Dana Blankenhorn

Solving The Problem of Abundance

Everyone is vulnerable to fighting the last war, and ignoring the conditions of this one.

For investors and policymakers, the great fears remain the currency and the money supply. I read it in every Seeking Alpha discussion thread, a pervasive fear that we’re about to be crushed because no one is going to believe the promises of the dollar, or that we’re running out of something essential whose lack is going to make our dollars worthless.

What this decade has shown, already, just halfway through it, is that those fears are baseless. The problems of scarcity have been replaced by the problems of abundance. There’s too much oil, too many commodities, too many cheaply manufactured goods on the market. There are too many devices, there is too much cloud, there are too many good movies and shows out there and not enough time to see them all.

Tax Carbon in the Name of Growth

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The following is going to annoy my liberal friends, but hear me out.

The decisive turn in a generation's political thesis, which is a collection of myths and values driving power, the point at which you go from winning elections to winning them for a generation, comes when business moves to your side.

You don't need all of business. You only need the rising tide of business to be on your side, that element of business driving economic growth.

Without significant business support, your side of the political world is always swimming upstream. That's because the business of America is business, even its political business is business, and anyone who questions that doesn't know America. (This Rising Tide is a restaurant in Scarborough, Maine. We hear good things about the lobster.)

The Bookends of the Crisis

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Katrina and Sandy are bookends to the crisis of our time.

The crisis is the War Against Oil, but it's a crisis that dare not speak its name.

Al Gore spoke its name, and he was buried for it. Buried by Bush's Supreme Court in 2000, then buried by ridicule after getting his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This President has tried to approach things in a different way. Rather than address the crisis directly, he has sought to make the case instead for the role of government. He used government to address the financial panic, with modest success, and he used it to try and address health care inflation, although success there remains years away. With people impatient for change they could feel, he needed a break.

Sandy was the break he needed.

As a political bookend, Katrina set things in motion. Katrina changed the nation in profound ways, ways we didn't even notice at first. Katrina made us angry, it enraged us. The non-reaction of the Bush Administration became its unforgiveable sin – more than Iraq, more even than the financial panic. Katrina, and New Orleans, became a burning coal in every Democrat's belly. Never again, we promised ourselves. That fire burned hot in 2006, it burned hotter in 2008, it burns in my heart today.

2012: The Landslide

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The future is hard to know, but in this case it's easy to guess.

There is a Democratic landslide in our future.

No one in the media wants to admit this, but it's baked in.

Once Americans take a decisive turn, and we've only taken six in our whole history as a nation before now, we don't reverse course.

We validate that turn, moving closer to our historic balance of rights and responsibilities, between money and power, between rich and poor, among one another.

Understanding Solyndra: Solar is not Silicon

I have talked about Moore's Law in many posts here, because I have an expansive view of the concept. But it's confusing to people, so from now on I'm going to talk about Dana's Law instead. 

Dana's Law holds that the amount of solar energy in production will double every year or 18 months as far as the eye can see. It's a Moore's Law frame applied to technology that's not entirely silicon.

Take Solyndra, for instance. Not silicon. Solyndra was using thin film CIGS technology and a new circular panel design. It hoped to produce energy at $3/watt, including capital costs. A year ago, when panel prices were at $5/watt, that was a breakthrough. But Chinese oversupply this year sent prices plunging to $1/watt, and Solyndra went bankrupt.

Some people are trying to spin this as bad news. It is not. It is good news. Production efficiency and market competition have cut the cost of producing solar energy.  The “problem” is that Chinese companies produced more panels than their own market could absorb and so “dumped” a ton of them on the U.S. market, killing some suppliers that were using technologies, like CIGS that could not scale as fast.

This happens often in tech. It's one reason our big tech companies hold so much cash. It's only a “scandal” if you're looking to make up a scandal. The solution is to do what some smart energy companies have been doing – make a switch from solar thermal to solar electric, and pick up some bargains. Lower costs now mean big profits later.

The Birth of Civilization

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is no energy shortage.

Global warming means there is more energy in the air than there was. How can there be an energy shortage?

What we're short of is stuff we can burn. Stuff we can burn is how we've defined energy throughout the eras we've called “civilization.”

Can you really call yourself civilized if you define energy the way cavemen did – as stuff you can burn? Didn't civilization start with farming?

Fact. There is abundant energy all around us. The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tide rolls. The Earth we know is a skim coat on top of molten rock.

What we're not doing is harvesting this abundance. Civilization has barely begun.

We know what has delayed the day of harvest. Fading industries always capture the political system to forestall their demise. But in the end technology wins out, then economics wins out. Massive factories became the Rust Belt, production without consumption became the Great Depression, unregulated utilities were harnessed by the Progressive Era, and we fought a Civil War to free human labor from southern planters, unleashing America's machine age.

This is what I have learned in my study of history. American history is a process. Technology leads, the economy follows, and politics struggles in vain to catch up with it all.

Where is the change happening? It's happening all around us.

 

Terraforming

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 22 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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My mom came to visit recently. Blogging is light as a result.

She's 87 now, we all love her and are proud of her relative independence. She uses a walker, but she can get around, and does. She took a red-eye in from the coast. But, best-case scenario, the world's oldest folks are going around age 114, and mom's frailty makes her unlikely to be a champion in the sport of Extreme Aging.

When most folks see this sort of scene in their lives they think about the past, but I'm not most folks. I think about the future.

More particularly, the future I won't see.

Today's crisis of shifting from burning stuff to harvesting the abundance all around us sets us up for the next crisis, which for lack of a better word I'll call the crisis of terraforming.

Consider. The explosion of air temperature we're seeing right now is a second hint (the ozone crisis was the first) concerning a very large question. Now that we can terraform the Earth, what kind of Earth will it be?

There Is No Energy Shortage

(The following originally appeared today at Renewableenergyworld.com, but since we have a lot of new visitors I'm reposting it here.)

It's Earth Day. It's Good Friday. It's a three-day Easter weekend.

And Americans are depressed.

Despite a rising stock market, despite falling unemployment, most Americans feel the economy is going into the tank.

The reason: high gas prices.

For those who did their efficiency homework years ago (which probably includes many readers of this site) high gas prices are no big deal. In fact, evidence suggests we're weathering this bout much better than in the past, thanks to efficiency technologies, where America has a lot more room to grow than its economic rivals.

Still, it's time we change the frame of the debate, starting with this Earth Day.

How Easy it is to Go Native in Washington

The process of “going native,” accepting the groupthink and frames of Washington policy wonks, has always upset activists of all kinds.

Writers in the Netroots call what happens The Village, and those who engage in this groupthink Villagers. When I hear the term I think of the old TV series The Prisoner, the villagers being those prisoners who obeyed orders and answered to their numbers, blindly following orders from whatever Number 2 was put in front of them.

Today's contestant is Darren Samuelsohn, who took a job at the ultimate villager site, Politico, after a decade as an environmental reporter. His latest basically calls the American renewable industry easy prey for foreign competition, and blithely notes it's being replaced in policy discussions by “cheap natural gas.”

In writing this he's accepting a whole lot of frames put forward by the cavemen who captured the Village with the first Bush and got utterly blatant about it with the second.

• Size is all that matters. It does in fossil fuels. In new tech industries innovation counts for a lot more, and we have more of it. Small companies can also move into niches quickly.

• Natural gas is cheap. Really? Really. Only if you ignore the environmental damage, a cost no one seems willing to account for. Accepting lousy accounting as reality means giving in to the frame.

• Solar and wind depend on government grants, while fossil fuels are free enterprise. Samuelsohn knows this to be a lie, yet he repeats it as though it's not.

Why the Economy Still Sucks (And Why It Won't For Much Longer)

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is not an April Fool's joke. Abundance is coming. The hard times are ending for good. But the hole Republicans got us into is a profound one, and making the turn from this crisis will take time.

There are two reasons why economic growth remains low, despite good policies which have staved off a second Great Depression:

1. Money Remains Underemployed
2. The New Game Hasn't Scaled Yet.

I have solutions for both problems today. Let's take them one at a time.

Money Remains Underemployed

There's plenty of capital around, but it is sitting in short-term storage. It's unemployed. Money managers say they're “preserving capital,” when what they should be doing is risking capital in hopes of a gain.

How do we bring that capital out and put it to work?

Inflation.