Internet Keeping the Planet Warm
Nov 23 2012 | Posted in Items | Read More »
Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to Obama’s Re-election
Nov 19 2012 | Posted in Zeitgeist | Read More »
Fix? It’s Not Broken
Nov 19 2012 | Posted in Zeitgeist | Read More »
Where Will the Jobs Come From?
The election is over but the central problem remains: millions cannot find jobs.
The Republican creed says that the government doesn’t create jobs, that lower taxes and less regulation are what will cause free market forces to create jobs. The wealthy are the “job creators”, so leave more money in their hands.
Democrats believe government programs — education, infrastructure, etc. — are needed to spur job growth and that those already well off should contribute more in taxes — their “fair share” — to make that happen.
Both assume that jobs are out there, like seeds in the soil, needing only a little sunshine and water to bloom. But what if neither are correct? Is there a darker truth that neither political parties nor the presidential candidates had dared voice?
pulling back the curtain
The subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 that led to steep job loss and the ultimate crash in 2008 caused America to notice seemingly for the first time that much of its prosperity was an illusion.
For decades we had been paying for the good life with unearned money. Banks promoted homeowners to trade the equity they had built up in their homes for renewed debt — home equity loans. Buying on credit had largely replaced money, with credit card debt building constantly right up to the economic collapse, peaking at $972 billion in September 2008. The stock market added its good vibrations, with the S&P 500 multiplying 15-fold from 1980 to the dot.com plunge in March 2000, and rising again to that same level in July 2007.
There was speculation that housing prices might never stop rising, spurred by interest rates held low by the Federal Reserve that caused people to refinance and spend the new-found gains. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had even encouraged us to buy houses using adjustable rate mortgages, praising lenders in a 2005 speech for offering a greater variety of “mortgage product alternatives” other than fixed-rate mortgages. “It was quite a system”, said Nicholas von Hoffman, in The New York Observer:
“You bought a house on a next-to-no-money down basis, the house increased in appraised value by 10% even before the first load of dishes got put in the dishwasher. You refinanced the house to extract the 10% appreciation and spent it on a vacation, and by the time you’d returned from the camping trip to Colorado or the Kalahari Desert, the value of the house had gone up another 10%”.
That prescient 2005 article went on to forecast the housing collapse and “voilà recession”.
Then came that collapse. Everything fell back to earth. No more house to borrow against, with their value plunging 28% below peak, ending the seemingly inexhaustible wellspring that had supplemented wages.
The new reality woke us with a cold shower of uncomfortable facts — facts that had gone unnoticed for decades, masked as they were by an illusory prosperity. We were told that, except for the upper income groups, Americans had not done all that well during the late decades of the last century. In the 45 years since 1967, the median income of the American male had actually flatlined, according to the Census Bureau. Adjusted for inflation, he earned $32,694 in 1967 and $32,986 last year. Average household income for the bottom 60% of all Americans had risen by only 17%, and most of that rise had come from the early years. Since 1980 household income rose only 6% (and has fallen by 11% since 2000). That household income has risen at all is because women entered the work force. They have seen their income double during the period, but to a median of only $21,000.
That the rest of households — the top 40% — fared much better has become common knowledge, with income rising 58% since 1967 (88% for the top 5%). But today there are 104 million people — a third of the population — who have annual incomes less than $38,180, which is twice the poverty threshold for a family of three, says Census Bureau bureau data.
the global playing field
What are the causes? Globalization has certainly taken its toll on American working class wage earners, vulnerable for enjoying a much higher pay envelope than the rest of the world. When low cost global telecommunications made possible the outsourcing of low level jobs such as call centers, companies quickly realized that white color work such as software coding, accounting, legal research, even x-ray and scan evaluation could also be transplanted to the other side of the world. Then one of every three manufacturing jobs — almost 6 million in the most recent decade alone — disappeared. American companies relocated facilities to foreign shores to take advantage of lower wages, and in some cases, the hundreds of thousands of engineers churned out by countries such as India and China, whereas American youths were going to film school and majoring in “communications”. All these realignments have combined to eliminate jobs in the U.S. and suppress the wages of those that remain.
there to stay
There’s no going back. U.S. multinationals have developed worldwide supply chains for commodities, engineering, production, parts and assembly and are increasingly decoupled from the U.S. They will simply move elsewhere if tax or other legislation attempts to short-circuit these elaborate networks. They’re doing fine selling to markets everywhere and are increasingly indifferent to the travails of America’s labor force, exemplified by that Apple executive who said, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”
How could the results of globalization been any different? Free trade between rich and poor nations has the inevitable leveling result of cutting the living standards of the former while raising those of the latter. U.S. multinationals have eagerly promoted globalism and membership in the World Trade Organization so as to gain entrance to foreign markets but with little concern for the obliteration of U.S. industries such as electronics and textiles.
And so, in the United States, those fortunate enough to find employment found themselves taking substantial pay cuts in comparison to the jobs they formerly held. Worse still, Louis Woodhill at Real Clear Markets peels back the job numbers to show that so many of the jobs heralded by the Obama administration are only part-time — 403,000 of the 559,000 added in the last quarter. He could have added that if part-time jobs are not counted as what he calls “decent” jobs, the unemployment rate would be more like 15%, and that still doesn’t count those who have given up looking for work. There is concern that this trend will intensify when Obamacare takes full effect, that businesses will hire two part-timers to avoid the requirement of buying healthcare for one full-time employee.
While manufacturing jobs were being outsourced to low wage countries, we shrugged that off; we decided we’d be a “services economy”. Then “information economy” sounded better. Economists in the ’80s and early ’90s said we should not bemoan the loss of mundane jobs to other countries, because this freed the newly unemployed to shed numbingly repetitive factory floor jobs and move up a level to higher skilled and higher paying work. That has again become the theme, with new emphasis on retooling ourselves to stay competitive by learning math and engineering or technical training at community colleges.
There has always been a fallacy to the economists’ argument, and not just that so many of those higher paying jobs have also moved overseas. The fallacy is that, the higher up the skill ladder one goes, the less jobs there are. It’s a pyramid, with fewer jobs at each level, which seems never to have occurred to those optimistic economists, so often lost as they are in theory. Thousands once manned the factory floors, for example, but the engineers and designers of the products they built numbered only in the hundreds.
One need only look at today’s super-growth stars for examples. The New York Times last year made the point that all the employees at Facebook, Twitter Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn — companies with a collective market value of about $170 billion at the time — could all fit in a basketball arena. Facebook this year bought Instagram, a San Francisco company, for $1 billion. It had 13 employees. From presidents to pundits we hear about America’s prowess in “innovation”, but what if most innovation comes from companies like these, providing relatively few jobs — and those held by highly skilled engineers?
doing with less
Several forces are aligned against job creation. With Americans having less to spend in the recession and worriedly paying down debt with what money they do have, the economy has lacked the demand to spur American businesses to hire and ramp up production. Major U.S. corporations instead wait on the sidelines while some $1.7 trillion accumulates. And now along comes the year-end “fiscal cliff” as if to persuade them of how wise their reticence has been. There is widespread fear that, barring action by Congress and the President, the simultaneous reversal of all Bush tax cuts, the rise of payroll taxes to normal, and the “sequester”’s cutback of $100 billion or so in defense and other spending will combine to reprise the recession.
It’s not only lack of demand and abundance of uncertainty that has stalled hiring. The recession has taught companies that they can make do with less employees. They’ve discovered productivity of a different sort. The Wall Street Journal reported that revenue per employee at S&P 500 companies rose from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.
rage against the machine
When they do decide to add to production, compared to the ongoing cost of paychecks and employee benefits, corporations are finding that the math of investing in ever less costly robotics is compelling.
And the machines have become ever more adept. Software and tooling now make it possible for those groping arms on auto assembly lines to perform three or four jobs, not just one. And robots have been developed to work far faster and perform delicate operations, such as those in the photo which, each of which says this New York Times piece on robots,
“endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured.”
That means robots can soon take over small appliance assembly, displacing even Chinese workers. The number seems preposterous, but the CEO of China’s Foxconn says he plans to install more than a million robots. He equates Foxconn’s million employees with animals and “to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
the cost of efficiency
The inefficient mom and pop stores on main Street are long gone, replaced by big box stores that left mom and pop to find work elsewhere, but Wal-Mart needed only so many greeters (and has dispensed even with them). Chains of warehouse-size stores have brought us imported goods at much lower prices, but they need less workers and the outflow of jobs to the foreign producers who fill store shelves has left fewer of us with the money to buy the goods — a downward vortex.
To displace or cannibalize those stores have come the online distribution center companies, the largest being Amazon, that operate with far fewer employees than the stores. Some months ago Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva Systems, which makes robots that roam warehouses, picking goods off the shelves to make up orders — work formerly done by people.
At least online ordering creates jobs in the delivery companies. But vision technology is coming in newer robots that can sense shapes of boxes so as to pull a box from a shelf and rotate it into position with boxes already collected so as to form an optimal cube for binding with plastic wrap. As their cost drops we can expect such machines to be adopted by companies like United Parcel Service and Federal Express, where wage earners in the tens of thousands now do the job.
We are developing an economy of surplus people. And we are all doing our part. First we learned to use ATMs, thinning the ranks of bank tellers. Ticket booths are gone; we buy subway and railroad tickets from machines. We pump our own gas. Supermarkets and chains like Home Depot now have us do our own checkout, eliminating those jobs. We book airline flights ourselves and even print the tickets. Getting us to do the chores is another way companies increasingly divorce the connection between increasing profits and hiring people.
failure of imagination?
Politicians and economists regularly assume that innovation and new ideas will create industries we cannot even imagine. But there’s an argument that The Next Big Thing has already been invented, at least as pertains to job creation. Think about it. Just what more is there that we all need? A currently running commercial tells us that we can now hand off our playlists to friends, phone to Bluetooth phone. Miraculous, but hardly essential to life, or life-changing, as were the inventions of locomotives, automobiles, planes — or appliances such as washing machines, for that matter.
Rana Foroohar ends a recent column in Time with: “Whoever ends up in the White House will have to grapple with the fact that growth may never be what it once was”.
So we are left with the question: Where in the future will we find jobs for tens of millions of people?
Nov 17 2012 | Posted in Economy | Read More »
Masked by Year-End Turmoil, Will the Pipeline Be Quietly Approved?
Election over, we are projecting that the Keystone XL pipeline will be the winner.
Actually, we predicted that a year ago to the day in an article titled “Obama’s Delay Says Keystone XL Approval Seems Assured”. Postponing for an entire year, to just past the election, the decision on a project that had already been extensively reviewed, looked clearly like a political maneuver to avoid alienating the environmentalist voting bloc. Now past the election,
Proof enough that the pipeline project would go forward was evident by March when TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to transport its oil through the United States, threatened to invoke eminent domain against those in the farm belt who were denying access to their lands. Let that sink in for a moment: a Canadian company claiming the right to eminent domain to transgress on property owned by Americans.
And that is exactly what has gone on since in Paris, Texas, where in August a county judge upheld TransCanada’s condemnation of a stretch of pasture (doing so in a 15-word decision delivered on his iPhone). In October, a group named Tar Sands Blockade erected a timber barrier to prevent construction crews from bisecting a 300 acre ranch in Paris. Environmentalist activist and actress Daryl Hannah joined 78-year-old owner Eleanor Fairchild to stand in the path of the machinery but to no avail (video).
They were arrested — Fairchild for trespassing on her own property. The protesters said that police officers used “sustained chokeholds, violent arm-twisting, pepper spray, and multiple uses of Tasers, all while blockaders were in handcuffs.”
Such is Texas, so married to oil and gas interests that any company declare itself a common carrier simply by checking boxes on a one-page form. Common carriers can exploit eminent domain. “No notice is given to the affected parties, no hearing is held, no evidence is presented, no investigation is conducted”, wrote a judge in one case, ruling in favor of a plaintive, but there has been no change in the process. preordained
Back to our point: would TransCanada have gone forward without a wink and a nod from the Obama administration to tell them that approval was in the bag?
America runs on oil and gas and cannot help but continue to do so for the foreseeable future. That renewables account for only 8% or so of the nation’s energy supply (nuclear another 8%) makes that clear. But the question is whether Obama’s “all of the above” policy should include particularly damaging sources of hydrocarbons.
The administration’s only expressed reason for officially stopping the pipeline a year ago was that the intended path sliced through the Ogallala in Nebraska, the largest water aquifer in the United States, along a 65-mile wetland where the groundwater is only 10 feet below the surface. A pipeline break there would contaminate a source that supplies 30% of the water used in the U.S. for agriculture, 83% of Nebraska’s agricultural water and 78% of the that state’s public water supply.
The pipeline’s planned route has since been detoured around the aquifer, but what remains problematic is the nature of the oil — Canada’s Alberta Province tar sands, a viscous bitumen sludge that releases from 10% to 30% more carbon dioxide than customary oil when burned, says a Rand Corporation study. And producing that oil, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), triples the greenhouse gas emissions of regular drilling because natural gas must be burned to produce the steam that separates the bitumen from the sand, and is needed again to turn the bitumen into synthetic crude. Our earlier article said: “At current production levels, that’s the greenhouse gas equivalent, every day, of 12 million cars, and enough natural gas to heat six million homes — and that’s before the tar sand oil is burned as fuel.
Water used to produce that steam winds up in tailing ponds that so far occupy 50 square kilometers. The toxic water kills unsuspecting migrating birds and leakage — alleged by the NRDC and denied by Canada — contaminates the water table and flows into streams.
What’s more, tar sands are strip-mined. It takes two tons of oily sand to leach one barrel of oil. To get at the sand requires felling the natural carbon reservoir of the northern forests. The doubling to 1.8 million barrels of tar sands production projected by Canada’s environmental ministry over the coming decade leads to cutting down some 740,000 acres of trees”.
If the U.S. were to scrub the pipeline, Canada’s Plan B is the far more arduous option to run it west across the Sierras in British Columbia for export at a projected cost of $5.5 billion. Some 220 tankers, reports The New York Times, would then ferry the oil out the twisting waterways from the inland town of Kitmat to the sea. Sending oil through the U.S. was a fine idea, but the alternate plan has British Columbians alarmed at the hazard of spills while seeing no benefits in return. Not to worry, Canadians. Obama will come through to spare you, we have no doubt.
Obama is free to disappoint them. But with Rahm Emanuel absent, his chief of staff who had lost a middle finger in an accident, whose would Obama volunteer?
Nov 11 2012 | Posted in Energy & Climate | Read More »
China Tells Us to Deposit Our Technology at Their Door
One of the first things Mitt Romney said he would do on Day One in the Oval Office had he won the election was to “declare China a currency manipulator, allowing me to put tariffs on products where they are stealing American jobs unfairly.”
Actually, while still undervalued and still a problem, the yuan has been allowed to rise against the dollar some 30% since 2005. And the President has imposed tariffs and filed protests with the World Trade Organization (WTO) in defense of a number of industries. We suggest to the President that he take Mitt Romney’s advice about cracking down on China and look at another Chinese practice that will pose still greater economic damage to the U.S. over time. We have already covered currency manipulation’s hollowing out of American manufacturing in this article and followed that piece with “We Create It, They Steal It”, about China’s piracy, counterfeiting of goods and trade secret theft. What this country should take steps to constrain is the willingness of U.S. companies to hand over their technology to the Chinese as the price of admission to the Chinese market. Mitt Romney knows about this, of course. He has taken a strong stance against Chinese trade practices, most publicly in a Washington Post op-ed a year ago, one charge being that China “misappropriates intellectual property by coercing ‘technology transfers’ as a condition of market access”. The U.S. had led the way in developing wind turbines and solar panels until China’s appropriation of that technology, coupled with government subsidies, rapidly overwhelmed U.S. producers, which have been compelled to shutter one after another American plant to such an extent that the Obama administration has had to file actions with the WTO accusing China of dumping solar panels in the U.S. for less than it costs to manufacture and ship them. In 2010, China put forth what masqueraded as an anti-monopoly law that would compel the licensing of technologies by foreign companies to Chinese counterparts in certain industries and make technology transfer a requirement for a foreign company seeking to merge with or buy a Chinese company. Companies that hoped to sell security-related digital products to government agencies such as routers, smart cards and firewall software were henceforward required to turn over data-encryption keys, encryption algorithms, and design specifications. But that only codified a practice of mandatory technology transfer that has been going on for decades, a strong factor in China’s rapid rise. Technology transfer is in keeping with China’s top-down government-directed industrial policy that decides which industries are to be developed for world dominance. No longer content with supplying the world with household items and assembling iPhones, the country’s successive 5-year plans now call for becoming an aggressive player in major industries such as aircraft and autos, and some of America’s biggest companies are kow-towing. flight risk
So at the beginning of 2011, General Electric signed on to share its most sophisticated airplane electronics with a state-owned Chinese company. The avionics it will share extend even to the ultra-high-tech computer system that went went into Boeing’s cutting edge new 787 Dreamliner, governing the plane’s navigation, communications, cockpit displays and controls. GE is not alone in helping China to build an advanced civilian aircraft, the C919, as the Wall Street Journal reported:
Several other American companies have also been chosen [to provide] power generators, fuel tanks, hydraulic controls, brakes, tires and other gear. The roster of United States suppliers includes Rockwell Collins, Honeywell, Hamilton Sundstrand, Parker Aerospace, Eaton Corporation and Kidde Aerospace. The Chinese government…had made it clear to Western companies that they should be “willing to share technology and know-how.”
Of concern is how much of this technology will migrate to China’s military.
Another tactic is for Chinese companies to buy American-based manufacturers with desirable technology, close up shop and move production to China.
road warriors
To a country that sells 17 million autos a year — almost all of them gasoline-powered $#0151; General Motors wants to introduce its Chevrolet Volt. The plug-in hybrid is very costly for the Chinese market, but mindful of the rising pollution problem, there are government subsidies for electrics up to $19,300 a car. That is, if GM manufactures the car entirely in China and turns over a third of the decades-long research that culminated in the Volt.
But GM plans to import from Michigan. And the Chinese restrictions are, of course, in violation of the WTO. As Romney wrote in the Washington Post op-ed, “Having embraced free enterprise to some degree, the Chinese government and Chinese companies have quickly divined the benefits of ignoring the rules followed by others.”
The question is whether GM will cave. The other question is why the U.S. government has not stepped in to block any such transfer of what is now partly taxpayer funded research, owing to the Detroit bailout.
Meanwhile, Ford announced that it would capitulate to China’s demands, turning over a core technology to a joint venture, once it decides to sell an electric in the country. That partner is civilian but affiliated with a major contractor to the People’s Liberation Army named China Weaponry Equipment.
American companies don’t seem to care. Their focus is on the enormity of the Chinese market, not the damage their giveaways will do to their companies in the years to come. Under the all-purpose bromide of maximization of shareholder value (foremost among those shareholders being themselves and their board members), short-term profits are all that matter to today’s corporate chieftains. Selling out the future of their companies is of little concern to these CEOs, who wouldn’t dream of missing the party by refusing to hand over their technology at the door.
And so we have John Rice, vice chairman of GE saying, “We can participate in that or sit on the sidelines. We’re not about sitting on the sidelines.” That their companies may find themselves sidelined in the future once we transfer their technology to China to manufacture our aircraft, our cars, our trains, our electronics is of no moment to his sort. He’ll be rich and content to leave the consequences behind.
And our government? It stands aside and does nothing, even though an economically weakened country is a national security risk. A Congressional advisory panel concluded that forced technology transfer and the close connection between China’s state-owned companies and the military only “bears watching”. For that matter, there is the question of just what the government could do. Globalization has put “our” multinational companies out of reach and made them answerable to no country.
“We can’t just sit back and let China run all over us,” Gov. Romney said. “People say, well, you’ll start a trade war. There’s one going on right now, folks.”
This is a popular, vote-getting position. There is the question of whether Romney will actually follow through should he make it to the White House.
Nov 6 2012 | Posted in World | Read More »
The Jobless 1%
Nov 4 2012 | Posted in Economy | Read More »
Global Warming: Wasn’t That Yesterday’s News Story?
Just half a decade ago the debate was whether cap-and-trade or a carbon tax was the better way to go. The media was filled with solar arrays and wind turbines We have apparently decided not to bother. It is easier to decide that there is no global warming than to do something about it. By two years ago, the percentage of people who believe Earth is warming at all — never mind whether human-caused or not — had dropped from 79% to 59% in a poll by the Pew Research Group. The science is ever more conclusive, but the deniers are winning. Nature disagrees. As if to bring us to our senses, she has delivered to us a two centuries storm, a behemoth 800 miles across, so deep in the year — the end of October, when one would think that the ocean’s heat had been drained off by earlier storms — that the name of this alphabetically-sequenced leviathan began with an “S”. Fourteen months earlier, hurricane Irene followed the same path up the Atlantic and wreaked havoc deep into New England. And in between, 2/3rds of the country was scorched with the worst drought in 55 years. In June, 3,215 temperature records were set nationwide, which was nothing compared to the 15,000 that had been set in March. The 12 months ending in June were the warmest continuous 12 months ever recorded. This is not a one year anomaly. The 11 years from 2001-2011 are among the 13 warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Global warming is a calamity that threatens the future of life on the planet. Nevertheless, we have the illogic of its being political. For just how politically polarized, see the chart. In the former camp are the fossil fuel industries that have waged a long-term campaign to persuade people that there is no global warming problem. Rex Tillerson, head of ExxonMobil, tells us the future is “manageable”. His company and Koch Industries have long funded the Cato Institute, which has held briefings on global warming with skeptics as panelists and even publishes an energy policy handbook that runs from advocating drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to eliminating the Department of Energy. Media outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are on the same wavelength, as are Democrats in Congress from coal-producing states, and most Republicans, traditionally allied with the businesses that fund their election campaigns. All profit by preserving the status quo. It is human nature for them to want to believe the science is wrong in order to be comfortable with their positions, and they have been handed helpful incidents which they have rushed to embrace. First came Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” — a graph that the Penn State physicist and climatologist developed to show temperature progression over the centuries. (The sharp upturn of the temperature line in the past century gives the graph the shape of a hockey stick.) Mann attracted a vitriolic critic, Canadian Stephen McIntyre, who disputed Mann’s use of “proxy” data — the likes of tree-rings, coral, ice cores, etc. — from which climate scientists infer temperature for times or areas where there were no actual temperature measurements. A paper McIntyre wrote won him the sort of space that scientists seldom get — a front page feature in the Wall Street Journal in 2005 — that was just what Republicans were hoping for. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wi.) called Mann’s work “scientific fascism.” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tx), who considered any action to forestall global warming “absolute nonsense”, opened a formal inquiry into the research of climate scientists, Mann among them. Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, subpoenaed Mann’s work while he was at the University of Virginia in an attempt to prove that Mann committed “fraud”. (His case was recently thrown out of court.) More than a thousand e-mails among scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU) in the U.K., the world’s leading research institute on climate change, were leaked in 2009 and skeptics eagerly mined them to expose multiple indiscretions, the biggest of which again involved proxy data. This time, when the CRU group came upon inconvenient 1960s tree-ring data that suggested that temperatures of that period were declining — even as actual temperature readings were rising — they employed what was called the “trick” of substituting the actual readings. The actuals are, of course, more reliable, but the media treated it as a scandalous cover-up nonetheless. It was “climategate”. Opponents leaped at the opportunity to say the science was corrupt and that claims of global warming were a “massive international scientific fraud” (Sensenbrenner again). They had been handed the smoking gun with which to invalidate all global warming. The public was listening. Remember that public opinion drop from 79% to 59%? That poll was taken five weeks after the climategate story broke. “Crisis fatigue” — the inability of humans to sustain the continuous level of anxiety that leads to unflagging action — may have played a part in why the public was eager to disbelieve global warming. A better explanation is our avoidist tendency. We eagerly grab onto whatever comes to hand that lets us mentally negate the unpleasant. As for Mann’s work, a lengthy account of the global warming disputes in Mother Jones magazine tells us that a 2006 assessment from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that while his methodology wasn’t perfect, the story his chart told was accurate. But “none of the exonerations mattered: the scientists had lost control of the narrative”. Those in Congress who wanted to thwart any and all government subsidies to other than fossil fuel industries would see another plum fall in their laps when solar array maker Solyndra collapsed. A bad and costly (at half a billion dollars of government backed loans) bet on an imaginative technology that relied on high prices for the silicon used in rival photovoltaic arrays, the company declared bankruptcy when silicon prices plummeted. The fallout exposed the Obama administration going against the Energy Department’s advice with its politically-driven plan to make Solyndra a paragon of green development. The public listened again. As with hockey sticks and climategate, the word “Solyndra” became the codeword that congressional Republicans have unfailingly used ever since to characterize as folly all government attempts to develop energy alternatives that could rival fossil fuels. The result is that the topic of global warming has all but vanished. More accurately, it flares momentarily, as with the summer drought and now with Sandy, and then — much like the anguished cries for gun control when some student slaughters fellow classmates — it subsides at the hands of Americans’ attention deficit disorder. Meanwhile, Nature is letting us know that it has other plans.
and how to overcome intermittency. Television showed us research into fossil fuel alternatives such as algae and cellulosic ethanol. Newspapers grappled with how to go about “sequestering” carbon.
But all has faded from the public conversation. Both Barack Obama and John McCain supported legislation to combat climate change in the 2008 campaign. But by this year, any mention of climate was nowhere to be found in Obama’s State of the Union address. The subject was never raised in any of the three presidential debates.
The chart from Pew Research shows just how polarized by political party is the belief in global warming and its causes.
Inescapably, it is a conflict between two mindsets — those who believe in the individual freedom to do as we please in the here and now versus those who are alarmed about the future and want to rein in humanity’s profligacy; those who are predominantly concerned for free markets and the protection of industry from regulation versus those who view that as mindless in the face of natural phenomena that are entirely indifferent to the transitory affairs of mankind.
Nov 3 2012 | Posted in Energy & Climate | Read More »