The Free Market: Hates us, loves our money

I get tired of hearing conservatives tell us how the free market should decide things that are important to us, things like (but not limited to) health care. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that the free market doesn’t really care about our health and well being, not unless they can make a buck off it.

The free market doesn’t care if we’re all obese or diabetic because of the food they sell us, for instance, because then they can create “pharmaceuticals” to combat these conditions, or exercise equipment, or books about eating healthy. They can offer us Lean Cuisines and Healthy Choices to create the illusion that they want us to eat better. If we were all lean and healthy, the stock market would drop.

The free market doesn’t care about the planet either. They give us the cars that use too much gas, insisting that this is what we demand. They come up with new gadgets that require ever-more electricity, stressing the grid and dumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They build homes that are hard to heat or cool naturally, but that’s okay because they have all the air conditioners and heat pumps we need.

Conservatives revere the free market. They see it as a beneficient god to whom we can pray for all the good things life has to offer, a god that will answer our prayers. Problem is, we just don’t know what to pray for.

The new patriotism?

Ethanol is the “in” thing — so much so that the United Nations is worried that worldwide food production might suffer in the rush to produce fuel crops. But in the US at least, it’s become unwise to debunk the ethanol myth, and those who do risk being branded as anti-enviroment — or, worse, unpatriotic.

While biofuels may indeed have a role in the current crisis that can be characterized as both environmental and geopolitical, they are not the answer to the looming oil shortage. They will not provide us with the independence from foreign oil we seek. They will not guarantee our national security, something that’s already being trotted out in defense of agricultural fuels.

Yes, they are renewable, but there’s not enough arable land in the US to plant enough corn — or any other crop, for that matter — to replace all the petroleum we use. In addition, the process of converting corn to energy requires… energy, from fertilizers to transportation to the conversion process itself. In short, it winds up to be not very efficient.

What’s happening, though, with the encouragement of this administration — and, yes, this Congress — is that farmers are all excited about corn. They see it as the new oil. Without restriction, many farmers are switching to corn in hopes of the riches they will reap.

Okay, not all farmers are excited. Corn is being diverted from feed to ethanol production and ranchers, for example, are complaining that as the supply of feed crops diminishes, costs rise. And their costs, of course, are passed along to consumers.

In fact, in the end, all rising costs and other hardships created by this rush to ethanol will be passed along to consumers, who might even begin to see shortages of many foods in the not too distant future.

Yes we need energy, but we can’t eat it. Nor can those starving in third-world nations, many of whom find their only hope for survival in the surplus food produced by the United States. As we divert grains to fuel, there simply won’t be any surplus.

Once again, the solutions to the parallel problems of energy shortages, global warming and national security involve a comprehensive energy plan, one that leans heavily on solar, wind and other natural phenomena that can be tapped. Add public transit and sustainable communities to that mix, and come up with a way to sequester carbon emissions and perhaps even remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and we’re talking about a plan — with biofuels only a footnote.

Meanwhile, let’s not call someone unpatriotic just because they see the flaws in ethanol.

Acting locally

I found a fascinating book at the library recently — Superbia!, by Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, a creation of Mother Earth News. It’s a discussion of how to change the way we live, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and after reading about the communities where people have made positive changes I come away amazed at how creative committed people can be when they’re aware of a problem.

Most Americans take our way of life for granted. We’ve grown up amidst surroundings that are a fact of life. There are aspects of our way of living we may curse — traffice jams, rising costs, for example — but generally we don’t connect the dots and see the overall picture.

The picture that some see is that we’ve created a way of living that is essentially not sustainable. We may curse the traffic, but we don’t necessarily think about the energy consumed while our cars sit and go nowhere. We tend not to think about the greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere that results from combustion accomplishing no work. It may be a small thing, but puzzles are usually comprised of many small pieces.

Traffic is but one symptom of that unsustainable lifestyle we’ve created for ourselves — a lifestyle that came about as a result of the population movement enabled by the development that took place after WWII, when vast tracts of farmland were turned into suburban neighborhoods, laced with roads and connected by more roads. From that point on, development became roadway centered. Up until then, development generally occurred first along rivers and then along railroads. Populations were more concentrated and most of what we needed was within easy reach.

Early communities were generally self-contained, typically with everything a family needed to live. What wasn’t made locally was, by the 20th century, shipped in by railroad. In those times, most agriculture was local too. For the most part, people ate what was grown locally. In those days, our world might have been considered cozy.

That all changed in the 1950s, with the advent of the federal highway system we call the Interstates. As railroads were allowed to perish, expansion occurred along these ribbons of roadway, ever outward from urban hubs. No one thought about replicating the style of community that we’d been accustomed to, and in general people relished the new space they were afforded. People moved from concrete neighborhoods of apartments to communities of single-family homes with new lawns and baby trees, quiet streets and shiny new schools. That we might no longer be able to walk to the grocery store was a small price to pay for what many considered country living.

Geographers and social scientists now look back on the evolution of modern America and see the mistakes we made, mistakes that cannot be reversed. The outward sprawl that in the beginning gave people what they perceived of as freedom was in reality a prison. We put distance between ourselves and everything that was crucial for sustaining lives — our work, our food, our culture. And in the process we fouled our nest.

Superbia! takes a look at what some communities in America are doing to step back in time a little. Nothing wholesale, but in many ways examples of how to make neighborhoods more liveable. It’s a refreshing and inspirational book, full of ideas that just about anyone anywhere can adapt to where they live, given the required awareness and spirit of cooperation.

A Silly Question

BP’s oil facility at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska was shut down because pipes were discovered to be corroded. Back in March, a pipe sprung a leak, and BP is under criminal investigation for the huge oil spill that resulted. I gotta ask… weren’t these pipes ever inspected? Or would that have been too much of a hardship on poor BP, whose recent quarterly earnings were less than $8 billion? Well, thanks to the shutdown, oil prices have risen over two dollars per barrel — another boost for oil company profits.

Update: Apparently the pipelines are inspected. So… another silly question — why doesn’t the inspection process work properly? Let’s remember how environmentally fragile the North Slope is, and a lot of legislators and the administration would dearly love to further risk damaging it for the few drops of oil believed to be below ground there.

Energy Independence Part 8

Bio-fuels are one component of the energy-independence equation. Back in January, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush mentioned ethanol from corn in particular, but also switchgrass. Typically, it was little more than a sound-byte. What he failed to say is, “I am launching an initiative to aggressively pursue the cultivation of crops suitable for bio-fuels. Starting tomorrow, the Federal Government, through the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Agriculture, will begin to develop programs aimed at encouraging, through incentives and grants, the cultivation and processing of crops ideal for bio-fuel use.”

Corn, though, isn’t ideal for bio-fuel. The net yield of energy is not nearly as large as other crops, notably the switchgrass mentioned by the president. While figures are imprecise, in general it takes one unit of energy to produce one and a third units of energy from corn. The potential for switchgrass is far greater.

But there’s one crop that’s never mentioned — hemp. Not long ago I posted a blog about industrial hemp — and its uses go far beyond biofuel. There are too many to mention in this posting, but check here for a comprehensive list. It’s worth pointing out, though, that right now there are several types of plastics being made from hemp. And as most of us know, petroleum has been an essential ingredient in the manufacture of plastic. Well, just imagine how much oil we wouldn’t need if we made plastics from hemp!

Why isn’t it legal to grow hemp in the United States? Well, back in the early 1920s, influential businessmen representing the paper, oil and chemical companies decided that help posed the kind of competition that could undermine their profits. So, they used their influence to persuade Congress to classify hemp as an illegal drug — and, with the help of a scare campaign against marijuana designed to influence the public, confused industrial hemp with its slightly hallucinogenic cousin, pot.

In the late 1990s, Canada legalized the cultivation of industrial hemp. It should happen in the States too.

Energy Independence, Part 7

The most abundant potential source of energy is the sun — and solar technology not new. Even decades ago, small solar cells generated enough energy to do small amounts of work — in cameras, for instance, where they measured light and adjusted the lens aperture and shutter settings accordingly. For some time now we’ve seen these small cells in calculators, where they replace batteries and function well on just the radiant energy from light bulbs.

What we seldom see are the large tasks solar cells can undertake — generating electricity on a scale large enough to power an entire home. That’s because, even though it’s available, even though it works, it’s not perceived as cost efficient. And right now, it isn’t. But it’s getting closer to be competitive with traditional sources of electricity — and this in spite of a lack of meaningful government support or sponsorship.

If there’s a problem with solar, it’s storing the energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine — which means roughly half the time. But consider this — imagine solar collectors operating full tilt during the heat of a sunny day in Florida, when temperatures are in the 90s and humidity is high. Imagine homes and businesses all running air conditioners to combat the heat and humidity. Imagine all those air conditioners — and every other appliance — operating from the very phenomenon that’s causing it to be so hot in the first place: the sun. Then imagine all the coal or natural gas that’s NOT being consumed to generate that electricity as the heat of the day wears on. Imagine that in this way fossil fuel consumption could be cut in at least half, if traditional power generation had to take over in hours of darkness.

But efficient storage of solar energy does not present a serious technical hurdle — not when national security and global health are concerned. And while solar energy may not seem to offer a direct solution to oil addiction (since automobiles seem to be the principal consumers of oil), consider this: if every home now burning oil for heat were able to rely on efficient electric heating instead, at least that much less oil would be needed. If electric cars were a viable option for certain kinds of driving and solar-generated electricity were cheap enough to compete with the price of gas, that much MORE oil would be freed up. Incrementally, we would move toward energy independence — and freedom from oil.

So what’s the hold-up? Solar energy has been around forever. Without it, we wouldn’t even be here. Without it, there wouldn’t even be any oil or coal in the ground. Without it, our cars wouldn’t be toasty warm on a sunny winter day when temperatures were in the 20s. Once again, it’s because of a lack of leadership. The last president who actively promoted solar energy was Jimmy Carter, over 30 years ago. Since then, it’s been largely ignored, shunted aside. Why? I don’t think it’s too cynical to lay the blame at the feet of big oil politics. Nor do I relieve the utilities of any guilt. Solar has the potential not only to make the US energy independent, it has the potential to make individual HOMES independent. So how can a utility bill a customer who doesn’t even need it? Power-company stockholders could say goodbye to their dividend checks.

Clearly our energy policy of the last thirty-odd years has not been in the public interest. It’s time for that to change. Between soaring oil prices and a rapidly warming atmosphere, our livelihoods and our way of life are threatened.

Energy Independence, Part 6

Until other alternative technologies are in place, Congress, with the President’s support, must legislate stricter fuel-efficiency standards. Manufacturers must be discouraged — and if necessary, prohibited, from producing vehicles that do not meet those standards. The public must accept that excess horsepower is not required for basic transportation. Similarly, while SUV-type vehicles have their place, the public must be offered alternatives that provide SUV features without the weight and fuel inefficiency of current models. The sale of used gas-guzzlers and older vehicles that do not meet emission standards should be prohibited. For those who need a car but cannot afford one that meets acceptable efficiency and emission standards, a program should be established to help with those financial concerns.

Also in the short term, development of hybrid technologies should be encouraged and, if necessary, subsidized, until hybrids replace conventional vehicles in the market. Hybrids offer an economy advantage in city driving, and emphasis should be placed on marketing them to consumers in urban and suburban areas.

Fully electric vehicles, which may be suitable for second vehicles that are most often used for errand running, should not be ruled out — especially as alternative means of power generation become available.

Bio-fuel technology should be fully exploited in the short term. While today the focus is on ethanol from corn, research has shown that other crops, particularly switchgrass and hemp, offer more promise as sources of bio-fuel — which is one reason the production of industrial hemp should be legalized in the US. While burning bio-fuels still contributes carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because such fuels come from a renewable source, there should be no net gain in atmospheric CO2 since when crops are replaced they should absorb the gas that resulted from combustion.

For the long term, research in fuel-cell technology should be accelerated. For operation, fuel cells require the hydrogen that is extracted from water, and no emissions result from the energy they produce. The snag has been that a large amount of energy is required to extract hydrogen from water. But this can be overcome as solar energy technology is fully developed. With free energy from the sun as part of the process, fuel cells currently offer the greatest hope for energy independence.

Finally, freight railroad service should be reinvigorated, with trucks providing primarily trunk service. It makes no sense for convoys of trucks to be traveling long distance, almost paralleling existing rails, when trains can move the same amount of freight more efficiently.

Energy Independence, Part 5

We expend energy to do work. That’s sort of a principle of physics. When an automobile engine burns gasoline, the idea is to move one or more persons from one place to another in a car. But when the car sits in traffic, engine idling, energy is being expended without accomplishing work. It’s wasted. Yet we’re addicted to our automobiles for several reasons. One, for that so-called sense of freedom. Another, because there aren’t always alternatives. And even when there are alternatives, many people still choose their cars.

For too long, support for public transportation in many areas has been grudging. Often decent mass-transit systems are impractical, simply because of the nature of our sprawling growth. Populations are no longer concentrated in a way that can be well served by bus and light rail systems. And if it’s impractical in many suburban areas, it’s certainly even less practical in rural sections of the country.

But where it is practical, public transportation should be expanded and made even more attractive an alternative to automobiles. And future planning should make public transit a high priority for communities of the future.

When public transportation does exist though, how can it be made more appealing than the private auto? One way is to make it cheaper to take a train or bus than to drive a car. If this means subsidies (and it surely will), so what. Another way is to make it far-reaching and timely. If people spend less time getting to their destination on a bus or train than they would in their car, they might be more inclined to regularly choose that option. Getting more people out of cars and into public transportation in cities and densely populated suburban areas would go a long way toward reducing greenhouse gases and energy consumption.

Once again though, it requires leadership at the top to get people behind public transportation. Right now we don’t have that kind of leadership. And once again, it requires the kind of leadership willing to fund public-transit alternatives. It might be expensive, but it’s a step that needs to be taken if we’re going to become energy independent and slow the rate of global warming.

Energy Independence, Part 4

Why are campaign and election reform crucial to gaining energy independence? Why would it be necessary to curtail common lobbying practices to gain energy independence?

Deep pockets buy elections, and deep pockets secure a political point of view. The people as a whole do not have the opportunity to dig into deep pockets in order to “buy” candidates and legislation that is in their best interests. Which is why we are usually left with elected officials who put the interests of large corporations ahead of the people. And it’s not about jobs or a strong economy — it’s about profits.

Once, during a confrontation between loggers and environmentalists in the Northwest, protestors displayed a banner that read, “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” How true that is. Yet when corporations balk at the thought of having rules forced upon them for environmental reasons, they raise the issues of job loss and a weakened economy — a scare tactic designed to sway public opinion against environmentalism.

These same kinds of corporations habitually fund the campaigns of candidates they believe will support their line of thinking, and engage in costly lobbying tactics to further influence these candidates once they are elected. But it should be clear to everyone by now that these practices have brought the planet to the brink of environmental disaster, that they have made us the target of terrorist attacks, and that they have forced us to become so dependent on oil that we’ve gone to war to stabilize its sources.

Only when environmentally conscious candidates are given a level playing field, and once elected they are able to support legislation that would be in the public interest, will we be able to properly attack the problems that beset us now.

But it still depends on having the right president in office, because only the president can command an audience wide enough to have any effect on the kind of public thinking that would allow this to happen in the first place.

Energy Independence, Part 3

A public education program must be thorough and persuasive. It must begin with the reasons for energy independence in the first place. It must candidly inform the public about the very real phenomenon of global warming, and the growing body of evidence that supports the views that the planet’s climate is changing. It must also, again candidly, explain that the energy policy of the past has affected our foreign policy which, in turn, has fostered sufficient hatred of the United State to have made us the target of terrorism. Our dependence on oil has literally cost innocent American lives.

But it’s not enough to tell the American people what’s wrong. Americans must also be told how to fix it. They must be told that the emerging fuel cell technology, about which President Bush spoke briefly in his State-of-the-Union address, receives far more serious attention — and public research dollars — in Europe and Japan than in the US. Will we have to import that too?

If all of the following recommendations are pursued, energy independence is achievable. And during the education phase of the program, the public must be persuaded that such steps are necessary and doable. The public must also be told the whys and hows of each aspect of the entire program. Finally, all aspects must be undertaken simultaneously.

1) Public transportation must be expanded, and its use must be encouraged.
2) Stricter fuel efficiency standards must be adopted for all vehicles using current combustion-engine technology. Manufacturers must be discouraged from manufacturing vehicles that consume an unreasonable amount of fuel. In other words, no more Humvees.
3) Hybrid vehicles must be promoted, and their purchase price must be more attractive than standard vehicles.
4) Fuel cell technology research must be accelerated, and subsidized.
5) Solar energy technology research must be accelerated, and subsidized.
6) Other alternative sources of energy, such as wind, tidal and geothermal, must be further explored and subsidized.
7) Industrial hemp must be legalized in the US, and its potential must be explored and fulfilled.
8) Election reform (believe it or not) and an end to lobbying practices, so elected leaders will be beholden only to the people of the United States, and not to the corporations that now control the process of government.

And where will the money come from for all the subsidized research? The Federal Government, of course, by way of increased taxes only on those who can afford it — on those whose wealth has come at the expense of planetary health, at the expense of the young, innocent lives lost in an irrational defense of oil sources. With courageous leadership, energy independence can be achieved.