Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

The maximum ice cover on the Arctic ocean this winter was at an all time low, some 300,000 square kilometers less than last year. Wat Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado commented;

It’s a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out.

A steady stream of findings lately suggest that climate change is accelerating. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than thought. The Arctic ice sheet is shrinking. Severe droughts have gripped parts of South Asia, Africa, and the U.S. Southwest. Last year’s hurricane season set numerous records, and Gulf water temperatures are already above normal.

The time has come not only to work to eliminate global warming pollution but to plan for living with the climate change that now looks inevitable.

And on this topic, the trailer to Al Gore’s global warming movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” can be seen here.

Despite the outcry over gas prices, consumers are buying more than ever, and the economy is running smoothly

…[A]nyone can save gasoline simply by slowing down. The federal government says that every five miles per hour you drive above 60 miles per hour is like paying an extra 20 cents a gallon for gasoline.

Yet people aren’t slowing down, at least in any broad sense. Take Maryland, where highway signs alert drivers that lower speeds save fuel. At the request of BusinessWeek, the Maryland Transportation Dept. put together data for six characteristic stretches of highway in the state, comparing average speeds this spring and one year ago. The combined change for the six was a decline of 0.27 miles per hour — statistically insignificant.

To put it bluntly, behaviors haven’t changed because for most Americans, gasoline prices just aren’t high enough to make a difference. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, gasoline accounts for about 4% of a typical consumer’s spending. A healthy chunk, to be sure, but less than the nearly 6% spent on, for example, recreation.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060512_840093.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

GM Set to Eliminate SUV by June
Huzzah! The senior mangagement at General Motors finally concedes that bigger is not necessarily better… Of course, “The Limits To Growth,” (Club of Rome, 1972) is still apostacy to them — even in this era of peak oil.

GM has steadily expanded the Hummer line but shrunk the models’ size. In 2002, GM introduced the H2, a medium-size version, and last spring it brought out the H3, the smallest of the group. The H3, which sports a 5-cylinder engine, is popular, but the entire Hummer group has been outsold this year by the Toyota Prius, [my emphasis–N.B.] a gas-electric hybrid. A key member of GM’s board of directors has suggested that GM scrap Hummer altogether to save cash.

Click here for link.

Happy Mother’s Day. Our post from last year discusses the origins of this holiday. (Hint, it has nothing to do with Hallmark.)

Hey folks,

If you have a My Yahoo page, you can easily add this blog as a feed to your headlines section by clicking the little button on the right side of the blog page that says, Add To My Yahoo. Then whenever a new story appears in the blog, the title of the article will appear on your My Yahoo page along with its age. Cool and easy.

Adam

It’s sad to see the anemic state of organized labor in this country today. Worse, it kills me to admit that, to a large degree, the erosion of the labor movement is the fault of the unions themselves. Their refusal or inability to change with the times, to keep the movement relevant in the face of globalization and the digital conversion — the so-called new economy — has been disastrous.

Disastrous, I might add, for union members and nonunion workers alike.

Just as the Democratic Party has largely ceded the battlefield to Republican stridency in recent years, so, too, has organized labor wilted before an economy where the unrestrained market rules all. The result is unsurprising: The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people “right-sizing”?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year.

You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They’ll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they’re the first to scream, “You’re stifling innovation!” at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/theluddite/0,70858-0.html?tw=rss.index

Got this from Dollars and Sense…
A dark night, a mysterious dame and a gumshoe looking for clues in the case of the vanishing wages
Ha! In addition to being on the mark, this column by Jared Bernstein is funny, too!

She had a neckline as low as the Nasdaq in ‘01, curves like sine waves and a dress tighter than the global oil supply. She had my attention even before she pulled out two reports I’d seen that very morning.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” she said in a voice that gave my calculator a power surge. “I didn’t know where else to turn.”

“You came to the right place, doll,” I said. “I see you’ve got the first-quarter GDP report, along with the new compensation results.” I’d been puzzling over these numbers all day, but what, I wondered, could this tall glass of ice water want with them?

“That’s right,” she purred. “I need to know why GDP is up 4.8%, the strongest quarter since 2003, yet real wages are falling.” Yeah, I thought, you and everybody else who works for a living.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-bernstein7may07,0,4131549.story

Deal Said To Advance Vote for D.C. In Congress
Are those pigs that are flying out there in the distance? You be the judge! (Now if this were April 1st, then I’d be properly incredulous…)

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) is teaming up with Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) to introduce a bill that would for the first time give the District a full vote in the House, a sign of bi-partisan cooperation that advocates of D.C. voting rights hailed as a breakthrough.

The legislation, which is to be unveiled at a news conference tomorrow, would expand the House from 435 seats to 437, giving a vote to the District’s delegate and an extra vote to Utah, the state next in line to enlarge its congressional delegation, according to the 2000 Census.

Click here for link.

Here Lewis responds to R. F. Moore. Moore’s comments are on the > lines.

> From: “Roy F. Moore”
> Date: Mon May 1, 2006 6:38 pm
> Subject: “Peak Oil” - Ain’t Necessarily So slightlyaskew
>
> In the interests of balance, I present some links to the other
> side of this discussion. The reports that the world’s oil supply
> is “drying up” may NOT REALLY BE TRUE.

For the record, what is drying up is CHEAP oil. Oil will never run
out. Never. There’s too much of it for that, and they keep finding
more. What will run out, and what is now running out, is CHEAP
oil. The price will ascend, and keep ascending, though fitfully;
i.e. we’re probably due right about now for a big correction (to
be followed by another run-up to even higher levels). Eventually
it will become impossibly expensive. That’ll be several decades
from now. It will change everything, since our whole
“civilization” is built on the assumption (and heretofore reality)
of very very cheap energy.

> But here are the links, friends and neighbors. You decide.
>
> First, John Christian Ryter of “News With Views”:
> http://www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon110.htm
>
> Second, Jerry Mazza of “Online Journal”:
> http://www.rense.com/general67/oils.htm
>
> Third, Charles Featherstone of the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
> http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1717
>
> Fourth, Newsletter #52 from the “Center for an Informed America”:
> http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr52.html#diamonds

I appreciate your desire for balance, Roy. Balance is always a
good thing.

Note however that newswithviews.com and mises.org are
“Libertarian” sites with a very heavy investment (emotionally and
intellectually, both) in the Faustian idea of limitlessness. They
believe that there will never be a shortage of anything for which
the free market cannot compensate — that the market and human
ingenuity, freed from meddlesome gubmint bureaucrats and odious
taxes, will always provide, one way or other. They think that
there are no serious environmental problems, no limits to growth,
no limits to population, no limits to consumption, no limits to
the current orgy of gluttony and greed, etc. NO LIMITS.

Newswithviews.com is particularly rabid in this regard, and
accordingly I take anything they publish with large rocks of salt.

Rense.com is just a big pile of weirdness — lots of fun, and
sometimes a source of leads for further research, but in no way
itself a source of serious credible info.

Davesweb.cnchost.com is Dave McGowan — probably the best, most
thorough single critic of peak oil. He makes some good points, but
also has many misconceptions and is sometimes quite shallow. For
example:

: http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr55.html
: “When the oil companies feel good and ready, voila, they will
: discover more oil in the world.”

Oh? Why don’t they — voila! — discover more oil in the
continental U.S., which peaked in 1970, and has been in decline
ever since? Why don’t they discover more oil in the North Sea,
which peaked a few years back and is in steep decline? Why don’t
they discover more oil in Alaska’s North Slope, which peaked in
1988 and is in steep decline? Why don’t they discover new North
Slopes and new North Seas? Heaven knows they spend many billions
each year TRYING to find them. Why have discoveries lagged so very
far behind consumption? (It is about 6:1, I gather; i.e. 6 barrels
burned for every 1 now being discovered, and falling. This is a
multi-decade pattern — continual fall of discovery relative to
rate of use. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked and eaten.)
At $70/barrel, there should be plenty of incentive for those
“voilas”. Are they just (conspiratorially) holding-back in order
to raise prices and profits still further? No, they are not.
Efforts to find more oil are ongoing, intensive, and very
well-financed. There is no “holding back”. There is no incentive
to under-report finds or reserves. On the contrary, there is
incentive to over-report them, and in fact there is evidence to
the effect that that has already happened, bigtime, most recently
with the Saudi fields. McGowan needs to Get Real — here and
elsewhere.

Lots of links to McGowan are here, FYI:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/peakoilindex.shtml

There’s also this guy (signs off as “John Denver”), who makes some
good points: http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/

There’s also Alex Jones, who has roughly the Newswithviews.com
mentality: “Peak Oil is a Corrupt Globalist Scam” (etcetera):
http://www.infowars.com/articles/economy/peak_oil_globalist_scam.htm

There’s also the late Joe Vialls, who also had the
Newswithviews.com mentality, along with a strong sprinkling of
anti-Zionism verging on Jew-hatred; e.g. “Russia Proves ‘Peak Oil’
is a Misleading Zionist Scam”. Vialls’ idea was that, apart from
abiotic oil (which he thought was real), vast oil reserves in the
South Atlantic (near the Falklands), and near Greenland, were/are
being concealed by an international circle of Zionists and other
manipulators. It was an intriguing, largely-undocumented
conspiracy theory. Here are links, some of which might be bad now,
since Joe passed away a couple years ago and his site might be
closed down (I’ve downloaded most of the key items; send request
to me off list; OR: google for “vialls”, “falklands”, “fortress
america”):
http://joevialls.altermedia.info/wecontrolamerica/peakoil.html
http://www.joevialls.co.uk/myahudi/fortress1.html
http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/fortress2.html
http://www.rense.com/general67/joe.htm

You might be interested to know that some of the communists are
also big critics of peak oil (and fans of the abiotic thesis,
below). They think that peak oil is a bourgeois reactionary plot
to deny the proletariat its rightful place at the table of
affluence. You can find many writeups debunking peak oil and
touting abiotic oil at e.g. the website of the revolutionary
communist Rolf Martens: http://www.rolf-martens.com/

Years ago I had heated exchanges with the “eco-socialists”
(Marxist watermelon-greens) about peak oil. They hated the idea,
and they hated me and others for insisting that it was real. They
thought we were right-wing Malthusian misanthropes and/or dupes of
capitalist pigs. Whereas people of the newswithviews.com mentality
accuse me of being a patsy (or even a conscious operative!) of
Jewish banker conspiracies, or authoritarian New World Order
conspiracies, or some such. One guy, a conspiracy theory scholar
of sorts, and of Libertarian sentiments, screamed that I was a
“filthy Rockefeller toady”, “collaborating with mass murderers”,
etc. When one questions the prevailing religion of progress and
perpetual plenitude, the feelings run high!

It feels funny to be out there in No Man’s Land — in the
crossfire between Marxists and social democrats on the one hand,
and Austrian-school free-marketeers and Randian objectivists on
the other.

Communists and capitalists alike (and moderns, generally) resent
the idea that their precious wet-dreams of unlimited growth and
consumption, ever-greater affluence, and endless modernization and
technologization could be interrupted by lack of a finite
essential such as petro-fuels or high-grade mineral ores. They
HATE that idea. They go ballistic. It’s like breaking the news to
them that they’ll never again have an orgasm. It’s like telling
them that their religion is all wrong. Hell, it IS telling them
that their religion is all wrong! Their belief systems are
religious in nature, much as they fancy themselves as being
totally “rational”.

Poor babies.

They’re just going through the first of the Kubler-Rossian steps
to acceptance of one’s own impending death: denial, anger,
bargaining, and depression. Those same steps must be climbed when
dealing with the impending death of anything to which one is
attached, including e.g. this “civilization”, our addiction to
a life of unearned (and harmful) leisure, etc.

———————-

> From: “Roy F. Moore”
> Date: Sat May 6, 2006 8:16 pm
> Subject: Re: “Peak Oil” - Ain’t Necessarily So slightlyaskew
>
> As listed in the four links I provided some time ago, both the
> Russians and Ukrainians have investigated over 50 years and have
> proven that oil was not created from decaying organic matter, but
> it created from the Earth’s magma itself. And is therefore, to use
> the scientific term, “abiotic”.

The canonical source is J F Kenney’s http://www.gasresources.net/
(which you might have cited; I can’t recall)

I had a brief email exchange with Kenney. I very politely asked
him if he would consider discussing the abiotic theory with
geologists and others on the energyresources list. He declined.
Rudely. That was most unfortunate, because we badly need this
issue to be hashed-out in public by experts. Most oil geology
experts don’t buy the abiotic story. It is hard to say who is
right. It is possible that BOTH are right; i.e. that both biotic
and abiotic oil exist. (The two theses are not mutually
exclusive.) It would be very helpful for the leading experts to
face off and undertake a public debate.

(By the way, the peak oil people don’t like me either, because I
don’t buy the peak oil story as an absolute, unarguable truth, as
they do. I am willing to listen to ANY point of view, no matter
how improbable or unorthodox. That includes things like abiotic
oil, cold fusion, “zero point” energy (free energy), etc., etc. I
question the Peak Oil religion, and especially the ugly dogmas of
the associated Church of Dieoff. That’s apostasy, and they don’t
like it one bit. The creator of http://www.dieoff.com — Jay
Hanson — thinks that I should be kicked off the peak oil lists!
He’s right, of course. )

A few practical questions about abiotic oil, however:

Why are the oil companies not pursuing this? Isn’t $70/barrel
enough? If not, then what price will be enough? Would this not be
in their interest? It is true that large organizations often
behave stupidly. Maybe the oil companies are being stupid about
abiotic oil. But it seems unlikely. The oil companies spend
megabucks on high-tech, energy-intensive, and globally exhaustive
exploration and development, complete with armies of geologists
and other scientists and technologists, all of the latest and best
equipment, etc. They have deeper pockets, and more motivation,
than anyone, anywhere. Are they really so dumb or blind as to miss
this? Or are they conspiring amongst themselves to ignore it so as
to raise prices? Maybe. But it seems unlikely.

Further, has anyone determined the EROEI (energy returned on
energy invested) of this very deep oil, assuming that it exists?
i.e.: How much energy does it take to get to it and raise it,
versus how much energy it yields? Maybe the oil companies have
determined the EROEI to be negative for abiotic oil, and thus
that it is not viable, long term.

As a point of perspective, it was determined years ago that the
EROEI on corn ethanol was in some situations slightly negative;
i.e. it took slightly more energy to produce a gallon of the stuff
than it yielded, for a net energy loss. Most ethanol production is
EROEI positive, but only slightly. Nothing like the fantastic
EROEIs (50:1, 100:1) that built our so-called “civilization”.
EROEI of conventional oil is now below 8:1 and is falling. All the
low-hanging fruit was picked and eaten, long ago.

The deal, in a nutshell, is that we had a free ride
(super-high-EROEI energy source) for many decades, but the free
ride is now over. Unless abiotic oil in unlimited quantities soon
starts spontaneously burbling up out of the ground.

A further point of perspective is that it is a very good thing
that we are running out of cheap oil. Cheap oil allowed us to
build the current “civilization” of greed, sloth, gluttony, and
perhaps several of the other Deadly Sins, indirectly. Cheap oil
fuels the flames (literally, even!) of those sins. Cheap oil has
allowed us to build the most wasteful and destructive and arrogant
civilization in history — an “imperial system”, in Ted Trainer’s
words (below), “involving extreme injustice, oppression and use of
terror.” It is truly a blessing that it is running out. The
excesses must be swept away, and this is the material mechanism
for the sweeping. We, and our civilization, must be chastised,
chastened, cleansed. We need to climb those Kubler-Rossian steps,
and get our egos back under control.

The sudden availability of unlimited cheap or free energy (from
abiotic oil or anywhere else) at this moment — before we’ve
learned the critical lessons that the coming contraction has to
teach us — would be a disaster much worse than running out of
oil.

Don’t tell anyone, but in the back of my mind I suspect that
something like abiotic oil (or, better, “zero point” energy) is
true. But the timing is wrong, and it is a good thing that that
truth (IF it is true) is being ignored or suppressed. With a big
new load of cheap energy, we would build more fleets of SUVs, pave
more millions of hectares, bulldoze more forests, precipitate
worse mass extinctions, etc., etc. — and probably extinct
ourselves in the process. In other words we would behave *all the
more* after the fashion of the crazed consumption-drunk psychos
that we’ve been for the past couple centuries.

> Nonetheless, it is necessary that we cut back our use of oil and
> natural gas, and do what we can to promote green and alternative
> energy.

Bigtime. Though too late for a comfortable transition, now. We
needed to start in 1975.

Alan

———————-

“[Oil is] a Faustian spectacle of illusion and deceit… Oil is a
resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts… Oil
fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing we can easily
overcome such unyielding obstacles as time… Oil creates the
illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for
free… Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is
above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease,
wealth, fortune, power.” — Michael Watts, in Petro-Violence: Some
Thoughts on Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/EnvirPol/WP/01-Watts.pdf
[ Watts’ whole article is freighted badly with postmodern-speak;
however, the excerpts posted here are well worth the trouble:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/distributism/message/1278 ]

“The economy underlying the way of life taken for granted in
Western industrial-affluent-consumer societies is an imperial
system involving extreme injustice, oppression and use of terror.
After documenting this situation at some length, attention is
given to the general issue of affluence, resource scarcity and
peace and security in a world of limited resources, severe
inequality and obsession with economic growth and ever-rising
living standards. It is argued that peace and security cannot be
expected unless the rich and over-consuming countries undertake a
fundamental, enormous (and improbable) shift away from their
commitments to affluence and growth and towards The Simpler Way.”
– Ted Trainer, If You Want Affluence, Prepare For War
http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D62IfYouWantAffluence.html

———————————————————————

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Green_All_Views/message/13650

The Misuses of “Anti-Semitism”
Got this from Dennis Kobray on the Green All Views Listserv…

The extended controversy over a paper by two professors, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” is prying the lid off a debate that has been bottled up for decades.

Routinely, the American news media have ignored or pilloried any strong criticism of Washington’s massive support for Israel. But the paper and an article based on it by respected academics John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, first published March 23 in the London Review of Books, are catalysts for some healthy public discussion of key issues.

The first mainstream media reactions to the paper–often with the customary name-calling–were mostly efforts to shut down debate before it could begin. Early venues for vituperative attacks on the paper included the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times (”nutty”), the Boston Herald (headline: “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard”) and The Washington Post (headline: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic”)[My emphasis.–N.B.].
*
*
*
In April, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins put her astute finger on a vital point. “In the United States, we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel,” she wrote. “In Israel, they have it as a matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel. … I don’t know that I’ve ever felt intimidated by the knee-jerk ‘you’re anti-Semitic’ charge leveled at anyone who criticizes Israel, but I do know I have certainly heard it often enough to become tired of it. And I wonder if that doesn’t produce the same result: giving up on the discussion.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon05082006.html