The Spiritual Transformation of Environmental Consciousness and the Gaslighting of the Public

Me, nine years ago:

We need a spiritual transformation that will make the necessary changes acceptable and how to achieve that I have no idea; globally we are in such a horrible state of paralysis that it is hard to get many of us to accept even minor change.

The spiritual transformation is under way.

People are being publicly shamed, told to scourge themselves and advised to undertake solutions that will not work. Veganism, not flying – these things will not stop climate change, they are not major parts of the problem. Relying exclusively on wind and solar power will not work; this alone will not be enough, unless we are willing to accept poverty as a norm.

It is not necessary to create an egalitarian socialist paradise to prevent the world from roasting or drowning under the risen seas.

Shaming people is popular. People listen to the fire and brimstone sermons. It brings them catharsis. Then they go home and keep on sinning.

No amount of blaming ourselves, no amount of hurting ourselves will change physical law. The seas will rise regardless of how much we scourge ourselves or pray or beg the Almighty.

Human civilization must stop using fossil fuels, the sooner the better. There will be privation, but no one individual will be able to escape or choose this privation. It will be imposed. Doing it willingly, proactively, reluctantly, or forced will not make a jot of difference.

People will have their bonfire of the vanities and, in the end, go home and wait for the storms and the rising seas.

Humans are clearly preparing for this transformation. Good. But we are also lost and wondering what to do and which way to go. And there are all these people ready to offer solutions which place the blame on the people in the street, in the factories, in the fields. The blame belongs on the people who are striving to squeeze the last few dollars or riyals out of their fossil fuel holdings before it all becomes worthless.

In Which the House Democratic Coalition Begins to Tear Apart

“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior - it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it.” – @AOC

Our leaders have abandoned us

The wealthy are pursing fantasies, rather than addressing real problems, or trying to squeeze the last few dollars out of the coal and oil reserves.

Our religious leaders focus on the minutae of sexual behavior, or on nationalism, rather than on the vast crimes being committed worldwide.

Our political leaders vie to see how many people they can throw out of the too few lifeboats.

Tweets: On the Election and General Political Attitudes

A coalition of women, people of color, and young people could swing the election. – link

I'm not even sure [Biden would win.] If it's old rich white guy vs old rich white guy, would people vote for Biden? – link

We have suddenly had a great deal of reality weighed in on us on a very short period of time. Denial is the natural stubborn reaction. There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that acceptance will eventually follow.  – link

Fascist Disaster Planning

I think most major world leaders have decided that planetary disaster is inevitable and that there isn’t enough space in the lifeboats, and so are starting to throw people into the ocean.

Shambles

Me, writing in 2017:

2020. Look to 2020. The country will be a shambles by then, but with luck, organization, and leadership an opposition can win in 2020. We can try things in 2018, but by 2020 I hope we are ready.

Well, we did try something in 2018 and it worked – the Democrats took back the House … and then starting slow-walking action against Trump and the Republicans.

The USA certainly is a shambles and I see no signs the opposition is going to be ready for the 2020 elections.

… and what will we do if Trump and the Republicans lose, yet refuse to leave office? What will we do about the outbreak of right-wing terrorism likely to follow the election, regardless of which side loses.

The Cost of Clean Power

It is a commonplace on that we are building no more nuclear plants and shutting down existing plants because they are too expensive. But…

They are less expensive than wind and solar – variable renewable energy (VRE.) Good, fine. But VRE has its limits, and somewhere between 60% and 90% of grid power, and something more reliable is needed for the balance, either fossil energy, large-scale long-term storage, large-scale hydro, or nuclear. Right now, that something is fossil energy, derived from natural gas and coal, both environmental problems. Natural gas plants is what we currently building and we have to stop burning natural gas. Not only is it a fossil fuel, and therefore a contributor to carbon emissions, it is itself a potent greenhouse gas, though a less persistent one than CO₂.

So, a bit of qualitative economic modeling. While we are building the smart grid, everything is fine for a while. VRE is ramping up and fossil fuel plants are shutting down. But when we arrive the limit of VRE (60%? 70%?) we have to either keep the fossil fuel plants going, driving the warming of the world, turn out the lights (or life-support) somewhere, or find something else to fill in the gap. By that time it will be very late and the necessary work will be very expensive. It would be wiser to start investing and researching now.

What We Now Are Building Instead of Nuclear Plants

Natural gas plants. Burning natural gas creates CO₂, a greenhouse gas. Natural gas production leaks methane which is itself a greenhouse gas, more potent but less persistent than CO₂. This is all crazy and this is what we are doing.

Genocidal Acts in Kashmir

“Just returned from Kashmir. Twelve year olds detained and beaten in midnight raids. Women threatened with rape. Young boys given electric shocks, families unaware of their whereabouts. This is the NORMAL you talk about. This is the worst I have seen in the valley yet.” – Rana Ayyub, Tweet

BBC reports, “Security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir have been accused of carrying out beatings and torture in the wake of the government's decision to strip the region of its autonomy.”

France 24 reports: “A magistrate speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity said at least 4,000 people were arrested and held under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a controversial law that allows authorities to imprison someone for up to two years without charge or trial.”

Guardian Kashmir page.

Added 9/1: in the Indian province of Assam, some 1.9 million people have been declared non-citizens, though their families have lived there for generations. The Indian government is building 10 giant concentration camps to hold them.

To the Indian defenders of their current government: if there is nothing wrong, and the Indian government wants the world to see there is nothing wrong, they need only restore normal communications and travel to Kashmir. As it is, it seems that India is concealing genocidal acts, if not outright genocide. Discouragingly, it appears that having the experience of colonization does not prevent a people from itself become colonizers.

Trump, Granting Wishes

For Trump, in his dementia, there is no line between his desires, his wishes, and reality. He really believes that his trade war is good for the USA, that incarcerating refugees is a reasonable thing to do, that there were "very fine people" on both sides at Charlottesville. For his followers, Trump provides exculpation of their cruel beliefs. Since the highest official in the land believes them, like the white supremacists who have come out of the woodwork, it's OK for them to believe. He is like an evil genie, granting wishes that rebound on the people who make them.

Brief Note: Why is the USA so bad at recycling?

We started recycling when I was a young bird. 40 years on, we are still burying a huge amount of garbage. It is not that more products could not be reused or recycled. Rather, we have not been willing to mandate that manufacturers spend the money necessary to make more products recyclable.

If we are to prosper in the future, this has to change.

Brief Note: Plastics in an Age without Fossil Fuels

Plastics are a byproduct of fossil fuel refining; they're largely made from what is left over after fuel oils are refined out of crude oil.

My initial notes for this series of posts were written while I was sitting in campsite. I was looking around at a tent and a screen house and various other things that make modern recreational camping possible and realizing that almost all of them are made of petroleum byproducts, all the synthetic textiles, all the plastics that make up the various containers. The main thing that wasn't is the little stove – which uses fossil fuel, it's a propane stove. If we stop using fossil fuels what are we going to replace these materials with?

The answer seems to be, plant-based products. In principle, with enough energy and engineering, any chemical, including any plastic, can be made from any other chemical which contains the right elements, any usable “feedstock” in the language of chemical engineering. In practice, some feedstocks are more suitable than others for particular products. Since the energy for producing plastics from fossil fuels itself comes from the petroleum used to produce the plastics, there is going to a significant increase in the demand for energy to the process. To some extent, this perhaps can be mitigated by using embodied solar energy in appropriately-chosen plants, but this is going to take time to work out.

So there is going to be a generation where we rebuild our base of knowledge and products. Time to get started.

Brief Note: the Costs of Supplementing Green Electricity

One of the chief arguments against building more nuclear facilities is that various forms of renewable energy are less expensive. The problem there is the one that energy researchers are finding; some predictable source of power or long-term large-scale ("grid scale") energy storage technology is necessary. Yet all current designs for grid-scale energy storage are physically large, with extensive environmental impacts, and expensive as well. The cost argument against nuclear power is much weaker when one considers the costs of grid-scale storage.

Some links:
  University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems Grid Energy Storage Fact Sheet
  Stanford's Energy's Grid Scale Storage page.
 

Brief note: restarting research into nuclear energy

I think we need to reactivate nuclear energy research. The energy industry has the large-scale light water reactor and no interest in doing other designs. These are hard to operate and extremely expensive. But there is utterly no interest in the industry in researching and developing better designs. So it is time to put the nuclear engineers at the national labs back at to work. We also need to pull together and archive the design work from early nuclear power plant design. A lot of that material is buried in reports, probably not even digital form, and it is important to preserve it because we may need it now.

The Green New Deal: Running the Numbers

The technologies definitely exist to meet our 2030 requirement reaching 60% [renewables] by 2030. We think that we have all the technologies in hand to reach 100% carbon-free or 100% clean by 2045, but it's a little bit less clear what that pathway looks like. And the reason is because when you start talking about really high levels of renewable energy generation technologies on the grid, you need to find ways to store that electricity because it's coming from sources like the wind and sun, so it's not coming 24/7 the way something like stored natural gas is. So, there are some unique technical challenges associated with running a grid with very, very high levels of renewables. We are making a lot of progress on figuring out how to run a grid like that, and we are very confident that by 2045, we will be able to get there. – Laura Wisland, interviewed in Union of Concerned Scientists podcast “Got Science: Clean Energy Momentum: From Goals to Gigawatts.” Accessed August 24, 2019. https://www.ucsusa.org/ep62-wisland.

The Technical Issues

In other words, the technologies we need to make the Green New Deal work do not yet exist. California can provide about 60% of its electricity via renewables. After that, what is needed is technology that can store energy not just for hours and days but for weeks and months. Currently that technology does not exist. It is hoped that it will be available by 2045. Lacking that technology there is large-scale hydroelectric or nuclear energy. There are not many greenhouse gas neutral electric generation technologies.

Laura Wisland is an expert on and advocate for green power with over a decade’s experience. But she must be politic in what she says. I do not need to be, and ravens are supposed to be harsh-voiced, so I will say it plainly: The Green New Deal is not enough. If we believe otherwise, we are deceiving ourselves and putting our nation and perhaps our world at risk

I wrote the Got Science producers on Twitter, and they wrote back with citations. Wisland herself was quoted: “We ‘think’ we can get to 100% carbon free power, but work continues to identify the most cost-effective pathways. E3 (consultant that runs electricity models for the energy agencies in CA) has done some analysis showing that we can get to about 90% and it's that last 10% that is the hardest to decarbonize. SB 100 (the law that created the 100% clean power goal) provides the state with flexibility to decide whether ultimately the power sector will be completely decarbonized or whether it's better to keep a little bit of carbon (gas) on the system to manage cost and reliability issues.”

A very bad mistake was made in the unequivocal opposition to nuclear power on the part of environmentalists. The nuclear plants were not built. Instead, coal and natural gas plants were built, both directly aggravating global climate change and producing the huge pollution and waste of coal and natural gas production and use. Worse still, this set an example for the developing world, with India and China building energy systems heavily relying on coal. Yet the Sanders Green New Deal proposal has the USA shutting down nuclear power plants before that technology exists.

The Political Issues

The credibility of environmentalism

What is going to happen to environmentalism when the public realizes that they are in part responsible for putting us into this position? The opposition to nuclear power, all the unfounded rumor-mongering all the lies, it played right to the hands of the fossil fuel industries and brought us to crisis more quickly then had we built those nuclear facilities.

This is not to say that nuclear power does not carry real risks, but these were dramatically overplayed by the environmental opposition to nuclear power. Worse still, no comparison with alternatives was done. Voices in the environmental movement who pointed out that coal was in many ways more environmentally troublesome than nuclear power were not heard.

Climate change is not the only environmental problem. The success of humans on earth depends on the human ability to manage our population and use of resources. If the environmental movement loses credibility in one area, we may lose many voices that defend our world and its ecosystems.

Policy Conclusions

My preference would be to roll forward on the Green New Deal, to continue research into the smart grid and long-term energy storage, and also to restart research into nuclear power generation. This seems to me likely, though, to be a counsel of perfection. I fear we are likely to come up short when it is too late to act, and many people will be left, literally, out in the cold, or perhaps the burning heat.

Citations

California Public Utilities Commission. “Proposed Preferred System Portfolio for IRP 2017-18: System Analysis and Production Cost Modeling Results.” California Public Utilities Commission, January 11, 2019. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/UtilitiesIndustries/Energy/EnergyPrograms/ElectPowerProcurementGeneration/irp/2018/Attachment%20A_Proposed%20Preferred%20System%20Portfolio%20for%20IRP%202018_final.pdf.

Herman K. Trabish. “Getting to 100% Zero Emissions in California: Beyond CAISO’s Eight-Solution Menu.” Utility Dive, January 3, 2019. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/getting-to-100-zero-emissions-in-california-beyond-caisos-eight-solution/544467/.

Democratic Leadership, Courage, ACORN, The Squad, Al Franken

There has been (you may know) a reevaluation of Al Franken from the estimable Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Franken, you probably know, was pressured out of the Senate by the Senate Democrats despite there being clear evidence both from the published image files themselves as well as the history of Leeann Tweeden that the charges were at best distorted.

But this is not about Franken. I went on to consider the bipartisan defunding of ACORN, the low-income voter registration group, based entirely on forged video evidence from conservative activists. And then I went on to consider the treatment of “The Squad” – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who Trump told to return to where they came from. It took effort to get the House Democratic leadership to support them, despite Trump’s outrageous racist remarks.

When there are attacks on liberal Democrats, the Democratic Congressional leadership can be depended on to fold. Democrats of vision, courage, and ability are discouraged and, often, forced out. The result has been Congressional Democratic Caucuses filled with people who are at best very cautious and at worst weak and cowardly. And now that we need bold action from Congress, there is now almost no-one in the Congressional Democratic Caucuses to undertake it.

Pelosi Opened the Gates to Trump

"I think [Ocasio-Cortez] is being very disrespectful to somebody who's been there a long timeI deal with Nancy Pelosi a lot and we go back and forth and it’s fine, but I think that a group of people is being very disrespectful to her. And you know what, I don’t think that Nancy can let that go on." – Friday, July 12, Bloomberg

AOC tweeted, "Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today. @IlhanMN’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress. We must speak out. 'First they came...'

Then, on Sunday, July 14, he tweets "Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." – The Hill

Shaun King (The Intercept) tweets:

It’s 1:43AM here in NYC and I’ve been studying white supremacist message boards for 4+ hours tonight. THEY ARE BUZZING WITH EXCITEMENT over the openly bigoted attacks from Trump against 4 women of color today. I literally have not seen them this excited since Charlottesville.

As AOC says, their lives are in danger.

That was a foolish move on the part of Speaker Pelosi. May it energize young voters.

Pelosi Widens the Split in the House Democratic Caucus or, We're So Scrod

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The official House Democrats account is using @AOC’s words about Pelosi and targeting her chief of staff? I’ve never seen anything like this. – Yashar Ali on Twitter

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This reminds me of how LBJ broke Humphrey, back in the 1950s. LBJ arranged a series of legislative defeats for Humphrey and, over time, Humphrey just folded. What AOC will do, under relentless attack from the leader of the House Democratic caucus, I do not know. I don't think she will fold. But, if this continues, this will break the caucus, and quite possibly keep young voters and people of color home in the 2020 elections, leading to Democratic losses.

If Trump Wins in 2020…

If we don't defeat the Republicans in 2020, taking at least the Presidency, Trump and the Republicans will:

• Militarize the Southern border. In this case, it is likely the southern border of the USA will be turned into a killing field.
• Seat more radical-right judges, and perhaps more rapists, on the Federal bench.
• Go to war, perhaps in Iran.

The destruction of US institutions will continue and we will see more grossly unqualified people appointed to senior government positions.

Two and a Half Parties: Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party's Dilemma

Why don’t the House Democrats impeach Donald Trump? Why didn’t they oppose the blank check supplemental appropriations bill (S.811, H.R.2157) for Homeland Security and its concentration camps? Why aren’t the Democrats doing, well, anything?

We know about the appropriations bill, because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told us. “Because the Problem Solvers Caucus said, ‘We have enough votes to kill the House amendments.’ And they held. These 40 members led by Representative Gottheimer that worked with Republicans to say we’re going to pass the McConnell bill and so they handed over the Democratic Party.” (Link.)

There’s a lot of blaming of the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. I think this is misdirected, and this is why:

Over time, as the Republicans have become more fascist, the Democratic right has become the refuge for conservatives who are not full-on fascists. The United States now has two-and-a-half parties: the Republican Party, which is fascist, the right of the Democratic Party, which is conservative, and the left of the Democratic Party, which is liberal and sometimes socialist. As I wrote nearly 10 years ago, the two wings of the Democratic Party exist in an uneasy alliance. Pelosi is having difficulty holding her coalition together. Should the Democrats initiate impeachment proceedings, the Problem Solvers Caucus would likely prevent the House from actually impeaching Trump, and then where would the party be? In this light, Pelosi’s blast directed at the four Democratic Representatives who voted against the supplemental funding bill becomes understandable; she is frustrated that she cannot maintain discipline within her caucus.

I am frustrated, too. I understand that inaction and working to defeat Trump in the next election seems to best thing which can be managed. I doubt any other Democratic Speaker could do better than Pelosi at reconciling the Party’s two wings in the House. At the same time, Democratic voters want to see bold action from the Party, and inaction appears as cowardice. Can a course to victory be charted?