By Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

(Remarks from the Senator’s weekly climate address. His office notes: “Yesterday afternoon Senator Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to deliver his weekly speech about climate change. It was a speech that had been prepared in advance, and which included a general reference to tornadoes in Oklahoma. Tragically, and unbeknownst to the Senator at the time, a series of tornadoes were hitting Oklahoma at the same moment he gave his remarks. Senator Whitehouse regrets the timing of his speech and offers his thoughts and prayers to the victims of yesterday’s storms and their families, and he stands ready to work with the Senators from Oklahoma to assist them and their constituents in this time of need.”)

Mr./Madam President, every week we’re here I try to remind this body of the damage that carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans, try to awaken us to our duty.  I’ve done it thirty-three times now.  I’ve tried to kick out the underpinnings of any argument the deniers could stand on.

I’ve kicked out the scientific denial argument, which properly belongs in the category of falsehood.  I’ve kicked out the economic denial argument, pointing out that in a proper market the costs of carbon must be in the price of carbon.  I tried to kick out the religious denial argument, showing that the belief that God will just tidy up after us however stupidly we behave runs counter to history and Biblical text.

Today, let’s take a crack at the political argument.  How wise is it for the Republican Party to wed itself to the deniers and proclaim that climate change is a hoax?

Make no mistake.  That is the default Republican position.  The default Republican position is that climate change is a hoax.  It’s been said right on this floor, and in committees, and I haven’t seen a single Republican Senator stand up afterwards in this chamber to say, “Wait a minute, that’s actually not the case.”

The chamber looks empty, but on C-SPAN lots of people are watching.  Lots of Republicans are watching.  Yet not one Republican has ever gotten back to me, even quietly on the side, to say, “You know what?  This is really getting serious.  Let’s see if we can work on this.”

An iron curtain of denial has fallen around the Republican Party.  So let me respectfully ask my Republican colleagues:  what are you thinking?  How do you imagine this ends?

More than 95 percent of climate scientists are convinced that human carbon pollution is causing massive and unprecedented change to our atmosphere and oceans. You want to go with the five percent, and you think that’s a winning strategy?

Moreover, it turns out a lot of those five-percenters are on the payroll of the polluters.  You know that.  It’s public knowledge.  Some of those “payroll scientists” are the same people who denied acid rain, or the dangers of tobacco.

You still like those odds?  Those are the folks to whom you want to hitch your Republican wagons?  You’ve got to know that they aren’t telling the truth.  So where does this go?  What’s your end game?

Our planet has had a run of at least 800,000 years with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 170 and 300 ppm.  That’s measurement; not theory.   Eight hundred thousand years.  Homo sapiens have only been around for about 200,000 years, so that 800,000 years—8,000 centuries—takes you back a ways.  Eight hundred thousand years between 170 and 300 ppm, and in just the last 50 years we’ve blown out of that range, and have now hit 400 ppm and climbing.

And you want to be on the side of “nothing’s going on”?  Really?

Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records?  Have you noticed those warming, rising seas?  Have you noticed species invading new territory, and miles of dead pine forests in the Rockies, and Arctic sea ice disappearing?

Do you understand that carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the sea, and that that is a law of science and is not debatable?  Do you understand that because they are absorbing the carbon the oceans are getting more acidic?  Thirty percent more acidic already and climbing?  Do you understand that’s a measurement, not a theory?

It’s one thing to be the party that stands against science.  Are you really also going to be the party that stands against measurement?

And do you know the measurement is showing that the ocean are not just becoming more acidic, they’re becoming more acidic at the fastest rate recorded in a geologic record of 50 million years?

Have you not heard about the coral reefs, those incubators of the ocean, bleaching out and dying off?  With almost twenty percent gone already worldwide?

If you’re a denier, look around.  Do you think the news is getting better for you?

Let me ask my Republican friends, what’s your best bet on whether this climate and oceans problem gets better or worse in the next 20 or 40 years?  Seriously.  Your party’s reputation is on the line here—all the chips; tell me how you’re going to bet.  Do you want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that suddenly this is all going to magically start getting better?  ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing.

And let me ask you this: what are the young people of today going to think when they are thirty-seven, or fifty-seven, and it really is worse, maybe a lot worse?  What are they going to think about the Republican Party then?  That you took the five percent bet with their futures?  That you went with the polluters over the scientists?

Young people are already out there asking their universities to divest from coal, like they divested from the evils of apartheid and the dangers of tobacco.  Good luck with that youth vote when you lock in with the coal merchants.

And the youth vote grows up and sticks around.

How’s it going to look for the Republican Party when the historical record shows—because facts have a funny way of coming out—that the campaign to fool the public on climate change was just as phony and dishonest as the campaign to fool the public on acid rain and the campaign to fool the public on tobacco?  When the historical record discloses that the five percent wasn’t even real and was actually a scam, paid for by the polluters?

And you, with young Americans’ futures in the balance, took sides with the scam.  If that is the state of play for young voters as they come of age, why would those young people ever trust the Republican Party, on anything else, ever again?

Speaking of taking sides, have you noticed who’s left on your side?  The Koch brothers—billionaire polluters;  the big oil companies — the biggest polluters in the world;  the coal barons—with their legacy of pollution, strip mining, “mountaintop removal,” and safety violations that kill their miners.  There’s a fine cast to be surrounded by.

But wait, you say, there’s more.  There’s the Heartland Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research, and the American Enterprise Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council; and the Heritage Foundation.  There are many organizations.

Right.  Like the heads of Hydra, they may look like many, but in reality it’s all the same beast.  It’s all the same scheme.  It’s all the same money behind the scheme.  You can name those front organizations, and many more, but none of it is real.  They’re all just part of the same cheesy vaudeville show put on by the big polluters.

Do you really want to lash yourself to that operation, and go down with that ship?  The great Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, branding itself as the one that gave it all to protect a gang of scheming polluters?  That’s where you’re headed.

Look who’s on the other side, on record, against you, seeing through that nonsense.  How about the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our military leaders?  How about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops?  How about NASA?  NASA’s driving a vehicle as big as an SUV around on the surface of Mars right now.  They sent it there, to Mars; they landed it safely, and now they’re driving it around.  On Mars.  Do you think those scientists just might know what they’re talking about?

How about every legitimate American scientific professional society — about thirty of them?  How about major American corporations like Walmart, Ford, Apple, or Coca-Cola?  How about global insurance and reinsurance businesses, like Lloyd’s of London and Munich Re, whose business depends on accurate risk models?

Whose side do you like in that?

In this corner, the Joint Chiefs, the bishops, Walmart, Ford, Apple, Coke, NASA, thirty top scientific organizations, the top insurers and reinsurers, and by the way several thousand legitimate others.

In that corner, the polluting industry and a screen of sketchy organizations they fund.

Let’s be serious.  Do you really want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that the polluters are the ones we should count on here?   ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing.

And for what?  To protect market share for the polluters.  That’s your upside.  Market share for polluters.

I’m willing to do a carbon pollution fee that sets the market in balance, and returns every single dollar to the American people.  No new agencies.  No new taxes.  No bigger government.  Every dollar back.  Just a balanced market, with the costs included in the price, which will make better energy choices, increase jobs, and prevent pollution.  Yes, that does mean less market share for the polluters as new technologies emerge.  That’s actually the point.  But every single dollar back in Americans’ pockets.

And by the way, the American people — three-quarters of them believe that climate change is real and that we need to do something about it.

So you may have a question for me:  why do you care?  Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings, and disgrace ourselves?

I’ll tell you why.  We’re stuck in this together.  When cyclones tear up Oklahoma, and hurricanes swamp Alabama, and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, for billions of dollars to recover.

And the damage your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas; it hits Rhode Island with floods and storms, and Oregon with acidified seas, and Montana with dying forests.  So like it or not, we’re in this together.

You drag America with you to your fate.

I want this future: a Republican Party that has returned to its senses, and is a strong and worthy adversary; in a strong America, that has done right by its people and the world.  That’s what I want.

I don’t want this future:  a Republican Party disgraced, that let its extremists run it off the cliff; in an America suffering from grave economic and environmental and diplomatic damage, because we didn’t wake up and do our duty to our people, and lead the world.

I do not want that future.  But that’s where you’re headed.

So I’ll keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful that you will wake up, before it is too late, both for you, and for the rest of us.

I yield the floor.

Yesterday, I wrote Yes, global warming IS giving us bigger, more devastating tornadoes, in response to the horrific devastation in Moore, Oklahoma.

And the usual jerks came out, accusing me of everything from being a retard to being a despicable liberal using the bodies of dead children to push my climate change agenda.

It would have been nice if any of these jerks had read what I actually said before accusing me of being totally ignorant, wrong, and evil.

What I said was, “Yes, climate change and global warming are giving us bigger, badder, and more costly storms.”

And the reason I gave for that is, “The connection is simple: Heat energy is what drives storms. The more heat energy you have in the system, the bigger the storms will be. the bigger the storms are, the greater the devastation. And the cost. And the loss of life.”

That’s just basic thermodynamics.

And last time I checked, that was NOT in any dispute – after Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York and New Jersey with unprecedented devastation, it was the business-friendly Bloomberg Magazine that ran with the cover, “It’s climate change, stupid”.

Now, we have unprecedented devastation in Oklahoma. Bigger, badder, more devastating – described as at the top end of EF5 (the top end of the tornado scale), with 200-mile-per-hour winds.

Even conservative climate-denying Senator James Inhofe couldn’t just downplay it. ”So many things happen that are so hard to explain,” he admitted on CNN. “This thing was huge. This is one of the largest ones that we’ve had… What you’re looking at now in Moore, Oklahoma is what you could have seen had you been there in 1999 or in some parts of of Shawnee. Devastation is devastation. And it’s just that this is so much worse. Because you’re talking about a two mile by 20 mile area. That’s very unusual.”

The problem with coming up with any kind of significant statistics when it comes to tornadoes is: those suckers are RARE. There have only been 59 EF5 tornadoes in the past 60 years. Separating out meaningful statistics from the background noise of random chance is going to be next to impossible – for either the climate hawk or climate denier side.

As Urooj Raja wrote just two months ago,

 One only needs to look to the past two tornado seasons to realize just how fickle Mother Nature can be from one year to the next.

After a record 2011 tornado season, which was the deadliest since 1953 and featured a whopping 1,690 tornadoes — the second-highest tornado count since 1953 — 2012 saw comparatively little tornado activity, with just 939 tornadoes. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012 also saw a below-average fatality count.

What caused the drop last year? Probably the intense drought that baked the great plains all summer. No moisture, no thunderstorms; no thunderstorms, no tornadoes. Since the drought may well have been related to global warming, I could even reasonably make the claim that “Climate change could lead to fewer tornadoes overall!”

But that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was going to a more basic level, the thermodynamics and science of tornado formation. And here’s what the NOAA has to say about that:

“….most tornadoes are related to the strength of a thunderstorm, and thunderstorms normally gain most of their energy from solar heating and latent heat released by the condensation of water vapor… as a whole, the months in which tornadoes are most likely correspond to the times of year with increased solar heating and strong frontal systems.”

Simple enough to understand? Tornadoes get their energy from heat. If there is more heat in the system, whatever tornadoes that DO form will have more energy to work with. This will vary from day to day, but overall, if the climate heats up, there will be more energy in the system.

So why doesn’t the NOAA say “Global warming will lead to bigger, more devastating tornadoes?” To understand that, you have to understand the difference between formal science, and how we humans make decisions.

Science is inherently conservative – and I do not use that term in any sort of disparaging way.  With science, you only make a claim once you have been able to examine evidence fully, document it, and reach definitive conclusions.

If you ask a scientist, “Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow?”, she would NOT be able to give you a definitive “Yes” or “No” answer – she would merely be able to say that all the evidence points to that being the likely outcome.

Here’s what the National Science and Technology Council’s Scientific Assessment on Climate Change has to say on tornadoes:

“Trends in other extreme weather events that occur at small spatial scales–such as tornadoes, hail, lightning, and dust storms–cannot be determined at the present time due to insufficient evidence.”

This is NOT the same as saying, “Climate change has NO effect on tornadoes.” This means what it says: Any affect that climate change has on tornado formation is too difficult for us to tease out of the data, primarily because we still don’t KNOW enough about tornado formation.

Here’s the NOAA’s augmentation of that statement:

This is because tornadoes are short-fused weather, on the time scale of seconds and minutes, and a space scale of fractions of a mile across. In contrast, climate trends take many years, decades, or millennia, spanning vast areas of the globe. The numerous unknowns dwell in the vast gap between those time and space scales. Climate models cannot resolve tornadoes or individual thunderstorms. They can indicate broad-scale shifts in three of the four favorable ingredients for severe thunderstorms (moisture, instability and wind shear), but as any severe weather forecaster can attest, having some favorable factors in place doesn’t guarantee tornadoes. Our physical understanding indicates mixed signals–some ingredients may increase (instability), while others may decrease (shear), in a warmer world. The other key ingredient (storm-scale lift), and to varying extents moisture, instability and shear, depend mostly on day-to-day patterns, and often, even minute-to-minute local weather. Finally, tornado record-keeping itself also has been prone to many errors and uncertainties, doesn’t exist for most of the world, and even in the U. S., only covers several decades in detailed form.

Which means two things:

1. We cannot state with scientific accuracy, for the purposes of peer-reviewed papers, what effect climate change is going to have on tornadoes
2. Anyone who says “The empirical evidence betrays you” is engaging in wishful thinking, and certainly doesn’t have the empirical evidence to back up his position.

After I wrote my post yesterday, the deniers were very happy to trot out their “evidence”, which did nothing to bolster their case. Data doesn’t count if it knocks down a straw man that nobody cares about, or is flat out WRONG.

Let’s see how that works:

Comment: Why do alarmists never like actual data? The NOAA has beautiful graphs showing that tornado frequency is unchanged since the 1970s, and DECREASED over the past 100 years.

I didn’t argue one way or the other about tornado frequency – it varies wildly from year to year, and as mentioned, there is even a chance that global warming will reduce two of the ingredients that spawn tornadoes (of all sizes) – atmospheric moisture and wind shear

HOWEVER, the record year for total number of tornadoes ranked EF1 or above was…  2011 (including SIX of the intense and destructive EF5 twisters – the kind we normally only see once a year). It was also the deadliest year in the modern era (550 deaths)

Also, note how the commenter cherry-picked the time frame – he can say “unchanged since the 1970s” precisely because there was an insane peak in tornado activity in 1974 – which also means compared to any OTHER baseline year, you could say tornadoes ARE way up (based on the peak in 2011).

And as for a decrease over 100 years – I have no idea what the real tornado count was 100 years ago, and neither does the commenter.

Comment: I just simply want to use common sense.There are no more tornadoes today than 40 or 50 years ago. There are more digital cameras and smartphones today for shooting them. In average, there are 1000 to 1200 twisters every year in USA….

Sorry, 2011 was the peak year for tornadoes. Still.

…I remenber the tornadoes outbreak of April 3-4 1974. About 350 people were killed. The concept of global warming did not even exist back then. Don’t tell me there are more twisters today than 40 years ago, that’s simply false. About the size of the twister that devastated a suburb of Oklahoma City May 20th, It’s maybe an EF4 or EF5 but it’s not unusual in this state to see a twister this size.

Of course global warming existed back then.

As for your other points - Sorry, 2011 was the peak year for tornadoes. Still. And we still only get about 1 EF5 per year on average, and this one was about as big an EF5 as we’ve EVER seen. “Not unusual”? Try again.

Comment: I suggest you check the facts about the reduction of tornados, before making up outragious lies like that.

… And the commenter’s link  takes us to the climate-denier blog Watts up with that?, which walks us through a series of studies… most of which are more than ten years old, and most of which are regional studies (of just Missouri, or just Alberta, Canada) which show about what we’d expect – nothing more than random noise compared to the overall climate (see NOAA comments, above).

…. But they also note this study, Diffenbaugh et al. (2008), which indicates:

“the number of tornadoes reported in the United States per year has been increasing steadily (~14 per year) over the past half century.”

So the deniers then have to go to the “Maybe that’s because of better coverage and cell phones” argument.

Note the tactic – “There’s NO EVIDENCE to back up the argument you didn’t even make, you moron… oh, and the evidence that does exist doesn’t count.”

Commenter: I sincerely suggest you go back to school and learn basic thermodynamics before attempting to apply them to weather patterns

Basic thermodynamics? You mean the kind that says:

“….most tornadoes are related to the strength of a thunderstorm, and thunderstorms normally gain most of their energy from solar heating and latent heat released by the condensation of water vapor… as a whole, the months in which tornadoes are most likely correspond to the times of year with increased solar heating and strong frontal systems.”

Oh yeah. THOSE thermodynamics.

Commenter: actually tornado activity is at ALL TIME LOW last 12 months. Please do your research first.

True, tornadoes HAVE dropped off sharply. As discussed above, this probably has a lot to do with the (likely-global-warming-related) massive midwest drought that has been parching the prairies. You can’t make any sort of scientific argument by cherry-picking one month or one year and saying “Look, look, there’s a great big blizzard so GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX.”

That’s moronic.

Finally, I’d like to comment on the difference between scientific certainty (for publication purposes) verses the kind of decision-making we do to protect our homes and families.

If the sheriff drives up to your house and says, “Flood waters are rising, I’m here to get you and your family out of here before you all drown,” you are entitled to demand evidence. You can question his assumptions. You can accuse him of scare-mongering. You can even decide the whole thing is a hoax designed by greedy scientists who just want more of your money. You can tell the sheriff to get the hell off your property, because you’re not going anywhere based on an alarmist hoax.

But your children will drown.

Here’s Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, today (via):

“So, you may have a question for me – Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.” (Read the whole speech here.)

97 percent of climate scientists say climate change is real, and humans are feeding the problem with CO2 from fossil fuels. This is going to cause a whole bunch of problems, including bigger and more devastating storms.

You don’t have to believe. But get the hell out of the way while we’re trying to fix things.

Do Something:

• THE REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF OKLAHOMA or text the word “food” to 32333 to donate $10
• Feeding America: Call 1-800-910-5524, or donate online here.
• Red Cross: (Central and Western Oklahoma region): Text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation to victims.
• The Blood Center of Central Texas. Go here to learn how you can donate blood.
• SAFE AND WELL - a resource to help those effected find each other

(Image via Moore Oklahoma Recovery Facebook page.)

As an insanely huge tornado smashes a path through the former oilfields of Oklahoma, it might be a nice time to remember – yes, climate change and global warming are giving us bigger, badder, and more costly storms.

Remember that the next time somebody tells you that dealing with climate change will be too expensive. NOT dealing with climate change has costs, too.

UPDATE: The deniers jumped down my throat in comments, so I go into a LOT more detail in this follow-up post.

The connection is simple: Heat energy is what drives storms. The more heat energy you have in the system, the bigger the storms will be. the bigger the storms are, the greater the devastation. And the cost. And the loss of life.

While the fossil fuel industry is still in denial, the insurance industry has known this for years. They know all about uncertainly – if they don’t manage uncertainty correctly, insurance companies go broke, and quickly.

2011 was the worst year on record for twisters – the month of April saw more than 600, more than doubling the previous record. It also saw the second worst day for fatalities – 318 people.

“Climate change? No,” Howard Bluestein, professor of meteorology at University of Oklahoma, told Huffington Post two years ago. “This is something that happens every 10 or 20 years when everything comes together like this. This is just natural variability.”

Except now it’s coming every two years.

This year, we’re on track for another doozy of a year, and it’ll probably be days before we know the toll from South Oklahoma City. As I write this, CNN is reporting 15 children trapped in the debris of an elementary school, and the images of devastation are shocking and terrifying.

Is this really the “new normal” we want to create for our children?

Follow-up: Tornadoes, storms, and superstorms – yes, it’s global warming.

Do Something:

• THE REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF OKLAHOMA or text the word “food” to 32333 to donate $10
• Feeding America: Call 1-800-910-5524, or donate online here.
• Red Cross: (Central and Western Oklahoma region): Text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation to victims.
• The Blood Center of Central Texas. Go here to learn how you can donate blood.
• SAFE AND WELL - a resource to help those effected find each other

By James Howard Kunstler

The collective state of mind in the USA these days may be even more peculiar than what went on in Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were freely elected to lead the country and reconstructed the battered national psyche into a superman cult that soon beat a path to mass death and ruin.

America has its own way of going crazy. We don’t goose-step to tragedy; we coalesce into an insane clown posse and stumble into it by pratfall — juggaloes dancing backwards off the cliff edge.

We’ve been softened up and made extra-stupid on a 60-year-long diet of TV and kreme-filled donuts. Instead of a “master race,” our political fantasies revolve around a master wish – to get something for nothing.

Want to feel good about yourself? Smoke some crank.

Want to become economically secure? Buy a Powerball ticket or drive to the local casino.

Want political esteem? Plug a flag pin into your lapel.

Want status? Borrow free money from the Federal Reserve at zero interest and arbitrage it into massive earnings for your primary dealer bank.

All these behaviors are the consequence of a culture that elevated advertising to such a high social good, it ended up drowning in its own manufactured bullshit.

A subset of our master wish has been on vivid display in recent months, namely the idea that God has blessed the USA with a limitless supply of new oil that will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. This propaganda from an oil industry desperate for capital investment has been swallowed whole by people in authority who ought to know better, just as that same class of people in Germany of 1934 should have known better about what they were bargaining for in economic well-being with the Nazi agenda.

In our case, the propaganda drumbeat is being led by formerly respectable news organizations. The New York Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, Forbes, and The Atlantic Magazine are media giants that have lately spread the “good news” that America will soon be 1) “energy independent,” 2) the world’s leading oil exporter (greater than Saudi Arabia is now!), and the “go-to nation” for cheap manufacturing.

All of these claims are false, by the way. The American way-of-life was designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil, not $90-a-barrel oil, and “new technology” has not changed that. The unfortunate and, to some extent, mendacious memes about the wonders of “new technology” have only snookered the public into a false sense of security about a future that will disappoint them badly and probably provoke an extreme political reaction as the reality of our predicament sweeps through daily life.

Most of the current “endless oil” fantasy revolves around shale oil. Just to get a visual idea of what this amounts to, consider the map down the page. It depicts the two major shale oil production regions of the USA: the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford “play” in Texas. Bakken production is confined almost entirely to four counties in North Dakota (Williams, Mountrail, McKenzie, Dunn). The Eagle Ford region touches perhaps ten Texas counties.

Now, realize that the oil fields all over the rest of the USA (including Alaska) are in decline. Here’s where the “bonanza” of new oil all comes from:

Horizontal drilling (often more than 10,000 feet down + many “laterals” an additional 10,000 feet horizontally) and then fracturing “tight” rock for shale oil is not only a way larger capital expense (lots of steel!) but the flow rates per well (82 barrels-a-day average) are laughable compared to the halcyon days of conventional oil — little better than “stripper” wells.

Consider also that shale oil well flow-rates decline greater than 60 percent in the first year (rapidly thereafter, too) and you can see easily that there will be no “kicking back” to run the pump-jacks like cash registers, as in the old days. In fact, the rapid depletion only prompts more frantic drilling and re-drilling to keep the production at its current rate – the “Red Queen Syndrome” (“I’m running as fast as I can to stay where I am”), which means fantastic capital expenditure to keep drilling and fracking more wells (even more steel!).

Consider also, that the small “sweet spots” in the shale oil regions were the ones drilled first (in earnest after 2003), for the simple reason that they were the most promising. This was the “low hanging fruit” — easy to pick. Outside these sweet spots the oil may be too meager or difficult or costly to bother drilling for.

This is a picture of a boomlet that may run a few more years — if the banking system doesn’t implode and the massive stream of capital doesn’t quit flowing to the shale counties. The excitement will all be over before 2020, but I suspect that troubles in finance and banking will put the schnitz on the shale gas mania long before that date. What will happen when the American public discovers that they were lied to about yet another important matter?

The discovery will coincide with very severe changes in daily life that won’t be avoidable. Everyone will be affected. Many will be impoverished and suffer real hardship. That’s when the public goes apeshit and starts tearing down the house.

Apart from the issue of sheer economic suffering and all the damage that will ensue, consider that it will be generations before anyone believes the “authorities” again — though, like the oil age itself, the era of giant national media will probably prove to be a one-shot deal, too. Future generations — if they are lucky — may read the news on one-page circulating broadsides, printed laboriously in hand-set type by letterpress. Or maybe they’ll be reduced to just parsing out rumors.

(Originally appeared at Clusterfuck Nation.)

____________________________________

In a huge disappointment to organic food and non-GMO activists, the Supreme Court gave Monsanto a huge victory this morning.

There had been some hope that they would re-evaluate the crazy notion that companies can patent life-forms. It is, after all, an idea that would have been laughed at by the founding fathers of this country.

But while the current Justices may give lip service to following the original intent of the law, anyone who’s been watching knows that their main loyalty is to keeping the market ripe for corporate profits.

The court ruled unanimously – the liberals joining with the “original intentist” conservatives. Even Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto employee, joined the cheerleading. And they ruled that Monsanto can has the right to control it’s designer genes down through the generations – not only can’t farmers replant the soybeans they grew themselves (overturning 10,000 years of agricultural practice), they can’t even plant random soybeans they bought from a grain elevator. Not if they’ve got Monsanto’s genes in them.

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The case:

76-year-old Vernon Bownman, an Indiana farmer, was planting a risky late-season low-yield second crop of soybeans. Rather than pay premium prices for Monsanto’s GMO seeds for a crop that wouldn’t do well, he bought cheap bulk soybeans from a grain elevator.

He reasoned that a lot of them would HAVE Monsanto’s genes – the biotech giant controls 90 percent of the soybean market in the US. And he was right – he was able to spray Monsanto’s Roundup week-killer on his fields and most of his plants contained the gene that allows them to survive that chemical onslaught.

Monsanto didn’t like that. They went into his fields and checked (something they swore in another court case they don’t do), and when they found their genes, they sued ol’ farmer Vern.

The lower court ruled that Vern was in the wrong and he had to pay up to the tune of $84,456.20.

The question:

Vern’s lawyers argued that under normal patent law, Monsanto’s rights were exhausted with the first sale. That doctrine is why you can sell your car without violating Ford or Toyota’s patents, or sell your house without violating every patent on every component.

But things get tricky when you start discussing “self-replicating technologies”. That’s the tortured term the companies devised to explain why you shouldn’t be able to replant a seed you had grown on your own farm – the technique that has made agriculture sustainable for the past 10,000 years.

Rather than looking at the request and saying, “Of course there are issues, because patent law was never meant to apply to lifeforms”, the courts bent over backward to help the companies out.

They decided that replanting GMO seeds is more like xeroxing a book and selling the copies, which is a no-no. And that’s what the Supreme Court upheld today.

“The question in this case,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan, “is whether a farmer who buys patented seeds may reproduce them through planting and harvesting without the patent holder’s permission. We hold that he may not.”

David F. Snively, executive vice president, secretary and general counsel of Monsanto (yes, that’s his name – I could NOT make that up) said in a statement:

“The court’s ruling today ensures that longstanding principles of patent law apply to breakthrough 21st century technologies that are central to meeting the growing demands of our planet and its people. The ruling also provides assurance to all inventors throughout the public and private sectors that they can and should continue to invest in innovation that feeds people, improves lives, creates jobs, and allows America to keep its competitive edge.”

Just for the record:

• When companies develop new strains of plants, they are called hybrids, and are not entitled to patent protection. Companies managed to make money off that business model for centuries.
• The only thing Monsanto did that was different was using tech to insert genes from one species into another directly, since that wouldn’t work through breeding.
• Monsanto in all of its history has only had TWO breakthrough technologies – herbicide resistance (for Roundup)and a built-in pesticide (BT).
• They’ve parlayed that two-trick-pony-act into billions in sales and dominance of the market (more than 90 percent of corn, soybeans, and other major crops).
• While they persistently play the “growing demands of our planet and its people”, their crops are NOT suitable in third-world economies. They work best on fossil-fuel-intensive factory farms.
• And they sure do love to sue small farmers. According to Bowman’s legal team, the corporate Goliath had filed 136 suits against 400 farmers and 53 small businesses by 2010.

“The court chose to protect Monsanto over farmers,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety. “The court’s ruling is contrary to logic and to agronomics.”

The future:

On the bright side, Kagan’s ruling was very narrow – they didn’t really address the issue of “self-replicating technology”, instead ruling that in this particular case, farmer Bowman was in the wrong – but that in some other hypothetical case it was possible that “the article’s self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control.”

“Obviously, we are disappointed in the decision which affirms the finding of infringement,” said Bowman’s lawyer, Lawyer Edgar H. Haughe. “But beyond that we are particularly surprised that the Supreme Court did not use this case to address the possibility of self-replicating technology, more broadly. It appears to be a narrow holding  in this case that only goes to farmer Bowman.”

But that’s not likely to impact Monsanto’s bottom line, or the rights of small farmers and organic farming, any time soon.

More on this issue:

• Game on! Supreme Court takes up Monsanto’s patented seeds
• Monsanto fail – they can’t sweep the latest shocking GMO study under the rug
• Organic farmers’ lawsuit against Monsanto dismissed
• Monsanto employees in the halls of government (part 2)
• The trouble with Monsanto and GMO – Dr David Suzuki spells it out

By James Howard Kunstler

Whenever the Federal Reserve wants to tweak the dials of the economy — or pretend that it can — it turns first to its sock puppet at The Wall Street Journal, John Hilsenrath, and leaks a rumor of policy change.

They like to do this late on Fridays when financial markets are about to close, so that market players will have a whole weekend to ponder the Fed’s actions like medieval viziers reading goat entrails.

Last Friday’s puddle of steaming guts was a supposed preview of the Fed’s “exit strategy” from its reckless policy of “quantitative easing” or “money” creation (or “liquidity,” if you like). In other words, they supposedly intend to stop juicing the financial markets with fake wealth, i.e. capital not accumulated from real productive activity, but just fictively created on computer hard drives.

For the past year they have been doing this to the tune of $85 billion a month, “buying” US Treasury bonds and bills and an assortment of miscellaneous securities (mostly trash that can’t be pawned off on anyone else) through their so-called “primary dealer” bank cohorts, the too-big-to-fail usual suspects, who “earn” hefty transaction fees in the process of conveying all these pixels from Point A to Point B.

These interventions are called Permanent Open Market Operations, or PoMo.

The theory all along has been that this $85 billion a month would seep down to Main Street to provoke spending (increasing the “velocity of money) and therefore “jump start” the economy. The theory has proven itself to be complete horseshit, of course. All it has done is suppress interest rates on bonds, depriving old people of income off their savings by so doing.

It also artificially jacked up reckless lending on loans for houses, cars, and college degrees, juiced the share price of stocks, and boosted food prices.

Meanwhile, an increasingly former middle class languishes in a purgatory of foreclosure, penury, and desperation. The Fed can’t really do anything to help them. It can only burden them with more easy-credit debt, especially their college-age children. But ours is a financialized economy and finance is too abstruse for most ordinary people to understand, so they just muddle along in a fog of dashed hopes and repossession.

Lately, though, the financial markets at the heart of the financialized economy — that is, an economy based on buying and selling increasingly dubious “paper” assets rather than on capital formation through producing things of value — are sending distress signals. The aforesaid efforts at economic dial-tweaking have only produced distortions and perversions in the basic functioning of the markets they’re designed to tweak:

• They pervert the “price discovery” mechanism by dumping “free money” into equity markets.
• They distort “risk premiums” by steering money out of savings, where it earns less than nothing, into riskier investments subject to the vagaries of everything from weather (commodity markets) to control fraud (bank stocks) to geopolitics (Toyota stock).
• They debauch market expectations in general by implying permanent artificial life-support.
• They promote market gaming such as front-running equity prices via high frequency trading on computers, naked shorting (pretending to borrow shares that, in fact, do not exist) and the abuse of futures markets — lately illustrated in the ongoing smash of paper gold and silver contracts, with the side effect of driving yet more money into stock markets.
• Finally, they undermine the meaning and value of money itself, which is the most dangerous game of all because when people lose confidence in their national currency, nations dissolve in political chaos.

Despite the aura of control, Fed officials (and casual observers) may sense things spinning out of control. Of course, hyper-fragility is exactly the effect that all the Fed’s own actions would predictably lead to. When you divorce truth from reality, strange things are bound to happen.

The Fed ventriloquists who speak through Hilsenrath at The Wall Street Journal suggest they would accomplish their exit from the current $85 billion-a-month QE policy in a set of “halting steps” by irregularly dialing down QE issuance month-by-month to fine-tune the results on-the-fly, as markets may require.

This is also complete horseshit because they could only accomplish controlled tweakings by somehow signaling their intentions beforehand through some lackey like Hilsenrath. Otherwise, they could not pretend to control the results of their actions. They might as well just throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks.

Unfortunately, the “halting steps” idea would only provide even more opportunities for selective, complex front-running, shorting, and gaming — which is to say setting up more dangerous behavior with more uncertain and possibly destructive outcomes.

Anyway, there’s no evidence at this moment that anyone believes what was leaked to Hilsenrath. It could easily be more smoke and mirrors aimed at concealing the fact that the Federal Reserve has no idea what it has been doing and fears the consequences.

There is one thing that we know for sure in this strange period when bankers have tried to manage reality in the absence of truth: that advanced industrial-technological economies designed to run on $20-a-barrel oil can’t run on $100-a-barrel oil, and that is why the US economy was subject to financialization in the first place — to offset declining productive activity by an attempt to get something for nothing.

Notice that this macro-trend coincided exactly with the rise of legalized gambling all over America. That is how the idea that you could get something for nothing got to be normal.

The world is about to find out that you really can’t get something for nothing. It will be a harsh lesson.

For a complete list of books by James Howard Kunstler and purchase links, CLICK HERE.

  

   

  

(Originally appeared at Clusterfuck Nation. )

By David Brin

Mars One: why did I volunteer?

I  believe that a one way Mars mission is a viable-enough idea for some people to consider it, even knowing, as I do, that “one-way” has several possible connotations.

On the surface, the claim is that eliminating the huge cost of the return flight will allow instead the establishment of full, self-regenerating and sustainable life-support systems on the Martian surface, allowing the new “colonists” to live out a normal span in some comfort.

You’ll strive hard upon arriving, unfold and deploy solar powered units that can produce food and other necessities, and voila, become the first human citizen of the Red Planet.  ”One way” then means you’re happy to spend the rest of a reasonable lifespan exploring, maintaining the colony, and then greeting the next wave.

There is a basic reality to this, knowing that all that time at low gravity has probably left you unfit for life on high-g Earth, in any event.

But, of course, this mission would have very low margins for error or the unexpected. Even if the sustainability modules work perfectly, the odds are still strong that “one-way” will also mean “short duration.” In which case your hard work won’t be wasted.

It will have set the stage for followup missions which will use your base, build on and improve it… after they bury you. And future generations will erect a monument on that spot.

You’ll want very qualified people, who can have a decent stab at setting up the life support technologies and perhaps (despite long odds) surviving to greet the second wave. But the first wave volunteers must be realistic about those odds, and willing to go, anyway.

And many call that very idea insane. I admit that may be somewhat true… so? People who cannot imagine any reasonable person making that choice simply aren’t envisioning the wide range of human diversity. Nor do they comprehend the vast drama of the human past, during which history often pivoted around risk-takers.

See more on the risks and hazards of a long duration space mission, including radiation, low-g atrophy, isolation, vacuum, and the difficulties of maintaining truuly sustainable food/water/recycling and life support. This won’t be easy. Never has been.

Consider what I told my family. By the very earliest date that Mars One might launch, I expect to be a spry 75 year old, whose kids are already successfully (ahem) launched, and who might yet spend a few years doing something truly remarkable.  I think you’ll find tens of thousands of people who – under those circumstances – will at least ponder it seriously.

Though I still cannot guarantee I would decide to actually go.  I’d need to see competence.  Lots of it.

And I still prefer Dennis Tito’s Mars Inspiration mission!

Oh, neither one is likely to fly any time soon. We will go, however, sooner or later.

And this conversation is well worth having.

(Originally appeared at Contrary Brin.)

By David Brin

Grand challenges!  It’s an approach to stimulating research and technology that has been around for a while, stretching back to the British longitude prize of the 1700s.

Aviation medals and awards spurred rapid advances during the 1920s and 1930s and sparked breakthroughs in human-powered flight in the 1980s and 1990s.  One contest helped lead to creation of the “spaceship” sub-orbital craft that Richard Branson and Burt Rutan will soon use to offer spectacular jaunts for rich folks. (Something I portray evolving into an extreme sport, in Existence.)

Newer X Prizes – stimulated especially by Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation - include Qualcomm’s contest to develop a medical tricorder and Google’s prize for the first private group to land an autonomous mobile probe on the moon, as well as Nokia’s Medical Sensing prize.

One major advantage of the prize approach is that the funder does not have to pay anything till the mission is accomplished. The allure of a possible prize… plus potential renown, of course… is often enough to make private groups, companies, teams or individuals willing to take passionate risks, investing their own time and money — a style of bold endeavor that did very well by our ancestors, during the Age of Exploration and the later barnstorming era of air flight development.

Many fail, some spectacularly… a few succeed. And we all move forward.

In 2010 the US Government began an effort to crowdsource ideas for new challenges at Challenge.gov which shows the range of new contests or prizes or incentives now being used to lure creative efforts, some of them way-cool… and others kind of trivial. They range from NASA launch systems to crowd-sourcing open payments systems to ideas for commemorative coins.

A more extensive web article (and another) takes you through many of the pros and cons and aspects you never thought of. If (for example) you are facing comfortable retirement, there would be worse ways to spend your time.

So let’s crowd-source this. Do any of you have ideas for endeavors or goals that would be perfect for an X Prize? It should require modest to intermediate cost, with substantial potential rewards… but with risky odds of success that are not quite good enough to draw in the normal market forces of rational investment.

And cool!  It should be cool enough to attract some millionaire/billionaire — and/or NASA or the White House (I know a guy) — to propose it as a Grand Challenge.  Or else, speak up with challenges that you’ve seen and found impressive.

(Originally appeared at Contrary Brin.)

How out-of-step is Governor Jerry Brown, when it comes to his destructive water polices for the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas?

The Sierra Club of California has called on Brown to abandon his position on  the construction of twin peripheral tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a policy that would harm fish and farmers but boost big agriculture and big energy.

“You and your administration are relying too heavily on an old-fashioned approach to resolving California’s water demand challenges at a time when more updated ideas and alternatives are needed,” the organization said in a letter to the Governor delivered on Monday.

“Your solution is to build something big before you leave office. Yet, building something big and old-fashioned isn’t going to ensure—especially during a time of climate disruption—that the people of California and the environment will be guaranteed the reliable and essential water supply needed at a time it is most critical.”

Kathryn Phillips, the group’s director, signed the letter on behalf of its more than 380,000 members in the state. She said the letter culminates a month of controversy surrounding the Brown Administration’s proposal to develop two giant tunnels, and massive accompanying infrastructure, to draw water from the Sacramento River before it arrives in the Delta.

Based on recently released chapters of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), the tunnel proposal “will be disastrous for the environment, the cultural resources and the economy in the Delta,” the letter says. “Whereas the Delta Reform Act speaks to dual goals of ecosystem restoration and reliability of Delta supplies, in the context of programs for long-term reliability statewide, the documentation released for the BDCP seems intent on maintaining or increasing high exports out of the Delta to benefit the State Water Project and Central Valley Project contractors at the expense of the environment.”

The letter notes that giant water engineering projects developed decades ago – including the damming of the Tuolumne River at Hetch-Hetchy Valley in the 1920’s, the diversion of the San Joaquin River at Friant Dam shortly after World War II, and construction of the New Melones Dam in the 1970s – “have helped delay development of a sustainable water policy in our current era.”

“It is critical that the current debate about the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta system not lead us to repeat history’s mistakes,” the letter states.

Finally, the letter calls on the Governor to provide leadership on water policy that invests in commonsense conservation and infrastructure improvements that aren’t driven by a few big water user agencies.

“California needs 21st-century leadership on water policy that fully considers a wide range of alternatives that address how we can reduce water loss from existing infrastructure, preserve water quality, improve conservation across the state and across sectors of the economy, and restore watersheds to help California meet its essential public health, economic, and environmental goals. We are asking you for a commitment to fiercely protect and fight for the public trust of surface and groundwater resources, which belong to all Californians,” the letter says.

“Rather than rushing to a tunnel solution, we urge you to reconsider your position on the Delta and explore alternative plans to lead California in a bolder, more enlightened and comprehensive direction on water supply policy,” the letter concludes.

The letter is available at: https://california2.sierraclub.org/…

Sierra Club California is the legislative and regulatory advocacy arm of the Sierra Club’s 13 chapters and more than 380,000 members and champions in California.

A broad coalition of environmental groups, Indian Tribes, fishing groups, family farmers, Delta residents and elected officials opposes the construction of the peripheral tunnels because it would likely lead to the extinction of Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt and other fish populations.

The Sierra Club letter follows the controversy over Deputy Director Meral recent comments that “BDCP is not about, and has never been about saving the Delta. The Delta cannot be saved,” as reported in Restore the Delta’s “Delta Flows” newsletter (http://www.restorethedelta.org/…).

Meral made his controversial comments while speaking with Tom Stokely of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) in a private conversation after a meeting with Northern California Indian Tribes on Monday, April 15.

“I was flabbergasted because that’s not what we’ve been told by politicians and state officials,” said Stokely after the conversation. “I was surprised at his candor because I’ve always known that BDCP is not about restoring the Delta.”

“It’s therefore ironic that the Brown administration is calling this a Bay Delta Conservation Plan,” emphasized Stokely. “You can keep the same acronym, but in reality it’s the Bay Delta CONVEYANCE Plan. It is and always has been about moving water, not saving the Delta.”

“We did not put the statement out for publicity gain or just to try to embarrass somebody,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta Executive Director, who witnessed Meral make the comment. “The reason we let this statement out was to show the true intent of the tunnels project,” which she said is to increase pumping Delta water south.”

In a May 3 letter in the Sacramento Bee, Barrigan-Parrilla noted, in response to the Bee’s May 1 editorial “Flimsy justification to call for a resignation”: “Restore the Delta did not call for Natural Resources Agency Deputy Secretary Jerry Meral’s ouster. It is the other Jerry who worries us the most. There is mounting evidence that the Brown administration is trying to force science and all water stakeholders to submit to their predetermined decision to build the Delta tunnel.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/…

By David Brin

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) and I have both agreed and disagreed about transparency, for years.

In his posting, Crime and Privacy, he has opined, for example, that

 ”Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can’t stop.”

Hm, well, that’s right in the general gist, though wrong in the specifics.

What Scott is fumbling around — and that I made explicit in The Transparent Society (1997) — is that universal and pervasive surveillance can take us in either of two directions.

One is toward Big Brother, if elites monopolize the omniscience and can surveil in secret, without accountability or supervision.  In that case, you get what Vernor Vinge called “ubiquitous law enforcement.” And if the cops can’t arrest everyone?  Then they’ll cherry-pick and arrest those whom they don’t like.  In the specifics, Adams is dead wrong.

But he is floundering in the right direction when he holds that:

“a lack of privacy would lead to fewer activities being against the law. The only reason law enforcement can afford to act against drug users, or prostitution, or gambling, for example, is because only 1% of those crimes are detectable. If police could magically know every time someone violated a drug or prostitution law, the volume would be so high they would end up ignoring the entire class of crimes for purely practical reasons. And that’s where we’re heading.”

Still wrong! But almost there.

What is missing from his vision is… citizenship. Let us assume that we remain sovereign voters and citizens, not just legally but empowered by omniscience of our own. By “sousveillance” — the ability and fierce determination to look BACK at the mighty – of government, oligarchy, corporatcy, criminality – in effect, watching the watchmen. (I portray this in my novels, EARTH and  EXISTENCE and it is very likely. )

Suppose we get used to applying reciprocal accountability and even inserting cameras of our own – or at least trusted witnesses – even in the authorities’ surveillance chambers and control rooms. In that case:

• Cherry-picking and other abuses will be caught and deterred.
• We will argue, debate, deliberate and change some of the laws ourselves.  Some will be abandoned, as Scott Adams describes, only by our choice, not because of some cop-laziness.

For example, if you are caught every single time you break the speed limit, and if the fine every time is $400, then you will join millions of your neighbors demanding that the system of fines be changed!  You currently pay $400 because the law assumes it is missing 99% of the speeders.  If it catches 100% of them, then rational people will negotiate a shift to a tariff system, where you pay by the mile… and by the mph… each time you hurry above the limit, but are not putting folks at risk.

Deterrence that’s reasonable and flexible. Um…. duh?

Here is what I find depressing. People just don’t get this! Not even smart, out-of-the-box thinkers like Scott Adams. They seldom look at the society of citizens around them and see it! We never notice that 99% of the stuff… even the rules… around us is working! (Just stand at a 4-way stop sign intersection and watch a miracle at work.)

Sure, complain about the wretched 1% that isn’t!  I got a list of complaints that rolls out the door. But this tendency to only notice what’s wrong seriously undermines our belief that we can fix things.

No wonder negotiation has broken down, in this era of dismal culture war.  We all assume the worst.

We never ponder… is there a solution that we could negotiate, among ourselves, so that these trends won’t rob our freedom, but enhance it?

(Originally appeared at Contrary Brin.