Romney - No body likes him

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's no surprise that those on the left don't like Willard Romney but the folks over at The American Conservative don't dislike him any less.  I have been passing on Daniel Larison's rants on Romney's foreign policy for months but he's not alone.  Social conservative Rod Dreher is not too excited with his foreign policy either, Dubya 2012.  

Scott Galupo:

The Loathsome Romney Candidacy: How Did We Get Here?

This is a milestone moment in American politics. "Fabulously wealthy" presidential candidates are more of a norm than an aberration - witness the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Ross Perot. But to a man, each of them ran at least in part on the principle of noblesse oblige - the idea that the wealthy must make sacrifices for the common good (yes, even George W. Bush, who promised not to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor).

In contrast, Romney and his ilk are having none of this. They are trying to persuade voters - and for all we know may have persuaded themselves - that, in effect, "As Goes Bain Capital, So Goes America."

I've thought a lot about this question over the last six months. How did this happen? How did we come to this pass, where a man like Mitt Romney - whose candidacy represents a breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power on behalf of a tiny sliver of the population - sits within striking distance of the highest office in the land?

An accident - the last man standing. Perhaps not!

Still, the "accident" narrative only gets you so far. The reality is, Romney slipped through - and there are troubling factors that buoy his campaign. The complete rejection of mainstream macroeconomic theory is one such factor. Cultural animus toward Obama is another. Liberals overstate its extent, but it's undeniably real.

Most decisive is what I've been calling the theological fusion of social and economic conservatism. Too many evangelical Christians seem incapable of even questioning Mammon. Now they enthusiastically welcome the money changers into the temple. Like the Calvinists of old, they glorify market outcomes as a sign of divine favor.  And the cliche "class warfare" has served as a handy tool to shut down any deviation from this new orthodoxy.

The prospect of a second Obama term doesn't excite me. Nevertheless, my overriding hope is to see Mitt Romney spat out of the body politic, once and for all. (Bold mine)

Noah Millman responds and Larison responds to Millman.

Noah Millman makes a good observation, but he seems to be missing Scott Galupo's objection to Romney:

So expelling Mitt Romney will do nothing to change the fact that a critique of the financialization of American capitalism has barely begun anywhere in American politics.

That's correct, but what I believe Scott was saying was that he wants Romney to lose so that we will be rid of Mitt Romney as a political figure. Put another way, a political system that rewards someone like Romney with the Presidency is in extremely poor health, and Scott doesn't want our system to be as far gone as a Romney victory would prove it to be. 

.....

Regardless, the point is that Scott is mostly objecting to what he calls Romney's "breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power." It's the sheer cynicism involved that offends even more than the interests served by that cynicism.

I haven't seen such an effective critiuqe of Romney on any of the progressive blogs or media.

Go Fuck Yourself is a legitimate policy position

By Dave Anderson:

The talk of Greek default and subsequent Euro exit suddenly went from crazy dirty fucking hippie talk to serious discussion of when instead of if and if instead of laughter.

The BBC:

The Greek president has called the four main parties, including the centre-right New Democracy and the Socialist Pasok, to try to form an emergency government to avoid new elections.

But Syriza said it would not attend because it could not back any coalition which supported austerity....

Elena Panaritis, an economist and MP for Pasok...Greece now having "conversations we should have had two and a half years ago," she said.

Go Fuck Yourself is a legitimate policy option and as the MP for PASOK notes, it is an option that should have been on the table thirty months ago:

Newshoggers in May 2010:

Which politician wants to tell their constituents that they need to take a 30% to 50% reduction in their standard of living to pay-off a bunch of damn foreigners at near par and maintain allegiance to a monetary system that increases their pain?  The current set may be willing to make that argument, but the next election will promote politicians who promise to take away some of the pain and screw the foreigners instead of their own people.  

A single European currency without massive cross-border transfers and a central bank that is scared shiftless of the threat of transitory inflation has led to massive amounts of needless pain.  The Greeks should have defaulted two years ago and walked away from the Euro when they still had some control over their long term internal assets instead of wasting two years of continued pain before walking away.  

The Greeks, and the rest of the peripheral Euro-zone nations should consider that telling the Germans and the tight money Bundsbank that Go Fuck Yourself is a legitimate policy position and one that they are seriously considering embracing unless policy changes to both the ECB and the entire European economic integration project changes to allow for easier resets of relative prices between countries in the Euro-zone.  

 

 

 

India's Technology Windfall And U.S. Myopia

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday brought news that India has selected France's Dassault as the preferred bidder for a hundred or more advanced fighter aircraft, the Rafale, in a deal worth up to $30 billion over ten years. Russia, the US and the Eurofighter consortium had also bid on the deal and the deal was so coveted that President Obama personally pushed the US bids on his last visit to India. The U.S. amabassador to India resigned the day after the U.S. bid was rejected.

But while the public talk from India is of a better airframe, more able to withstand the Indian climate, I strongly suspect that the real reason the Rafale won the bidding war is that French President Nicholas Sarkozy had last year promised an unprecedented technology transfer, including machine tools and military secrets, if the French plane won - a promise he has now said France will keep to. Only the Russian bid offered anything similiar, and india is well aware Russian tech does not meet Euro heights.

So, in ten years time India will have the plants and the know-how to make advanced military aircraft - and the technology will have rapidly filtered into other areas of Indian manufacturing, giving India a massive leg up in its bid for superpowerdom. The deal was too sweet not to take, and the U.S. government was foolish and prideful not to offer something similiar. Indeed, U.S. policy towards India has been extrordinarily myopic for years, perhaps because the major military and foreign policy apparatchiks have been befuddled by General Kayani of Pakistan's Jedi mind tricks and false promises of more complete Pakistani co-operation. Pakistan's primary economic and military ally is and will remain China, not America, and it's about time U.S. administrations recognised this.

India, the natural counter-balance to China, is feeling ignored and unloved by the U.S. after the false spring of Bush's nuclear giveaway and the bipartisan rush to sell India lots of expensive but obsolescent weaponry. And it's trying to create a new strategy that accepts the reality of America and the West's continuing bamboozlement by Pakistan - including through outreach to nations like Iran. India is well aware that war between the regional superpowers is not at all unlikely in the future but like China would prefer economic battles. Technology transfers like the Rafale deal give India a leg up either way, and if America wants a powerful democratic ally in the region it should be offering such transfers at every opportunity rather than leaving it to Europe to become India's preferred future trading partner.

Not really a laughing matter

By BJ Bjornson

Though sometimes humour is the only way you can deal with some things. Today�s news brings a UN report noting that humanity�s future, or at least the future for a good chunk of humanity, is looking quite grim.

As the world's population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.

Even by 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water, according to U.N. estimates, at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply.

And if the world fails to tackle these problems, it risks condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty, the report said.

Knowing that we�re already pushing up against the limits of some of the critical resources we would need increase food production, I think it�s safe to say that there�s a very good chance that we�re not going to reach those targets. We�re already past sustainability on a number of fronts, and increasing production by draining away aquifers, looting the ocean of fish stocks, or otherwise further destroying our chance for future sustainable uses of land and water isn�t really going to help in more than the very short-term, and lead to an even bigger crash on the other side.

But since dwelling on that fact is kind of depressing, I�ll leave you with this recent, and oddly prophetic, Onion piece,

Saying there's no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet's resources�and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

. . .

"I'm just going to level with you�the earth's carrying capacity will no longer be able to keep up with population growth, and civilization will end unless large swaths of human beings are killed, so the question is: How do we want to do this?" Cambridge University ecologist Dr. Edwin Peters said. "Do we want to give everyone a number and implement a death lottery system? Incinerate the nation's children? Kill off an entire race of people? Give everyone a shotgun and let them sort it out themselves?"

. . .

"The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with," said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer�sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. "At this point, it's merely a question of coordination. If we can get the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Beijing, India, Europe, and Latin America to voluntarily off themselves at 6 p.m. EST on June 1, we can kill the people that need to be killed and the planet can finally start renewing its resources."

Is it too late to get on board for that moon base?

Brutal Logic

By BJ Bjornson

David Roberts has a couple of posts up at Grist regarding the quite ugly situation facing us in regards to climate change. Starting with the second, Roberts notes some rather ugly points that doesn�t give one much in the way of optimism for humanity�s future.

We pretend that 2 degrees C is our threshold. Yet the climate scenarios and plans presented to policymakers do not actually reflect that threshold. As Anderson and Bows say, "most policy advice is to accept a high probability of extremely dangerous climate change rather than propose radical and immediate emission reductions."

Note, also, that most popular climate scenarios include an implausibly early peak in global emissions -- 2010 in many cases, 2015-16 in the case of the Stern Report, the ADAM project, and the U.K.'s Committee on Climate Change.

Why do climate analysts do this? Why do they present plans that contain wildly optimistic assumptions about the peak in global emissions and yet a high probability of overshooting the 2 degrees C target?

The answer is fairly simple, and it has to do with the answer to question (4), regarding what level of emissions reductions is reasonable to expect. According to the Stern Review and others, emissions reductions of 3 to 4 percent a year are the maximum compatible with continued economic growth. And so that's the level they use in their scenarios. Yet reductions at that pace offer very little practical hope of hitting 2 degrees C.

In other words, climate analysts construct their scenarios not to avoid dangerous climate change but to avoid threatening economic growth.

That would make sense if being richer would help us prosper in a 4 degrees C [7.2 degrees F] world. But ... no such luck.

That�s where we start looking back at the initial post, which notes that the long-stated target of 2 degrees C no longer looks like it will actually avoid the �acceptable� level of dangerous changes. Instead, the damage once expected at 2 C is now expected at much lower temperatures, which means that even the stated target is going to be bad.

He then gets into talking about what it will take to actually hit that target, and that doesn�t look too good either:

Anderson is adamant that the familiar targets almost all politicians and many scientists use in public -- e.g., "80 percent reduction in the rate of emissions by 2050" -- are deeply misleading. As far as the climate is concerned, the rate of emissions in 2050 relative to the rate of emissions today is meaningless. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for over a century; the atmosphere doesn't care what year it arrives. (Though targets in the distant future are comforting to politicians, for obvious reasons.)

The only thing that matters in limiting temperature rise is cumulative emissions, the total amount we dump into the atmosphere this century. When the total concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere rises, temperature rises. That is the correlation that matters.

. . .

Right now, global emissions are rising, faster and faster. Between 2000 and 2007, they rose at around 3.5 percent a year; by 2009 it was up to 5.6 percent. In 2010, we hit 5.9 percent growth, a record. We aren't just going in the wrong direction -- we're accelerating in the wrong direction.

. . .

The growth of emissions is making the task ahead more and more difficult. The longer we wait to start shrinking emissions, the faster we'll have to shrink them to stay under budget. Here's a visualization of what that means -- some sample reduction curves with varying peak years (the four different lines are based on the four main IPCC scenarios):




As you can see, if we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that's unlikely.

How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically impossible. (D'oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45.

After that, things start getting scary:

It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we're going to hit 4 degrees C. It won't be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.

It's seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would "only" have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.

Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, "a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond 'adaptation', is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable."

He goes on to explain that the reason for the potential instability is that the positive feedback loops such as melting Arctic permafrost releasing methane to cause greater heating and more melting start becoming self-reinforcing and negate whatever humanity does to try and stop its own emissions; the �tipping points� we always hear about. We might hit them before a 4 degree C change, but will almost certainly hit them with it.

At that level, there's good reason to believe that some positive feedbacks will become self-reinforcing. In other words, 4 degrees C would very likely be a way station on the road to much higher temperatures.

Moving back to the second post, the conclusion of the paper Roberts is using as a basis for these is pretty plain,

This is the stark conclusion drawn by Anderson and Bows: "The logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations."

All of which points to, �not gonna happen�, at least within the current political climate. It basically boils down to one of those wishes that we hit peak oil fast enough to for the austerity and transition away from fossil fuels to become forced rather than planned, because if we have to hope for a planned austerity that does anything outside of rescue the gambling banksters corrupt politicos like what�s happening in Europe and the U.S. these days, it will never happen.

Saving The Plutocrats

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Here is some economic history from Barry Ritholtz:

We�ve known for literally thousands of years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We�ve known for 1,900 years that that rampant inequality destroys societies.

We�ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We�ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies.

We�ve known for hundreds of years that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands is dangerous for free markets.

We�ve known for hundreds of years that trust is vital for a healthy economy.

We�ve known since the 1930s Great Depression that separating depository banking from speculative investment banking is key to economic stability. See this, this, this and this.

We�ve known since 1988 that quantitative easing doesn�t work to rescue an ailing economy.

We�ve known since 1993 that derivatives such as credit default swaps � if not reined in � could take down the economy. And see this.

We�ve known since 1998 that crony capitalism destroys even the strongest economies, and that economies that are capitalist in name only need major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.

We�ve known since 2007 or earlier that lax oversight of hedge funds could blow up the economy.

Of course the technocrats and politicians in the US and Europe have either learned none of these lessons or are ignoring them.  The latest example is Europe's disastrous summit.

I thought disasters were all meant to happen over the weekend? Somehow, in Brussels, EU leaders have contrived to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory on Thursday night, leaving Friday for finger-pointing and recriminations and wondering whether anybody who signed on to this deal has any chance at all of even getting re-elected, let alone being remembered as one of the leaders who saved the euro.

Here�s how the FT put it on Wednesday:

It borders on hysterical to say there are but hours to save the euro, but there is a risk that if the crisis is not now tamed the price of a rescue might start to spiral out of politicians� grasp. The stakes are therefore very high at Friday�s summit. The world cannot afford another half-baked solution.

And yet, inevitably, another half-baked solution is exactly what we got. Which means, I fear, that it is now, officially, too late to save the Eurozone: the collapse of the entire edifice is now not a matter of if but rather of when.

So why is this happening? We will return to Ritholz's first point for the answer:

We�ve known for literally thousands of years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse.

The technocrats and politicians are simply ignoring the fact that there is trillions of dollars of debt that is never going to be repaid. Of course the primary goal is not to save the international financial system or the Euro but to protect the TBF banks and the wealth and power of the plutocrats.  Of course their policy will fail on all counts. 

As Kevin O'Rourke points out the forced austerity makes it even less likely that any of the debt will ever be repaid.

One lesson that the world has learned since the financial crisis of 2008 is that a contractionary fiscal policy means what it says: contraction. Since 2010, a Europe-wide experiment has conclusively falsified the idea that fiscal contractions are expansionary. August 2011 saw the largest monthly decrease in eurozone industrial production since September 2009, German exports fell sharply in October, and now-casting.com is predicting declines in eurozone GDP for late 2011 and early 2012.

A contracting economy will be even less likely that debt will be repaid.  It should be obvious that the Eurozone is going to eventually breakup.  O'Rourke thinks the sooner the better.

An immediate breakup of the eurozone would be a catastrophe, which is why the European Council agreed to a �fiscal stability union� in exchange for some movement by the ECB. This may indeed prevent collapse in the short run � though that is far from certain. Treaty negotiations outside the EU framework, and the ratification procedures that will follow, are a recipe for even more uncertainty when Europe needs it least.

In the slightly longer run, such a deal, assuming that it goes ahead, will mean continued austerity on the eurozone periphery, without the offsetting impact of devaluation or stimulus at the core. Unemployment will continue to rise, placing pressure on households, governments, and banks. We will hear much more about the relative merits of technocracy and democracy. Anti-European sentiment will continue to grow, and populist parties will prosper. Violence is not out of the question.

This summit should have proposed institutional changes to avert such a scenario. But if such changes are politically impossible, and the euro is doomed, then a speedy death is preferable to a prolonged and painful demise. A eurozone collapse in the immediate future would be widely perceived as a catastrophe, which should at least serve as a source of hope for the future. But if it collapses after several years of perverse macroeconomic policies required by countries� treaty obligations, the end, when it comes, will be regarded not as a calamity, but as a liberation.

And that really would be worse.

Climategate II - The Yawning

By BJ Bjornson

I was going to do up a post on the release of more of the hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, but I think I�ll just outsource this one to Brendan DeMelle, who has a thorough round-up of the coverage and what you need to know about this latest dumping of additional documents from the original hack.

In the end, it appears to be a poorly disguised attempt to derail the upcoming UN climate summit. (Though given the certainty of a complete lack of action from the U.S. and the likely attempts at outright sabotage from countries like Canada, why even bother at this point?)

More interesting to me is the apparent lack of effort by the UK police to track down the hackers themselves.

We're so screwed, Part 2,347

By BJ Bjornson

Sometimes the news just gets really depressing to read, even when its information you already know. This quite-excellent article from Al Jazeera certainly qualifies. Some excerpts:

"From a climate change/fisheries/pollution/habitat destruction point of view, our nightmare is here, it's the world we live in."

This bleak statement about the current status of the world's oceans comes from Dr Wallace J Nichols, a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Al Jazeera asked Dr Nichols, along with several other ocean experts, how they see the effects climate change, pollution and seafood harvesting are having on the oceans.

. . .

In March 1958, when high-precision monitoring began, atmospheric CO2 was 315.71 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is approaching 390 ppm.

. . .

The Zoological Society of London reported in July 2009 that "360 is now known to be the level at which coral reefs cease to be viable in the long run."

In September 2009 Nature magazine stated that atmospheric CO2 levels above 350 ppm "threaten the ecological life-support systems" of the planet and "challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."

. . .

At a 2008 academic conference Exeter University scientist Kevin Anderson showed slides and graphs "representing the fumes that belch from chimneys, exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead".

He concluded it was "improbable" that we would be able to stop short of 650 ppm, even if rich countries adopted "draconian emissions reductions within a decade".

That number, should it come to pass, would mean that global average temperatures would increase five times as much as previous models predicted.

. . .

Historically, oceans have been chemically constant, but less than 10 years ago oceanographers were shocked when researchers noticed the seas were acidifying - 30 per cent more acidic - as they absorbed more of the carbon dioxide humans have emitted into the atmosphere, a process that Britain's Royal Society has described as "essentially irreversible."

The oceans are already more acidic than they have been at any time in the last 800,000 years. At current rates, by 2050 it will be more corrosive than they have been in the past 20 million years.

. . .

In this kind of environment, shellfish cannot produce thick enough shells. By 2009, the Pacific oyster industry was reporting 80 per cent mortality for oyster larvae due to the corrosive nature of the water.

"Acidification has the potential to change food security around the world, so I think it's incumbent upon the entire world to recognise this and deal with it," Cooley told Al Jazeera.

Lovely no? And that�s before it starts taking about the other effects of pollution and overfishing on the ocean�s species, including those that we depend on for a not-insignificant portion of our food supply.

Now add to that this story, �Worst extinction ever linked to massive CO2 spill�

Scientists finally know the date � and hence the likely cause � of a massive extinction that wiped out 95 per cent of life in the oceans and 70 per cent of life on land more than 200 million years ago.

. . .

The precise timing coincides with a huge outpouring of carbon dioxide and methane from volcanic lava flows in northwest Asia known as the Siberian traps.

"That led to cascading effect � global warming, aridity in various areas, giant wildfires, acidification of the ocean," said Charles Henderson, a geosciences professor at the University of Calgary who co-authored the paper with a large international team.

"All of these things led to a very inhospitable world."

It would be nice if we learned something from that history, but I noticed one other point that will likely mean this information won�t matter all that much either.

Most affected species met their demise within 20,000 years � a blink of an eye on the geological timescale.

A blink of an eye on the geological timescale (for those of us that accept the world�s more than 6,000 year old), but still a lot longer than those next quarterly profit reports are due, so likely it�ll be business as usual until it�s too late to do anything about the extinction level event we�re causing to the planet�s species, with our own species included.

Dreams of yet another War

Commentary By Ron Beasley

OTB's Doug Mataconis and I never agree on any thing economic or domestic - he is after all an immature Randian A-hole.  That said we usually do agree on foreign policy and war.  He has a good post today on the rumors of an attack on Iran's nuclear installations.

We have reports that Israel, Great Britain and the US are planning to attack Iran.  Doug:

So, expect the drumbeat of war to begin pounding again from the usual quarters. As far as the Israelis are concerned, there are obvious reasons to be concerned about a nuclear Iran, or a non-nuclear Iran for that matter. The rhetoric coming from Ahmedinejad and Khameni, along with the regime�s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, makes them a serious threat to the safety and security of Israeli citizens, and Israeli interests in other parts of the world. At the same time, though, it�s fairly clear that an attack on Iran wouldn�t be the cakewalk that some on the right seem to think it would be:

 

Iran�s forces may not be up to much but, with the help of Hamas and Hezbollah, they could wreak havoc. British and US troops in Afghanistan would be exposed to even greater danger than they are now � their bases in the Gulf, notably in Qatar and Bahrain, would be easy targets. The Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf, the canal through which more than 50% of the world�s oil is shipped, would be closed. What would arise from the ashes?

Some may say that is a price worth paying to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The suggestion is that there is a �window� now that would enable Israel on its own to strike Iran�s nuclear sites. Next year, the �window� would be left open to the US (and the UK) before Iran�s nuclear weapons reached the point of no return.

Such reasoning, if this is what it can be called, is that of the dangerous fool. How crushed and devastated would Iran have to be before it could no longer restart a nuclear programme, even one just involving fissile material as a weapon for terrorists?

(�)

Why attack, or even threaten to attack, a country whose leaders are increasingly worried, more worried, about the state of the economy and internal dissent than any perceived threat from Israel? Iran is a far more sophisticated and divided society than the picture generally painted in the west.

If the Republicans push an attack on Iran as part of their campaign they are swimming upstream politically. They are already in a mine field when the criticize the Iraq withdrawal - 75% of the voters approve. Two thirds of the voters want us out of Afghanistan. You would have to be insane to think the American people would support a new war. Of course we have seen nothing that would indicate that today's Republican party is sane.

This talk of war is nonsense - it's not going to happen.  I would really prefer that Iran did not have nuclear weapons but the same can be said for Israel. Pakistan and India - one more really won't matter and might actually be an additional deterrent.  Certainly not worth going to war for.

Some Things Just Get Worse

By BJ Bjornson

This really isn�t much a surprise to anyone paying attention, but it deserves repeating all the same.

The bad news just got worse: A new study finds that reining in greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert serious changes to Earth's climate will be at best extremely difficult. Current goals for reducing emissions fall far short of what would be needed to keep warming below dangerous levels, the study suggests. To succeed, we would most likely have to reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century. Starting later would be far more expensive and require unproven technology.

. . .

"The alarming thing is very few scenarios give the kind of future we want," says climate scientist Neil Edwards of The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K. Both he and Rogelj emphasize the uncertainties inherent in the modeling, especially on the social and technological side, but the message seems clear to Edwards: "What we need is at the cutting edge. We need to be as innovative as we can be in every way." And even then, success is far from guaranteed.

At this point, I don�t see any real prospect of our avoiding a future where the world is different, and maybe far different, place climatically. This is in no small part due to the fact that opposition to climate change (or to the belief that climate change is human-caused, or to the belief that any and all proposals to do so something about it are the wrong way to deal with it, see my previous post), has become a matter of faith and litmus test with one of the two major parties in the U.S. which continues to wield sufficient power to at least block any progress on that front. And said party and the fossil fuel industries that support it have numerous allies elsewhere.

Add to that things like the energy trap, which ensures that any action we take will be immediately more painful than doing nothing and you�ve set yourself up for a future where the dramatic action needed will simply never come until it is far too late.

The sad part of that being, what comes of putting those hard decisions off is going to be a lot more painful in the long run.

The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won�t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods.

The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.

Think adaptation, in the personal rather than evolutionary sense, because we�re heading for a changed climate whether you like it or not.

The Ogallala Aquifer

By BJ Bjornson

I hadn�t heard of Charles Pierce until a couple of days ago when he was referenced a couple of times over at Balloon Juice, but I am glad that I�ve started reading him.  There is an excellent, if somewhat long read on his blog now regarding an issue that I�ve seen mentioned every now and again, and which will become far more important in the very near future, the Ogallala Aquifer.

Under the high plains of the midwest, there is a resource called the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a subsystem of a huge underground mega-system called the High Plains Aquifer. It is made of permeable layers of sand, sandstone, and gravel within which are contained billions and billions of gallons of water. The nature of the aquifer geology makes the water easy to pump. The system covers 174,000 square miles beneath eight different states, ranging north-south from North Dakota to Texas, and from Nebraska in the east all the way west to parts of New Mexico. Nebraska depends most vitally on the water found in the aquifer. And there are two concerns about the aquifer that ought to be serious concerns in our politics, but that aren't. One of them isn't being treated as a concern at all. The other is not being treated seriously, but instead as a slogan and one more litmus test by the Republican presidential candidates, and as some sort of nuisance complaint by a Democratic administration that appears to be falling down on the job.

The first problem is that portions of the aquifer are running dry. The second is that Trans-Canada, the Canadian oil giant, wants to run a pipeline through a portion of the aquifer in Nebraska. How you feel about that depends entirely on how much you trust oil companies these days, because your State Department appears to be taking a dive on the question, and your Environmental Protection Agency is dodging it entirely.

Make no mistake. You screw with the Ogallala Aquifer and you screw with this nation's heartbeat. Twenty percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States depends upon it. Pumping the water from it is all that has kept the Dust Bowl from coming back, year after year. Any damage to it fundamentally changes the lives of the people who depend on it, their personal economies, the overall national economy, and what we can grow to feed ourselves. Absent the aquifer, and the nation's breadbasket goes back to being a prairie, vast grasslands that the people who first crossed them referred to as a desert. You end up with dry-land corn and some dry-land wheat. And the aquifer is far easier to empty than it is to fill. The technology to fully exploit it has existed only since the 1950's, and portions of it are already dangerously low. It won't be fully recharged until the next Ice Age.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it is worth remembering that this is a subset of a much larger problem that�s becoming more common everywhere.  Water is only renewable to the extent that you don�t take more out a system than can be replenished by it, and in far too many cases, we�ve been doing just that, not just for drinking and bathing, but to cool our power plants and water our lawns (okay, no lawns where I live, but you know, in general).  Even worse is how it gets used for things like fracking and processing bitumen from the tar sands, which doesn�t just suck up the water resources available, but contaminates it so it can�t be recycled for other uses later.

This is already the source of actual armed conflict in many places, and it is an issue that will only spread as climate change shifts rainfall patterns.

MSM catches up on Somalia

By BJ Bjornson

This story from the Telegraph has a familiar ring.

To the northwest, Somaliland was the first to declare its independence from what was the sovereign state of Somalia, within months of the collapse of the last national administration 20 years ago.

. . .

To its east, Puntland is aiming to follow suit. . . .

Himan and Heeb, Galmudug and areas of north-western Galgaduud are now all busy declaring independence and electing provincial rulers.

To the south, Ahlu Sunna Wal Jamaa, a militia allied to the Transitional Federal Government but operating unilaterally is taking increasing territory from al-Shabaab.

And close to the Kenyan border, the latest area to break off is Azania, also known as Jubaland.

The article ends by noting that while these proto-states pretty much mean the end of any attempts to re-unify the Somali state, they are also probably the best chance for real local stability and a counter to the radical al-Shabab.

The reason it sounds familiar is because Dave was pointing that out right here two and a half years ago.

The US's best interests are served by seeing pockets of stability form and sustain themselves so that global interconnections can be made, and multi-issue linkages are possible. These pockets of stability may or may not be in the form of traditional states of the Westphalian model, but they are valuable none the less. These pockets are often a recognition of reality on the ground; local elites, networks and tribal connections as well as sometimes being the strongest group of thugs around who have fairly limited objectives can be sources of needed stability from which proto-states can emerge to better reflect ongoing realities. . . .

The same applies for Somalia and other failed or failing states --- working with the reality that there really is no such thing as a unified Somali state with an effective central government but there are regional pockets of stability that are effectively serving as limited proto-states will be far more successful in accomplishing the limited political/economic goals of the United States (smooth flow of global trade, sidelining of radical Islamists who have the capacity and intent for global strikes) then attempting to re-create a unified Somali state.

The biggest danger at the moment is that the Kenyan invasion will disrupt or otherwise delegitimize the recently forming southern pockets of stability.

Whatever its source, the instability in Somalia is making the effects of the famine there even worse, as aid agencies find it more difficult to provide aid, and the recent spate of kidnappings is only going to increase the pressure.

Somali gunmen have kidnapped three employees of the Danish Demining Group working in northern Somalia, according to officials, the latest in a series of abductions in the nation.

. . .

The nothern-autonomous province of Puntland is generally considered more stable than the rest of Somalia, which is a battleground between disparate armed groups and the weak UN-backed government in the capital.

Somalia is one of the world�s most dangerous regions for aid workers. It is also home to a number of pirate gangs who earn a living by seizing boats, but who have recently been accused of capturing hostages on land as well.

It would appear that the best case scenario at this point would be for Kenya�s punitive expedition to end before it causes further disruption to the already tenuous situation in southern Somalia and hope that the forming proto-states can establish sufficient stability in the aftermath that some semblance of security returns to the country and aid and other economic activity can return.

For the U.S., and the West in general, the best option is to stay the hell out of the way. It was in no small part the fact that the U.S. was pouring aid towards its local warlord proxies back in 2006 that helped spawn al-Shabab�s more moderate precursor Islamic Courts Union�s takeover of southern Somalia before the Ethiopian invasion, which radicalized the Islamists and led to today�s more fragmented and dangerous environment. Too much recent history for any aid to be taken at face value and not risk a backlash.

As Dave said in �09, minimalism should be the watchword for this, but we�ll have to see if it will be.

The Energy Trap

By BJ Bjornson

In a comment to my post regarding electricity use and cars, Bill H. said the following:

Well it doesn't really matter whether a car, electric or internal combustion, uses more or less electricity, but whether it uses more or less energy. Electricity is, for the near future, generated almost entirely with fossil fuel, but even when that eventually is no longer the case, the consumption of energy in any form is detrimental to some degree.

And there is still the matter of the amount of energy and natural resources consumed in manufacturing the car, the type and availability of resources needed to make the energy storage devices for the car, and the disposal of worn out cars and, in particular, expired energy storage devices for the cars.

We don't need to be thinking in terms of cars that use a little bit less energy, we need to make a quantum change in the way we interact with our planet, such as thinking of a way to live without cars at all.

The comment brought to mind this rather excellent post by Tom Murphy on the Energy Trap:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability�first in petroleum�our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here�s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but�energy. And that�s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term�effectively steepening the decline�for a long-term energy plan? It�s a trap!

He proceeds to lay out a pretty good analysis of the issue, and I encourage you to read through it. For my purposes, it is important to note that a major part of the reason for this trap is the significant upfront costs in energy for most renewable sources such as solar and wind. To use solar or wind power, you need to build all of the components and energy storage devices ahead of actually getting any energy out of it, and that upfront cost counts against what you have left over to use.

Best way to avoid having to deal with such an issue would be to invest in those upfront costs while enjoying a surplus, which on the energy front has been the case for most of the last several decades. The only problem being that we haven�t really worked all that hard in preparing for fossil fuels� replacement, and we�re now getting to a point where the trap starts to limit our decisions.

Even more fun from a policy standpoint is the fact that fossil fuels don�t tend to fall into the same kind of trap.

For resources that do not require substantial up-front cost in the form of infrastructure, the trap does not apply. Fossil fuels tend to be of this sort. The energy required to deliver a barrel of oil or a ton of coal tends to be specific to the delivered unit, and is not dominated by up-front cost. It is similar for tar sands, which requires substantial energy to heat and process the sludge. Even at 5:1 EROEI, filling a 2-unit gap can be achieved by producing 2.5 units of output while losing 0.5 units to investment. Thus it is possible to maintain a steady energy supply. The fact that fossil fuels don�t trap us encourages us to stick with them. But being a finite resource, their attractiveness is the sound of the Siren, luring us to stay on the sinking ship. Or did the Sirens lure sailors from ships?  Either way, fossil fuels are already compatible with our transportation fleet, strengthening the death-grip.

Two things of further note. We are already at peak production of oil, which is why we�re seeing such wild swings in prices with major upswings whenever the economy starts to show signs of life and people start driving and using more energy again. While sinking our resources into new and improved ways of extracting the resource (and continuing the doom that is climate change and just plain old pollution) will help in flattening out the decline, it won�t stop it, and will likely assist in our reaching the peaks of other fossil fuels even faster.

The second point is that the analysis in Tom�s post assumed a constant energy need or usage, at least in respect to fossil fuels. Even at that point, we�re looking at painful shortages if we want to replace the source of that energy with renewables, but the situation is in some respects even worse.

The reality is that we�ve been increasing our energy needs year by year, even despite greater efficiency is our use of said energy. This is mostly due to more people using that energy, as living standards in even the Third World start increasing, but the end result is that the coming crunch will be worse due to the fact that we won�t just be trying to maintain a constant amount of energy for our use, but trying to find a way to continue increasing the energy available.

This is where you run into the reality that such a solution is just plain impossible. As the economist Graeme Maxton noted in a video Ron posted last week, �on a finite planet, the only people who believe we can grow forever are the mad, or economists.�

All of which brings us back to Bill�s point that we need a quantum leap in the way we deal with our planet. We are, and have been for some time, living well beyond our means, pilfering the planet�s inheritance at an astonishing and ever accelerating rate. This holds most obviously with fossil fuels, but also includes nominally renewable resources such as aquifers, forests, fish stocks, and numerous others, and it simply cannot last.

One way or another, we are going to be forced back into balance with nature, either through some incredibly tough choices or our effective self-destruction. Given our history, I wouldn�t put very good odds on the former, which means your best hope is probably something along the lines of John Robb�s resilient communities idea, where you hope you can leverage local surpluses now to create places that can survive the coming disruptions intact.

Any way you look at it, the future isn�t looking to be all that bright a place for humanity.

Worse Than 2008

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have thought for some time that those predicting another recession are overly optimistic.  We are about to see a collapse of the world financial system and there is nothing anyone can do about it.  The banks that were bailed out are still insolvent - zombie banks.

Well IMF adviser Robert Shapiro has said what anyone paying attention knew already.

In an interview with IMF adviser Robert Shapiro, the bailout expert has pretty much said what, once again, is on everyone's mind: "If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system. We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world. This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008....

Watch it:

Meltdown

Commentary By Ron Beasley

 

When it comes to financial collapse documentaries, the public canon has one well-deserving Oscar Winner, "Inside Job", and one straight to HBO exercise in ass kissing and name dropping which shall remain nameless. Ironically, just like during the Arab Spring, it is that "dubious" Al Jazeera that shows US media how coverage of various matters, either geopolitical or financial, is done.

~Tyler Durden

The corporate media of the United States has given us bits and pieces of the events that led to the financial collapse but it took Al Jezeera to put it all together. Thanks to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge we can watch a four part series that puts the bits and pieces together.  Each part is 40 plus minutes long but if you want to know what happened, how it happened, why it happened and what is likely to happen take the time to watch all four.

• Part One


• Part Two


• Part Three


• Part Four

Must see TV!

Update:

Commentors have pointed out this was a CBC production not Al Jezeera.

Related: 

The Monster

R2P Before The Fact

By Steve Hynd

Over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast blog, Zach Beachamp responded to my last post on the ethics of R2P. Zach writes in defense of R2P interventions that "humanitarian intervention is often necessary to create the conditions under which aid can be effective in saving lives."

Food and medicine can't very well get passed out in war zones, and evil or corrupt governments will limit the ability of aid organizations to operate. Either way, aid doesn't get to the people who desperately need it.

That's why it's so critical to either end the fighting or, as the case may be, topple the government slaughtering its population. Civil wars and awful governments have tremendous long term consequences beyond the already-awful casualties caused by the fighting itself. They are, in some cases, the root causes of the spread of disease, famine, poverty, and other horrors. Further, both civil wars and bad governance prevent the international community from taking effective action to ameliorate the humanitarian crises they create. Somalia is one example. North Korea is another.

Steve's talking about Libya, a comparatively better off country. However, Qaddafi was directly responsible for dire poverty despite the country's wealth, and one can only imagine that conditions would have gotten worse as a result of a) the government diverting resources from economic development/basic subsistance aid to power consolidation after the likely slaughter in Benghazi and b) growing international isolation. The intervention in Libya likely headed off long-term humanitarian problems as well as a short-term catastrophe.

As I've been examining in the past few days, we aren't certain that the consequences of intervention will be comparatively better yet, though there are reasons for optimism. That's an important constraint on intervention: that the outcome be better than the consequences of doing nothing. Indeed, humanitarian intervention, like any other war, is subject to just war constraints.

This is one of those cases where I'd agree wholeheartedly if the real world matched the idealised one in which we often talk about ethical matters, but it simply doesn't - as Zach obviously recognises. If in the real world aid cannot be delivered to those who need it because of an oppressive regime that first needs toppling by external forces, it's equally true that in the real world those external forces are then unimaginably bad at delivering aid and development at gunpoint.

Take Afghanistan as just one example. Billions of foreign dollars delivered, massive surges of COIN armed intervention paired with grandiose externally developed plans for development - and yet there's very little to show for it. Corruption is rampant and a goodly portion of all those aid bucks has gone to enriching the kind of people who in other circumstances would be the subject of calls for regime change. Massive infrastructure projects which still don't touch the lives of those they need to - and in which the always-substantial profits get repatriated by foreign contractors. And the killing  - both of the humanitarian interveners and locals alike - continues. The overwhelming evidence is that armed humanitarian intervention is incredibly bad at delivering the "humanitarian" bit. Instead, those intervening invariably seem to turn into Hummvees in a china shop.

The same now looks likely to happen in Libya. The West will not stop the rebels from assaulting the town of Sirte en masse, despite the certain loss of civilian lives. The rebels estimate that 50,000 civilians have died in the Libyan conflict already - and they're only counting civilians on "their" side. The UN is planning what can only be described as heaby-handed running of the post-conflict situation. The rebels in Misrata are already rebelling against the Benghazi leadership, composed as it is of people parachuted in from exile in the US and ex-Gaddafi strongmen who have changed sides with the wind. Those strongmen and their militias are already acting like the old regime.

All of this argues that humanitarian objectives are extremely, I would say prohibitively, difficult to deliver at gun point. Instead of such armed interventionism R2P missions should be focussing on aid and development before the situation deteriorates to the shooting point. Zach's argument sounds to me (and Zach) like an argument for a Peace Corps to do aid before military intervention becomes needed, one that wears dungerees instead of uniforms and weilds shovels instead of assault rifles and airstrikes. Fund it to the tune of say $200 billion, taken right out of the Pentagon's over-inflated budget and put it to work on "pre-COIN", aid and development to promote good governance and helpful infrastructure before things in a country go so far South that airstrikes are needed. It would not only be a perfect utilitarian answer, it would even be useful on the home front.

Where's The Billions For R2P Against Famine?

By Steve Hynd

In comments to my last post on the dangerous precedent of R2P interventions that are really all about picking favorites, my friend and Newshoggers colleague B.J. Bjornson asked:

How many thousands of civilians being in danger of massacre would be enough? If you believed that it actually was hundreds of thousands, would you then have supported the intervention? Tens of thousands? Just a few hundred? ... Are there any circumstances where you would call for the US and other nations to step in and try to prevent the worst from happening?

It's a question worth addressing, of course, and my first impulse is the strict Nuremberg answer: that the only legal armed intervention should be responding to aggressive warfare by a state on another state, otherwise the intervention itself would be the aggressive war and thus a "crime against peace". But we live in times of "non-state actors" and there's also at least some case for saying that a state waging aggressive warfare on an entire segment of it's own population qualifies as a case for legal armed intervention.

But in response to the "how many" question, I have another.

Do you think the dead care how they died?

Right to Protect interventionism is essentially a utilitarian argument - that by using violence in reply to violence the greater good of the greater number can be achieved - specifically, that fewer people will die if there is an armed intervention than if the state or non-state actor is allowed to continue killing unopposed by external forces. But it largely ignores a wider utilitarian argument to do so - that the resources required to intervene could be put to better use saving more lives elsewhere.

The war in Libya has cost the US somewhere in the region of $1.2 billion over six months, at a rough guess. That's a drop in the ocean compared with the hundreds of billions so far spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the bloated overall defense budget. But State spends far less on core foreign assistance - including food aid - than is spent on America's wars. That stands at only $32.9 billion in the FY2012 request. DoD will get three and a half times that money for Afghanistan and Iraq alone.

Meanwhile:

Drought, conflict and a lack of food aid have left 3.6 million people at risk of starvation in southern Somalia. The drought, the worst in decades, has affected about 12 million people across the Horn of Africa.

And:

Famine in parts of southern Somalia has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly children, the United Nations said Wednesday in an official declaration of what aid officials describe as the worst humanitarian crisis in the troubled country in two decades.

I doubt the dead care whether they are killed by a bullet or starvation - they're still just as dead. Utillitarian ethics, such as those used to justify R2P interventionism, dictate that resources should first go to missions which would help the greatest number - yet the budget for Somalian aid is a measly $105 million.

My utilitarian answer to the question of when R2P armed interventions would be justified is the same I think J.S. Mill would have offered: when the other, greater threats of massacre by any cause have already been dealt with. Where are the billions for Right To Protect against famine? Where are the Beltway foreign policy insiders advocating allocating scare resources where they will do most good?

Real men buy bombs, and drop them

By Steve Hynd

Via Kat, some excellent comment from Simon Jenkins at the UK's Guardian:

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

...There is no strategic defence justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defence or Britain 2.5%, or for the Nato "target" of 2%.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. There really is no justification for such massive defense spending. Al Qaeda certainly does not provide any such rationale. At most, a collection of fundie nutters who number less than one American brigade worldwide provides justification for increased spending on international law enforcement and aid. We're already spending more than enough on the military end of counter-terrorism.

Most of the foreign policy establishment in America agrees with Gates, perhaps unsurprising when most of their jobs - even the supposedly progressive ones - are reliant on money from the military-industrial complex. The notion that the best response is not always military intervention occurs to too few of the VSPs. And once military intervention has begun, no matter how badly it is going, almost all agree that America must be seen to "win" and to be the "good guy". An alternative simply doesn't compute for almost all those "inside the beltway" insiders.

Which brings me to Ambassador Eikenberry's lashing out at Afghanistan's Karzai:

�When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost � in terms of life and treasure � hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people,� the ambassador said, �they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.�

...�When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption, our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on,� Mr. Eikenberry said.

What effort exactly? What's the mission? We keep being told it's not nation building, oh no, but to fight 100 or so goatherders with guns. To that end we have invaded and overthrown a government; billeted over 100,000 troops on Afghan soil; entered into a protracted guerilla war with a goodly section of the Afghan population (the Taliban are not foreigners); killed civilians and tried to cover those deaths up; dictated policy to Afghanistan's people; backed our own proxies in a drug war; and recruited tens of thousands of Afghans into auxilliary adjuncts to our forces, to be used as cannon fodder.

Oh, and it's not just Karzai who thinks the US' military-biassed, scattergun approach to aid has fuelled corruption in Afghanistan. A two-year study by the US Senate Foreign relations Committee thinks so too.

Recent U.S. government reports suggest that the Obama administration instead doubled down on a flawed strategy, pouring large sums into projects that have fueled corruption, distorted local economies and left Afghanistan with technology it won't be able to maintain after NATO forces leave.

The bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said in a report this month that "overly ambitious proposals, incomplete analysis, poor planning, weak coordination and inadequate follow-through by federal officials" risked wasting billions more.

So what would you call it, if not an occupation, Ambassador?

Michael Lind, VSP Asshat Part Deux

By Steve Hynd

Michael Lind, luminary thinker at the New America Foundation, has a response to critics of his incredibly ill-informed and energy lobby driven op-ed on climate change the other day.

Short version: I'm not a "global warming denialist" but...

If there were really a clear and present danger of catastrophic overheating, we could not afford to rely on feeble, indirect, "market-friendly" measures like cap and trade and renewable energy mandates on utilities, to say nothing of trivial, symbolic gestures like LEED certification of "green" houses. The only rational course of action would be for the federal government to declare martial law, nationalize the energy sector, conscript American industry and engage in an emergency nuclear power build-out at taxpayer expense. There would need to be Marshall Plan subsidies to help poor coal-burning countries shift to nuclear energy. Most people would consider an occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl a price worth paying, if the apocalyptic alternative were a runaway global greenhouse effect and the end of civilization or humanity on an earth as dead as Venus.

Get that? If the incredibly well informed and impeccably respectable VSP's who correctly foresaw the derivatives debacle and housing bubbles before the turned into economy-wrecking crises aren't doing shit, then obviously we've nothing to worry about. Trust us. (/snark)

Along the way, Lind makes some other howlers, like failing to wonder why Europe needs a country-sized solar plant in Africa when it has plenty of wind, tide and hydro resources of its own. Umm, Scotland, Mr. Lind? Well on it's way to generating 100% of its own power requirements from renewable means by 2020.

And as for the notion of a massive build of nuke plants, when studies show it'd be difficult to find enough safe sites to increase nuclear generation worldwide by more than 2%...

This guy gets backing from Democrats. No, really! It's nausea-inducing stuff to contemplate.

Yet another F from Lind, who seems to have assembled his op-eds by copying and pasting from big energy pamphlets. And yet another F for Salon for continuing to publish his shill pieces.

Michael Lind - Fossil Fuel Shill Or Unwitting Dupe?

By Steve Hynd

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, a heavyweight pundit at a heavyweight left-leaning thinktank. At Salon yesterday, he attempted to make the case that "everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong" (H/t Kat). In the process, he becomes a shill, willing or duped, for the entrenched energy lobby. An extended quote, with my emphasis, is in order.

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable �shale gas� or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable �tight oil,� thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken "play" along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India.

Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the dangers of fracking).

The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at least until China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves.

Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of fossil fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic global warming?

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world�s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world�s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy consumption.

There's just so much wrong with this and I've tried to flag up the key mis-statements in bold. Let's take those bolded sections and see why Lind is only considering a carefully chosen picture.

Fracking does indeed free up new oil and gas resources. But it comes at a heavy cost - one probably too heavy to pay in a world where "water wars" are already a reality. Fracking relies on injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to fracture the strata and release the fossil fuels. The trouble is that most of the world's shale deposits also constitute valuable ground water resources, used to provide irrigation and water for both animal and human consumption. As Texas - which has the worst water quality in the U.S. -has already discovered, fracking increases contamination of those ground water resevoirs with heavy hydrocarbons and heavy metals, making them unuseable without carbon-heavy, money and energy intensive treatments. Pennsylvania has the same problem.

The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people�s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman�s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.

Linn may be dismissive about the prospect of radical climate change, with dry places getting dryer as wet areas get wetter, but others aren't. More of that later, suffice to say for now that fracking is unlikely to be the complete and perfect panacea that Lind wants it to be, for a variety of reasons to do with poisoning the very people it is supposed to provide energy to. Oh, and then there's the little thing about it possibly causing earthquakes in some areas (H/t Kat). How well that would go down in Lind's "nuclear heavy" world doesn't have to be imagined.

But even if all the problems with fracking could be ressolved satisfactorily, we're not out of the woods and into Lind's fossil fuel Utopia yet. Lind correctly states that burning methane produces less carbon than burning coal or oil. He just doesn't say exactly how much less. However the EPA figures (PDF) show that methane has half the carbon emmissions for a given heat content of coal and threequarters that of fuel oil. Coal is far and away the most carbon-heavy way to "power industrial civilization" and can't be done heavily for another decade, let alone "centuries", without tipping the world into catastrophic climate change. Burning methane is only going to put off that problem for a little while.

And this is where Lind really shows his hand. he may well state, blithely, that "scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes" but he gives no additional evidence for this statement -- and the vast majority of experts disagree. In 2008, an equally auspicious thinktank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which has provided the wonk thinking and many appointees for the Obama administration's foreign and defense policy, had this to say about a mere 2.6 degree Celsius (4.7 degrees Farenheit) global temperature increase:

In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6�C by 2040, massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario...nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.

And just on Friday, new figures on carbon emmissions were released which made the idea of keeping global temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius a utopian one, according to the chief economist of the International Energy Authority. CNAS' scenario is the one we're already facing. It can get worse, if we keep burning fossil fuels at profligate rates as Lind suggests.

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100," he said.

At a 5.6 degree Celsius (10 Farenheit) rise, according to CNAS:

The catastrophic scenario, with average global temperatures increasing by 5.6�C by 2100, finds strong and surprising intersections between the two great security threats of the day� global climate change and international terrorism waged by Islamist extremists. This catastrophic scenario would pose almost inconceivable challenges as human society struggled to adapt. It is by far the most difficult future to visualize without straining credulity. The scenario notes that understanding climate change in light of the other great threat of our age, terrorism, can be illuminating. Although distinct in nature, both threats are linked to energy use in the industrialized world, and, indeed, the solutions to both depend on transforming the world�s energy economy�America�s energy economy in particular. The security community must come to grips with these linkages, because dealing with only one of these threats in isolation is likely to exacerbate the other, while dealing with them together can provide important synergies.

Lind, in his position as a senior director at New America, must have read the CNAS reports. Apparently he just wanted to ignore them. He's likewise ignoring the evidence when he writes that "the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power". As Andrew Simms notes in the Guardian today (H/t Kat): "A comprehensive, favourable assessment by MIT concluded that even under an almost unimaginably positive scenario, containing several major unsolved problems, nuclear would only increase its global share of electricity generation by 2%". As Simms also says:

Mobilise the same amount of money that was used to bail out states and banks in the wake of the financial market failures, and use it to invest in smart grids and mixed renewable energy systems. That scale of investment could, potentially, displace fossil fuels at a stroke.

But if there's anything on which Lind should know his stuff, it's foreign policy and international relations. Unfortunately, he drops the ball there too, with his predictions that shale oil and gas will finally free the US and Europe of the tyranny of Russian and Middle eastern energy blackmail, and enable the West to contemplate a more hands-off policy with regards to those regions. You see, he's also willfully ignoring the news that the climate-change driven food crisis (H/t Kat):

An Oxfam report published yesterday forecasts that a billion people will go undernourished this year. It is not the only one to sound the alarm: last week the UN warned that spiralling food prices could well lead to riots, as happened in 30 countries three years ago. Then there is Christian Aid, which recently put out its own report on hunger, and the World Bank, which has talked more and more of late about food poverty. However alarming Oxfam's predictions this week about the future of food might be � that the average price of staples will more than double in the next couple of decades, hitting the world's poorest hardest � few of the other NGOs working in this field would sharply disagree with them. Nor would Oxfam's description of the food-supply system as "bust" be too controversial. Any system that produces enough food for the entire world and yet fails to feed one in seven people, which is subject to rampant speculation and land-grabbing, and where crops and land that could be used to feed people are instead turned into fuel for Hummers, is patently not working.

Add famine to water wars, mass migrations and disease epidemics, not to mention climate-fuelled natural disasters, and one can see why no nation can remain untouched or above dealing with societal changes driven by global warming, even if it wanted to take an "I'm alright, Jack" stance due to its own massive fossil fuel reserves now made accessable. back to CNAS again:

A few countries may benefit from climate change in the short term, but there will be no �winners.� Any location on Earth is potentially vulnerable to the cascading and reinforcing negative effects of global climate change. While growing seasons might lengthen in some areas, or frozen seaways might open to new maritime traffic in others, the negative offsetting consequences�such as a collapse of ocean systems and their fisheries�could easily negate any perceived local or national advantages. Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades or longer. Today�s �winner� could be tomorrow�s big-time loser.

Climate change effects will aggravate existing international crises and problems. Although a shared sense of threat can in some cases promote national innovation and reform as well as induce cooperation among governments, the scenario authors found that climate change is likely to worsen existing tensions, especially over natural resources, and possibly lead to conflict. Indeed, this magnifying of existing problems by climate change is already taking place, from desertification in Darfur, to water shortages in the Middle East, to disruptions of monsoons in South Asia and attendant struggles over land and water use. These and other effects are likely to increase and intensify in the years ahead.

Lind's combination of climate denialism and fracking triumphalism is entirely wrong-headed. I'm not sure whether he, like 9 out of 10 climate denying scientists, was paid by Exxon (or Shell) to deliver his timely Salon vision of utopia - but I almost wish he were simply a paid shill rather than grading his expertise a total F for Fail.