Here's a "letter from Michigan" on the demise of GM, and re-purposing industrial infrastructure to produce 21st Century mass transit and renewable energy technologies:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=248
Exactly right!
Friday, June 19, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
How the US Lost the Second World War
Here’s a short unbalanced history of Chrysler: Founded in 1925 (out of the detritus of Maxwell-Chalmers). Buys a stake in Mitsubishi in the 1970s and responds to the threat of Japanese imports by selling re-badged Japanese imports. Is purchased by the German automotive titan Daimler-Benz in 1998; burped back up in 2007. Effectively taken over by Italy’s Fiat in 2009.
So. . . remind me again, because I’m easily confused these days: Who won World War II?
I don’t ask this out of xenophobic pique. It’s just. . . interesting.
The typical explanation for the post-War industrial success of Germany and Japan is that the war destroyed aging and outdated industrial infrastructure and required companies to start over from scratch. Devastation wrought desperation as well; producing high quality, efficient products was taken to be a matter of personal survival as much as national pride.
The US, meanwhile, brimming with national pride and Victor’s Hubris (cousin of the guy who wrote Le Miz), was spared domestic war damage, chased efficiency experts like W. Edwards Deming out of the country (to Japan, BTW, where he was paid rapt attention) and continued to make cars in Model T barns into the 1970s.
There is ongoing jousting about what killed Chrysler and GM and, to a somewhat lesser degree, lamed Ford: piggy executives, regulatory meddling, the Great Recession, insurmountable “legacy” costs, fat cat unions. My vote goes to “stubborn inefficiency,” on a variety of fronts, with “naïve indifference” a close second. European and Japanese auto makers have had a variety of goads to efficiency for decades: from the basic space constraints in “Little Europe” and “Island Japan” to war-ravaged infrastructure to consistently high fuel taxes over a period of many years now.
The Adam Smith purists (who seem to have done a pretty spotty and shoddy job of reading the works of their deity) fulminate about the corrosive effects of industrial policy; that’s silly: Germany, Japan, and South Korea have, for the most part, pursued effective industrial policies; for the past few decades, we have pursued short-sighted, crony-crippled industrial policies.
And the howls of protest from the likes of GM have evolved (one might better say “pirouetted”) more to the tune of momentary convenience than to long term coherence: for most of the 20th Century GM was at the vanguard of fighting off the Stalinist Specter of National Healthcare (The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming!); more recently, they’ve stripped their gears shifting into reverse, and started lamenting the competitive disadvantage of being saddled with a workforce with business-supported healthcare and pensions.
It’s a blow to the pride of any (Honda-driving) American, to watch one of our flagship industries finally realize the seriousness of its wounds and fall over. Sadly, I do think that “what’s good for GM is good for America.” And that’s downsizing.
But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean easy. . .
So. . . remind me again, because I’m easily confused these days: Who won World War II?
I don’t ask this out of xenophobic pique. It’s just. . . interesting.
The typical explanation for the post-War industrial success of Germany and Japan is that the war destroyed aging and outdated industrial infrastructure and required companies to start over from scratch. Devastation wrought desperation as well; producing high quality, efficient products was taken to be a matter of personal survival as much as national pride.
The US, meanwhile, brimming with national pride and Victor’s Hubris (cousin of the guy who wrote Le Miz), was spared domestic war damage, chased efficiency experts like W. Edwards Deming out of the country (to Japan, BTW, where he was paid rapt attention) and continued to make cars in Model T barns into the 1970s.
There is ongoing jousting about what killed Chrysler and GM and, to a somewhat lesser degree, lamed Ford: piggy executives, regulatory meddling, the Great Recession, insurmountable “legacy” costs, fat cat unions. My vote goes to “stubborn inefficiency,” on a variety of fronts, with “naïve indifference” a close second. European and Japanese auto makers have had a variety of goads to efficiency for decades: from the basic space constraints in “Little Europe” and “Island Japan” to war-ravaged infrastructure to consistently high fuel taxes over a period of many years now.
The Adam Smith purists (who seem to have done a pretty spotty and shoddy job of reading the works of their deity) fulminate about the corrosive effects of industrial policy; that’s silly: Germany, Japan, and South Korea have, for the most part, pursued effective industrial policies; for the past few decades, we have pursued short-sighted, crony-crippled industrial policies.
And the howls of protest from the likes of GM have evolved (one might better say “pirouetted”) more to the tune of momentary convenience than to long term coherence: for most of the 20th Century GM was at the vanguard of fighting off the Stalinist Specter of National Healthcare (The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming!); more recently, they’ve stripped their gears shifting into reverse, and started lamenting the competitive disadvantage of being saddled with a workforce with business-supported healthcare and pensions.
It’s a blow to the pride of any (Honda-driving) American, to watch one of our flagship industries finally realize the seriousness of its wounds and fall over. Sadly, I do think that “what’s good for GM is good for America.” And that’s downsizing.
But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean easy. . .
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Zeus, Hera, and the Other Utilities
I've been looking at the swath I tore out of my kitchen ceiling (maybe six feet, by one foot) for more than a week, the underbelly of the house, or of the upstairs bathroom anyway, exposed.
Makes me aware, every day now, of the power of water (and of the odd reticence, where I live anyway, of people to do home repair work, or to give estimates, or to return phone calls. . . But I digress).
In a very real sense, the utilities that residents in advanced industrial countries take for granted, amount to a channeling and a taming of elemental forces: water, fire, energy. Modern life is based on our capacity to bend these forces to our collective will. And that works. . . except when it doesn't.
As when a gas leak takes out a neighborhood or a water main failure turns a Manhattan intersection into Old Faithful or an ice storm snuffs out the electricity for a few days (or weeks).
And of course, there are the smaller scale, end-user issues, little glitches in our own home utility networks. I've become sufficiently respectful of the cost of failure in most of these areas that I don't do much home plumbing work anymore. You only have to be wrong by a drip; add those up and down comes your ceiling (not my fault this time, BTW). I'll do a little home electrical work only under very circumscribed conditions.
(Having checked three times that the circuit is off, having donned rubber-soled shoes and kitchen gloves, my overactive adrenal gland still flinging hot drops into my icy stomach with the precision of a metronome. . . But I digress.)
Americans in particular are generally indifferent to efficiency.
Sometimes we talk about that as the legacy of continental expansion. (Don't like it here? Not enough land/water/oil/gold? Move.)
Sometimes we view it as an artifact of post-WWII boomer hubris. (Limits? Hell, we're not even going to age! Now where did I leave my ginkgo bil-whatever-it's called?)
But it seems to me that there's a moral or spiritual dimension to this as well.
I'm ambivalent writing that.
I more often view religion as a force for oppression than for liberation, for irrational rather than rational behavior. (As an atheist, married to a pagan—“Mommy prays to the shrubbery”—with a militantly anti-religion daughter, well it's complicated.) But wouldn't we slow our resource usage (perhaps drastically) if you had to say grace every time you turned on a faucet, threw a switch, lit a stove—a replacement for the physical penance we had to do when warmth or cooking meant gathering and chopping wood, when water meant a trip to the well and back with a bucket?
I'm not advocating for that, for what would amount to a mass conversion to something close to Greek or Roman polytheism—though the sandals would be cool. But a reduction in resource usage can't be achieved only through efficiency, regulation, and a more rational alignment of economic incentives (all of which we still desperately need).
We need to look inward as well as outward, to recognize our own failings and obligations (no guilt, no shame, just looking, just taking inventory) and our strengths as well. If religion does this for some people, fine by me. I'm more comfortable with behavioral economics, or a sort of secular spirituality, willing to admit that I have a problem, convinced that we are not powerless before our resource addiction.
Makes me aware, every day now, of the power of water (and of the odd reticence, where I live anyway, of people to do home repair work, or to give estimates, or to return phone calls. . . But I digress).In a very real sense, the utilities that residents in advanced industrial countries take for granted, amount to a channeling and a taming of elemental forces: water, fire, energy. Modern life is based on our capacity to bend these forces to our collective will. And that works. . . except when it doesn't.
As when a gas leak takes out a neighborhood or a water main failure turns a Manhattan intersection into Old Faithful or an ice storm snuffs out the electricity for a few days (or weeks).
And of course, there are the smaller scale, end-user issues, little glitches in our own home utility networks. I've become sufficiently respectful of the cost of failure in most of these areas that I don't do much home plumbing work anymore. You only have to be wrong by a drip; add those up and down comes your ceiling (not my fault this time, BTW). I'll do a little home electrical work only under very circumscribed conditions.
(Having checked three times that the circuit is off, having donned rubber-soled shoes and kitchen gloves, my overactive adrenal gland still flinging hot drops into my icy stomach with the precision of a metronome. . . But I digress.)
Americans in particular are generally indifferent to efficiency.
Sometimes we talk about that as the legacy of continental expansion. (Don't like it here? Not enough land/water/oil/gold? Move.)
Sometimes we view it as an artifact of post-WWII boomer hubris. (Limits? Hell, we're not even going to age! Now where did I leave my ginkgo bil-whatever-it's called?)
But it seems to me that there's a moral or spiritual dimension to this as well.
I'm ambivalent writing that.
I more often view religion as a force for oppression than for liberation, for irrational rather than rational behavior. (As an atheist, married to a pagan—“Mommy prays to the shrubbery”—with a militantly anti-religion daughter, well it's complicated.) But wouldn't we slow our resource usage (perhaps drastically) if you had to say grace every time you turned on a faucet, threw a switch, lit a stove—a replacement for the physical penance we had to do when warmth or cooking meant gathering and chopping wood, when water meant a trip to the well and back with a bucket?
I'm not advocating for that, for what would amount to a mass conversion to something close to Greek or Roman polytheism—though the sandals would be cool. But a reduction in resource usage can't be achieved only through efficiency, regulation, and a more rational alignment of economic incentives (all of which we still desperately need).
We need to look inward as well as outward, to recognize our own failings and obligations (no guilt, no shame, just looking, just taking inventory) and our strengths as well. If religion does this for some people, fine by me. I'm more comfortable with behavioral economics, or a sort of secular spirituality, willing to admit that I have a problem, convinced that we are not powerless before our resource addiction.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Bigger Better Power Grid? Maybe Not
The US electricity grid has been attracting a lot of attention lately—and even some new funding, including some folded into the recent federal stimulus bill. Why not? It's old, it's creaky, it's unreliable; it's been suffering from insufficient investment for a couple of decades now.
Particularly if we are going to make increased use of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources—like wind and solar—it makes sense that we should be upgrading the ability of the national system to store energy, to move it around efficiently, to enhance real-time communication and meaningful data sharing, between both utilities themselves and between utilities and their customers. The grid needs to be bigger, stronger, and smarter.
Or does it?
Let's start with “bigger.”
I worked in data communications for most of the 1980s, which was a lot like working for a power company. Most of what I did had to do with installing or maintaining terminals that were hardwired to centralized mainframe—Big Iron—computers. When you needed computing power, you plugged in to this utility—and hoped that the system was up, that there weren't too many other users, that no one was doing anything computationally intensive.
Then came the IBM PC, in 1981, and the first Apple Mac, in 1984. Pretty soon, you had more computing power on your desk (in your cell phone, in your watch) than it had taken us to reach the moon.
The build-out of global computer and communication networks has added a huge degree of resilience to our access to computing power. I'm not connected to one machine by one wire. While network problems occur all the time, they are largely invisible to us. The broadband connections that we use are dynamic and, for the most part, “self-healing.” If I have problems with my computer. . . well, we have more computers than people in my house—or there's my office, or the library, or Kinkos.
Mainframe computing hasn't quite died. But it has certainly diminished in importance.
So why should I get my power from a central location?
I would suggest that this has more to do with “installed base,” entrenched interests, and habit, than it does with an objective assessment of how best to provide electricity to the country.
We're told we need a bigger, newer, “reinforced” power grid to do things like move wind energy from the plains and solar energy from the deserts to cities on the coasts. I'm not sure about that. Distributed power production has many of the same benefits inherent in distributed computing. We might do better to have power markets and collectives than to rely on the benevolence of industrial conglomerates (recall Enron and Grandma Millie).
I'd like to see solar shingles—or thin film photovoltaics—as the only thing we ever put on southern facing roofs, going forward; retrofitting, certainly for government buildings, would also make a fine jobs program. For residential power, coastal areas could supplement this with offshore wind and wave energy. Cheap availability of wind power in the middle of the country might be just the incentive we need to revive American industry.
A smarter grid does make sense to me (or a smarter network of smaller power networks, loosely interconnected). Every building ought to be producing, as well as using, energy. A number of systems have been developed to use the batteries in electric cars for energy storage and load balancing. In a system designed at MIT, for example, your car would make ongoing calculations about when to enter the electricity market, as either a buyer or a seller.
It has been said that we are asking a 19th century power grid to deal with 21st century problems, and that the answer is to upgrade this older technology.
Perhaps we should instead adopt, or develop, 21st century solutions.
Particularly if we are going to make increased use of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources—like wind and solar—it makes sense that we should be upgrading the ability of the national system to store energy, to move it around efficiently, to enhance real-time communication and meaningful data sharing, between both utilities themselves and between utilities and their customers. The grid needs to be bigger, stronger, and smarter.
Or does it?
Let's start with “bigger.”
I worked in data communications for most of the 1980s, which was a lot like working for a power company. Most of what I did had to do with installing or maintaining terminals that were hardwired to centralized mainframe—Big Iron—computers. When you needed computing power, you plugged in to this utility—and hoped that the system was up, that there weren't too many other users, that no one was doing anything computationally intensive.
Then came the IBM PC, in 1981, and the first Apple Mac, in 1984. Pretty soon, you had more computing power on your desk (in your cell phone, in your watch) than it had taken us to reach the moon.
The build-out of global computer and communication networks has added a huge degree of resilience to our access to computing power. I'm not connected to one machine by one wire. While network problems occur all the time, they are largely invisible to us. The broadband connections that we use are dynamic and, for the most part, “self-healing.” If I have problems with my computer. . . well, we have more computers than people in my house—or there's my office, or the library, or Kinkos.
Mainframe computing hasn't quite died. But it has certainly diminished in importance.
So why should I get my power from a central location?
I would suggest that this has more to do with “installed base,” entrenched interests, and habit, than it does with an objective assessment of how best to provide electricity to the country.
We're told we need a bigger, newer, “reinforced” power grid to do things like move wind energy from the plains and solar energy from the deserts to cities on the coasts. I'm not sure about that. Distributed power production has many of the same benefits inherent in distributed computing. We might do better to have power markets and collectives than to rely on the benevolence of industrial conglomerates (recall Enron and Grandma Millie).
I'd like to see solar shingles—or thin film photovoltaics—as the only thing we ever put on southern facing roofs, going forward; retrofitting, certainly for government buildings, would also make a fine jobs program. For residential power, coastal areas could supplement this with offshore wind and wave energy. Cheap availability of wind power in the middle of the country might be just the incentive we need to revive American industry.
A smarter grid does make sense to me (or a smarter network of smaller power networks, loosely interconnected). Every building ought to be producing, as well as using, energy. A number of systems have been developed to use the batteries in electric cars for energy storage and load balancing. In a system designed at MIT, for example, your car would make ongoing calculations about when to enter the electricity market, as either a buyer or a seller.
It has been said that we are asking a 19th century power grid to deal with 21st century problems, and that the answer is to upgrade this older technology.
Perhaps we should instead adopt, or develop, 21st century solutions.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Judging Hydrocarbon-Americans
I live a block from an urban lake on which “personal water craft” are a regular feature; during the summer, it can be like living within earshot of a motocross arena, the growl and scream of two-stroke engines our constant soundtrack.
I’ve never ridden a Jet-Ski or a Ski-Doo but I can understand the appeal. I like machines; I like speed; I have some residual childhood nostalgia for the perfume of old time bus exhaust, that good sweet, high sulfur, black cloud—a touch of which is the magic ingredient in street food, from New York pretzels to roadside Mexican tacos.
Never dune buggy’ed across the sand or ATV’ed through the woods, and those things seem a little more odd to me somehow, but the basic formula is the same:
Hydrocarbs + Speed = Adrenalin
Of course lots of things make you temporarily feel good—and I'll succumb to PC timidity here and specify no particular act or substance—but, both individually and collectively, we recognize that some of them should be avoided anyway. The downside cost, sometimes to ourselves, often to others as well, is too high.
So, never mind the fact that I may be aging into a Hey-You-Kids-Get-Off-My-Lawn! attitude toward my neighborhood and my neighbors, why isn't there more reaction against forms of recreation that are primarily centered around the burning of hydrocarbons?
Lots of reasons, I suppose.
But it seems to me that one of them is the successful perversion of (or perhaps a basic flaw in) the modern tendency toward (ostensible) relativism: you don't judge me, I don't judge you.
I have yet to see people sporting t-shirts or baseball caps identifying themselves as Hydrocarbon-Americans, but it's just a matter of time. Burning fuel is a necessary evil for some; for others, it's on the continuum between fun (which I get) and a fundamental right (with which I take issue).
Yup, here comes the Nanny State and the dour judgmental Greenie.
Context matters.
If it's 1900 and you want to go out on the arctic tundra with a backpack full of high explosives and spend your weekend blowing holes in the ground, well that's an odd form of recreation but, “to each. . .”
In 2009, it's not too much of a stretch to think of the population of the world as living on a shrinking ice sheet. If your idea of a fun weekend is setting off explosions that cause the space we're all living on to shrink, as pieces calve off and either sink or float away. . . It's not Luddite prissiness to say this is no longer just private business, or a values-neutral argument about “lifestyle,” in which the Green Killjoys are trying to bring down the Speedy Exuberants and who's to say what's really right or wrong?
Yes, I am judging the lifestyle and life choices of the Hydrocarbon-American tribe.
Hey-you-kids stop making a racket out on the water! Wanna burn something on the lake? Get a rowboat, a canoe, or a kayak, and burn some calories!
Am I gonna tell your parents?
No, I'm listening to your children: they're gettin' pissed at you for shrinking their ice sheet.
I’ve never ridden a Jet-Ski or a Ski-Doo but I can understand the appeal. I like machines; I like speed; I have some residual childhood nostalgia for the perfume of old time bus exhaust, that good sweet, high sulfur, black cloud—a touch of which is the magic ingredient in street food, from New York pretzels to roadside Mexican tacos.
Never dune buggy’ed across the sand or ATV’ed through the woods, and those things seem a little more odd to me somehow, but the basic formula is the same:
Hydrocarbs + Speed = Adrenalin
Of course lots of things make you temporarily feel good—and I'll succumb to PC timidity here and specify no particular act or substance—but, both individually and collectively, we recognize that some of them should be avoided anyway. The downside cost, sometimes to ourselves, often to others as well, is too high.
So, never mind the fact that I may be aging into a Hey-You-Kids-Get-Off-My-Lawn! attitude toward my neighborhood and my neighbors, why isn't there more reaction against forms of recreation that are primarily centered around the burning of hydrocarbons?
Lots of reasons, I suppose.
But it seems to me that one of them is the successful perversion of (or perhaps a basic flaw in) the modern tendency toward (ostensible) relativism: you don't judge me, I don't judge you.
I have yet to see people sporting t-shirts or baseball caps identifying themselves as Hydrocarbon-Americans, but it's just a matter of time. Burning fuel is a necessary evil for some; for others, it's on the continuum between fun (which I get) and a fundamental right (with which I take issue).
Yup, here comes the Nanny State and the dour judgmental Greenie.
Context matters.
If it's 1900 and you want to go out on the arctic tundra with a backpack full of high explosives and spend your weekend blowing holes in the ground, well that's an odd form of recreation but, “to each. . .”
In 2009, it's not too much of a stretch to think of the population of the world as living on a shrinking ice sheet. If your idea of a fun weekend is setting off explosions that cause the space we're all living on to shrink, as pieces calve off and either sink or float away. . . It's not Luddite prissiness to say this is no longer just private business, or a values-neutral argument about “lifestyle,” in which the Green Killjoys are trying to bring down the Speedy Exuberants and who's to say what's really right or wrong?
Yes, I am judging the lifestyle and life choices of the Hydrocarbon-American tribe.
Hey-you-kids stop making a racket out on the water! Wanna burn something on the lake? Get a rowboat, a canoe, or a kayak, and burn some calories!
Am I gonna tell your parents?
No, I'm listening to your children: they're gettin' pissed at you for shrinking their ice sheet.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
This Old Roof: Obstacles Retrofitting
The home energy audit guy never even got to open his magic bag of compact fluorescent light bulbs; the only incandescent we have left is a bathroom heat lamp. And I was able to show *him* a thing or two about LED lighting; the four bulb array over my desk: 160 watts incandescent, 60 watts using compact fluorescents, but only 6 watts of LEDs.
We’ve got an Energy Star clothes washer, fridge, and dishwasher, too.
What he had to offer—what the feds, the state, and my gas company are willing to chip in toward—those things I can’t do.
We could use more attic insulation, for example, and the utility would pick up 75% of the first $2000—which would be most of the cost. But. . .
As a matter of code compliance, they can’t insulate unless the roof has vents, which mine does not and cutting holes in this old roof—due for replacement when we bought the house, almost twenty years ago—would be a BAD idea.
We don’t just need a new layer either—that’s been done and done and done—we need to strip everything off, right down to the older asbestos-laden shingles that would be a hazardous waste disposal issue. A $12,000 job, if we’re lucky, and I’m not aware of programs under which gummint at any level is paying me for that. Same obstacle to installing a solar water heater—the $8000 cost brought down to a tempting $3000 out of pocket, when you add back all the rebates and credits.
The house was built in 1914; the boiler is original equipment. Started out burning coal, was converted to oil, then converted to gas. We could get a good deal on replacing our cast iron snow man. But. . .
That would mean tenting part of the basement, stripping (what else?) asbestos off the boiler and the connecting pipes, then smashing the thing to pieces to get it out of the house.
Unless someone puts cold water in it when it’s hot, and cracks it, moreover, that boiler’s going to outlive me. A newer, somewhat more efficient unit? My plumber gives it, maybe, ten years.
Never mind the US, I’d like my *family* to be energy independent. I’ve won the light bulb game; I’ve got most of the right appliances.
For the bigger items, it’s not the cost of technology that’s holding me back; it’s the cost—and the limitations—of owning a 95 year old house.
The average US house is about 34 years old; just over a quarter of our housing stock is more than fifty years old. If we are really going to push down home energy usage, we’re going to have to more comprehensively address the problems associated with retrofitting.
We’ve got an Energy Star clothes washer, fridge, and dishwasher, too.
What he had to offer—what the feds, the state, and my gas company are willing to chip in toward—those things I can’t do.
We could use more attic insulation, for example, and the utility would pick up 75% of the first $2000—which would be most of the cost. But. . .
As a matter of code compliance, they can’t insulate unless the roof has vents, which mine does not and cutting holes in this old roof—due for replacement when we bought the house, almost twenty years ago—would be a BAD idea.
We don’t just need a new layer either—that’s been done and done and done—we need to strip everything off, right down to the older asbestos-laden shingles that would be a hazardous waste disposal issue. A $12,000 job, if we’re lucky, and I’m not aware of programs under which gummint at any level is paying me for that. Same obstacle to installing a solar water heater—the $8000 cost brought down to a tempting $3000 out of pocket, when you add back all the rebates and credits.
The house was built in 1914; the boiler is original equipment. Started out burning coal, was converted to oil, then converted to gas. We could get a good deal on replacing our cast iron snow man. But. . .
That would mean tenting part of the basement, stripping (what else?) asbestos off the boiler and the connecting pipes, then smashing the thing to pieces to get it out of the house.
Unless someone puts cold water in it when it’s hot, and cracks it, moreover, that boiler’s going to outlive me. A newer, somewhat more efficient unit? My plumber gives it, maybe, ten years.
Never mind the US, I’d like my *family* to be energy independent. I’ve won the light bulb game; I’ve got most of the right appliances.
For the bigger items, it’s not the cost of technology that’s holding me back; it’s the cost—and the limitations—of owning a 95 year old house.
The average US house is about 34 years old; just over a quarter of our housing stock is more than fifty years old. If we are really going to push down home energy usage, we’re going to have to more comprehensively address the problems associated with retrofitting.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Can We Just Bury the Carbon Problem?
According to the New York Times, SCS Energy, of Concord, MA is looking to build a coal-fired power plant—in lovely Linden, New Jersey, famously part of the early beats of the Soprano’s title sequence—with the CO2 it emits to be piped out into the ocean, and sequestered beneath the seabed, about a hundred miles off the coast of Atlantic City.
This isn’t so much the stuff of nightmares to me as it is cause for dyspepsia, another irritating, and diversionary, sideshow. Is carbon capture and sequestration possible? I don’t know. It’s being explored in a variety of places, from a variety of angles. For the most part, the research is genuine and the intentions sincere—the article notes that the one seabed project extant has been running for the past thirteen years, 155 miles off the cost of Norway.
The rhetorical use of carbon sequestration, however, strikes me (as almost always) as A Clarion Call to Inaction! of the “Don’t worry, we’ll just. . .” variety. No need to change our lifestyles or our mindsets. More digging (drill, baby, drill!), more burning (burn, baby, burn!), and we’ll all be just fine.
I can’t recall the name of the former US Congressman who died in the last six months or so, famous for saying (surely not uniquely) that “most problems started out as clever solutions of one sort or another.”
Carbon sequestration falls into that category, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not a geologist, so I can’t render a professional judgment of the odds that sequestered CO2 might belch up out of the ocean or other subterranean repositories. But it seems to me like a shaky bet to make in order to extend the life of a fundamentally bad system.
Putting aside what happens when you burn it, there’s just no such thing as “clean coal,” from mountaintop removal mining, to transportation, to coal ash sludge repositories. Oil and gas have their own, rather similar, filthy problems, even before you get to greenhouse gases. As to the “greening” of nukes: fifty years in, we still have no permanent nuclear waste storage solution, and the US is littered with radioactive patches, both military and civilian; the stopgap measure has been to store most waste on-site at generating facilities.
The Times ran another piece (8 April ’09), “Not So Green After All: Alternative Fuel Still a Dalliance for Oil Giants,” which makes an apt bookend to the carbon sequestration piece.
Both articles highlight a trend of longstanding that’s particularly galling because it’s been particularly successful: after fighting the idea of climate change in the eighties and nineties (a misuse of the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine as egregious as that of the tobacco industry), what Old Order Energy Producers have switched to, in the current decade, is the strategy of saying publicly, often, and in dulcet tones that they understand the problem and they’re definitely going to do something about it.
They're banking (not without evidence) that when we wake up from our naps, we won't remember that we were promised ice cream--or, at any rate, we won't be so exercised about it.
Semi-Privately, of course, they lobby on against any kind of change, muddying the water.
This isn’t so much the stuff of nightmares to me as it is cause for dyspepsia, another irritating, and diversionary, sideshow. Is carbon capture and sequestration possible? I don’t know. It’s being explored in a variety of places, from a variety of angles. For the most part, the research is genuine and the intentions sincere—the article notes that the one seabed project extant has been running for the past thirteen years, 155 miles off the cost of Norway.
The rhetorical use of carbon sequestration, however, strikes me (as almost always) as A Clarion Call to Inaction! of the “Don’t worry, we’ll just. . .” variety. No need to change our lifestyles or our mindsets. More digging (drill, baby, drill!), more burning (burn, baby, burn!), and we’ll all be just fine.
I can’t recall the name of the former US Congressman who died in the last six months or so, famous for saying (surely not uniquely) that “most problems started out as clever solutions of one sort or another.”
Carbon sequestration falls into that category, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not a geologist, so I can’t render a professional judgment of the odds that sequestered CO2 might belch up out of the ocean or other subterranean repositories. But it seems to me like a shaky bet to make in order to extend the life of a fundamentally bad system.
Putting aside what happens when you burn it, there’s just no such thing as “clean coal,” from mountaintop removal mining, to transportation, to coal ash sludge repositories. Oil and gas have their own, rather similar, filthy problems, even before you get to greenhouse gases. As to the “greening” of nukes: fifty years in, we still have no permanent nuclear waste storage solution, and the US is littered with radioactive patches, both military and civilian; the stopgap measure has been to store most waste on-site at generating facilities.
The Times ran another piece (8 April ’09), “Not So Green After All: Alternative Fuel Still a Dalliance for Oil Giants,” which makes an apt bookend to the carbon sequestration piece.
Both articles highlight a trend of longstanding that’s particularly galling because it’s been particularly successful: after fighting the idea of climate change in the eighties and nineties (a misuse of the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine as egregious as that of the tobacco industry), what Old Order Energy Producers have switched to, in the current decade, is the strategy of saying publicly, often, and in dulcet tones that they understand the problem and they’re definitely going to do something about it.
They're banking (not without evidence) that when we wake up from our naps, we won't remember that we were promised ice cream--or, at any rate, we won't be so exercised about it.
Semi-Privately, of course, they lobby on against any kind of change, muddying the water.
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