Ebola and the weak link of public health

It has long been my contention that one of the chief symptoms of the age of constraints we have now entered would be the decline of public health systems globally. This comes at a time when our vulnerability to a worldwide epidemic is increasing because of widespread international travel, the proliferation of densely populated megacities and the general trend toward urban living. Of course, urban environments are ideal for spreading disease because of the proximity of the residents.

The sudden re-emergence of the deadly Ebola virus is testing whether public health systems are adequate to the job of containing such threats. While we know that there is a link between the general health of a population and public health expenditures, it is difficult to find statistics on expenditures worldwide by country to assess the direction of public health spending. We do have evidence that declining health spending in Greece in the aftermath of the financial crisis there was followed by demonstrably worse outcomes. And, the medical community thinks the United States is spending too little on public health, just $251 per person (in 2012). Keep in mind that this is distinct from spending on medical care which totaled $8,086 per person.

So let's be clear; public health refers to the following according the American Heritage Dictionary:

The science and practice of protecting and improving the health of a community, as by preventive medicine, health education, control of communicable diseases, application of sanitary measures, and monitoring of environmental hazards.

Bubble time: Friends and relatives act as if we've returned to business-as-usual

It is a testament to the psychological power of financial bubbles that people who know and trust me and generally accept the analysis I've put forth in my writings over the last decade are jumping into the stock market again with a pledge that they are in for the long term--no matter what.

Few would ever shop for a car, a house or even groceries the way people today are shopping for stocks--buying after the price has almost tripled. But a market experiencing a dramatic melt-up--26 percent for the S&P 500 last year and another 5 percent so far this year (8 percent when I first wrote this sentence)--has created a psychological contagion that is hard to resist. Who doesn't want to join in the mass euphoria experienced by others who are getting something for nothing?

Now there was a time when investing in the stock market for the long term worked because the businesses that made up that market were supported by unconstrained supplies of energy and other critical resources. The undulations in the economy were due primarily to economic cycles. But as economist James Hamilton has pointed out, 10 of the last 11 recessions were preceded by an oil price spike. That's not definitive proof that the oil price was THE cause of any particular recession. But it would be hard to rule out oil as a major factor in those recessions.

Why doesn't the 'long emergency' feel like an emergency?

In 2006 when James Howard Kunstler published his breakthrough book The Long Emergency, the next two years seemed to vindicate his warning that the oil age was coming to an end with perilous consequences. Oil soared to $147 a barrel in mid-2008. A few analysts suggested that it was headed for $200; but that was not to be. By autumn the stock market had collapsed and with it the world economy. Oil, too, then collapsed, trading in the mid-$30 range by December as demand for oil fell off a cliff with the economy. It seemed for months that the world was headed for an economic depression.

But extraordinary stimulative spending by governments around the world and emergency measures by central banks reversed the trend and led to a weak, but extended recovery of sorts that lasts to this day (though not for everyone--just ask the Greeks).

Oil prices have rebounded and have remained at or near record levels for more than three years when measured by the average daily price of the world benchmark Brent Crude. That high price (higher on average than the year of the spike) is holding back economic growth. It is creating a seeming puzzle for economic policymakers who don't understand why their extraordinary measures have not led to extraordinary growth. They are blind to the central role of energy and particularly oil in the economy.

Taking a short break--no post his week

I'm taking a short break. I expect to post again on Sunday, July 27.

Orwellian Newspeak and the oil industry's fake abundance story

When what you are saying is so obviously at odds with the plain truth, it is useful to choose your words carefully to obscure this fact. This was the strategy of the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda arm of the authoritarian government depicted in George Orwell's novel 1984. The altered language was called Newspeak, a variant of standard English.

The oil industry's fake abundance story is so full of verbal legerdemain that it has become a sort of lexicon of Newspeak for oil. The public relations firms and fake think tanks behind this Newspeak have already achieved a notable goal, one styled as "doublethink" in Orwell's 1984. In an afterword to the edition I have social psychologist Erich Fromm explains the essence of doublethink: "[I]n a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what it true."

We now have nearly an entire population in the United States and nearly an entire media establishment that believes that oil is abundant--not because of the objective facts, but because of the oil industry's highly successful public relations campaign, a campaign that is still underway. The reason it is still underway is that it is essential to repeat the fake abundance story again and again in order to drown out any possibility that contrary facts will make their way into the public mind.

Freedom in a full world

The Independence Day holiday in the United States has people here thinking about fireworks, parades and eating lots of barbequed meat. There will be many speeches on the gift of freedom which America helped to spread across the world. But there will be almost no introspection about what that word means.

Freedom is one of those abstract words that politicians love to use in speeches because doing so allows everyone listening to project their own meaning onto the word (and to identify the politician as someone who shares their values).

To some people freedom might mean freedom of conscience, to live by religious or moral tenets free from coercion by the state or the community. To others it might mean freedom of action to determine what course we want to take in life and to have the freedom to pursue it. But for many it has now become an amorphous rallying cry whenever patriotism is invoked--we are fighting for freedom, aren't we? But is it the freedom for each to think and act as he or she pleases no matter what?

Sleeper agents in the (somewhat) enchanted biosphere

When I was a young boy, I was afraid of creatures I called "hoppers" who I believed lurked under my bed. They were patterned after leaping animated cartoon figures appearing in the closing credits of "Fractured Fairytales," a segment of the popular children's television program "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show." My bedroom had to be checked each night for these creatures before I could enter and go to sleep.

Of course, over time, the hoppers disappeared from under my bed. But, the world never quite lost its enchanted if sometimes menacing quality. Though only vaguely aware of it, I continued to react to animals, plants and just plain objects of all kinds as if they had unusual potency in the affairs of humans--potency with malevolent possibilities.

As a young man in my 20s this peculiar version of reality became conscious to me when I read Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's essay entitled "General Description of Types." Since that day I have learned to sift carefully through my experience and thoughts for the undue influence of this psychological disposition and rigorously question any overly positive or negative conclusions that might have been influenced by it.

Taking a short break--No post this week

I'm taking a short break and expect to post again on Sunday, June 29.

We will never run out of oil (which is entirely beside the point)

Harvard economist Morris Adelman, famous for saying that we will never run out of oil, died last month. What followed the announcement of his death was a predictable set of encomiums like this one from defenders of the oil industry extolling Adelman's infinite wisdom.

Some (including my father, it seems) were so caught up in the odd celebratory mood--one that resurfaces every time people contemplate just how much stuff there is in the universe--that Adelman's rather narrow and almost meaningless dictum was being offered as the basis for a complete energy policy. (And, never mind that that energy policy makes absolutely no mention of climate change.)

All of this makes sense only if you keep yourself from thinking about it. But a simple illustration will show just how meaningless the notion that we will never run out of oil is. Imagine for a moment that starting tomorrow one-half of the oil that human society normally consumes each day is no longer available and that this goes on for several months.

Talkin' trash: Are we literally throwing away energy?

Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann wakes up every day thinking about trash. What got him thinking about it in the first place is how much of it is simply dumped into landfills across America when most of what is not recyclable could instead be turned into energy for homes and businesses everywhere.

Schmidt-Pathmann has seen a better approach in his native Germany where only about 1 percent of all municipal waste goes into landfills. This compares with about 68 percent in the United States of the 400 million tons discarded annually, he explains. (Exact numbers are hard to come by, but he prefers figures collected by Biocycle Magazine.) Germans recycle almost 70 percent of their municipal waste and burn almost all the rest to turn it into energy.

Schmidt-Pathmann is founder and executive director of the Zero Landfill Initiative based in Seattle. He says that the United States could add 12 gigawatts (billions of watts) of electricity generation by expanding waste-to-energy facilities even if the country upped its percentage of recycling to that of Germany's. The United States currently recycles about 25 percent of its waste. Burning all the landfill waste currently available would provide an extra 33 gigawatts. That would be the equivalent of 33 large electricity generating plants.