Unconvincing Concern

It's interesting how all of these concerns about pollution produced by electric vehicles (often referred to by the cool kids as EV's), and environmental havoc caused by the production of wind energy etc, are brought up by people who were never one bit concerned about the environment before EV's and alternative energy were allegedly harming it. Strip mining, oil wells and refineries, coal-powered electric plants, elimination of wetlands to build condos and golf courses, whatever, they're just fine with all of that, but a Nissan Leaf? OMG THE LITHIUM MINING, YOU MONSTER!!!!! A wind power station? OMG YOU'RE GOING TO KILL ALL THE BIRDS!!!!!

Yeah, right, your concern is so touching and authentic. PS: Wouldn't a bus pass beat driving any kind of car? I suppose it would depend on the kind of bus and other factors. Well, there are plenty of very smart engineers and scientists we can ask about that and other things. And we can check to see whether they're funded by oil or coal companies. I've been thinking about getting a bus pass. The buses here are biodiesel hybrids. I would rather that they were all-electric and charged 100% from solar and wind, but they're not. Yet.

And by the way, yes, a certain amount of pollution is caused by manufacturing the batteries which power electric vehicles, but that pollution is typically offset several times over by the emissions avoided by driving an electric vehicle over the lifetime of the car. In some cases, it's offset by the reduction in pollution during several months worth of driving. Also, the emissions caused by manufacturing those batteries are steadily sinking, in significant part because the people who manufacture and drive electric vehicles actually care about the environment and are constantly learning about such things and improving their practices.

And that thing about windmills killing birds? Yeah, turns out that doesn't really happen. Strip mines, on the pother hand, and oilfields, and refineries, and oil and gas pipelines, and emissions from gasoline- and diesel-burning vehicles? It may shock you to learn that all of those things actually do harm birds, and other animals, and plants too.

Where I See Myself In 5 Years

I'm 55 years old, and last night, for the first time in my life, when I tried to picture myself in 5 years I actually came up with something.

Many times over the course of my life I've been asked, "Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?" and I've never been able to come up with anything. Then last night, channel-surfing, I saw Danny McBride, playing one of the title characters in "Vice Principals" (I was going to watch the entire series but was unable to keep up past the first 2 episodes, because there is simply too much to watch. There is too much good stuff on TV to watch it all! Think about THAT, and compare it to the 1970's, if you ever start to think that the world can't be changed!), posing the question to an actress playing a high school student in a time out. The student was clearly drawing a blank, so McBride snapped at her: "Just make something up!"

And that is how, 55 years in, I finally was able to do the in-5-years thing: I just made something up.

5 years from now, at age 60, lean and fit, a man who runs 30 or more FAST miles in an average week, outdoors, not in a gym, I will be an extremely rich and famous writer, the author of several huge best-sellers, books translated into more than 40 languages. 40 and growing fast. I'm a frequent guest on the big-time celebrity talk-show circuit, a big wheel in the Democratic Party, an unofficial advisor to the Clintons and Obamas, a guy who plots and schemes with Gates and Buffet and Musk, a Nobel Prize winner, a MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient, a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences and the French Legion of Honor, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Leopoldina and pour le mérite of Germany and a whole bunch of other things.

But mostly I am known for stomping on the dying ashes of the petroleum industry and replacing it with solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and other means of energy production. By virtue of my great fame I am able to spread knowledge of the lies and dirty tricks of Big Oil and have just about shamed them to death. Through my many connections I've put solar panels on many millions of buildings from Peoria to Peking, windmills in many a windy place, built tidal and geothermal power plants. I've put oil out of business. We mainly just use it for lubrication now, and we've got plenty for that without ever having to drill any more.

I've built a few hydroelectric plants too. I'm aware that huge dams cause problems, but sometimes it's been either that or oil, gas and nuclear, and I stamp out oil, gas and nuclear.

(I confess that I still don't understand hydrogen fuel cells. Whenever I read or hear about them I always think: "Oh the humanity" etc. I still don't know how to categorize them: dirty, clean, safe, dangerous?)

I promote research into ever more efficient and clean ways for humans to do what we do, both by writing and speaking inspirationally about the importance of this transformation, and, through my political connections, by making sure that the educational and research infrastructure in technology and engineering thrives.

5 years from now I will have become the first person to win Nobel Prizes in both the Literature and Peace categories. 5 years from now the weather already will have begun to calm back down, and people will already be able to breathe easier again, literally, and to see more stars again at night. Because of me. All because of ME.

Is Alternative Energy The Cause Of The Drop In Oil Prices?

Many people have made doom-and-gloom predictions about worldwide chaos caused by the end of Big Oil, because the world simply runs out of oil -- you've heard it: gasoline casting $40 a gallon etc -- but what if we're headed very soon for the end of Big Oil, not because the supply is drying up, but because the demand is disappearing?

Is demand for oil going to drop nearly to the point of disappearing? (It could still be used for lubrication and plastic if we no longer use it for fuel. Then again, consumption of plastic might drastically drop...)

It might seem as if it would be easy to find the answer to that -- and that the answer would be yes, since wind, solar and other non-suicidal ways of generating energy are growing fast, and hybrid and all-electric vehicles are replacing all-petrochemical ones not just on the roads, but in the cases of ships and trains as well -- but we are told by alleged experts that the reasons for the drop in oil prices are murky and complex.

Also, the most-asked question concerning the relationship between alternative and petrochemical energy -- most-often asked in the mainstream media, anyway -- seems to be, not something like: How soon will we be able to stop killing ourselves with oil use? but the somewhat shorter-term question: will lower oil prices drive alternative energy out of the market? Nevermind whether humanity will be gone in 30 years -- can I make a killing 6 months from now by shorting alternative?

I know that suggesting that the petrochemical industry is controlling and distorting the public discourse about energy trends makes me sound paranoid to some. But research predictions about such trends for yourself, see if I'm onto something when I suggest that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there. Predictions not fitting facts.

Union Of Concerned Scientists Denounces Lies By Petrochemical Industry

If I'm a raving paranoid conspiracy theorist when it comes to the petrochemical industry interfering with the development of alternative energy, then so are the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The UCS have released a collection of incriminating documents, The Climate Deception Dossiers. In the UCS' words:

"The documents clearly show that:

"Fossil fuel companies have intentionally spread climate disinformation for decades.

"Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.

"The campaign of deception continues today."

The UCS say that "at a minimum," these companies should be held "accountable for their actions and responsible for the harm they have caused" :

* Shell

* Conoco Phillips

* Peabody

* British Petroleum

* ExxonMobil

* Chevron

The UCS calls on these companies to stop lying about climate change, and to pay for the damage they have caused. (We did it to the tobaccos companies, we can do it to the oil companies too.) (But not if we keep electing Republicans, because these are the people the Republicans work for.) They provide links to documents backing up their charges that these companies have known about climate change for decades and have deliberately and systematically spread disinformation and interfered with the development of alternative energy.

UCS, you magnificent bastards, I salute you! UCS homepage.

Nonsense Used To Disparage Alternative Energy

Remember the claims that the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries used in hybrid and electric cars would generate much more pollution than would be averted by lower vehicle emissions? Or that Wind-electric turbines were killing massive amounts of birds, or that solar panels were killing turtles?

You don't? I suppose more of you might remember those claims if there had ever been anything to them.

How about this: people going with remarkable speed from claiming that wind and solar would never generate enough electricity to be significant, to claiming that they will generate too much electricity and overload the grids, leading to catastrophe?

I'm no engineer, but I can easily imagine a grid which would automatically switch off a source of electricity if and when it produced too much electricity.

Unfortunately, it's more difficult for me to imagine an end to sheer oil-industry-funded nonsense used against the spread of green energy.

We Can Cut Down On Petrochemical Consumption Right Now

Did I hear that correctly on Chris Hayes' show last week -- you can get solar panels installed on your house for free and pay for them later out of the money you make selling surplus electricity back to the grid? Maybe I didn't hear that correctly, or maybe I did, and it was a bit of solar-energy-industry hype which doesn't apply to every potential home-solar customer. Much of Hayes' segment on solar consisted of businessmen saying this and that and Chris reacting: Really? Wow! without seeming to have done a lot of fact checking before putting it all on the air.

However, it does seem that if it's not true for every house right now, it will be pretty soon.

Hayes pointed out that utilities don't like this. One more reason for utilities to be publicly-owned and like what's good for the public. I did hear someone say -- again, this didn't seem to have been fact-checked -- that utilities had brought brought something like 40 lawsuits against people who dared to try to free themselves from them, and had won in only 2 cases. 2 cases in Oklahoma, where people with solar panels on their houses must pay a tax. (Environmentalists in Oklahoma, stay strong! It MEANS something to be an environmentalist there! Alaska too!)

[PS, 30. May 2016: I heard correctly. And the information is accurate in most of the 50 states. In some states the legislatures and utilities have combined to screw you out of such possibilities -- for the present time. For the love of Clarence Darrow, educate yourself about what's going on around you and vote in state and local elections!]

Alfred Doeblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in 1929. Had I remembered correctly, were the passenger trains electric in Berlin in 1929? I had: on the 1st page of the 1st chapter, it reads: "Er ließ Elektrische auf Elektrische vorbeifahren[...]" ("He let electric after electric go by[...]") They called them "electrics," maybe because electric trains were still a novelty in 1929? Maybe not: London's Tube had electric trains in 1890, the Paris Métro had them in 1900, Cleveland and Denver in the 1880's. So why are some trains in the US, not just in the Punjab and Mexico, but also in the "Home of the Brave," still burning diesel oil in the year Two Thousand And For Crying Out Loud?

Actually, I think most of those trains are mostly diesel-electric hybrids by now. Big new ships are hybrids too.

You may've heard about that solar-powered plane circling the Earth recently. Did you know that there's still no passenger train service to or from Columbus or Phoenix? In Europe the trains stop at just about single little town -- and they're not hybrids, they're all-electric. And there are well-tended bicycle paths all over the place, riding a bike doesn't equal dodging cars and trucks.

I'm trying to make you angry. Angry at oil companies. BP. Exxon. Gazprom, which is basically just another name for Boris Putin. Angry at the politicians, mostly Republicans in the US, who keep the companies alive and their owners rich from continuing to endanger human life. Vote the bums out! Let's get those solar panels up. Help me and Chris Hayes shine more light on things like those Oklahoma utilities taxing people for daring to put solar panels on the roofs of their homes. Ask who killed the electric car in the 1990's and who's slowing it down today, and why you can't ride a train cross-country to Columbus or Phoenix, and why Amtrak isn't all-electric with all of its electricity coming from wind or solar, and why in most places in the US you can't walk or ride a bike separately from the motorized traffic, and other questions like that, and keep on asking and asking until you get something resembling intelligent answers. What do you say, how about if we attempt to stand up for ourselves and keep some anti-social billionaire creeps from wiping out the human species?

So Suppose We Just Convert Away from Petro-Fuels. "We" Being The Whole Planet

Where my engineers at? What would it take, just in terms of logistics, leaving politics completely out of it for the moment, to relegate petrochemicals to the status of lubricants, and possibly also plastic? We need to talk about plastic too, as well as burning oil and gas and coal.

Of course, politics is a huge part of this, maybe the biggest part. I think that the single greatest threat to our survival is the continuing burning of fossil fuels, and I think that one of the things the petrochemical industry is doing to prevent the transition to more sustainable sources of energy is suppressing information about how easily this transition could be done. I just did a Google search for suppression of information about renewable, and apparently the fact that I think oil companies are blocking the flow of information means I'm a conspiracy theorist. Or maybe I'm just a normal alert citizen and the thing about the conspiracy theory is just more petrochemical industry BS.

Let's look at 2 pages in a world atlas, pp 96-97 in the 2008 edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World. On p 96 a graph shows some information on worldwide energy consumption -- but wait, it shows only consumption of petrochemicals and nuclear and hydroelectric power. "Excluded are biomass fuels such as wood, peat, and animal waste, and wind, solar and geothermal energy which, though important locally in some counties, are not always reliably documented statistically." That's strange, isn't it? What's this tiny fine print under the graph? "Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007." Okay, not so strange at all anymore, is it?

On p 97 there's a little chart of worldwide wind energy generating capacity yearly from 1980 to 2007, not provided by BP. Because, you know, BP is concerned about the reliability of such figures. Terribly concerned about reliability. Yeah, I'm delusional when I say that oil companies are interfering with the flow of information. 1980, 10 megawatts of worldwide wide energy generating capacity; 2007, 74,300 megawatts. 10 megawatts to 74,300 megawatts in 27 years. Yep, only a totally cuckoo-bananas conspiracy theorist would ask why such figures would be left out of a graph on worldwide energy consumption. Provided by an oil company. To the makers of a world atlas. Who put the figures on wind energy on the next page anyway. Please note, I'm only claiming that it's as obvious as can be and in our faces everywhere we turn that the oil companies are trying to keep the general public ignorant about big basic energy issues, and not necessarily that they're any good at it or are succeeding.

Go Green

Two commercials: one is a dorky ad for BMW with Couric and Gumbel in an all-electric vehicle which was made in a wind-powered factory:



In the other a beautiful, statuesque woman with a hypnotic voice is spewing some horseshit about how wonderful fracking and offshore drilling are. How they could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economy. I wonder how many of those jobs would be because of increased demand for doctors and other health-care workers to cope with the more numerous cases of heart and lung disease, and skin cancer, and burn victims who lit a match in a house which was fracked under, and heat stroke, and funeral homes to commemorate those drowned in tsunamis, and so forth.

They're going to need some very beautiful actresses with extremely hypnotic voices to get me to forget that, now that we can build cars that run on electricity in factories that run on wind, we're not going to be needing so much oil and gas and coal. When the word finally gets around that plug-in electric vehicles currently have fuel costs about half those of hybrids, which in turn go about twice as far on a gallon of gasoline as their conventional counterparts, and that those costs will continue to sink as power generation becomes more efficient, and that green homes already produce more power than they use, and make money by selling their surplus to the grid, and that what goes for cars and trucks and homes is also applicable to trains and ships and planes and office buildings and factories, people simply won't want their petrochemicals so badly any more. They're going to have to truly hypnotize me, to make me completely unconscious and under their control, to get me to forget all of that.

I'm not talking about green technologies which are under development or theoretical, but technology already in use. We just need to spread the word that the new stuff is already here, and let the oil companies take their rightful place in the leper colony next to tobacco.

How many drivers right now have zero transportation fuel costs, because they live in green homes which produce a surplus even after they tank up their electric cars or trucks? Whatever the number is, one thing is certain: the number is going to grow, and word of such things will get around, and the cost of oil and gas -- compared with less than zero -- will grow less and less attractive even to those people who are just too fucking stupid to factor in the costs of petrochemicals' direct damage to people's health, and the costs of climate change.

But why take my word for any of this? Who am I? That's right: I'm nobody. Paul Krugman is somebody. Listen to him.

The only hope the petrochemical industry has left is misinformation. And so here it comes: the commercials telling us how yummy fracking is and how many jobs offshore drilling will bring. (Don't forget the jobs of the people cleaning up the spills which are actually noticed and then actually required to be cleaned up. Yes, the list of jobs created by big oil really does just go on and on.)