Piqued Oil
Another topic of this election that gained less traction for either side than I would have thought is the idea of Peak Oil. Like the effect a brisk fall day has on perceptions of global warming, the price of gasoline falling back from a point where it can change peoples behavior has them instead re-deploying the idea that cheap oil will last forever. It's worth going over again the idea of peak oil. The glass is half empty and it is half full. It is neither a metaphor of optimism or pessimism
Growth Economics on a Finite Planet - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com. We may burn through the rest of oil fast or slow. It is likely peak use of fossil fuel energy in our civilization, and the most dramatic parta of the story are yet to come. It is merely that we have accounted for most of what petrochemical deposits this world has and are approaching , drill as we might, having extracted the fuller portion of it. This particular Nantucket sleigh ride is half over. Paying for it isn't
If Elected ... - On Global Warming, McCain and Obama Agree - Urgent Action Is Needed - Series - NYTimes.com.
There have been comments that nuclear power is a winning proposition, and there is industry movement on this front as well. It is said it is emission-less, from the perspective of greenhouse gases perhaps, but not so much for radiation. The industry's most intractable problem, what to do with spent nuclear fuel, has not been solved :
The Energy Challenge - Nuclear Power May Be in Early Stages of a Revival - Series - NYTimes.com. Nor for those who can remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl is the matter issue-free. The authorities plan to place nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain which may or may not be ready to accept it in 10 years. It will sit outdoors on concrete pallets until then. Yucca Mountain is currently re-orienting towards the goal of keeping the radioactive waste under wraps for a period longer then the initial 10,000 years envisioned
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - Wikipedia. A period of time over-equaling human recorded history. I especially liked the idea of having monoliths of the nuclear hazard symbol. It could be called Rad-henge. That'll keep them down on the farm. The biweekly, Science News, has a usefull summary of the candidates' positions on selected science matters in a recent issue
Science News / The Science Vote.
Those who keep an eye on the Republican commentariat (NRO and Weekly Standard that sort of thing) have observed an unprecedented level of anxiety and hand-wringing. Among those Laura Rozen has observed this:
[A]re they afraid of losing power? the access to power they and their circles have had all these years? War and Piece : October 07, 2008 [T]here's likely to be more of a psychic tipping point this moment for conservatives is because they've had power now for a while and it's very hard to face the prospect of giving that up. Especially when there seems to be a big element of fear on their part too that some of the right exercised their power so divisively, and there could be a kind of retribution against them War and Piece : October 13, 2008
There is an amplifying instability to extreme power accumulation in a democracy. Fear of the consequences of relinquishing power, of having had a lifestyle too wedded to having power. For being a one-party aspirational state. Converting all mechanisms of governance to partisianism. Of having governed by secrecy, autocratically. Too many closets too many skeletons. This is familiarly the Roman lesson. From Sulla down, governors of provinces had to fear returning to Rome because of prosecutions for the way they exploited their positions and extracted wealth. Until the day came when the autocrats simply chose not to return - to a republic. For any special aggregation of power that may have occurred apologists rarely fail to posit the myth of special times. That we live in dangerous times that demand special and ultra responsive authoritarianism. I reject this line of rationalization largely. While nature occasionally engulfs or withdraws from us catastrophically. Man is a constant for man. The well ordered republic requires nothing extraordinary in rule or law to deal with others. I know it doesn't seem so in view of history. Often we write our history wrong, or not well enough.
Other traditional games are being played this election season. The infallible fallback: taxes. Hate them and become happy. I've always remembered the simple thought exercise of the 10 percent solution. Tell people you will help them cut government by 90%. Slash it back to a libertarian nub. Ask them to examine the budget and only keep the 10% they think is worthwhile. You will collate the results and be in touch. The result of this will be exactly the government we have. The corollary to this: "my legislator big ear(marks) and all, is a statesmen. The rest are bums." The tax cuts that politicians propose are never permanent and transforming, they are partial and temporal. An ever-borning giveaway designed to allow inclined candidates the ability to declare a chicken for your pot with every election. The thin logic of tax cuts is that they are rarely saved and often put into the consumer economy, in the right circumstance expanding sectors of that can occaisionally lead to higher net collection. This cannot disguise the degree that the federal budget is increasingly funded by debt due to failure to raise the necessary revenue
Tax Magic - washingtonpost.com .
Related to this is the phenomenon of outsourcing the work of the Federal Government to the private sector. Since the dispensation of the work is still in the end, dependent on political decision, it makes little difference whether the work is performed technically inside or outside of government. Any chimerical gains in efficiency are likely to be lost to lesser accountability. The primary purpose of outsourcing, like much national security spending (Billion dollar programs to militarize US borders) is to gain entry to jobs program politics.
At a time when many (myself certainly) look for the avenues and alleys of the financial world to be brought under increased scrutiny
What Went Wrong - washingtonpost.com, even chastened somewhat
How the financial collapse killed libertarianism. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine. At the least, a post-mortem inquiry Is Capitalism Dead? From the Cato Institute and others on on the subject of regulation: a cobbled up counter revolution or rear-guard action. In this public radio Marketplace commentary Will Wilkinson attempts to argue that it wasn't too little regulation, but too much that lead to the mortgage banking collapse
Marketplace: Crisis calls for the right regulation. For people like this the Market is moral argument. Peeling back layers of ritual worship of its purity this claim reduces to Pareto Optimality. The idea of an aggregate production curve that is the allocation of all things to perfection. The market values only efficiency, crowds out all other notions of good, right just and allowable. The market obtains. A moral code of material production and resource use. All else an anathema, because any other notion of right and wrong introduces cost
BBC NEWS | Business | 'More inequality' in rich nations.
Markets are institutions of men, they are taken as belonging to those that run them. Humans seek to normalize, temporize and tame rude nature, working out (or disregarding) risk, inconvenient loose ends, uncertainly and cost. Stabilizing the flow of their affairs. People abhor a truly free market the way nature abhors a vacuum. Within this not altogether free market the indistinct rationality of choice draws a production curve short of optimal. Pareto Optimality is an ideal and no actual state. All actual production curves fall inside it. They exist, are reviewed measured judged, and weighed for their fairness or unfairness from particular corporal interest. Markets are a model organizing principle, nothing more. They are not the good - the end of right order and justice. As a final thought I recall a Frontline program from a few years ago that depicted the credit card industry reacting to apprehensions of the criminality of its business practices simply by having the laws changed by accommodating legislators an election cycle later. This has been process and template for years. When you have institutions too big to fail
Doesn't Anyone Care About Moral Hazard Anymore? : NPR (more Cato Inst. but ...) entities too large and wealthy to contain within the law. You are not in control. Take it back.
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