thought this thing all the way through.

Which also demonstrates, by the way, that not everybody in that 5% elite is exactly rocket surgeon material. So maybe my scenario above was actually a little … conservative, if you will.

Thanks to Kevin for taking this issue head-on. I hope he won’t mind me adding my two cents…

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US.

There are perhaps reasons for optimism. Politics in America can be cyclical, and by that thinking our current reactionary hegemony may have run its natural course. The Millennial Generation, which is between 75-100 million strong and extremely active socially and politically, skews heavily away from the policies that have defined the nation since Reagan. And some believe that Obama is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime charismatic who, like John F. Kennedy, can redirect the course of the culture through sheer force of vision and will. If any or all of these things are true, then there is room for … hope.

But while hope is an occasionally helpful frame of mind, it’s no substitute for intelligence, insight, planning, hard work and cash.

As I consider the state of the Republic some 49 days into the Obama era, I find in that formulation a variety of reasons to worry. For starters, it strikes me that very few people – very few, even, of the most visible lights in the progressive firmament – truly understand the magnitude of the conservative climb to power or the nature of the strategy employed. It’s not well understood how long it took, for instance, or how complex the effort was, or how deeply the foundation was poured, or how much it cost. The shallowness of our popular history is a dangerous condition in an age of instant gratification, when winning a skirmish is all-too-easily mistaken for winning the war, and it’s nothing short of terrifying to think that some saw January 20 as the end of the struggle instead of the beginning.

Yes, it was a triumph, and we were right to pause and celebrate, to mark the achievement of a critical milestone, but afterward the collective sigh was nearly audible. I don’t want to overstate the effect, though. I’m not suggesting that a majority of American progressives think the hard part is over, that we can put our society on cruise control and that the wicked Republican Nosferatu is dead once and for all, because that’s simply not the case. Instead, I’m suggesting that we may not sufficiently understand the nature of our opponent and that the failure to stake it through the heart now, while it’s down, assures that it will rise from its all-too-shallow grave to terrorize us once more. The landscape has changed, for sure, but the fundamental engines that propelled the modern reactionary right to power in the first place are alive, well, and already hard at work plotting their resurrection.

The Long War Against America

Let’s take a second to understand a few of the relevant facts regarding the war that still rages around us.

1: The conservative revolution was a generation in the making. Those who laid the groundwork for the eventual ascent of the Republican kwisatz haderach took a long view – an astoundingly long view by American standards – and accepted the occasional tactical setback so long as the eternal march of the faithful continued. One of the godfathers of the movement, Daniel Bell, published his foundational The End of Ideology in 1960, and his intellectual contributions to the landscape we now inhabit can hardly be overstated. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), for instance, he gushed about the coming “information age” and painted a rather rosy picture of the life of the “information worker.” This new post-industrial age would be marked by certain significant shifts in axial principles, and among his more powerful claims was the assertion that growth in the information sector resulted necessarily in prestigious knowledge-based employment. Information sector jobs were depicted as automatically better-paying and more fulfilling.

Krishan Kumar’s 1978 retort (Prophecy and Progress: the Sociology of Industrial and Post-industrial Society) aptly demonstrated the fallacies in Bell’s reasoning. Information-based enterprises, like the industrial sector enterprises which preceded them, have a set of basic operational needs which are neither information nor expertise-based. A software operation, for example, requires the same custodial services as a manufacturing operation. Bell’s rhetoric, however, counts such menial employment by the same standards it uses for programmers and managers. In many practical respects, though, the daily operations of service sector businesses differ little from the industrial sector, and claims that a shift in the type of “product” offered from goods to services equals a change in the fundamental structure of employment ought to be greeted cautiously.

So, there you have a pointed exchange from Daniel Bell and Krishan Kumar, two men that you’ve probably never heard of. But ask yourself, which of the perspectives strikes you as rhetorically familiar? Which argument have you heard, and in service to what kinds of policies?

Right. And here’s how complete the rout was. The most enthusiastic parroting of Bell’s construction I’ve ever run across came from Al Gore when he was Vice President. The Democratic Vice President. Take this snippet from a 1994 speech to the International Telecommunications Union:

Approximately 60% of all US workers are “knowledge workers” — people whose jobs depend on the information they generate and receive over our information infrastructure. As we create new jobs, 8 out of 10 are in information-intensive sectors of our economy. And these new jobs are well-paying jobs for financial analysts, computer programmers, and other educated workers (Gore 1994).

One assumes “knowledge” companies don’t need janitors. Regardless, when we reach the point where our “liberal” leaders are reading directly from the script authored by conservative intellectuals, it’s safe to say that the progressive possibility is in deep, deep trouble.

2: The conservative revolution was built on a strong intellectual and academic foundation. (I do not, by the way, use the term “intellectual” to signify correctness or moral righteousness – one can be intellectual while being wrong and evil.) Given how effectively conservatives have kneecapped education in America, it’s remarkably ironic how important academics were to empowering the movement. Daniel Bell is noted above; he and other intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and those associated with a host of conservative “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution worked diligently to re-engineer the very DNA of America’s popular ideology. They sought to understand the collective psyche in ways that could be shifted, altered and exploited, and their efforts to deconstruct and re-encode our shared vocabulary is among the grandest achievements in the history of human propaganda. Turning “liberal” into a dirty word was barely the beginning.

These efforts mattered more than it is possible to quantify. As the neo-Marxist scholar Stuart Hall explains, the “battle of signification” is everything. Whoever wins the struggle to dictate to vocabulary used will win the debate.* Think about the abortion “debate” and the clever, almost-always unchallenged construction of “unborn human life.” If that phrase is allowed to stand, the pro-choicer has nearly zero chance of winning the argument.

3: The conservative movement was incredibly well-funded. And still is. One source estimates that between the late 1970s and late 1990s alone 12 major conservative foundations funneled hundreds of millions of dollars – at least – to think tanks, policy organizations, individual scholars, media apparatuses, legal organizations, advocacy groups and more. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation are five of the biggest donors.

In 1988, the Olin Foundation alone distributed $55 million in grants. The Scaife family has donated more than $200 million over the years. Million dollar annual grants to individual think tanks are routine.

These Foundations have also been instrumental in creating the most famous think tanks. The Heritage Foundation, considered the leading think tank in America, was created in 1973 with $250,000 in seed money from brewery mogul Joseph Coors. The Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think tank, was founded in 1977 by the Koch family foundations. )

….
According to the Center for Policy Alternatives, the major conservative think tanks in Washington had a combined budget of $45.9 million, while the major progressive think tanks had a combined budget of $10.2 million. What this means is that far-right think tanks are better able to publicize their findings, stage more conferences, lobby harder for their policies, and present more and better-packaged information before Congress.

Not too put too fine a point on it, but conservative interests have a lot of cash and they’ve proven conclusively that they’re willing to invest it in programs that assure their continued political, social, cultural and economic domination.

And while I hate to oversimplify complex dynamics, it must be said that the points I have just made go a long way toward explaining the last 30+ years of American political history. Yes, there are other factors, but subtract the cash and the intellectual groundwork it bought and our current landscape would look dramatically different. Whether that’s a good thing I’ll let you decide for yourself. My opinion is probably obvious, but I’m not a billionaire.

What Must Be Done

In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman does a meticulous job of explaining how we got here from there – “there” being the New Deal society that stands today as the Golden Age of American prosperity. Toward the end he sounds an optimistic note, suggesting that some of the factors that played key roles in the rise of movement conservatism are waning – racism, for instance – and that without their broad mobilizing power the conservatives are in deep kim-chee. There is ample evidence supporting his claims, so perhaps he’s right. I certainly hope so. But if I might return to my vampire metaphor from earlier, when you have the soul-sucking undead bastard down, you don’t stand around hoping. You drive a stake through its evil, demonic heart.

Right now, almost 50 days into the Obama administration, we have Dracula on the canvas. And this is where you, my friends, come in. The way we assure an enlightened future for our nation is to act, and act resolutely, to make sure that movement conservatism stays down. In order to accomplish this, we need to proceed along the following fronts:

We must empower progressive intellectuals the way the Right has empowered theirs. As researchers like George Lakoff have demonstrated, much of the conservative success emerged from how they framed issues and re-encoded the very language we all speak. Political lingustics is an important field – as noted earlier – and if we can successfully keep the English language from being transformed into Newspeak we will hamstring the conservative noise machine in a meaningful way.

However, Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute recently closed its doors and various of its brightest lights are currently seeking to find funds to build on its work. Put simply, the bright lights on the Right are living well while our brightest and best are, as is so often the case, struggling to survive.

We must restore credibility and integrity to the media. As I’ve noted elsewhere, things began to unravel in earnest when Reagan’s newly appointed FCC apparatchiks were allowed to decree, with a straight face, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” Newspeak, indeed. Now reporting has been replaced by “fair and balanced” and there is a frighteningly real risk that journalism – real journalism – is dying.

Its future, if it has one, perhaps lies in endowment. I’ve heard a variety of ideas tossed around, including Mother Jones’ new tilt at non-profit journalism. I can’t say what the successful model will look like at this point, but if it emerges, it will center on the insulation of reporting and analysis from the influence of cash and spin.

We must revitalize our educational infrastructure around the imperatives of intellectual inquiry and critical thought. We have seemingly convinced ourselves that the only proper function of education is job training, and that’s an ideology that serves an identifiable master. Specifically, let’s ask ourselves who benefits when an ed system cranks out people with “marketable” skills but no capability for asking uneasy questions about their condition.

There is no surer innoculation against tyranny than a critically minded citizenry. To this end we must invest in education – and I say “invest” instead of “spend” because every dollar you spend is returned to you several times over – and invest mightily. Invest in educational innovation, in new ways of teaching everything from basic math and science to advanced reasoning skills. Invest heavily in early childhood reading programs, because nothing better energizes subsequent, lifelong learning. And most of all, invest in public education. The next time you hear somebody ranting about the marvels of vouchers and “competition” in education, remember a few things.

First, America has historically out-learned, out-taught, out-researched and out-innovated every nation on the face of the Earth. The people who did that were, in most cases, the products of public education.

Second, we’ve always had alternatives to public ed – “competition,” if you will. Private schools, parochial schools, and so on. If competition cured all ills, then how do we explain the state of contemporary public ed?

Third, we have more alternatives than ever today. We have the options noted in the previous item, plus Montessoris and Charters and again, all this competition seems not to have solved our problems.

Finally, the next time you hear rosy conservative rhetoric that seems at little at odds with the empirical world you live in, remember – we live in an age where the language has been re-tooled to serve the ends of a narrow minority. It’s possible, just possible, that you’re hearing propaganda instead of fact. And always feel free to backtrack the data. It may just come from one of those marvelously well-funded conservative “think tanks.”

In summary: Dear Progressive Billionaires, America needs your money. And I don’t mean a million here and million there. I mean hundreds of millions, even billions. If we are to realize any meaningful dreams of hope and change, we must have a world where our brightest and best can apply their minds to our shared problems as professionals. When their intellects are doing it for a living and ours are trying to carve out a couple hours after work, we lose. When their brightest minds are primarily concerned with crafting winning policy and ours are constantly distracted by desperate concerns about their ability to feed their families, they win.

Money isn’t everything, but since you’re a billionaire I’ll assume that you understand a thing or two about what it can accomplish.

Thanks for your time. If you find some value in what I’ve said but aren’t sure where to start, click the Contact button and drop me a line. I know people who are worthy of your generosity and people who will reward your support a thousand times over.

Sincerely,

Sam Smith

_______________

* See “The work of representation.” in Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/The Open University, 1997), 13-74.

What I feel today, as I review the news that former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio’s conviction has been upheld, isn’t about pleasure in his mighty fall from power. In fact, it’s not “pleasure” at all.

Instead, tell me what the word is for “taking satisfaction in justice served,” because that’s what I’m guilty of. Right now I’m feeling powerfully and righteously satisfied that a man who caused so much misfortune is getting at least a small slice of what he deserves.

Sadly, there will never be full justice for the likes of Nacchio – and Lay and Skilling and Ebbers and Kozlowski and Rigas and Madoff – because our system of law simply doesn’t allow for it. Any punishment you could mete out that would legitimately count as justice for annihilating the lives of hard-working people the way these men did would run afoul of the 8th Amendment before it was 1% administered.

It’s a curious and unfortunate quirk of our legal system that one man can spend longer in jail – a real jail, not a federal country club – for selling comparatively harmless drugs to consenting adult customers than another man who destroys the life savings of hundreds and thousands of people who never did anything but show up every day and work their asses off in hopes that they could afford to retire one day.

If it seems like I’m taking the Nacchio case personally, there’s a reason. While my case pales in comparison to those his actions harmed the worst, the arrogant bastard did me significant material damage, as well. When Qwest’s “merger” with US West was finalized in the summer of 2000, I was one of the many USW employees shown the door. Joe had a burr under his saddle where the USW PR group was concerned – we’d worked pretty hard to protect our interests against what we saw coming, and he didn’t much like it – so when the deal was sealed a host of were kicked to the curb. To be honest, Nacchio fired more talent than most companies will ever have. Lean and mean, that was the mantra. His favorite metric was “revenue per employee,” and if there was any question about somebody’s ability to drag cash in the door, they were useless.

I’d had the pleasure of working on some really interesting projects prior to my turfing. I had been given the freedom to develop programs so innovative that, to the best of my knowledge, they had never been done before. We had online PR successes doing things that many companies still, nine years later, think of as “new.” We were in the process of rewriting the book on how PR was and could be done. We were aligning these efforts directly with community concerns, and other parts of the business (which also got axe-murdered on day one of Nacchio’s reign) were responsible for dramatic levels of corporate giving. If I described the benefits that USW employees received you’d think I was making it up, but rest assured that nobody today – nobody, short of very high-placed executives, gets anything like the benefit packages USW provided for its managers and workers. It’s true that a lot of our customers weren’t happy with us and rejoiced when the stake was driven through US West’s heart, but I predicted – accurately – that the day would come when they’d wish they had us back.

In other words, US West was a pretty good company, and I personally was doing some of the best work of my professional career. I had unfinished business, and that gripes me to this day. And financially I’ve never quite recovered. The fact that he damaged so many people so much worse than he did me is infuriating.

I’m not the only one who hasn’t recovered, either. Neither has the company. In the wake of the Nacchio debacle it has charted a course that frankly looks a lot more like US West than Qwest, but even though it has figured some important things out, the damage the man did wasn’t of the sort that’s going to get fixed in just a few years.

I can’t imagine a tool, a method or a metric that would allow us to fully asses the damage, the sheer unbridled havoc that Joe Nacchio has inflicted. Even if there were, I’d be afraid to see the results. So while I’m glad to see that he’s going to jail, I lament, and will until the day I die, that he’ll never see true justice.

But imprisonment isn’t the only way life punishes us, I guess, so maybe justice will visit Joe Nacchio in another guise. Whatever the case, let it not be said that I’m a malicious person. I wish for Nacchio nothing more or less than the same thing I wish for every single human alive – that he gets precisely what he deserves.

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R?

One response might argue that tout est politique. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with totalizing positions like this, though, because they tend to trivialize – if everything is politics, then nothing is. However, there’s no denying the fundamental truth that many things we don’t commonly associate with politics are powerfully political in their implications.

Take popular music, for instance. It’s impossible to consider the sweeping cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s without the soundtrack – Dylan, The Beatles, Woodstock…the list goes on and on. Some of those artists were quite explicitly agitating for political reform while others wove themselves into the social tapestry in less obvious ways, but the sum total of the music of that decade was inherently political.

Contrast that with the music of the Bush administration. Where was the protest, the outcry? Who was the Dylan of the 2000s? What record will we be comparing, come 2024, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

The absence of such a voice was not an accident. Part of the grand conservative plan, the blitzkrieg that was launched upon Reagan’s inauguration, was the neutering of music’s political possibility. When Ronnie’s FCC hacks, Fowler and Brenner, decreed that “the public interest is what the public is interested in,” it did so in order to subvert, once and for all, the power of the creative social mind to the will of corporate logic. It dismantled radio ownership limits that assured a massive diversity of options for artists and audiences alike, and found its ultimate expression in Clear Channel’s pro-war, pro-Bush rallies and the banishment of those who chose to give voice to their dissent (the most notable case being the attempted silencing of The Dixie Chicks).

So when our generation needed to be marching in the streets and demanding an end to the outrage in Iraq, where was the soundtrack? Who ultimately benefited from those policies way back in the early ’80s? We’re fighting an unjust invasion and occupation and the rallies in the streets are for the war?! Corporate-sponsored pro-war rallies?!

When I’m writing a TunesDay piece on some band or another, providing a video link or encouraging you to check it out at eMusic, part of what’s going on is purely and simply about the music as art. But it’s also about the bigger picture, about the need for our culture to build a strong platform whereby artists can be heard. If they use this platform to sing silly love songs, that’s fine, so long as the platform is there when they need to sing about injustice. I recently did a piece promoting The Well Wishers, Maximo Park and The Dandy Warhols, and none of these bands may ever contribute a note to the cause of world peace. On the other hand, if I flash back to 1997 and Green Day’s Nimrod, I’m not sure I could have predicted American Idiot, a manifesto so powerful that not even the soul-deadening corporate might of Clear Channel could contain it.

What political blogs do is important, especially in a society where the legacy press has largely abdicated its responsibility to watchdog our institutions of power. Who Obama selects to run the State Department matters. His choices for Treasury and Defense and our various intelligence and military leadership posts matter tremendously.

But empires rarely rise and fall as a result of a couple close-in political knife fights. In my view, a great deal of what even the best poliblogs do is tactical, street-level and near-term. This isn’t true across the board, of course. There are outstanding thinkers and writers who are looking at the big picture and the long term. And this is where I think S&R has done and will continue to do its best work. Not in the political battle, but the culture war.

We may debate some of the nuances and specifics amongst ourselves, but in general it’s safe to say that those of us here at Scholars & Rogues have a shared vision of a more progressive society. I don’t use that word in any sort of conventional, partisan sense. By “progressive” I mean more enlightened; better educated; more appreciative of the cultural arts; better informed about the forces shaping our world; more productively spiritual (and less dogmatically sectarian) in our approach to life; more generous and charitable; more tolerant and more willing to understand the value of diversity; more committed to community and the common good; more literate; more intellectually curious and prone to critical thought; more responsive to the well-reasoned than to the passionately felt; and above all, more insistent that those we choose to represent us, to lead us and to govern us be the best America has to offer, not the worst.

Some of the solutions that get us to our destination may be “liberal” by our current reckoning, some “conservative.” The best ideas may be “idealistic” or they may be “pragmatic.” But in the end, I think most of us believe that a society that reads – in an environment uncluttered by censorship, either active or passive, governmental or cultural or corporate – is in better shape than one that doesn’t read or won’t. A society whose citizens not only have knowledge in their heads, but who have been trained to use it in innovative ways is more likely to solve more problems faster and more effectively. A country that thinks and thinks relentlessly is nearly immune to the machinations of despotism. A nation whose mythologies make clear that war is the last resort, not the first, is more likely to achieve greatness both at home and abroad. A nation whose media structures are designed to foster the best that is thought and created is one whose streets are less likely to flow with the blood of aggrieved citizens. A culture where competition aims to help people up the ladder instead of keeping them in their place is one that maximizes its collective genius. A political economy where genuine opportunity arises from a level playing field is certainly more likely to produce spectacular successes than one where the reality is that of a rigged game played beneath a banner of cynical egalitarian rhetoric.

And the most actualized of all possible societies is one where happiness and satisfaction have nothing at all to do with purchasing power.

This is what I think Scholars & Rogues is. We’ve covered a lot of ground since we launched less than two years ago, and at that point I deliberately chose not to compose a mission statement. Our philosophy was simple: invite the smartest people we could find to share their thoughts and trust the power of that intellect to start great conversations, attract more great minds and build the foundation of a thriving community. With that in place, I wanted to learn what we were rather than dictating what we would be.

Some of what we write may look trivial at first, and the occasional item may even prove trivial in the final analysis. But I think we now have a good sense of what we are and why our readers keep stopping by. We hope our political writings are worthy in the coming months and (if we’re lucky) years, and we expect that our audience will grasp the deeper political mission embedded in our far-flung musings.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work toward a better culture, and in doing so will trust that if you enlighten the people and establish social structures that exalt the best they have to offer, the merely political will take care of itself.

So I spent some time digging, looking for data that may tell us something about how America is constructed at our current moment in time. Specifically, I went in search of information that would reveal something about the cultural progress we’re making. I’m not the first to do something along these lines – this red state/blue state comparison from after the Bush/Kerry election was revealing, to say the least – but I think it’s important to continue tracking ourselves according to how we’re doing on the values that are most likely to drive us onward and upward.

I focused on things like basic measures of prosperity, education, the arts, and so on. My reasons are pretty simple – education, in particular, is probably the single most important determiner for achievement and social health. More educated people earn more money, engage in fewer anti-social behaviors, contribute more to the economic and tax base, drive more innovation, and so on. Education is strongly linked to any number of economic vitality measures, and a recent study “finds the number of jobs created by increasing education spending is larger than jobs lost from raising taxes to support that spending.” On the whole, there’s no desirable social quality I’m familiar with that doesn’t correlate strongly with education.

I doubt my findings are going to tell you anything you probably don’t already know, but still, maybe the pictures will be interesting.

First, a note or two on methodology. What I did, in essence, was note that we have 51 jurisdictions voting for the president – 50 states + Washington, DC. Obama carried 29, McCain 22. So I color-coded each measure according to that 29-22 break in a way that will make sense once you look at it. Blue represents the high side – the top 29 jurisdictions – and red the low 22. This is not scientific, nor is it intended to be. The data I was able to find is imperfect in places, and I wish some of it were a little more current. The break around the 29-30 mark is often based on minute differences, and so on. So take these maps for exactly what they are – rough depictions of how our nation breaks down along a variety of subjective measures.

Let’s start by having a look at the electoral results from the presidential election.

Next, let’s see how these results correlate with financial well-being. The first graphic here indicates average pay.

Per capita income rates are obviously quite similar…

…as are median household income rates.

It appears that Obama did well in states where people are comparatively better off financially.

Now, let’s compare these maps with a few that tell us about our commitment to education. First, have a look at this graph, which depicts adult population levels with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

If you’re noticing that there’s a higher concentration of grads in blue states, maybe it’s because these states tend to spend more on education.

We don’t exactly lavish our teachers with money anywhere, but again, they have it better in blue states.

I’m not exactly sure what this next map tells us, but it’s interesting to note the relationship between income levels, attendance rates and voting behaviors.

At this stage, we at least have enough evidence to suspect a relationship between academic achievement, financial success and education. We probably won’t be surprised at what happens when we begin adding arts expenditures to the equation. Here, for instance, we see state appropriations for arts organizations.

The Americans for the Arts Action Fund report card evaluations returned results that look strikingly similar.

Do you see a pattern? I know I do. And I suspect that if I had excellent data on every measure of progressive tendency I can think of, the pattern would be even stronger. Is the correlation perfect? Of course not – if you overlay all these maps, what emerges looks like this:

So no, we’re not as perfect bifurcated as we might fear. And that’s good news.

While I hate how we’ve had our country turned into a red vs. blue battleground, for now the colors illustrate something important. Here, blue stands for prosperity, educational achievement and a commitment to the pursuit of our higher selves. And on these measures, bluer is better.

Sources

• National Education Association
• US Census Bureau
• ArtsUSA.org
• Arts Action Fund.org

A person consists both of their being and of the works that their being produces. Whether those works are physical or as intangible as the time spent on a particular task.

A traditional Westminster approach to politics, with a typical Left / Right political duopoly, has become the gold standard of democratic representation. It is also conflicted and inherently incapable of resolving its core contradiction.

The way it is supposed to work is that Left-leaning parties are the parties of Collectivism while Right-leaning parties are the parties of Individualism.

Collectivism implies redistribution of wealth to look out for the marginalised or neglected members of society, and to ensure that everyone has equal opportunity.

Individualism implies innovation, uninhibited originality, wealth creation on an epic scale and each person rising to their own level of accomplishment.

The structure of the dynamic tension between the two political schools is designed to constrain the nightmare extreme scenarios of each approach. For Collectivism, that is the worst excesses of forced equality which impoverishes a nation and flattens innovation. For Individualism, it is the worst excesses of concentrated wealth that abandons a frustrated underclass to perpetual poverty in violent ghettos. A duality of parties that remains true to this ideal and recognises the threat from extremism of both their own and the other’s ideals is a very powerful social temper.

It provides its own feedback loop. As society twists one way, politics can twist the other, holding society in balance.

However, no more.

Each party is now hopelessly contradicted and the upshot is that neither side is capable of reconciling their objectives.

Parties of the Right have approached their mandate by supporting the rights of businesses, but not of individuals. As if you can accept the microwaves, toasters and high-definition televisions of the world, but not the people who made them.

Parties of the Left are no better, supporting the rights of people but bemoaning business. As if people have merit, but their works have none.

The Right provide bailouts and subsidies to businesses, while the Left provides entitlements and benefits to people. Somewhere in this has become cemented the belief that people – individuals – are separate from their works. That the works should be held accountable for their own existence and that people are the innocent victims of such works.

Labels, like “business” and “rich” and “poor”, are thrown around as if they’re not just distinct definitions, but unconnected, unrelated objects.

The truth will always be that they are not. It is impossible to promote individuals without also promoting their works.

A political party that promotes people may find that it cannot control their works, or the way that such works concentrate wealth. Spurts of inequality are an inevitable result of the innovation that results from individual freedom. A political party that promotes business may find that it cannot control the personal expressions, or social interactions, of the people who produce. An increasing space for alternative lifestyles is a natural consequence of business freedom to create consumer choice.

These inherent contradictions have become so entrenched that it is scarcely surprising that the most passionate devotees of either side sound so peculiarly detached and unhinged.

Until leaders reconcile these two contradictory approaches they will never return to the dynamic tension which enabled the innovation that built their societies in the first place.

“In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA’s ‘driftnet’ tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO ‘predicate acts’ alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

This is a wonderful approach. Even if the suit gets nowhere, the RIAA’s business model in recent years has hinged on litigation and intimidation, not finding innovative ways of making the Internets work for them and the artists they allegedly represent.

With a little luck, maybe the Missouri case will intimidate the RIAA right back. With a little more luck, maybe the counterclaimant wins.

Pair that with an FCC appointee (and bear with me while I indulge a hopeless fantasy here) who’s willing to reassert the public interest standard, and you might even have something on the radio that you could stand listening to…..

• Green construction does not always mean “natural”
• Skeptic Magazine’s blog debunks Global Warming Petition Project
• UNESCO’s aquifer map a guide to future water conflict?
• New data on charcoal in soil raises carbon questions
• Wave and tidal energy growing pains
• Update on hybrid vehicle technology

The R-value for a 2×4 pine wall stud in a wood frame constructed residence is about 4.38. The R-value for the fiberglass batt insulation that fills the cavity between the wall studs is between 11 and 15 (source). In an exterior wall that’s constructed with studs at 16 inches on center, that means that roughly 9% of the wall has an R value that’s less than half that of the insulation. It also illustrates why green buildings are not necessarily going to be constructed of all-natural, renewable materials. Sometimes the natural materials just aren’t as good.

While the American Chemical Society Chemical and Engineering News story linked above occasionally reads like a product brochure for Dow Chemical, BASF, 3M, et al, it provides some interesting information. The article proposes that buildings that last, need minimal maintenance, are energy efficient are the greenest buildings, especially with the inclusion of high tech products manufactured using green chemistry. Obviously, if you’re going to lose significant heat through the natural pine wall studs, then an argument could be made that the natural solution (softwood studs) isn’t necessarily “green.” But maybe replacing standard gypsum wallboard and external plywood siding with structural polyurethane panels is enough to compensate for the losses due to the studs. The trick with polyurethane foam panels, according to the article, is to find some that are expanded with air instead of fluorocarbons (which are powerful greenhouse gases and can leak from the panels over time).

The article describes a number of other interesting new technologies. Small wax capsules embedded in flooring and wall panels are being used to help reduce temperature variability in offices. As the building heats up during, the wax eventually starts to melt, absorbing a significant energy as it changes phase from solid to liquid. In the evenings, the wax capsules gradually release their energy back into the building as the wax re-solidifies. These phase changes reduce the amount of cooling (and heating) that the building’s HVAC system must produce. And a form of voltage-controlled window shading that is coated on the window glass itself enables a simple controller to adjust how much light penetrates the building’s interior, from nearly all of the sunlight to as little as 2%.

But while it’s hardly as “sexy” as new green buildings, the most important green building is not the new home made with structural polyurethane panels, wax capsule wallboard, and so on – it’s the building being retrofit from an energy waster to a highly energy efficient structure. As the article points out, little of the building is thrown away and a building that used to throw away energy doesn’t any more.

Perhaps the most important point made in the entire CEN article was made by green homeowner Jean Merritt in the second paragraph: “There was a lot of disagreement within the community about what is green. You have to sift through people’s motivation. Are they just trying to sell you a product?”

Given all the times that specific chemical companies and their products were mentioned in this article, that’s a reasonable question to ask of Chemical and Engineering News too.

———-

Skeptic Magazine’s blog debunks Global Warming Petition Project
Michael Shermer founded and publishes Skeptic Magazine, has written 11 books, and writes a column for Scientific American, the magazine where I first encountered his work. Skeptic also publishes an online enewsletter known as eSkeptic, and on November 12, eSkeptic ran a guest post by Gary J. Whittenberger Ph.D. titled Misleading by Petition – Just What is the Consensus on Global Warming?. In it, Whittenberger disassembles one of the memes that came out earlier this year from the denier camp, namely that an online petition signed by over 30,000 so-called scientists could possibly disrupt the claim that the experts nearly all agree that climate disruption is largely driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂).

The petition in question is known as the Global Warming Petition Project, and it is organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a group out of rural Oregon that has ties to global warming denier groups and, through its support of home schooling, a number of conservative Christian and Catholic groups as well. The website claims that the petition “signed by over 31,000 American scientists.” But what Whittenberger found is that this is hardly the case. As he says in the eSkeptic piece:

[OISM principle Arthur Robinson] even seems to think that persons with Bachelors degrees in mathematics and engineering are relevant and qualified experts on the issue. This seems to make about as much sense as considering electricians to be experts on plumbing because they have certificates from trade school just as plumbers do.

As someone who has spent some time investigating the OISM myself, I have to agree with Whittenberger’s conclusions – that the OISM’s petition “solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions”. Similarly, any climate disruption skeptic or denier who relies on this petition to prove their point is relying on the wrong source.

h/t: Mike “Random” Pecaut

———-

UNESCO’s aquifer map a guide to future water conflict?
Water is a dwindling resource. Glaciers are melting. Droughts are becoming more common and harsher. And an increasing global population is stressing what water remains more and more. And so water conflicts are expected to increase in both frequency and severity. A few weeks ago, UNESCO released a global map that shows all the major aquifers and sources of groundwater and how they intersect international borders. The purpose for this map, as reported by New Scientist, is to push the international community to develop a treaty regarding how water resources are shared across national borders.

The problem is this – if one nation pumps water out of an aquifer (especially from a fossil aquifer that isn’t being refilled by seasonal rains), then that nation’s neighbors have less water, and that could lead to armed conflict. This is essentially the problem that the Colorado River Compact mostly solved between the eight states that use the Colorado River in the U.S. Southwest in the 1930s, but writ large with actual warfare as a possible outcome. And as with the eight parties to the Colorado River Compact, the more nations that are involved in drawing from a single aquifer, the more difficult multi-lateral treaties over that water will be, and the more important an international, UN-developed global treaty becomes. And it appears from a detailed look at the map that there are significant portions of Africa, Europe, and Asia where ten or more nations could all be drawing from a single aquifer, increasing the likelihood of conflict.

This map is relatively general, and the article says that a more detailed map of the world’s aquifers will be released in spring, 2009. But the map is good enough to illustrate something else – merely agreeing on how aquifer water will be extracted won’t be enough. Without a significant amount of scientific knowledge of how the aquifers are recharged, and an understanding of how recharging is expected to change in the future as a result of anthropogenic climate disruption, international laws may not be enough to prevent water conflicts among so many interested parties drawing on a common resource. If your people are dying of starvation because you’re not allowed to pump enough water out of the ground to grow your crops, you’ll almost certainly ignore the “agreement” that limits your pumping. And if/when that happens, all the agreements in the world won’t prevent open warfare.

h/t: Lex

———-

New data on charcoal in soil raises carbon questions
Soil researchers from the U.S. and Australia have published new data that raises questions about how much carbon soils can sequester, and how much carbon is released into the atmosphere when land use changes. According to the ABC Science article linked above, the authors of the paper suggest that climate models are underestimating the amount of carbon that is sequestered in soil.

This new data needs to be understood in case it does, as Dr. Evelyn Krull suggests, make climate disruption “look worse than it actually would be”. I look forward to reading more about this new data, and how it affects the climate model predictions. More accurate models are always a good thing.

———-

Wave and tidal energy growing pains
In the second Weekly Carboholic, I introduced readers to Finavera Renewables, a company who was placing a prototype wave power generation bouy off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula for a trial run on how wave energy could be tapped along the Pacific coast. The Seattle Times ran an article last week that provides an update on Finavera’s pilot program as well as a number of other wave and tidal energy programs in the Pacific Northwest.

Finavera remains the only company who actually has an approved permit for an ocean pilot program, but they’re not alone in being interested in the potential for ocean-based energy. Another company is looking at large emplacements of water turbines to take advantage of the significant tidal flow through Admiralty Inlet, the main water inlet into Puget Sound from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But at this point no-one has put any generation buoys or turbines into the water. Concerns about fishing grounds, a marine sanctuary, and the effect of electric cables on marine life have held up many of the dozens of programs the article claims are in some stage of development.

It’s probably only a matter of time before some project developer actually puts something in the water, but it’s good to see that environmental concerns aren’t being pushed aside in favor of energy – and that the economics of ocean energy (currently estimated at about 20 cents per kWh, as compared to 4 cents from wind turbines) isn’t being ignored in favor of the latest energy fad.

———-

Update on hybrid vehicle technology
Today’s Green, Inc. blog at the NYTimes has two articles that talk about new developments in hybrid vehicle technology. The first is about the use of ultracapacitors as a temporary energy storage system in order to lengthen the life of hybrid batteries and the second is about making hybrid heavy trucks.

Batteries don’t like sudden surges of energy, either coming into the battery while charging or going out of battery while discharging. Large swings in current tend to degrade the battery life as the current heats up the battery and, in extreme cases, could cause the battery to over heat and burst into flame. In standard electronic systems, this energy flow problem is handled with storage devices called capacitors. Capacitors store energy in an electric field and provide the high frequency currents that modern electronics need, leaving batteries to provide the more-or-less constant base current that feeds the overall power consumption of the electronics. Capacitors that are large enough to provide the same basic functionality for a hybrid car as it accelerates or brakes hard (with regenerative braking) have been extremely rare and expensive due to their size and energy storage requirements. But now AFS Trinity Power may have developed a high energy density, high voltage, and relatively inexpensive ultracapacitor to do the job. Green Inc reports that when an independent lab tested the capacitor/battery combination and compared it to a battery-only option, the battery lifetime increased by 7.6x, from 500 cycles to 3800 cycles. In terms of a car lifetime, that’s an increase from less than 2 years between battery replacements to over 12 years.

Large trucks cannot be propelled by electricity alone, but a large truck’s efficiency can be improved by the addition of a hybrid system, according to the second Green Inc article. The same basic technology that is currently in use in buses and delivery trucks is being redeveloped for use in large trucks such as semis and utility vehicles. While I don’t know exactly how it works, one of the main advantages that electric motors have over combustion engines is in low-speed torque, so I can easily imagine that a hybrid system could be utilized to reduce the overall horsepower required for an equivalently sized vehicle as the electric motor aids the diesel engine at low speeds or as the vehicle is moving over steep or rough terrain.

And let’s not forget – there have been “hybrid” diesel-electric train locomotives since they were invented – in 1917. Cars and trucks are just a little behind the curve.

Image credits:
Heartland Builders, LLC
BGR & UNESCO
SeaGen
WIRED Underwire blog

That’s because The Times has fallen on hard times (forgive me). The faltering business model that has strapped financial straitjackets onto other newspapers (witness the Christian Science Monitor ending its print edition) may have finally knee-capped the nation’s best newspaper. It has significant debt coming due, and insignificant cash on hand.

Reports Henry Blodget of the Silicon Valley Insider:

[T[he company must deliver $400 million to lenders in May of 2009, six months from now. The company has only $46 million of cash on hand, and its operations will likely begin consuming this meager balance this quarter or next. The company has been shut out of the commercial paper market, but has a $366 million short-term credit line remaining that it entered into several years ago, when the industry was strong. It has not yet drawn this cash down, and given the current environment and the trends at the company, we would not take for granted that it will be able to do so. [emphasis added]

Consider numbers we can all understand: In 2002, The Times’ stock price hit nearly $53. On Monday, the last line of a Forbes.com story relayed this telling stat: “Shares in the Times company fell 59 cents, or 6.3 percent, to $8.73 in mid-afternoon trading …” [emphasis added]

The Times‘ suddenly accelerated descent into fiscal disarray has probably irritated Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Just two months ago, Mr. Slim bought a 6.4 percent stake of the New York Times Co. at about $14 a share, an investment then worth about $127 million. If he’s still in, he’s lost nearly half his investment.

Recall, please, Mr. Sulzberger’s comment just 21 months ago at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, when asked about the future of the print edition of The Times:

I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.

Bet he cares now. At the time, he said The Times was focused on becoming an Internet news leader, saying it had doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition. But the problem is simple: It may have consistently high readership online, but that’s not translating into sufficient online advertising revenue to meet the expectations of institutional investors concerned primarily with short-term gain.

Here’s the short-term financial picture for the Times company as constructed by Mr. Blodget based on recent NYTCo. filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

What NYTCo. has:
• $46 million of cash
• $366 million owed to it by advertisers
Total: $412 million

What NYTCo. owes:
• $398 million of short-term debt (due in May)
• $161 million of accounts payable (newsprint, travel, etc.)
• $100 million of payroll (salaries)
• $159 million of other expenses
• $50 million owed on long-term debt and rent
Total: $865 million

Bottom line, short term: NYTCo. owes $453 million more than it has.

Other harpies have been snipping at The Times‘ heels. Recall, please, that in January a pair of hedge funds demanded changes at the company:

The trouble, according to Firebrand Partners and Harbinger Capital, is that the New York Times company has moved far too slowly to replace the revenue that is being lost as readership figures come under pressure and advertisers shift their spending from newspapers to the internet. [emphasis added]

Firebrand’s founder, Scott Galloway, wants the Times company to diversify. In a January letter to Mr. Sulzberger, Mr. Galloway wrote: “We believe a renewed focus on the core assets and the redeployment of capital to expedite the acquisition of digital assets affords the greatest shareholder appreciation and creates the appropriate platform to compete in today’s media landscape.” [emphasis added]

Well, good luck with appreciating shareholder value with that acquisition of digital assets. (About.com is highly profitable, so why’s the Times company shopping it around?) Too little, too late. The Times, like virtually every major newspaper company in America, refused to accept the Internet as an effective colleague and instead regarded it only as an ineffective, sure-to-fail upstart. Such arrogance is proving costly.

The news worsens. Nielsen reports that advertising spending for the first half of 2008 declined by 1.4 percent compared with the same period in 2007. Its news on Internet advertising is mixed:

Although overall Internet ad spending, when including paid search and online video advertising, was up by 11% during the first half of this year, image-based Internet advertising declined by 6% during the first half of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007. …

The decrease in image-based Internet advertising was driven by a 27% drop in online ad spending by financial services companies, which decreased their spending from $1.5 billion in the first half of 2007 to $1.1 billion during the first two quarters of this year. [emphasis added]

AFP reports that:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers said Internet advertising revenues rose 15.2 percent in the first six months of 2008 over the first half of 2007. Online advertising revenue was up 12.8 percent in the second quarter over the same period of 2007 but declined 0.3 percent from the first quarter of the year, from 5.8 billion dollars to 5.7 billion dollars, the IAB-PwC survey said. [emphasis added]

And that’s the problem for the Times company and every other newspaper company that has placed its business-model bet on sure-to-be-profitable Internet advertising. Despite double-digit growth in online advertising revenue in recent years, that growth isn’t paying off fast enough.

“Total advertising revenue for the newspaper industry is expected to decline 11.5% to $40.1 billion this year,” reports Jennifer Saba of industry trade journal Editor & Publisher. Print ad revenues, though declining, still provide the bulk of the industry’s income. Internet ad revenues, though increasing, will not produce sufficient revenue soon enough to stave off drastic, perhaps catastrophic, changes in the newspaper industry.

In February, reported The Times‘ Richard Pérez-Peña, “The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900.” When The Times said in February it would cut 100 jobs, its stock immediately rose 86 cents to $18.84. Now it’s under 10 bucks.

The Times, in fiscally happier times (forgive me again), bet big on expansion in New England to maximize revenue. In 1993, shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web for full public use, the Times company bought The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion. In 1999, it bought the Worcester, Mass., Telegram & Gazette for $295 million. Both deals were roundly criticized as too pricey for value received. Both deals have proven to be financial drains on the Times company. (The Times did not significantly embrace the Internet for several years and made poor decisions. Remember the ill-fated, pay-for-premium-content TimesSelect?)

Early this week, Forbes reported that the company “increased its estimates for how much The Boston Globe and other New England newspapers it owns have declined in value because of reductions in advertising revenue.” That drop in value — $166 million — occurred in just the third quarter. The Times company said the fourth quarter will bring further devaluation of the properties.

Prediction I: The Times will initially follow the industry’s formula: Cut expenses drastically (read: jobs). Seek to at least maintain current share price. Prediction II: The strategy will fail. Prediction III: The Times will sell assets. Prediction IV: That, too, will fail, because the company has insufficient assets relative to its debt and declining ad revenue. In September, E&P reported that the Times company ad revenue had declined 14.1 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Total revenue dropped 8.8 percent for the month.

Could the Times company raise enough cash to take itself private? Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why About.com may be on sale.

All this in a tanking economy. The Times and other newspaper companies shouldn’t bet on traditional big-bucks advertisers — Detroit, real estate, and want-ad classifieds — to come to the rescue. They’ve got problems of their own.

According to Mr. Blodget, the long-term view for the Times company is equally bleak:

What NYT has:
• $1.355 billion of buildings, real-estate, printing presses, trucks, technology
• $146 million of investments in joint ventures (Red Sox, etc.)
Total: $1.501 billion

What NYT owes:
• $673 million of long-term debt
• $7 million of long-term rent
• $284 million of pension benefits
• $214 million of retiree healthcare and other benefits
• $290 million of other liabilities
Total: $1.468 billion

Bottom line, long term: Balance sheet carrying values can provide a very misleading picture of long-term asset values, especially for things like land and buildings, which may have appreciated (or depreciated) significantly. As a result, there may be significant embedded value in these assets. But assuming the NYT’s land, buildings, and joint-ventures are carried at something approaching market value, NYTCo has only about $33 million more than it owes. [emphasis added]

The Gray Lady badly needs a Green Mistress, but in an American economy this distressed, that’s unlikely to occur. (Oh, Rupert? You interested in a really good deal?)

So what will the Times company do? Sell assets? In this economy, who will buy? Cut jobs? Assuredly, but at what credibility cost to the journalistic product it sells? End its print editions, and not just that of The Times, but of other papers it owns as well? Newsprint and subscriber delivery are costly. Aside from staff cuts, that seems the most likely — and quickest — route to cut costs substantially.

Any change in the Times company’s business model will influence the readership habits and information needs and wants of millions of people. The Times has been the opinion leader of the fabled Eastern Liberal Elite™ for a century and its front page has influenced daily the contents of hundreds of newspapers nationwide.

Perhaps the changes won’t immediately be so drastic, preserving the print edition. Says Mr. Blodget: The Times company’s realistic options have been reduced to:

• Major cost cuts (including dividend)
• Large asset sales
• Sale of equity at fire sale price.

Like most newspaper companies, the Times company has proven to be short-sighted in its adaptation to the Internet, its recognition of changing demographics and readership needs and desires, and its dog-on-a-short-leash relationship with institutional investors.

We should hope The Times survives with the quality of its journalism intact (wrong-on-WMDs Judith Miller, plagiarist Jayson Blair et al. incidents notwithstanding). With nearly 100 Pulitzer Prizes to show to the tourists, it’s still the best journalism gig in town.

As the new year approaches, The Times will surely and frequently editorially instruct president-elect Barack Obama on the appropriate means to reinvigorate the American economy.

In the midst of its own partially self-induced financial decline, The Times‘ advice ought to be taken cum grano salis.

by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite.

Somehow the Gold Isn’t All

The point is actually very simple, even obvious and even allowing for an understanding that the logic of Kapital is accumulation, a Vice for the Ages: they are greedy. If there were a large public appetite for Goethe in the original medieval German, they would feed it. There isn’t, and so they plunder the global treasure and rape the human spirit in ways that make the Vikings and the Visigoths look like UNICEF.

For them, it isn’t that the truth shall set you free, it’s the belief that wealth will make you happy, and as far as I can see, they can’t even get that right. To make this point I could point to a bevy of social theorists and clinicians, the armies of therapists, the mountains of anti-depressants, the addictions, to the sheer turmoil, if I read Dominic Dunne correctly, that seems to afflict the lives of the wealthy. I won’t; I will simply borrow this from Robert Service’s “Spell of the Yukon”:

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scribbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy – I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came out with a fortune last Fall -
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.”

The fact is that the lesson learned from the coverage of cases such as JonBenet is that we face not just a crisis of the media in general and journalism in particular, with its fearful flight from purpose, but a larger crisis of prevailing values. The problem isn’t complicated: in a market economy, and in a culture defined to an inordinate extent by economic calculation, other values are inevitably squeezed out, values that recognize a public interest, a public good that needs to be served and that is different from the aggregation of individual wants, indeed that suggests that what people want is not the same as what they need. Witness the way in which around the globe public service broadcasting organizations are being marginalized or, in some instances, systematically dismantled, to make way for a market-driven media culture, something which strikes me as akin to pulling down the Taj Mahal and replacing it with a shanty town.

The issues raised by rampant materialism and consumerism, and the sidelining of other “virtues,” does not only speak to a critique of American culture and media. The problem is global, if only because global media are also dominated by large corporations. If I look at my home country, the UK, there are many critics arguing that, in its once-celebrated culture of broadcasting, it has lost its way, unable to fulfill its public service remit, mired in sleaze and tat, no longer vigorous, vibrant and socially significant. And if it is a shadow of its former self, is that a failure from within or is it one more portent, one more shrill illustration that history has moved on, the market is dominant, feeding public appetites that suggest a larger cultural and spiritual deterioration, a culture full of what Richard Hoggart once called “corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”?

I accept, however, that people like Hoggart and so many others (and I would include myself here) who regret what has happened are declared to be on the wrong side of history. Maybe so, but what I think we can say is that what’s being lost are some important values that, once gone, will be extremely difficult to retrieve: respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, justice, fairness, civic virtue, citizenship. In other words, all the values and commitments that define a mature civilization and that provide the possibility of realizing the essential demand of liberal humanism, the achievement of the full and complete individual.

The Moronic Inferno

The absence of that fullness and completeness, the startling lack of mature judgment and cultivated taste, so prevalent in much popular culture, is very much suggested in the fact that by some bizarre alchemy of the times JonBenet became a celebrity and remains one – which begs yet again the question of why. How did a dead six year-old child become part of what Sean O’Hagan has called the “moronic inferno that is contemporary celebrity…”? As ever, the answer is both simple and complex: simple because it’s clear that people like and need celebrities; complex because of the complex intertwining of psychology, culture and personal biography that feed that need.

As I was writing this, on Sunday morning, December 9, 2007, an event was taking place in South Carolina that is a pitch perfect example of the odious cult of personality. Oprah (her name is in your Microsoft Word spellchecker dictionary, by the way) was on the stump for Barack Obama (and neither “Barack” nor “Obama” are in my spellchecker dictionary). The original intent had been to hold a rally in an indoor arena, seating 18,000 people. When it sold out in minutes, they decided to switch to an outdoor stadium with 80,000 seats. It also sold out.

Does anyone seriously believe that those in attendance are there for any other reason than to “see” Oprah, rather than to “listen” to Obama. (I understand that this has since changed, since Obama himself morphed into a politician-as-rock star.) Put this another way, there were then candidates for the Democratic party nomination with enormous experience, many ideas and thoughts about how to deal with the troubled times within which we live, including Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, all of who were hard pressed to fill a high school gym. This is telling us something – as a culture we are about the “moronic” rather than the profound and important. And it is precisely here that the issue becomes worthy of unpackaging, because in a curious, even bizarre sense, Oprah and JonBenet and all those others are cut from the same cloth, and it is we who wield the scissors.

For example, can there be any more pathetic, sad, revealing comment about the state of the culture – and not just in the United States – than the following comment from David Samuels, in an article about the paparazzi who follow Britney Spears around (30 to 45 on any given night) in The Atlantic, April 2008:

“History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make ‘Britney Spears’ the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years…”

Read the whole piece and you might, if you have any sense of decency, want to slit your wrists. (In kind of related, nauseous vein, try this: the journalist Tana Ganeva pointed out that in 2006, the British retail chain Tesco – think Target – launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.” Amidst protests from parents, Tesco moved the product from the toy section, but shelved it elsewhere in their stores.)

Affluenza

As ever, the observation of the fact of celebrity culture is less important than the question, why, from within what psychological and cultural pathologies does the need for celebrity gestate, what sustains it to the point where it metastasizes into compulsive needs, and why is it that those needs seem to be particularly acute, if Samuels is correct (which I suspect he is) among women between the ages of 16 and 34? In two books Oliver James has argued that the problem is that we live in a troubled time of “Affluenza,” where the drives of neo-liberal economics, with its compulsive competitiveness, materialism, and individualism produce not happiness but emotional distress, anguish and insecurity. As Margaret Bunting writes:

“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,” mass consumer societies which despite their claims to kneel at the altar of sovereign individualism inevitably and ironically, cripple personal agency.”

Tim Kasser, in The High Price of Materialism, suggests that there is a “scientific explanation of how our contemporary culture of consumerism and materialism affects our everyday happiness and psychological health. Other writers have shown that once we have sufficient food, shelter, and clothing, further material gains do little to improve our well-being. Kasser goes beyond these findings to investigate how people’s materialistic desires relate to their well-being. He shows that people whose values center on the accumulation of wealth or material possessions face a greater risk of unhappiness, including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and problems with intimacy – regardless of age, income, or culture.

What I am suggesting, then, is that one of the ways in which we deal with the pain of living in a hyper-consuming society, is by focusing in on those more famous than ourselves, whether they be dead or alive. The implication, however, is that in salivating over celebrity, something is being lost, and something is awry.

James is suggesting that “affluenza” and its attendant conditions is actually a mental illness, a darker version of Doris Lessing’s comment in her 2007 Nobel lecture, when she spoke movingly of a desperately poor woman she had seen in Africa who, despite the misery of circumstance, was reading Anna Karenina. She asks, rhetorically, “…do we think we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?”

The question is, what to do? For Lessing, the answer would lie in “the storyteller, the dream maker, the myth maker, that is our phoenix that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.” It is the conviction that great art, great literature, great culture can make us morally better by, as F. R. Leavis wrote, kindling “our own best self…” echoing Plato, who said that the muses gave us arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul curcuit, when it has got out of tune, into harmony with itself.” The English poet, Ted Hughes wrote to one of his students that the “mentally sick” could be cured by being “put in contact with their real nature,” which for Hughes could be achieved through poetry. The point is simple: the obsession with celebrity is not some harmless whim, not to be taken seriously, it is window into a poisoned spirit.

Emblematic of this is the sight of a culture which is to an extraordinary extent driven by emotion, not reasoned thought. The sociologist Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote, in the early part of the 20th century, that there was “a democracy of the emotions.” If he were writing today he would say that we are a democracy of emotions on steroids, as if Barry Bonds and Barbara Cartland had conjoined and spawned the populace of late modernity. It is not that emotion per se is not a deeply important part of what it is to be human, it is faux emotion, manipulated emotion, hysterical emotion that swamps reason, buries all thought beneath it like an enormous mudslide devouring a Guatemalan village.

The Great Renunciation

What I would like to argue here is this: what is suggested by the media coverage of the Ramsey story and others like it, this escalating dynamic that we have witnessed in the past two decades or so, is what I am going to call the Great Renunciation. What is being renounced, as a necessary part of the reorganization of global political economy, are ways of thinking about the purpose of the making of culture, most potently in broadcasting, that are informed by a concept of public interest and public good.

Those ways of thinking are, necessarily if mischievously, presented by the ideologues of the market as remnants from a time before. Remnants that are deemed to be not just anachronistic, but seen as toxins in a body politic that needs to ‘modernize,’ better to confront the challenges of global capital. It is as if the only way they can validate the present, their present, is to invalidate the past.

It is an ideological tendency brought to the fore by Ronald Reagan’s first Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, who announced in 1981 that henceforth the public interest would be that in which the public was interested. Those people around the world and in the United States who argued that there were certain profound values that needed to be protected (and I include myself in that number, having spent the best part of two decades studying, writing and lecturing about public service broadcasting all over the planet) were treated as suffering from the affliction of either a rheumy-eyed nostalgia which was no longer relevant or a stubbornness that was, for the financial well-being of the company, dysfunctional. Either way, they had to go.

I can understand the latter argument better than the former. If there is an honest claim that what matters is the bottom line and the profit margin, while I may not agree with that at least I know what it means. The argument that cultural values as traditionally understood are not quite relevant or modern or useful to the society is something that mystifies me. What exactly is it that is no longer relevant? Creativity, diversity, quality, standards, serving a citizenry, balance, intelligence, curiosity, innovation, not pandering to a superficial mass taste, being optimistic that the audience can discover pleasures and understandings that they otherwise might not have known, independence from pressures that dilute and corrupt the process of the creative act, that erode journalistic standards, that diminish insights that the broadcaster can have when allowed to do so? Are these not relevant, are these passé, do we no longer need such things, such commitments?

There is running through the commentaries of the new modernism in cultural production a terrible conceit, an arrogance that avoids, because it has to, what Yeats called the “ancient questions’. It is for this reason that we must in the first instance fess up to the fact that the world has become, again, not just a dangerous place, but in those realms that strut their economic and populist significance, a vulgar reality. We need, indeed, to resurrect the very idea of vulgarity, loutishness, moral and intellectual impoverishment, to acknowledge the sourness and bile, resentment and fears of much of contemporary life. Let’s be honest, do any of us know very many happy and grounded people?

I remember only too well when David Mills and I were negotiating, with Channel Four and then ITV, budgets for our documentaries. The sense one had was that many of the people we were dealing with lived and breathed in terror. Their faces had the shadow of strain of a man who has just been told that he has cancer. It isn’t that they weren’t decent people, or that left to themselves their creativity would not pour forth. It’s just that they functioned in indecent circumstance. They were surrounded by circumstances in which to fail was anathema, where to take a risk was to court failure and where, ironically, the forces of competition made failure all that much more likely.

This is not how it should be. This is not healthy either for the individuals involved or the society they are supposed to serve.

What the ideologues of this new age of consumption have done, and will continue to do with ever greater relish, is to take the stuff of the vulgate and present it as if it were the equivalent of Rilke and Joyce, Greene and Hemingway, Picasso or Dali, the Beatles or Beethoven, Rowling or Tolkien, Hancock or Pynchon, Attenborough or Murrow, Tony Garnett or David Chase, Paddy Chayefsky or Dennis Potter. Well it isn’t, and the suggestion that it is, mouthed by apparently highly intelligent individuals, is simply stupid, so lacking in substance that there has to be an explanation.

And there is: self-interested cynicism, with an IV drip of greed. The emerging ‘culture’ of television is the twin of that other corporate culture in which preen the exquisite, perfectly formed grotesques of Enron and WorldCom, of Global Crossing and Arthur Andersen, the oil companies and their brethren elsewhere in the world of modern capital (I do not by the way subscribe to the chic, tad optimistic, notion of “late-capitalism”; It’s just beginning. I’m with Max Weber: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness.” Weber went mad and looking around one can begin to see why – the madness, as well as the pessimism).

Basic Moral Values

I came to know and think about the culture of broadcasting through the writing of a biography of Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. If there was one bone of contention which Greene gnawed away at it was the question of the relationship between the need for creative freedom and a wider social responsibility. He explored the theme brilliantly in a speech in Rome in 1965, in which he spoke of his concern about attempts at censorship of broadcasters

“which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks, not to undertake those adventures of the spirit which must be at the heart of every truly new creative work…historically, the greatest risks have attached to the maintenance of what is right and honourable and true. Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne…”

In the same speech, he continues:

“Relevance is the key – relevance to the audience, and to the tide of opinion in society. Outrage is wrong. Shock may be good. Provocation can be healthy and indeed socially imperative. These are issues to which the broadcaster must apply his conscience.”

In the first draft that Charles Curran had prepared for Greene, he had written, “shock may not be good.” Greene literally put a red line though ‘not.’ There was no brighter star in Greene’s firmament than the creative mind, in whatever genre. And there was no greater responsibility that he possessed than to try and find, nurture and protect that mind. And for this the need to be “truly independent” was crucial because without that one could not be truthful, accurate, impartial, creative, one could not court failure and therefore one could not take risks. Truth for him – which involved the truth of journalism as well as the truth of art – was like a constantly endangered species that one needed to breed and then protect, all the better to sustain what he called “basic moral values – truthfulness, justice, freedom, compassion, tolerance.”

I refer back to Greene for two reasons. Those values and commitments – which invoke the “ancient questions” – remain vitally important to the maintenance of a mature, vital, creative, humane (the thing that troubles me most about large amounts of culture today is its lack of common humanity), democratic society. The second reason is to point up how such reasoning has all but disappeared from the landscape of public discourse, which is obsessed with the material, the consumed, the pragmatic, “inward investment,” as if the making of culture was like asking Toyota to build a car plant in Toledo. The generation which now rules the roost seems decidedly uncomfortable in using such language – bad career move maybe, bit old fashioned, so yesterday.

At the heart of that debate about culture in general, and broadcasting in particular are two elemental questions: what actually do we mean by standards, “great” programs, television as an art form but also infused with other, even larger, social, democratic purposes; and if we can assume that whatever the definitional problems, we all do recognize that, as John Donne wrote, “no man can draw a line twixt day and night, tho’ light and dark are tolerably distinguishable,” then what exactly were the arrangements – institutional as well as philosophical – in which such moments of excellence happened?

And can those arrangements live on in a market led world?

Even as one types that last sentence the silliness of the proposition feels all too clear. Of course, there will be moments of great television, and even more of great radio, which seems to me to be a potentially more resilient medium partly because in economic terms it is less important than television. That, however, is not the point, since the real question – given the fact that even deserts have the occasional tree – is what will the overall landscape of television look like: will there be original, edgy long-form documentaries that explore issues of magnitude?; will there be dramas that are literate, that challenge and needle and provoke, that linger in the memory because they made you think?; will there be news worthy of the democratic project, providing for the political life of the society in ways that serve it well, that feeds the needs of the citizen, that pushes and jostles its way onto the stage of public discourse because to ignore it would be foolish and perverse?; will there be children’s programs that are worthy of the colossal importance of raising our children well, of seeing in them the future, rather than a market to be sold to?; will there be comedy that works because of the brilliance of the performer and the fineness of the writing, in no need of a laugh track to simulate humor?; will there be the quirkily original, the eccentric, the lateral thinking and creativity that springs, unbeckoned but welcomed and applauded, from the folds of imagination?; will there be those moments when we watch not alone, but as part of an integrated culture, drawn together through the mysterious alchemies of communication?; will there be refinement, range, diversity, integrity, professionalism, courage, the ability to make mistakes?Will we have a culture of which we can be proud, and about which we will feel no shame? And can we do this within the same universe of social practice as the market, all the while regulated with the lightness of a snowflake?

I hope so, and if we can then fears about what is unfolding will have gladly and delightfully proven to be unwarranted. But then I think of the beast, looming and lurking, threatening, ravenous, uncaring – at least of others – dangerous, America, Britain, the planet as a cultural Jurassic Park, governed by the canny intelligence of velociraptors. There is, then, only one way to deal with the beast: the whip! The lash!

Bend It Like Rousseau

I want to suggest, then, that the only meaningful question that one should ask about culture is what are, and what will be, the values that inform its practice. Indeed, utterly central to this debate is the conviction that at the heart of the very idea of, for example, public broadcasting, there are certain values which should guide the process of program making and the relationship with the audience which are to all intents and purposes abstract, but which are nonetheless important for that: excellence, standards, quality, truth, impartiality, intelligence and so on. And of course it is obvious, even trite, to observe that these are difficult and abstract and almost beyond language to capture, as if noting that were sufficient grounds for denying their significance. A metaphor: few people understand the physics of applying a specific kind of pressure to a spherical object which then arcs through the ether, but an awful lot of people nevertheless seem to find a kind of majestic beauty in David Beckham’s use of his right foot. Some things, let us be blunt, do not need to be explained, merely recognized and appreciated.

The reason why this question of values is, at least to my way of thinking, absolutely front and center to any debate about culture is that, because of its ubiquity and presumed sense of importance in people’s lives, any such discussion is actually a discussion of what values should prevail within the larger culture and society. It is surely vital to understand and accept that the definition of policies and values for the cultural industries is inevitably and necessarily suggestive of a definition of policies and values for the character of a whole society. They capture the sets of choices and preferences, which color all the imperatives, ambitions and institutions, which constitute, in the most literal sense, a social order. Two hundred years ago when Poland was going through one of its periods of political reform, the leadership called on Rousseau to advise them. As to the economic system, he observed:

“(The choice) to be adopted by Poland depends on the purposes she has in view in reforming her constitution. If your only wish is to become noisy, brilliant and fearsome, and to influence the other peoples of Europe, their example lies before you; devote yourselves to following it . . . Try to make money very necessary, in order to keep the people in a condition of great dependence; and with that end in view, encourage national luxury, and the luxury of spirit which is inseparable from it. In this way, you will create a scheming, ardent, avid, ambitious, servile and knavish people, like all the rest; one goes to the two extremes of opulence and misery, or license and slavery, with nothing in between. I know that men can only be made to act in terms of their own interests; but pecuniary interest is the worst, the basest and most corrupting of all, and even, as I confidently repeat and shall always maintain, the least and weakest in the eyes of those who really know the human heart. In all hearts there is naturally a reserve of grand passions, when greed for gold alone remains, it is because all the rest, which should have been stimulated and developed, have been enervated and stifled.”

There is another, guiding assumption behind the argument I am trying to make here. It is that the most profound values and conceptual commitments that constitute humanity at its best – might I suggest life and liberty, justice and truth, rights both civil and human, democracy, love – by definition have no materiality. There may be material expressions or metaphors – the scales of justice, the voting booth, the statute book, the kiss – but these are only, can only be, the necessary tangibility which allows us to realize, use, benefit from the language of our human imagination. So language is crucial – and I know that is stating the obvious – to our very ability to realize that which the mind has wrought.

It is then a reasonable argument to suggest that insofar as language born from the reflective mind and the play of informed, mature imagination is diminished, then so are those values and philosophical commitments. And there lies my essential concern with how this, and other cultures, are evolving and will continue to evolve: symbolically and concretely. It is a situation which suggests that in pursuing the necessary materiality of the market, where the only value is commodity value, we are inevitably marginalizing the mysterious possibilities of the mind and the heart that have formed the essential elements of that long march of the species to establish a civilized and caring world guided by a potent and powerful moral imagination, and a commitment to values that are none the less vital because they are non-material.

In fact, some of the most powerful visions of the purpose of, for example, broadcasting emerged within unusual and trying circumstances. Consider, for instance, the cultural histories of the occupations of Germany and Japan in the late 1940s and the formulation of Allied policy for broadcasting in the rebuilding of those societies. There one can see powerful testament to the idea of broadcasting as primarily a social rather than an economic process, as something with moral, cultural, intellectual and creative purpose and not just as a source of mild comment and moderate pleasure. The Charters of NHK in Japan and the ARD in Germany, dictated to a great extent by foreign military governments in Japan and Germany, were replete with the public service ideal. If broadcasting was to comment, it should do so with a flourish. If it was to amuse, it should do so with élan. If it was to educate, it should do so with real professionalism. It was simply understood by the American and Allied leadership that the life of the mind of a society was far too precious and important to be left to the vagaries of a commercial system.

It could be argued that such policies were creatures of the moment, as massive destruction demanded enormous reconstruction, of which communications would inevitably be part. But what was required was the restoration not just of highways, buildings, plants, but also of the shattered imaginative lives of whole populations. The architects of postwar Germany and Japan sensed correctly that healthy, diverse cultural institutions were a prerequisite to a functioning liberal democracy. Broadcasting was thus to be used as a key part of the cultural and social regeneration of those societies.

In that lies the real clue to the nature and purpose of great public broadcasting: that it makes best sense when it represents a national and moral optimism within a society, when it suggests – through the diversity and quality of its programs – that we can be better than we are: better served, better amused, better informed, and, thus, better citizens.

Next: Public Service

INDEX

Before you answer, what do we mean by “technology”? I think we all have sort of an operational idea in our heads of what we mean by the term, but if you’re like most people, odds are pretty good that you’ve never sat down and tried to articulate a real definition. A couple pretty smart thinkers had some thoughts on the subject that you might find helpful. Or challenging. Let’s see.

First, Arnold Pacey, a British scholar whose Culture of Technology helps us understand that technology is a lot more than just the machine itself, which Pacey calls the “restricted” sense of the term. The machine – the technical dimension, is only a part of the whole picture.

Have a look at this diagram:

The bottom point is what Pacey calls the “technical aspect,” which includes “knowledge, skill and technique; tools, machines, chemicals, liveware; resources, products, and wastes.” This lower third of the equation, the “restricted meaning,” is what most people – probably you included – mean when they use the term “technology.”

However, the “general meaning” incorporates the top two corners of the triangle, the “cultural aspect” and the “organizational aspect.” The cultural includes “goals, values and ethical codes, belief in progress, awareness and creativity.” The organizational signifies “economic and industrial activity, professional activity, users and consumers, trade unions.” Put another way, the cultural is what people think about it, how they use it, what they believe about it, and so on. The organizational has to do with official laws and policies governing its development and use.

Consider Pacey’s example of the snowmobile. It’s one machine, one technical apparatus. However, in some parts of the world it’s a recreational vehicle. In other places it’s used to hunt. In still others it’s a work vehicle (imagine that you’re working on an oil pipeline in the far north). And if you’re just west of where I live, in Colorado’s ski country, it can even be an emergency rescue device. These distinctions matter when talking about a machine and help explain the difference between technical and technological.

As for the organizational dimension, think about all the ways in official policies (governmental, corporate, etc.) dictate how devices are used – or even ban their use (or existence). Right now you’re using the Internet. In the early 1990s the government made some important decisions about the Net, decisions that spurred its development as a commercial, social, educational and entertainment technology. If the government had instead restricted its use for anything but, say, defense and intelligence gathering, we’d have a very different Internet today. That is, the Internet would be, wires and routers and protocols notwithstanding – a very different technology.

Next, let’s broaden our understanding just a bit more. In Technopoly, Neil Postman made clear that technologies aren’t always physical things. One example was education – broadly considered, education is a tool that humans developed to serve a purpose. (If we get just a little bit cynical, we might decide that education is a tool that can be used for a number of purposes, not all of them necessarily noble.)

So, with these things in mind, we here at Scholars & Rogues want to ask our readers: what do you believe is the greatest technology in human history?

Feel free to nominate, debate, argue, debunk, whatever.We look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Reference

Pacey, Arnold. The Culture of Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

One of the more common arguments you hear from global heating deniers and skeptics is that the urban heat island effect is causing global temperature measurements to look a lot hotter than they actually are. This is such a powerful argument because there is some truth to it – when you plop down a new road or build a town around what used to be a rural National Weather Service temperature monitoring station, there’s going to be a major uptick in the temperature that station measures. Skeptics like Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com have spent a great deal of time documenting situations where new roads, new construction, even the addition of an asphalt walkway to a gas grill could be responsible for spurious temperature readings out of weather stations. However, the argument that global heating is all a misunderstanding of the urban heat island effect took a hit recently with the release of a new study that finds temperatures measured in established cities trend nearly identically to rural temperatures.

The key word there is “established”. According to paper co-author David Lister, if a city has been around long enough, and if temperature measurements have been taken in the urban area long enough, then you can measure both the average temperature difference and the trend of the the local temperature. And when Lister and his colleagues analyzed both the temperature average and trend over cities, the found that if a city had been measuring data for a long time, then the the urban heat island effect was almost entirely negated. Here’s how that works.

Let’s say you’ve got a thermometer outside your house sitting above an asphalt road. You know it’ll be hotter than a thermometer a mile away next to a pond – that’s the urban heat island effect. But if you take measurements using the same thermometers and at the same time for years, you’ll find that the trend (how much each thermometer goes up and/or down over time) is roughly equal for each thermometer. The one outside your house may be two degrees hotter all the time than the one by the pond, but because it’s hotter all the time, the difference in the temperature of the thermometer outside your house from one year to the next will be pretty much the same as the difference in the temperature of the thermometer at the pond from one year to the next.

Or, to use a different example, if you’re jumping up 10 feet above a trampoline, you’re still going to be 10 feet in the air over the trampoline even if you put the trampoline up on the roof instead of on the ground – you’re jumping jumping up and down just as high even though the trampoline is higher in the air. The trampoline on the roof is like the thermometer on your house over asphalt while the trampoline in the ground is like the thermometer by the pond.

What this means is that climatologists can be confident in using urban temperature data for monitoring stations in established cities so long as the monitoring station itself has been stable (no new asphalt walkways to grills nearby). Cities like London, Vienna, New York, Tokyo, etc. where there are decades if not centuries of temperature data are just as good thermometers of global heating as rural locations.

However, in situations where cities pop up around monitoring stations or where new monitoring stations are installed, extreme care must be taken in order to get accurate temperature data. After all, you don’t want to be measuring how high someone’s jumping off a trampoline on the ground only to have the trampoline moved atop the roof without your noticing, because that would mess with your measurements. It appears that Lister’s group crunched some data on Chinese urban temperature monitoring and found that only about 60% of measured temperature increase was actual trend as opposed to urban heat island effect.

All in all, it sounds like an excellent paper.

———-

A new study into the ice sheets that once covered North America suggests that Greenland may melt dramatically faster than the IPCC or even most climatologists expect. The study, reported in Nature News, suggests that the entire North American ice cap (the Laurentide ice sheet, or LIS) melted over the course of about 1,000 years, producing enough meltwater to raise ocean levels by 0.7 to 1.3 meter per century. According to the article, this was likely because the land mass of North America warmed fast enough to drive the ice sheet back.

This applies to Greenland because it suggests that, once the ice is gone from the margins of the island, the warming land will warm the ice cap and melt it quickly, perhaps within just a few centuries. This is a much faster pace than scientists previously expected, and there will no doubt be some disagreement about the accuracy of this new study as a result. But if it’s true, then coastal regions should expect a great deal more sea level rise due to Greenland’s melt than the last IPCC estimate.

The article also pointed out that the scientists did something that many global heating deniers do not – they verified their conclusions. The scientists initially determined the rate of the LIS collapse using “radiocarbon dates of organic matter and marine shells, cosmogenic dates from the surface of boulders, and the composition of isotopes in marine sediment cores”, but then the scientists also used a state-of-the art climate model to see if its results would bear out the paleoclimate data.

It did, providing yet another independent accuracy check on climate modeling, or at least the climate model(s) that was used by the scientists involved in this study.

———-

One of the strangest climate articles I’ve read yet came across my LCD screen last week. According to the Times Online, a classified group of scientists code-named “Jason” developed a rudimentary climate model back in the late 1970s that predicted global heating remarkably similar to what the IPCC is predicting today. This was during the “we’re headed into another ice age” period, by the way.

According to the article, what ultimately turned the Jason group’s conclusions around was the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Reagan apparently didn’t like the conclusions of the Jasons or of the climate scientists of the National Academy of Sciences (which had agreed with the Jasons conclusions in a report headed by MIT professor Jule Charney), so Reagan commissioned a third study by Bill Nierenberg that ultimately gave Reagan what he wanted to hear:

Overall, the synopsis emphasized the positive effects of climate change over the negative, the uncertainty surrounding predictions of future change rather than the emerging consensus and the low end of harmful impact estimates rather than the high end. Faced with this rather benign scenario, adaptation was the key….

But this was only the beginning of his involvement in what eventually became a movement of global warming sceptics. A year after his report came out he became a co-founder of the George C Marshall Institute, one of the leading think tanks that would go on to challenge almost every aspect of the scientific consensus on climate change. Nierenberg hardened his position. He began to argue not just that global warming wasn’t a problem, but also that it wasn’t happening at all. There was no systematic warming trend, the climate was simply going through its normal, natural fluctuations.

And thus began the global heating denialist industry we’re still fighting today. Just think how much different things might be today had Reagan not been the original decider, and had decided to ignore science in favor of faith thirty years ago….

———-

There’s some good news about global heating too, though. According to Reuters, case of plague are likely to fall in the U.S. because the climate will be too hot and too dry to support the fleas and rats that host and vector the disease.

Great news for the desert southwest and its fringes. Too bad that plague cases are expected to go up in central Asia, where the climate is expected to get wetter. Talk about a mixed blessing.

———-

According to the Washington Post, California bill SB375 may be the first-in-the-nation urban planning law designed specifically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The bill gives top priority for federal transportation and development dollars throughout the state to high density urban centers in a bid to drastically cut down on driving. And while no new transportation projects would be turned down because they didn’t comply with the new law, 100% of transportation subsidies would go to complying projects by 2012.

If this bill is signed by Governor Schwarzenegger as it’s expected to be, then California will become the first state to consciously choose to focus people into high density urban living and out of suburban tract homes. If other states, or even the federal government under a new president, were to follow suit, this could be the start of a major cultural transformation in the United States.

And that could be just what the U.S. needs to address global heating.

In the interests of disclosure, I’ve rearranged the order of the questions and answers in order to group them logically by topic instead of chronologically.

S&R: Can you give me a brief rundown of what PCAP is and what its purpose is?

Bill Becker: PCAP is a project of the University of Colorado, the Wirth Chair, to produce a 100 day action plan for the next President of the United States on climate change. We’ve been going since January 1st 2007, eighteen or nineteen months now. We published our first plan in December of last year, 2007. We’re going to publish the final plan in October of this year. The first plan had more than 300 policy ideas and programmatic ideas. It’s easily the most comprehensive blueprint for federal private leadership that’s out there right now. What we’re finding is that a lot has changed since last December – the politics has changed, there’s been some new science, Jim Hansen has been more aggressive about what we need to do, so we’re updating all of what we proposed in December and we’ll release it very shortly.

S&R: You released your last plan in December, and you said that a whole bunch of things have changed since then. Can you give me some examples?

BB: One is Jim Hansen, who says that we need to get to 350 ppm [of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere]. We’re already over that, so that’s going to be quite a feat. The Warner-Lieberman Bill failed in the senate, so we don’t yet have a climate cap-and-auction or cap-and-trade bill in place. The Bali [conference] has happened since we published the report where nations have committed now, in December 2009, to come back together and figure out what we’re going to do after Kyoto. And there are some other things. The energy bill in December passed with new CAFÉ standards and some good features on appliance efficiency and so on. So all of that has changed and it impacts what we proposed in December and we’ll reflect that in the new one.

S&R: You’re talking to both Presidential candidates, and last night you said to the Green Constitutional Congress that you’d already talked to Congress some. What’s the response been so far?

BB: It’s been very positive. No promises, and we haven’t asked for any. You know, with more than 300 ideas it’s impractical to suggest that anybody’s going to sign up to them all, but they’re certainly using it. We see some of the ideas and even some of the language beginning to show up, or has some time ago shown up, in the platforms of the campaigns. So it’s good. The reception has been positive.

We met with Obama himself and his policy director Heather Higgenbottom last October, way back then when there was still a lot of people in the field for President. And then we met with John McCain’s senior staff starting late last year. And we’ve been in touch with the senior advisers of both campaigns since then. On July 1 we held in Washington D.C a briefing on the security implications of climate change for the senior advisers of the campaigns and both campaigns were well represented at that. We had six scientists, two admirals, and other national defense experts on hand. It was a day long briefing that went really, really well. So they’ve been engaged. We’ve been engaged. Very positive.

S&R: What would you say are the top five or ten recommendations that PCAP has made?

BB: The first thing is that the President, in his inaugural address, in those first hundred minutes of the administration, needs to stand up and send a signal to this country and to the international community that there’s a new sheriff in town and that this country is going to be a leader again and a collaborator with other nations in solving [climate change]. That signal needs to go out right away, and the whole world and this country will be watching for that signal.

The second thing is that the President needs to begin to exercise the authority he has under current law to begin to change federal policy, how federal government uses energy. There’s a considerable amount of executive authority already in the President’s hands to do some good things. We’ve done a legal analysis of those authorities and we’ve identified to the President, or rather he’ll be able to find out from our studies, what he can do without waiting for Congress.

Then I would recommend that the President challenge Congress to return to him a cap-and-trade bill – a cap-and-auction bill is a better way to put it – within a hundred days. We need to send the signal to the world that we’re serious about this. We need to get that debate behind us. We recommend a certain kind of auction bill, by the way, and we think that the President needs to set standards for the kind [of bill] he wants to see on his desk. It needs to be transparent. It needs to be equitable. It needs to be adjustable because market conditions will change and we may not get the price right all at once. It needs to be a 100% auction – we shouldn’t be giving allowances away. And we recommend that it be an upstream cap-and-trade, which means we’re permitting or auctioning allowances to the 1500 or so places where fossil fuel comes into the economy. That’s the mine mouth, the well head, the port for natural gas, and if you do that, you’re avoiding having to permit 15 or 20 thousand entities and you’ll get rid of all this complexity that’s been built into the legislation so far – the off ramps and price caps and all this kind of stuff. It becomes much easier to administer and a much more manageable system. So those are a couple things.

Then we think the President needs to champion a very controversial move – to stop subsidizing fossil energy. It’s only something that Congress can do, but the President, with the bully pulpit and leadership skills, needs to see that happen, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not just because it makes no sense for us to be paying one another to emit carbon, and that’s what we’re doing – taxpayer money is going to oil companies or coal companies – but it’s also because it makes no sense on one hand to put a price on carbon through a cap-and-auction system so that you’re correcting market signals so the market can do it’s magic, but on the other hand you’re distorting market signals by subsidizing the same fuels you’re trying to cap. It makes no sense from a public policy or economic standpoint. It’s a tough battle. Last December, the Senate and the House tried to pay for tax subsidies for solar and wind by shifting fossil energy subsidies over, basically oil company subsidies. The oil industry rose up, opposed it, the White House said it would veto it, and it failed. So it’s not going to be an easy fight, but the President should lead it.

The next thing the President should do is get control of the carbon emissions of the federal government itself. It’s the world’s largest energy user. It produces about 2% of the U.S. carbon emissions. The federal government has incredible procurement power – what it buys, it’s such a huge consumer that it can change the marketplace. If it starts buying plug-in hybrid vehicles, if it establishes a sustained, large market, that encourages manufacturers to invest in producing those [plug-in hybrids]. So the federal government has a long ways to go and can, we think, become a carbon neutral enterprise, certainly by mid-century. That’s no mean feat, but we think it can be done.

The President needs to set out a whole new set of energy metrics, a whole new set of energy targets for the country quite different from the ones we have now. We need to cut our petroleum use in half by 2020. We need to get 25% of our electricity from renewables by 2025. We need to increase our efficiency 2.5% a year. These kinds of metrics. Our President needs to stand up and recalibrate what the nation’s energy goals are. So those are a few of the things.

S&R: If you could think of the single greatest element that’s missing from the conversation over climate change in this country, what would it be?

BB: The opportunity. I don’t mean to be mercenary by that, but the fact is that in building this new economy and in sustaining it there’s probably the largest global opportunity for helping people, for creating jobs, for earning income, for economic stability – probably the largest opportunity we’ve ever seen. We have 2 billion people in the world without electricity. I mentioned earlier today the cheapest way to get them that electricity is with distributed solar and wind rather than building transmission lines and centralized power. That’s a huge market and so far we’re just sitting on the sidelines for the most part. We yielded the solar market to Germany, the wind market to Denmark, and more solar market to Japan.

We invented those technologies in this country. We’re still the most innovative country in the world by any stretch of the imagination. We’ve got more Nobel laureates, more national laboratories, we have more scientists – 100,000 scientists and engineers on the federal payroll for crying out loud. This is a huge opportunity, and I think if people move from fear of change, from fear of not knowing what the new economy is, and understand that we will come out much stronger as a nation and as people and as employers and employees at the other end of that transition, then I think that we’ll be able to mobilize the country to do the right thing.

I think right now there’s too much fear of change. Some of it results in skepticism that there is any problem, some of it results in inertia about doing anything about it, so we need to talk more about the positive side. This is a tremendous opportunity for this country and for the world. It has humanitarian dimensions. We heard today [at the Rocky Mountain Roundtable on Energy and Climate Change] that the two great problems are the environment and poverty in the world today. We can address both at once by helping get clean technologies for electricity and clean water to the people of the world, rather than building more coal plants or more fossil energy production projects to give them the energy they need. So it’s the opportunity argument I think we need to make.

S&R: How hard do you think it will be for Congress, or whatever organization it delegates, to sit down, go through the tax code and federal law, and pull out the subsidies, hidden or otherwise?

BB: It’s going to be hard. But I think it’s not Congress.

We’re suggesting that the President task the Office of Management of the Budget, the Department of Treasury, a task force, essentially, to begin pulling the curtain back on the ways in which we subsidize carbon. A lot of them are very, very subtle kinds of subsidies, and some of them are very, very popular subsidies. A good case in point is the home interest deduction on McMansions. [Congressmen] John Dingell put a bill in to eliminate the home interest deduction on homes over a certain size – the really, really huge homes – and to gradually reduce that deduction until you got down to 2500 or 3000 square feet. But the point is that [the home interest deduction] is a very popular subsidy that is actually encouraging people to build larger homes which use more electricity and produce more carbon emissions.

Some of [the subsidies] are sacred cows, and we’re not suggesting that the President stride into the field and start shooting sacred cows. Some of them need to be herded in different directions, we think. Not all subsidies can be or should be eliminated – some of them are necessary for national security. A good case in point is policing the Persian Gulf oil lanes or the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – those should be maintained.

The point I try to make on subsidies is that we need to stop paying one another to do the wrong things. We need to remove perverse subsidies from the system, and by perverse I mean those things that encourage the bad things like carbon emissions. We need to stop them. The process we’re recommending is an inventory, publicly put on the Internet where everyone can see it, of the subsidies that are identified that are encouraging carbon use so we get a national discussion of which we should jettison. The President could even form a Presidential commission to recommend which subsidies to get rid of and do a base-closing kind of procedure – all or nothing. Put a bill into Congress and either take the package or you do none of them. That eliminates some of the political pain of picking out certain constituencies.

S&R: If you can’t get federal action on those things for one reason or another, do you have a plan to get those kinds of things implemented in a bottom-up strategy instead of a top-down?

BB: Well, the bottom-up is already happening, of course. There are 850 mayors who pledged to meet at least Kyoto targets. There are 21 states that have passed renewable portfolio standards. There are 31 [states], I believe, that have climate action plans in place or under development. So the states and localities have already exerted leadership and I expect they’ll continue. As you know, there’s several regional cap-and-auction or cap-and-trade plans in place or coming into being. If there’s a silver lining to a lack of federal leadership these past years, and it’s hard to find one, but if there is one it’s that governors and mayors and even some businesspeople are beginning to take ownership of this issue and beginning to act on it.

I don’t think we’re going to see the failure at the federal level that you’ve asked about. I don’t think, with the international mandate to do something about this, with the growing scientific evidence, and with the growing physical evidence in this country of severe weather – flooding and forest fires and all of that, which I believe are the early signs of climate change in this country – I don’t believe the President or the Congress could fail to act in some way. It may take longer than we like, but they can’t take too long and I’ll tell you why.

When we and others talk about the need for bold and urgent action, we’re reflecting what the world community has said developed nations must do to solve this problem. The IPCC says we need to level off, globally, carbon emissions. We need to stop the growth of carbon emissions by 2015. That’s six years, only six years after the President takes office. That’s not a lot of time because that implies a major change in our economy – a transformation. Jim Hansen says next year is going to be the most important year perhaps in civilized history because the Congress and the President need to not only set the tone but set the policy for rapid change in our economy to a brand new, low carbon or carbon-constrained economy. 158 nations got together before Bali last year – the U.S. was not one of them – but they believe that the developed nations need to cut their carbon emissions between 25 and 40% by 2020. That’s a huge number.

Our carbon emissions in the United States are heading in the opposite direction – they’re going up 1.2 to 1.5% a year. The Energy Information Administration projects that under business as usual they’ll go up 35% by 2030. That’s precisely the wrong direction. So this is not going to happen as it needs to happen without federal leadership. The states and localities can do so much, but we need a unified federal policy, we need consistent policy, and we need leadership.

Tomorrow: S&R interviews PCAP’s Bill Becker, Part 2
Wednesday: Part 3

Due to the large size of this week’s Carboholic, I’ve busted it up into sections for readability.

Science

When you’re talking about Antarctica and global heating, there are some serious problems. The few satellites that are in polar orbits to monitor the poles can’t directly detect how thick the ice shelf is, or what the salinity and temperature of the water beneath the ice shelf is. Floating sensor buoys can’t get beneath the ice shelves and are rather limited in their operational depth. And sending people out to drill deep holes and manually measure temperature and salinity is far too expensive and dangerous. And given that what the water under floating ice shelves is doing may be key to understanding how Antarctica will respond to global heating, the problems represent serious limitations. Which is why the key to understanding what’s happening immediately around and beneath the Antarctic ice shelves may well be elephant seals.

According to the Canberra Times article, scientists outfitted elephant seals with special sensor-laden headgear and then sat back and recorded the data that they got back before the sensors ran out of battery power or fell off the seal’s head. In the process, the scientists involved recorded 30 times more data about the sea ice zone of the Southern Ocean than they’d had previously. They also provided 9 times more data than conventional buoys would have and increased the accuracy of Antarctic ocean current maps around the southern Indian Ocean, the Ross Sea and Western Antarctic Peninsula.

———-

As of last week, the area of Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its second lowest area in recorded history, and with three more weeks of melting yet to come before the sea ice hits its seasonal minimum in September, there’s an excellent chance that this year will set a new record for the smallest amount of sea ice. In addition, both the Northwest and the Northeast passages were open to shipping as of last week, making the Arctic sea ice cap essentially a floating island for what is believed to be the first time in 125,000 years.

It’s possible that, as the BBC article quotes Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC, as saying, the Arctic may have actually hit a “tipping point” where the sea ice is guaranteed to continue shrinking until it disappears altogether in the summer. This creates a major problem because less ice means that there is more absorption of solar energy, so the Arctic warms even faster. This could mean that the permafrost on the Arctic shore could thaw out and start decomposing, releasing massive amounts of methane into the air, it it may also lead to releases of methane from offshore hydrate deposits.

———-

Speaking of permafrost, an article in TerraDaily last week pointed out that “the climate change models upon which future projections are based, do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.” This was part of a commentary by German researcher Christian Beer of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry that was published along side a study by a team of American researchers who sampled the amount of carbon stored in Alaskan permafrost. What they found was that prior studies had underestimated the amount of carbon by 60%. No prior study had ever probed deeper than 40 cm, and the minimum depth that the new study probed to was at least a meter.

To put this into perspective, North America has an amount of organic carbon stored away in its Arctic permafrost that is roughly equal to 1/6 of the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The team of scientists in the article believe that the permafrosts of Europe and Asia have similar amounts of carbon stored.

———-

According to an article in the Lexington Herald Leader by a McClatchy Newspapers reporter, some scientists believe that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was caused by runaway global heating that was in turn caused by massive carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the Siberian Traps lava flows. Lee Kump, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University, is quoted as saying “The end-Permian catastrophe is an extreme version of the consequences of global warming.” For comparison, the P-T mass extinction resulted in the extinction of an approximately 95% of all marine organisms and up to 85% of land organisms.

———-

A new study published in Nature and reported in Science News indicates that the carbon cycle in the ocean may be more complex than previously thought, and that as a result climate models may be overestimating how much carbon the ocean can store.

Previous models assume that the availability of other nutrients like nitrogen and iron determine how fast ocean life can absorb CO₂ from the water and air. The new study indicates that the ratio of nutrients matters too – when there’s too many nutrients compared to the CO₂, then bacteria may thrive instead of phytoplankton (the life that would actually pull CO₂ out of the water and sequester it in the ocean). This could result in a net release of CO₂ from the oceans instead of a net absorption, increasing the amount of CO₂ in the air and thus boosting global heating. However, the study was based on the Arctic ocean, and the scientists involved have no information on what parts of the world’s oceans are carbon-limited vs. nutrient limited. Regardless, however, this new information will need to be included in the next generation of climate models.

———-

In yet another study, this one published in the journal Science, scientists from Israel, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and NASA report that the interaction between aerosols and clouds depend greatly on how clear or cloudy the area is already. In areas where the sky is already clear, aerosols like soot from fires and pollution provide a cooling effect by stimulating more cloud formation. But when too much aerosol is added to an already cloudy area, the additional aerosol actually heats up the air and leads to existing clouds burning off.

The impressive thing about this study is that, when the analytical model developed by the researchers was tested against actual data from the Amazon, the results matched very accurately. So accurately, in fact, that the researchers were able to rule out cloud cover as a source of temperature changes in the measured data near areas of Amazon forest burning. I haven’t read the paper myself, so there’s a chance that there’s some circular modeling going on here (using Amazon data to develop the model and then testing it on the Amazon data would naturally get a high degree of accuracy), but if it holds up to scientific scrutiny, then it’s excellent news. Cloud models built from base principles have been one of the biggest holes in climate modeling, and so an improvement in this area will dramatically improve the accuracy of climate modeling in general.

———-

Back in 1998, Michael Mann of Penn State University released his infamous “hockey stick” graph. It showed that modern temperatures were the highest in the last thousand years or so and it was based largely on tree rings. This graph, however, was roundly criticized for its methodology even though the U.S. National Research Council generally accepted the graph as accurate. The BBC reports that a new study by Michael Mann has just been published, and it shows that the “hockey stick” was right.

Mann and his team took 1200 new proxy data records from terrestrial and marine sources throughout the Northern Hemisphere and, when they were done doing their analysis, discovered that the hockey stick was right even when tree rings were entirely excluded. Not only that, but ten more years of data has pushed the end of the stick back to 700 AD with significant accuracy and back to roughly 0 AD with less accuracy. And by using multiple statistical methods to analyze the data, the researchers have largely immunized this conclusion from the same criticisms that the 1998 hockey stick faced.

Overall, the data now shows that the later half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century were unusually hot in the Northern Hemisphere as compared to the last 1300 years. Note that this includes the so-called Medieval Warm Period. Unfortunately, Mann’s team can only make such conclusions for the Northern Hemisphere, as there is at present insufficient data from the Southern Hemisphere to draw any detailed conclusions for the entire planet.

Technology/Research and Development

Cement is believed to be responsible for about 5% of the world’s total CO₂ emissions. These emissions are largely a result of the coal and natural gas-fired kilns that are used to cook limestone into cement for use in buildings, roads, bridges, etc. But if medical cement inventor and Stanford professor Brent Constantz has anything to say about it, his new construction cements will be net CO₂ absorbers, not emitters.

The trick is that Constantz’s new cement doesn’t need to be cooked in a kiln, although he was understandably reticent to discuss the details with the San Francisco Chronicle – he hasn’t been awarded his patent on the process yet. Not only that, but he can take coal emissions, bubble them through seawater, and sequester an additional ton of CO₂ for every ton of cement he makes. And he says that the same process can be used to manufacture aggregate, the sand and gravel that underlies roads and makes up concrete and asphalt. This suggests that he’s somehow converting the power plant’s emissions into a mineral directly.

There are, however, two potential problems. The first is the major one – construction companies are understandably conservative when it comes to new building materials, and they may not be willing to use Constantz’s new cement right away. The second is price, although if he’s right and he can sell his cement for $100 per ton instead of $110 per ton for standard Portland cement, that one will fade quickly.

———-

One of the big problems with carbon sequestration is ensuring that the pressurized gases or liquid CO₂ don’t leak back out into the environment. If chemists could develop a way to convert CO₂ into a mineral like chalk or sand, sequestering CO₂ would be downright easy – just dump it or use it as fill somewhere. It now appears that a Pennsylvania State University chemical engineer may have figured out how to do this very thing, at least on a small scale.

Dirk Van Essendelft of Penn State described how to use the mineral serpentine to absorb CO₂ and convert it into sand and magnesium carbonate, a mineral similar to chalk. He calculated that capturing the CO₂ would consume much less energy (about 10% loss of energy from the power plant) than present methods (about 30% loss). His method uses water, an acid, ammonia, and carbon dioxide to create sand and magnesium carbonate, and the magnesium carbonate could be used instead of limestone to make cement (gee, this sounds familiar….). Unfortunately, while serpentine is pretty common on the coasts, it’s too expensive to transport inland, so this is not a magic bullet for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

———-

Fluorocarbons (FCs) are amazing things. They’re very stable chemical compounds and they have huge greenhouse gas potential. Compared to CO₂, most FCs are 100x to 10,000x more potent greenhouse gases. The reason everyone’s focused on CO₂, however, is because there’s so much CO₂ in the air that it, at present, far overwhelms the impact of FCs. However, the more FCs that are emitted into the atmosphere, the more heating we’ll get from those industrial chemicals. And because FCs are so chemically stable, they last in the atmosphere a very, very long time – decades to centuries.

According to New Scientist, however, chemists have discovered a way to break open the chemical bonds of these long-lived industrial chemicals in a way that is low-energy and that results in environmentally benign waste products. Given that the only other alternative is long-term storage (50,000 years) or expensive and energy intensive destruction methods, if the chemists are right, then this will enable FCs to be gradually taken off the list of greenhouse gases contributing to global heating.

———-

All three of the discussions above are examples of what the American Chemical Society (ACS) calls green chemistry, and green chemistry is the subject of this month’s Chemical & Engineering News cover story, Calling All Chemists.

The basic ideas behind green chemistry are laid out in the ACS’ “12 principles of green chemistry”. The principles basically come down to prevent waste, use every atom, design and use safer chemicals and solvents, make the reactions low energy and energy efficient, and use renewable feedstocks wherever possible. As an example, chemists are working on developing methods to adapt synthetic solvent-based chemistry to water-based and to use hydrogen peroxide as a solvent instead of other, toxic chemicals.

According to the story, John C. Warner, president and chief technology officer of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, estimates that about 10% of all chemical processes and products are presently environmentally benign and that about 25% could be made benign “relatively easily.” This leaves 65% to be invented or reinvented. However, as important as developing a green chemical industry is to the future, most universities don’t require their chemistry and chemical engineering grads to demonstrate any understanding of the environmental impacts of the processes and products they use every day. However, green chemists are looking to nanotechnology to lead the way toward green chemistry – nanotech is a new field and can be made green from the beginning.

It’s a very long article, and this little blurb doesn’t do it justice. But it’s good to know that there are a lot of people interested in making chemistry green.

Politics

A United Nations report issued last week urges every nation to phase out energy subsidies as being unfair to the poor, economically wasteful, and environmentally questionable. According to the AP article, the UN estimates that governments spend $300 billion every year in energy subsidies that “encourage consumption and discourage efficiency.” Politically expedient subsidies are also perpetuating “inefficiencies” in the global markets and some nations are spending more on energy subsidies than they are on their education and health budgets combined. Obviously, this isn’t a good thing.

Perhaps most interesting, the AP quotes Kaveh Zahedi, UNEP’s climate change coordinator, as saying that “cutting off the subsidies would be good for the environment as it would reduce carbon emissions by as much as 6 percent”. These reductions would be from corrections to market inefficiencies that are a result of the subsidies as well as the investment of some of that $300 billion per year into green energy.

———-

Back in April, the Carboholic brought the news that the UK was starting a conversation about abandoning low lying villages and towns to rising seas. Last week brought news that the UK’s Environment Agency head Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury was already drawing up plans to evacuate and resettle people away from the areas hardest hit by coastal erosion and sea level rise.

According to the Daily Mail story, the Environment Agency is already drawing up plans for evacuations and will present those plans to the communities affected in Norfolk, Suffolk, East Anglia, and any other areas that are deemed unsavable due to cost or lack of technology. And Lord Smith warned that UK taxpayers would probably have to foot the bill for resettlement costs – private insurers would be unlikely to cover losses as a result of sea level rise.

I understand that no-one wants to abandon their home and community, but Lord Smith is unfortunately correct – some communities will be simply untenable in the face of rising sea levels. The United States Congress needs to catch up to the UK on this issue. Some towns along the Mississippi River that are in the flood plain should probably be relocated since the U.S. taxpayer shouldn’t have to keep paying to rebuild doomed communities. This is unfortunately just as true of low-lying parts of major metropolitan areas, such as New York City, Baltimore, Washington D.C., San Diego, Miami, and even New Orleans.

Energy

Back in August, the New York Times reported that two companies will be building large solar power plants in central California. The electricity made by the plants will be sold to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), and when complete, the two plants will supply 800 MW of power to the California grid. The larger of the two plants, at 550 MW, will be almost 9x larger than the largest solar plant anywhere else in the world, and the two plants combined will cover approximately 12.5 square miles with photovoltaic panels.

While PG&E doesn’t expect the new solar electricity to be competitive with coal or natural gas, they do expect cost parity with other renewable sources, and since there’s a law that requires 20% of all electricity in California to come from renewable sources by 2010, PG&E doesn’t really have a whole lot of choice in the matter.

———-

You know something’s wrong when you have to turn off your renewable energy sources (solar power, wind turbines) in order to keep from overloading your transmission lines, but that’s exactly what a NYTimes article last week reported. Generating power is becoming easier and cheaper, but because our transmission lines are so bad, moving that cheap renewable energy to where it can be used is just as hard as always.

The problem, according to the NYTimes article, is that our present electricity grid was built with local and regional needs in mind. To borrow the article’s metaphor:

[i]t resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

It’s so bad, in fact, that the best wind generation areas aren’t being built out with turbines because there’s no transmission lines that can get the electricity from those turbines to market. And the states see little advantage to helping their neighboring states improve their electricity grids without getting a benefit themselves. And when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 went into effect, and the Department of Energy declared two large sections of the country “national interest electrical transmission corridors,” the states affected understandably hit the roof, metaphorically speaking.

The problem is that the U.S. has a vested national interest in ensuring that the national grid is reliable and redundant, and right now, with over 500 owners controlling the 200,000 miles of transmission line in the United States, there’s no good way to force the issue. You don’t want the FERC coming in and throwing people off their lands using federal eminent domain, but “local control” cannot be permitted to impede the construction of DC high voltage transmission lines from solar-thermal plants in Arizona to Denver and San Francisco either.

———-

According to the Houston Chronicle, people living near wind turbines have started reporting various medical problems ranging from sleep disorders, headaches, ringing in the ears, vertigo, and even problems with concentration and memory.

According to the Chronicle article, Dr. Nina Pierpont of Malone, N.Y. has written a book about what she calls “wind turbine syndrome,” and in it she goes into detail about various medical problems that can be caused by living too close to wind turbines. She recommends that turbines not be erected any closer than two miles from the nearest home lest the low-frequency vibrations caused by the spinning turbines cause medical problems. As you might imagine, wind turbine manufacturers and the utilities who are erecting the turbines don’t buy Dr. Pierpont’s conclusions.

Applying a little bit of basic science and logic to this issue, it makes sense to me that there would be some people who are susceptible to those low frequency vibrations, and that they’d suffer various medical maladies as a result. But until we get actual medical studies instead of books for mass publication, it’ll be difficult to draw any serious conclusions.

———-

I’ve discussed the problems that would result in the release methane from methane hydrates, but the methane also represents a potential opportunity. There’s too much methane to burn it all off (and it would produce CO₂ anyway, although that’s still a net greenhouse gas reduction) before it becomes a major climate threat, but there’s also so much of it that we could potentially tap it and burn it for electricity as a bridge technology between extremely dirty coal and clean renewable sources such as solar and wind, and it would cut CO₂ emissions in half. This article discusses this potential in a little more detail.

———-

If I could afford it, I’d do two things to my home in an instant – add photovoltaic solar panels to my roof and batteries to my basement, and have a small ground source heat pump installed in my back yard. These little heat pumps pull the heat out of your home in the summer and store it in the ground beneath your home, cooling your home in the summer. In the winter, they pull the stored heat out of the ground and pump it back into your house, heating it some. And while the heat pump doesn’t eliminate the need for heating or air conditioning/evaporative cooling, according to the NYTimes article, the pump can reduce energy costs by 25% to 65%.

Unfortunately, I can’t afford this right now, and even if I could, I’m not sure that the cost of electricity and natural gas in Colorado are so high to justify the expense just yet. And considering that the most cost effective systems are not home systems, but rather commercial systems, it might not make sense for a while yet. But if the Department of Energy statistics shown in the NYTimes article are accurate (about a doubling in installed heat pump systems over 3 years), then I would expect the costs to come down and effectiveness for residential installations to go up.

Image credits:
NSIDC
Jeff Schmaltz aboard ISS, NASA Visible Earth
RealClimate