Dana Blankenhorn

Not Enough Being Right

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When I was younger I thought being right was important. 

Surely it was better than being wrong.

I wonder now. 

Being right and watching the world spin in another direction is terribly painful. Take the best known example from recent history, Jimmy Carter's "Cardigan Sweater" speech. 

Republicans used that speech to reject everything Jimmy Carter believed in, validating the Nixon Thesis of Conflict and putting Ronald Reagan's smiling face on the cover of it. 

The result? War, mass death, inflation, global warming, and (in time) skyrocketing prices anyway.

Kevin Mattson's "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President" takes apart the speech, the issues, the result, and concludes that the country was wrong to ignore Carter's concerns. The Man himself has taken being right and unpopular as a badge of honor. He has spent his life out of office popularizing all sorts of unpopular causes -- Palestinians, homelessness, Africa. He doesn't mind being ignored, even vilified. He just keeps moving forward. His reward is in heaven. 

That's a great Christian attitude, and perhaps in that position the only thing you can do, but it's small consolation, as I've found in my own life.

The Economic Recovery Act

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The so-called "cap and trade" legislation being voted on today by the U.S. House has been horribly mis-labeled.

Its name should be The Economic Recovery Act.

While every action of this Administration and Congress up until now has aimed to stanch some type of bleeding or cauterize some economic wound, this bill is meant to define and launch a new economy that can grow and restore American leadership.

The bill is hardly perfect, but it's not meant to be at this point. It's meant to pass. It's meant to act as a marker against which a future Senate bill might be measured. The final policy will mix what the House passes, what the Senate passes, and how the Administration interprets the law in implementing it.

Take What You Can Get

The President seems to frustrate his supporters at every turn.

• Rather than confront the military over its misadventures, he tries a Petreaus plan in Afghanistan. 
• Rather than confront Wall Street over its failures he appoints bank regulators whose experience includes the season of crime. 
• Rather than confront the Bush Torture Regime he seems to dither, refusing to endorse either a special prosecutor or a "truth commission," giving the former Vice President and the Republicans every opportunity to defend what they did in public. 

This is just as true regarding The War Against Oil as anything else. "Mr. Obama’s “new” energy policy is more of the same old pandering," writes Bob Gordon of The Auto Channel. He doesn't call us to a war against oil. He just negotiates higher mileage standards. 

Of course as frustrated as liberals are conservatives are, squared. They're mad as hell, but to them it feels like they're raging against the wind. He borrows trillions, literally trillions, he remakes the economy and all the rules, yet he remains enormously popular. It drives them crazy, and we can only pray the Secret Service can do its job.

But there is something else going on. It's something the media is only barely conscious of, so intent are they on triangulating him, on trying to pin him down. 

The War Against Oil is a War for the Economy

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Want to get the economy out of the ditch? 

Make something. Make something new, something valuable, something real, something with a ready market. 

Despite what critics felt there was something real about the Internet, which defined the 1990s. The Internet accelerates the transfer of knowledge, and of any knowledge-based value store. It's the most powerful economic accelerant since the creation of the telegraph.

By contrast there was nothing ever real about the economic drivers of this decade, financial services and homes. Not that homes aren't real. But the value of a home has nothing to do with its cost or even its location. It is a measure of the economic value left out there to buy homes. A home sucks money, it only creates money for those who build, assuming someone buys. Thus homes became a natural sinkhole for the confederate money of this decade, soaking up as much as the banksters could create from thin air.

Now that the economy has stopped falling this question becomes vital. On what will we base the next boom? 

The answer is obvious. Energy. 

Behind Obama Fail in the War Against Oil

While the President's first 100 days deserve strong praise there is one area of conspicuous failure.

The War Against Oil.

There are good and bad reasons for this:

1. Good - Lower energy prices reduce the priority for alternatives, and the savings from conservation.
2.  Bad - Energy has been lost among all the other priorities of the first 100 days.  

You can't fight the market unless you either make it your top priority or have an ongoing market failure driving public opinion. We have ongoing market failures in the financial and health markets. But in energy, in the near term, the market is our friend. The recession has pushed oil prices into the $50/barrel range, and gasoline prices are half what they were at their peak. 

The Technology on Which Space Depends

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 16of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Why have so few of us reached space? Why is even the International Space Station a fraction of the size most sci-fi writers predicted a half century ago?

Cost. Specifically the energy cost of getting out of Earth's gravity well.

It's not that people have lost interest. When a company called Solaren announced a deal to install solar panels in space and sell the resulting power to PG&E early this week, so many people rushed to the rail that Solaren's site quickly exceeded its bandwidth limit and was taken down. 

The deal is pie-in-the-sky. It was the utility's presence in the story that made it newsworthy, but in fact that company risked nothing. If Solaren gets its system working PG&E will buy its power. If.

The Atlanta Blackout of 2009

The lights went out here around 10 AM and just came back on about an hour ago.

So a blackout you never heard of actually lasted longer than the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. (This home about a mile from my own was destroyed yesterday, writes DecaturMetro.)

I learned an important lesson. I'm completely unprepared.

I never replaced the laptop that blew up a year ago and so didn't have an alternate machine. I misplaced the stick memory to which I'd copied my passwords. Even if we had a burglar alarm system it would have stopped running without wall power, so I was forced to stay home.

Mostly I read, I slept, and I used my cell phone. I got cold because the heater requires electric power to turn on the gas. I couldn't eat because opening the refrigerator door would spoil all the food inside it. Had this gone on overnight no one in the house could have gotten to work tomorrow because all our clocks use wall power.

Oil Fights Back

Those engaged in the War Against Oil must not underestimate the potential of oil to muddy the waters.

Their chief weapon is to question the premise of that war, namely global warming.

Doubt is their ally, because doubt prevents  action. To that end any scientist who questions global warming is being trotted out. These range from industry shills to thoughtful men like Freeman Dyson, who realize science offers nothing like an "airtight" case. 

All this is driven by right-wing "think tanks" like the Cato Institute and Heartland Institute, whose thoughts always lean to the golden rule -- he who has the gold makes the rules. But what many liberal bloggers don't understand is that, while orders come from the top and people follow with a devotion that would make Mao proud, their belief in this ideology is real.

Look carefully at the conservative comments under this New York Times blog post on Michele Bachmann, a "hatie" from Minnesota whose attitude towards Obama is identical with that of Jerry Rubin's 1969 attitude toward Nixon:

• What reasonable people take issue with is that the cause for climate change is somehow related to human activity.
  
• Conservatives are not invested in denying climate change - they are invested in denying man-made climate change which is a myth ginned up by liberal kooks pusing their agenda.
• The right doesn’t want to have more of our money confiscated, just to further motivate scientists and researchers and businessmen to invent a competitive solution (that currently doesn’t exist), to a problem that might not even be real.
• I believe that the earth may be warming slightly, but I am not convinced that anything that man does will alter this shift one way of the other.
  

This "belief" makes it possible to claim that public commitment to a War Against Oil is fleeting, that green energy is an economic sinkhole, and that rolling back fossil fuel use is a money-loser.

What is in a Word in the War Against Oil

Last night the President gave all those who agree we need a War Against Oil nearly everything we could have asked for.

To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.

So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

He has a plan. It's tied to reducing hydrocarbon emissions. He did mention "clean coal" but he also (for the first time) advocated a cap-and-trade system to cap emissions, which could easily kill current coal plants in short order.

He even gave it the right priority. First. He said in his speech he would concentrate on three key challenges -- energy, health and education. Energy first. That's not an accident, it's a priority.

The only thing he did not do was use the word "war."

This was a mistake.

A Good Start in The War Against Oil But Just a Start

The President's Stimulus bill, just signed , makes a very good start toward fighting the War Against Oil. (Picture from Whitehouse.gov.)

But oil is a pernicious foe. Even now its advocates are taking advantage of some parts of the stim, and condemning the necessary next steps, in order to keep Americans enslaved to the oil power.

Let's start with the good news. Nearly 10% of this money is going into the low-hanging fruit of conservation and research:

1. Almost $11 billion will go into making government buildings more efficient.
2. Almost $10.5 billion will go into improving the efficiency of housing used by poor people, who are least likely to make the investment on their own.
3. About $16.4 billion is going into "supertrains" of one sort or another, either local transit or inter-city links. Trains are 10-20 times more efficient at moving people than cars.
4. There is $11 billion here for "smart grid" technology, which could allow utilities to buy as well as sell power.
5. There's $7.5 billion for building renewable power sources and transmission lines to get them to market.

There's some potential waste here, and a lot will depend on how well Dr. Stephen Chu and the Department of Energy do their work doling out the money.

• Some think of the "smart grid" only in terms of time-shifting power demand and getting more money from each kilowatt they sell, not enabling the purchase of power from urban solar farms or suburban windmill owners.
• Boone Pickens could easily grab that $7.5 billion to force construction of low-efficiency power lines from his West Texas windfarms to Dallas-Ft. Worth.

There's a big bet being placed here, namely that government can do things right. Republicans love condemning government and praising the free market, but it was the privatization of government and rejection of regulation that got us into this mess.

Now, for a warning and what comes next.