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.

What climate activists should learn from the Monterey Shale downgrade

There is an important hidden lesson for climate activists in the vast downgrade of recoverable oil resources now thought to be available from California's Monterey Shale. Almost all climate activists have rejected any talk that the world's oil, natural gas and even coal supplies are nearing plateaus and possibly peaks in their production. That's because they fear that such talk will make the public and policymakers believe that climate change will be less of a problem as a result or no problem at all.

Any yet, for obvious reasons climate activists rejoiced when the Monterey downgrade was announced. But this only served to highlight the fact that climate activists have lost control of the public narrative on energy and can only steal it back by including constraints on fossil fuel supply as part of their story.

In fact, climate activists have been content to accept fossil fuel industry claims--the two parties agree on little else--that we have vast resources of economically recoverable fossil fuels, the rate of production of which will continue to grow for decades--unless, of course, climate activists stop this trend. This stance makes for an heroic narrative, but misses what is actually happening in the minds of the public and policymakers, minds which must be won over in order to address climate change effectively.

Let me explain.

The great imaginary California oil boom: Over before it started

It turns out that the oil industry has been pulling our collective leg.

The pending 96 percent reduction in estimated deep shale oil resources in California revealed last week in the Los Angeles Times calls into question the oil industry's premise of a decades-long revival in U.S. oil production and the already implausible predictions of American energy independence. The reduction also appears to bolster the view of long-time skeptics that the U.S. shale oil boom--now centered in North Dakota and Texas--will likely be short-lived, petering out by the end of this decade. (I've been expressing my skepticism in writing about resource claims made for both shale gas and oil since 2008.)

California has been abuzz for the past couple of years about the prospect of vast new oil wealth supposedly ready for the taking in the Monterey Shale thousands of feet below the state. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) had previously estimated that 15.4 billion barrels were technically recoverable, basing the number on a report from a contractor who relied heavily on oil industry presentations rather than independent data.

Our shadow, the Borg, and the ruthlessness of efficiency

During my graduate school days--which featured 1,000 pages plus of assigned reading in history each week--I used to fall asleep watching late-night reruns of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" after returning home from evening trips to the gym. (Given the circumstances, you'll understand that curling up to a good book was not my way of unwinding back then.)

Starfleet meets its shadow

Recently, I've taken another look at some of those episodes that I mostly dozed through in the mid-1990s as well as episodes of other Star Trek spinoffs. What stands out is how much the Borg, a collectivist race of ruthlessly efficient drones seeking perfection (as they define it), fit perfectly as the shadow side of the United Federation of Planets, presumably the good guys.

What comes into relief through this fictional contest is that it really represents an unconscious internal struggle in our modern culture; the Borg are the shadow side of our post-Enlightenment society.

Taxing the sun: The Koch brothers find a tax they like

We hear so much from the fossil fuel lobby that the free market should determine our energy future--that government shouldn't favor one technology or fuel over another. When implemented, this view typically favors the incumbents which in this case are fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Very convenient.

But does the industry believe its own rhetoric? The Koch brothers, the much-maligned fossil fuel titans, were in the news last week after their legislative stalking horse, the innocuously named American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was discovered pushing legislation in the states that would establish fees (read: taxes) for hooking solar panels to the existing grid. (Yes, I know it's not exactly a tax because the utilities who are also lobbying for it collect it. Again, very convenient.)

Now these are the same Koch brothers who say they hate taxes and anything that looks like a tax and certainly anyone who wants to raise taxes. But taxing solar panel owners is essentially what they are doing in an attempt to make increasingly competitive electricity from solar less competitive with fossil fuels.

Could NAFTA force the Keystone XL pipeline on the United States?

As the Obama administration puts off once again any decision on authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, there are whispers of another intriguing possibility. If the U.S. government fails to approve the pipeline soon or rejects it outright, the Canadians may challenge the delay or rejection under the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by both countries. This move opens up a politically attractive option not previously available to the Obama administration, something I'll discuss below.

I've been wondering about how NAFTA might affect any decision. Under its provisions, Canada is obliged to maintain the same ratio of exports to total production of oil and natural gas as prevailed in the previous 36 months regardless of the situation, that is, emergency or no. The pain of any voluntary restriction by Canada must be borne in proportion to its current consumption. Each party to the treaty would be obliged to suffer the same percentage decline in oil or gas deliveries from Canadian production.

So, what if Canada decides to expand oil production from the tar sands and export that oil to Asia? Would that production be included in total Canadian production for the purposes of the treaty? Could the United States proceed against Canada for reducing the proportion that the United States is receiving from total production?