Dana Blankenhorn

Fall of the House of Oil

There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.

It’s happened.

Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.

The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago. 

The Demand of 2020: Law and Order

Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.

They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.

Regulation is the best protection business can have.

When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.

The Climax State

One advantage that biologists have over economists and political analysts is a clear understanding of a “climax state.”

A climax state, whether it’s a swamp filled in by peat, a redwood forest, or a planet filled with huge dinosaurs, is the most vulnerable thing in nature. It only looks stable. But a fire, or any sudden conflagration, can destroy it utterly. Mankind has, in the last thousand years, created such a climax state.

This was all described to me in the summer of 1991, when we took our family vacation around our home state of Georgia and found ourselves riding in a canoe through the Okefenokee swamp. Our guide described how the life-and-death competition among plants and animals leaves organic matter behind, which fills in the water and creates little islands, which are eventually connected as more water disappears. But these islands are highly flammable. A fire in the swamp clears them out, leaving a new swamp for creatures to compete in.

It's lack of competition that makes ecologies vulnerable.

Nature in the City

One of my big gripes with the present time, with freedom and democracy on the line, is that it delays consideration of other important issues.

Like that of nature in the city.

We like to pretend that nature has been tamed in the city, that it has no place save what we carve out for it. This is false.

During this century, as exurbs have extended their tentacles to the deepest woods and the tallest mountains, we have seen an unprecedented, seldom remarked-upon, rush of animals to American cities. When I was raising chickens 20 years ago I only had to worry about opossums and raccoons. Now we have coyotes, hawks and falcons. We also have bunny rabbits, deer, armadillo and feral hogs roaming the local landscape.

Speaking Your Own Truth

In his book The Tools, Phil Stutz found a way to make me cry.

One of his tools is that you should imagine yourself as a child, insignificant and broken, flawed. Not your best self, just the opposite. Then, when it’s your turn to speak, speak through that child. Once you’re unafraid of being seen for what you are, or what you’re afraid you are, you’ll be fearless.

I’ve been using this tool all my life without knowing it. I desperately want to be heard. It’s what I’m about. So, I shout, on this typewriter, as loud as I can, every day. When I’m done, I’m satisfied, whether a lot of people were listening or just a few. This gives me inner peace. It’s not what I do, or my job, it’s what I am, I tell people.

I didn’t understand the meaning of this until I faced a child who didn’t have it. I would tell this child, every day if I could that what mattered to him wasn’t what he was learning, but how he integrated it, and how he expressed what he knew to teach new truths others. The kid didn’t believe me. The fear was too great. He went around the world, learning, but afraid to speak his truth, and no one ever heard what he had to say.

There are many success stories, however, who are just like this child. They just parrot what teachers tell them. They say what they’re told to say. They memorize a script and recite it, believing that they’re saying something but, in fact, contributing nothing new to the conversation.

Nature of Money, Nature of Man

When I wrote my “anti-Trump polemic” early this year I thought I was writing about politics.

It turns out I was writing an economics book.

I learned this while reading a biography of the late Jane Jacobs, best known for her fight against the “urban renewal” of Robert Moses. After that fight Jacobs moved to Toronto, becoming one of Canada’s most beloved intellectuals, and there she wrote an economics history book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 

In this book Jacobs identified cities, rather than farms, as the original source of wealth. It was cities that turned wheat into bread and beer. It is cities that transform everything.

True, as far as it goes. But how and why remained a mystery to Jacobs. The nature of money eluded her. It’s something my recent book explains by looking at American history and seeking what I first saw as political patterns in our national life, and later concluded were economic patterns.

The answers, in our time, strike at the nature of money, the nature of man, and why, even after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, there remain people like John Stossel who continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change. 

Wealth, it turns out, is entirely man-made. This is more controversial than it seems. Politicians have always believed wealth to be a product of holding land, or of exploiting it. They see history as great men moving lesser men around like pawns on a chessboard. Social historians, by contrast, focus on the real lives of ordinary people. These are important, but they are no more relevant to economic history than land is.

What Comes Next

Reporters on all beats are so obsessed with the here-and-now they ignore what is going on beneath, the trends that will make up tomorrow.

This has always been my indictment of the business I have called home for nearly 40 years. It’s why I didn’t make more of my news career than I did. I was constantly looking around corners, seeking the future, rather than looking closely at what was in front of me.

That’s OK. I’ve had a good life. No, make that a great life. A wonderful life partner, two great kids, a home we have built together, comfort in our old age, and memories of good times.

But I’m still looking around corners, still trying to figure out what’s next. Ask any old person. Inside them you’ll always find a 20-year old going “what the fuck?”

For a decade now, ever since I began seeing that technology was going to achieve political power, and sustain that power, meaning all that’s happening now is a play I foresaw, I have been thinking about what comes next.

The Internet of Things? Renewable energy? Artificial Intelligence? All these of the now. They’re what is happening. I foresaw IoT nearly 15 years ago now, and reported on it here to you, as “The World of Always On.” I began covering renewable energy just as that area began to boom, and predicted we would achieve crossover with fossil fuels by 2016. As we did. Artificial intelligence? I’d settle for some of the real kind, frankly.

Why Tech Moves Us Left

Technology creates value and productivity.

It does this at an extraordinary, even accelerating rate.

The problem is neither economics nor our politics is equipped to handle abundance.

When the basics are easily afforded, most of us go on to luxuries. This should be true for societies as well as individuals. But it’s not.

The problem is that the business models for societal luxuries can’t be created without government. Government is the only force that represents shared endeavor. And ideology has declared government involvement in the economy anathema.

Going on Offense

The best years of this century for Democrats were 2005 and 2006, when DNC chair Howard Dean initiated his “50-state strategy.”

The idea was simple. Democrats would fight everywhere, not just in blue states but in red ones as well. They would fight on every level, on local and state issues, even if they had no chance. But they would fight.

Dean, plus Katrina, combined to make 2006 the only mid-term election of this century where Democrats enjoyed an unalloyed triumph. This holds important lessons for today’s Democrats, and for their technology overlords.

First, it makes little sense to just complain, as they did during Trump’s Inauguration. You need to go on offense.

Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

For all those depressed over the prospect of Donald Trump as President (no one I know will admit to having voted for him) there is this.

Technology represents an irresistible tide.

No matter how tightly Republicans cling to the resource economy technology is overtaking it and, in doing so, destroying any hope his politics may have for a future.

We are on an accelerating track of change in which human capital means more-and-more, all other types of capital less-and-less. Devotion to the interests of the resource industries is counterproductive. That’s good for China, great for India and East Asia, even good news for Africa and Latin America. All the Middle East needs is a little peace to realize that Israel is a better economic model to follow than Saudi Arabia.

Revolutions are coming. Good ones.