Important Questions About T. Boone Pickens

There's been a lot of talk lately about T. Boone Pickens and his ideas about what should be done to stem US dependence of foreign oil. Namely a lot of people are listening to his ideas about wind energy, electric cars, and natural gas vehicles. While nothing he advocates is particularly original to those of us who have been following these issues for years, many people see his status as a longtime oilman as opposed to some nutty environmentalist, egg-headed scientists, or "out of touch" policy wonk, as granting a sort of perverse credibility. And this does raise a need for citizens to start asking questions. Perhaps the most obvious feature of the PickensPlan is that the emphasis is entirely on reducing dependence of foreign oil, with very few references to global warming or other environmental issues.

Before getting into the meat of Pickens' agenda regarding energy and water in America, I'd like to first mention that T. Boone Pickens was a supporter of Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry in 2004.

But perhaps a more important but less known aspect Pickens' business and political agenda is that he is both a water baron and a promoter of water privatization. Which is to say that he is advocating the creation of an industry, that he has plans to make a fortune in. (More on this theme later.) And in this case it involves an industry that raises important and profound questions about society, the relationship between civilization and nature, basic human rights, and even our ability to survive as a species. Namely the idea of water as a commodity to be used for corporate profit.

Given what we know about T. Boone Pickens one has to ask what his motives might be for promoting wind energy, electric cars, and natural gas trucks. Could it be that he hopes to make a lot of money in wind electricity and natural gas? After all, he has invested heavily in wind energy and natural gas.

Furthermore other pieces of the energy puzzle such as solar energy, public transit, the smart grid, 2nd and 3rd generation bioenergy, and other more innovative ways to produce and store energy (notably stuff he doesn't seem to consider as profitable-at least for him) are noticeably vague or absent in the PickensPlan. The actual ideas Pickens advances to reduce dependency on foreign oil are at best rather conservative in terms of the technologies and policies the it promotes and those that at best get relatively little attention. At worst it looks like part of a larger design that in combination with water privatization that would have the potential to give oil barons like himself the opportunity to have more rather than less control over society and its resources than they did in the 2oth century.

If you think about it the Pickens Plan posits a solution where although alternative energy sources are important, the favored form is primarily large scale windfarms which will presumably be owned by energy barons like himself. Where natural gas and oil are increasingly scarce and while efficiency increases the main control would be higher prices, which would also benefit him. If water also becomes progressively scarce then there is also very scant and conservative emphasis on water recycling, conservation, or technologies such as aquifer recharge or low enegy desalinization. And of course, no talk about the role of democracy or policy in the matter. Instead the solution is to make water expensive and increasingly controlled by men like himself.
This would be a wonderful strategy to gain an immense amount of money and power in a resource strapped society, and would depend in large measure on reinforcing and accentuating this scarcity by marginalizing technologies that either can't be easily controlled and centralized, or involve more radical concepts. And by marginalizing the concept of public spaces, if not democracy itself.

While the Pickens energy plan does contain some decent strategies-the point of this post is not to be *against* large scale wind power or electric cars. I also do not suggest that it is inherently wrong for alternative energy companies to want to make a profit, nor that people who are wealthy or have worked in fossil fuels industry never have valid perspectives. However, it is important to recognize that the choices of renewable energy can be very political. And if anybody advocates putting most of society's eggs in relatively few baskets, it is essential to ask why. Of course, it's always possible that the advocate could be simply enamored with a particular technology. But sometimes there is a more self serving motive.

See you next post! And

Say Goodnight Readers!

Carbon Recycling and the Zinc Economy

Just when you thought there wasn't anything else that could be recycled. First it was cans and newspapers, then electronics and plastics, and recently sewage.

But yes, there are some scientists who believe they have a better idea than capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground to prevent global climate change. They want to capture carbon dioxide and recycle it. In short they want to capture carbon dioxide from either various sources (coal plants, breweries, cement factories etc) or perhaps eventually from the atmosphere itself and using renewable energy and a variety of suggested technologies turn it into fuels. It may sound like something out of science fiction but then again the internet would have in 1950, now wouldn't it?

And in many ways it makes more sense than the hydrogen economy. Why?

One reason is like the joke about the man who was asked why he robbed banks, and answered "That's where the money is." Namely those carbon-carbon bonds that fossil fuels and most alternative fuels (ethanol, algal oil, biodiesel) are so rich in, contain much more energy than hydrogen-hydrogen bonds.

Also there's the benefit of being able to store liquid based carbon fuels without any special technology. With hydrogen fuels engineers are still debating which technology would make the most sense for storing hydrogen. And many of the canidates are likely to be expensive, heavy, and/or take a long time to perfect.

Basically recycled carbon fuels and hydrogen are both ways of storing energy (hopefully renewable) rather than sources of energy. But storing energy as hydrocarbon fuels that our society is currently familiar with has so many obvious advantages. One proposed technology involves using solar chemical energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and combine it with water to produce fuel. Other ideas involve combining hydrogen with carbon dioxide to create methanol or using biocatalysts to produce methanol using water, carbon dioxide, and electricity.

Furthermore methanol can be converted into several different types of fuels and/or substances that can be combined with algal oil into order to create designer fuels for a variety of applications.

Is this a real possibility? Many researchers believe so. While it is hard to tell exactly when and how widely such technologies will be applied, the idea of being able to recycle a fair amount of carbon dioxide into liquid fuels definitely makes the idea weaning society off high levels of fossil fuels and drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions lot simpler than having to do it entirely with some combination renewable electricity and batteries, nuclear power, and biofuels. This post is not meant to make a case that carbon recycling is "better" than solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, energy efficiency, or at least some types of biofuels.
I am however making a case that carbon recycling is likely to be more practical than the hydrogen economy. Many people are attracted to the idea of hydrogen energy because nothing but water comes out of the tailpipe. And this is understandable.
However, in the case of the carbon dioxide emitted in the case of recycled carbon fuels will also likely have a lower or non-existant contribution to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Another proposal to store renewable energy involves a using zinc air fuel cells for applications such as cars, machinery, or small scale generations. Basically a zinc air fuel cell combines zinc metal (stored as fuel in very small pellets) and oxygen to produce electricity and zinc oxide, which is a sort of white powder. In addition to those small zinc pellets being much more portable and storable as fuel than hydrogen and in some ways safer than hydrocarbon fuels, the zinc oxide can be collected and reclaimed right back into small zinc pellets, possibly using renewable energy. Basically a zinc vehicle would run much like an electric vehicle, but unlike an electric vehicle it could probably refueled (while collecting the zinc oxide of course!!) relatively quickly rather than taking hours to recharge.

Of course, many people will find that these ideas aren't as sexy as the hydrogen economy. But they might prove to be more succesful ways of using the world's ample renewable energy on a large scale basis.

Hopefully this provides some more food for thought. And

Say Goodnight Readers!

World Water Day 2009

Hello Everyone!

Today is World Water Day and the theme for 2009 is Transboundary Water. No this is not some sort of New Age theory on water but a very common global situation.

So what is transboundary water? Any body of water who's drainage basin expands into more than one country.

And basically virtually all of the earth's land is on a drainage basin of some kind or another. Any time more water falls on land than will be absorbed into the soil, groundwater, or living things the land will act as a drainage basin for some river, creek, tributary, lake, pond, sea, inland sea, or ocean. Mostly this is of course driven by rainfall, but it could also be released from a sewage facility, crop irrigation, or a septic tank.

So most people know it or not, are living on a drainage basin somewhere.

And as it turns out the UN estimates that the 263 transboundary (transnational) river basin in the world cover 45 percent of the earth's land surface and are home to 40 of the world's people. And that doesn't include the amount of groundwater that connects at least two countries.

Why is this important? Several reasons.

First of all there can be problems where two countries who share a river basin or ground aquifer have drastically different environmental laws, use patterns, or worse other reasons for conflict. In the past few decades it was widely predicted that water could become a major cause of war in the 21st century. But the reality isn't automatically so gloomy. In the past 60 years there have been over 200 international water agreements and only 37 cases of violence (not necessarily full blown war) over water between nations.

Also if water shortages increase globally more and more nations might not be able to deal with the problem entirely on their own. For example, one overlooked aspect of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians involves the fact that the Palestinians have a lower amount of water available to them per capita than the population of almost any country in the world. And Israel is also living on one of the more modest water supplies for a developed nation.

In the United States it is predicted that 36 states will face water shortages in the next four years (by 2013), and that includes every state that touches the Mexican border, as well as some that share a border or a Great Lake with Canada.

Across the world China is also a nation at risk for major water shortages.

Yet China also shares its borders with Korea, Southeast Asia (towards which it has a long history of aggression), and parts of Central Asia. The famous Mekong River flows from China into Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma.

Furthermore if a transboundary river basin or aquifer doesn't present much potential for conflict it can result in one nation getting all the water if the wealthier nation can simply afford more powerful pumps and deeper wells. The poorer of the two nations might end up with little recourse.

In absence of an international framework to deal with water issues one nation's behavior could become another nation's problems. And of course, worse case scenarios could involve war, famines, or massive refugee crisises around the world.

See you next post! And

Say Goodnight readers!

The Little Told Story of Agent Blue

It's official. The war in Iraq has now lasted for six full years. I don't know what I can say about it, truly.

But I think now is a good time to discuss a largely untold story about the Vietnam War. Namely the story of Agent Blue. Agent Blue was not some character in a "007" film, but another one of the Rainbow Herbicides like the much more notorious Agent Orange. Of all the rainbow herbicides, Agent Orange was the most widely used and gained the most notoriety for the health effects it was known to have on many Vietnam Vets or their offspring and many of the Vietnamese particularly those living in areas that were the most heavily sprayed.

Agent Blue may not have gained the same notoriety, but its purpose in the Vietnam War was no less nefarious. A lot of discussions of the Agent Orange, the widely known Rainbow Herbicide talks about it as depriving the Viet Cong of hiding places. But the larger goal involved in that kind of chemical warfare is to destroy the plant based ecosystem of an area including the food supply of the "enemy". In fact, one of the earlier well known uses of the term ecocide was a book that talked about it in reference to the Vietnam War.

Indeed if Agent Orange was the main herbicide intended to deprive the Viet Cong of hiding places, Agent Blue's main purpose was to deprive them of food, since it was primarily used for killing rice.

You might be asking by now if this is some sort of conspiracy theory, but I'm afraid that it was never any big secret. In fact, very open references to destroying the Viet Cong's food supply with herbicides can be found in newspaper clippings early in the Vietnam War.

The problem was how do you distinguish between a "Viet Cong" rice paddy vs. a "pro-Diem" rice paddy?

Most rice paddies in Vietnam at that time were grown primarily for and by peasants who couldn't exactly buy food at Fred Meyers if their crops were destroyed by herbicides. And as has often been the case in war the strategy was to starve the enemy, largely by starving the populace at large.

The program was slowed down not because of any public outrage, but because it caused a shortage of the same herbicides for domestic users. (Potential topic for future blogs.)

What indeed is one to make of intentionally and systematically trying to wipe out the population's food supply like that? And while simultaneously having dropped napalm and more bombs than were dropped on Europe during WWI? While also at the same time fighting a body count based ground war?

Of course, there has been a lot of debate about the Vietnam War for the past 40 plus years now. But sadly, discussion of the effects of that war on the Vietnamese have been often lacking.

And in the annals of war, too often stories like Agent Blue have remained untold.

See You Next Post! And

Say Goodnight Readers.

Absurdities of Our Times: Part 1

Happy Saint Patrick's Day Everyone!

Now if you readers looking at this blog are anything like me you've at times looked back on things done by people in the past and thought "boy was that ridiculous/stupid", and most of us have had some times had that reaction answered by an elder with something to the effect of "Well 200 years from now people will probably look at a lot of things we do now as ridiculous/stupid." And perhaps you set to wondering what some of those things might be.

Now in some of my posts, I'm going to propose some distinct possibilities. And before getting heavy, I'm going to start with something that so many people consider part of their daily lives and even a necessity.

Bottled Water. Now as a science fiction bug who grew up in the 80's, I have a pretty high tolerance for suspension of disbelief in this arena. I've entertained stories of Fremen riding giants worm wearing stillsuits designed to recycle the water from their sweat and waste products, Charlton Heston as a cop who steal luxuries like soap, beefs, and jam in a world that looks like a cross between "Thx-1138" and The Warsaw Ghetto, the last of earth's forests surviving in spaceship tended by the inspiration for R2-D2 and a seriously creepy hippie guy, Chicago mothers calling to their children to come inside and get some fresh air, and more.

But somehow it still seems that bottled water takes the cake. It is an industry that can survive only in a climate of extreme corporate hubris and widespread public ignorance of history, environmental law, and even the most basic facts about how modern infrastructure works. It is a situation that can exist in a society that for all the increasing environmental awareness, by and large, does not understand anything approaching a genuine water ethic.

Many people buy bottled water on the assumption that it is simply safer, cleaner and healthier without asking some very basic questions.

If public water is so dangerous how does this water magically become safe?
How are tap and bottled water sources regulated?
If tap water is a hazard why is it OK for me to brush my teeth, and shower in it? Eat food not only cooked in it, but also grown with water that is after all from the same planet and perhaps even the same watershed?

And perhaps the more importantly:

Is it moral to use something like bottled water as a solution to problems with the tap water? If I can't drink my tap water shouldn't I be raising hell or at least looking for answers rather than just buying water?

Why do I trust the Coca Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi (Aquafina) companies more than I do my municipal government? How can I find out if this belief is correct or not? What about my role as a "consumer" in creating the former, vs. any power as a Citizen to influence the latter?

In case I have either scared you or seem to have put forth a very steep challenge, I can start out by telling that tap water which is under the EPA's jurisdiction is much more carefully regulated and regularly tested than bottled water which was sort of grandfathered into being regulated by the FDA as an "occasional beverage". Basically it was assumed prior to the creation of the EPA in 1972, and a series of events such as Love Canal that bottled water was a sort of rich man's affectation or a health conscious alternative to a soda or alcoholic drink, and basically in the same category as Tab (Hi Mom!).

The issue has been extensively reported by The Natural Resources Defense Council, E Magazine, and other respected environmental researchers. (So this isn't just a matter of believing what "they" tell you.)


One of the things I'd like to get across in this post is just how strange a concept the bottled water truly is. Through most of history water sellers were as hated as predatory lenders and thieves, and viewed as a lynch-pin of social injustice if not tyranny, in nearly every society where they existed. And most such societies were not only in very scarce environments, but also were characterized by massive social inequity, little investment in the public good, a predatory mercentile class, and a leadership who saw its role in terms of absolute entitlement over its subjects rather than responsibility for a just and humane society.
Yet here we are in the modern developed world with its well developed water system, unthinkable to most of the preindustrial world with a few possible exceptions like Ancient Rome, with so much scientific know how and publlic oversight, and typically a mission statement for the public good. And more and more of the population looks upon these bottled water brands not only as benevolent but even hip and trendy.

What is the moral of this post? That is beyond bottled water?

To question the conventional wisdom. Question what you think you know about the problems our world faces. And about what is right in your immediate surroundings.

See you next post! And

Say Goodnight readers!

Nearly Six Years and Counting

Hello Everyone!

It's Friday the 13th today. But the real day of infamy this month lies not that old superstition about Friday the 13th, nor anything to do with Jason Voorhees. No, I'm afraid it is something much more terrible than old wives tales or a celluloid monster from Crystal Lake.

The sixth anniversary of the Iraq War is only a week from today. Now the Iraq War has outlasted US involvement in WWI, WWII, Korea, and even the US Civil War. It has not yet equaled, dare I say it? The Vietnam War.

Now having opposed the war since before it happened, I have been amazed for the past six years by the extent to which certain consequences of the war have not much been talked about. And what not only the previous administration, but also most of the larger media, and even much of the anti-war movement didn't consideracceptable to even mention in public. Supposedly these forbidden topics were rendered taboo for fear of being seen as being "against the troops" and/or in the anti-war movement for fear of "alienating Middle America".

The most egregious of which are the consequences of this war for the people of Iraq. Of course, the number of Iraqis who have been killed by violence, hunger, increased crime, and lack of medical care as a result of this war is not known. But estimates range from 100,000 to over 1 million, and most critics suggest that these estimates tend be extremely conservative at best. On top of that the number of displaced Iraqis now stands at 1.7 million people with about 100,000 living in other countries in the Middle East. And we know relatively little about how these people are surviving although it is clear that many are on the margins at best.
More people still have gone through this time without enough to eat, without medical care, without safe water, and without work. Many children have not been able to continue school for much or all of the past six years, often having missed out on their chances at an education.
And even if and when peace is found again in Iraq it could take many years for the society to get back on its feet at even a basic level.

Also little talked about in the mainstream media are the amounts of, unexploded munitions that can kill or maim decades later, and depleted uranium which can cause cancer or horrendous birth defects centuries later, in many regions of Iraq. Both of which are very difficult, dangerous, and expensive to clean up at even the most cursory levels.

Even less known is the fact that this destruction is largely occurring in one of the world's largest hotspots for biodiversity of major food crops and historical staples. Namely Iraq includes most of the center of genetic diversity for common foods such as wheat, barley, rye, oats, lentils, lupine, vetch, alfalfa, clover, apples, cherries, pomegranates, figs, pears, hawthorn, and quince. And currently not much is known about the effects of this war and its destruction upon those important biological resources. However, the consequences of squandering crop biodiversity should speak for itself. Or so I would hope.

See you next post! And

Say Goodnight readers.

Cap and Refund

In recent news it is looking as if President Obama's plan to reduce greenhouse gases is going to follow a "Cap and Refund" model.

In this plan the EPA would auction a maximum number of CO2 credits for a given period of time, and the money raised from the auction would go primarily to lower and middle income citizens via a means tested tax credit, with additional portions set aside to aid economically struggling regions of the country and industries that are going to be hard hit by the need to buy carbon credits, and a small portion set aside for research and development of renewable energy.

How does this compare to other proposals to limit carbon dioxide emissions?

Well once we eliminate suggestions such as voluntary human extinction, dismantling industrial society by any means necessary, or doing nothing here are some of the options.

1) Carbon Tax: This system would not put a ceiling on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted like a cap and trade system would. Theoretically putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions would provide an incentive to emit less, but it would be hard to translate this into an overall national reduction in emissions. Another danger is the creation of a potentially very regressive tax.

2) "Traditional" Pollution Limits: In other words this could assign a maximum amount of a particular pollutant that any individual source is allowed to emit. Examples of this would include requiring factories to report their emissions levels to the EPA and requiring your car to pass an emissions test. In this framwork limits are usually set based upon a compromise between desirable outcomes (air quality, water quality, total national greenhouse gases) and what is then considered technologically feasible.
This might have been a decent stop-gap option for slowing climate change. That is if it had been started no later than 1980 or so!!
Such a program might have curbed carbon emissions but would not have provided any guarantee of decreasing the total national level.

3) Other cap and trade options:

a) Cap and Allocate: In this scenario a cap is set and credits are allocated to certain parties. In some cases these parties may be allowed to trade these allowances on the open market.

In the US a basic Cap and Allocate system was applied with the EPA's Acid Rain Program in which a market for sulfur dioxide was created. And it was both successful at preventing acid rain and showed that with money incentive that cutting emissions was made cheaper than previously expected.

b) Cap and Grandfather: Basically this is a version of cap and allocate where initial limits are based largely on historical emissions. This was largely the case with the Kyoto protocol, and in the initial phase of the European Union Emission Trading System, until reforms were added so that an increasing percentage of the carbon credits were put into an auction system. Most criticism of cap and grandfather center on the inequality of rewarding those parties on the basis of past emissions and economic inequality.

c) Cap and Auction: In this system the limited number of pollution credits are entirely auctioned by the Agency in Charge to the buyers for a given period of time. In this scenario nobody is "entitled" to any credits based on historical use or any other consideration. Of course, there are a variety of proposals exist on how to use the money from the auction ranging from general government funds to creating a long term trust fund in which equal checks would be mailed to each citizen on a year basis after the yearly dividends reached a certain size. The Alaska Permanent Fund in fact, does exactly that with percentage of the state's oil revenue.

President Obama's Proposed Cap and Refund is basically a version of cap and auction in which most of the revenue is used basically as a socioeconomic equalizer and a buffer against any economic shocks that might be created by it.

d) Cap and Share: This concept involved taking the carbon emission credits and distributing them equally to each adult citizen, with the right to use, sell, or retire prematurely as he or she sees fit. This was endorsed heavily by Dennis Kucinich, and has been supported by many as a form of direct economic democracy. Many of these proponents have suggested that people could sell or buy credits, at carbon credit firms (in fact pollution credit firms already exist in the real world even if most people have never dealt with them), and other locations. Critics claim that such a system would be susceptible to severe price instability and various shenanigans on the part of both powerful organizations and small time con men.

4) Relying on new technologies and conservation as a "Personal Virtue". This isn't a real system, but it had to be mentioned.
Ultimately this system would tend to make the virtue of conservation, the booby prize for people willing to scrimp on energy so that somebody else can drive a hummer on cheap gas for as long as possible.
And it will take years for a full transition to a carbon neutral energy economy.

For a long time I was personally inclined to support a carbon tax even while campaigning for Obama, because I feared that a Cap and Trade system was likely to be a Cap and Grandfather. When I was a radical 19 year old, I loved the idea of a Cap and Share system. Now I think that Obama's Cap and Refund system is the best option that we are realistically likely to get in this time and with the situation we are facing.
Currently, I don't think our economy can handle a system that does not involve putting money back into the hands of ordinary citizens. And that the need to cut emissions is too urgent for experimental ideas like Cap and Share.

In fact, the biggest downside to Obama's cap and refund, may be the downside to any plan we can choose this late in the game. It might not be enough to prevent global warming without additional measures.

The world may have to look for ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or otherwise mitigate their consequences. Of course, that task would be much harder than not emitting them in the first place. And many of the options could have environmental consequences of their own. We could discuss some of those ideas in future blogs if you like.

See you next post! And:

Say goodnight readers!

Introduction: These are the Days

Hello Everyone,

I'm starting this blog as a forum for various topics that interest me and hopefully any readers.

Some of those interests include but are not limited to:

-Planetary survival
-World water issues and water politics
-World hunger
-US politics
-Technology and society
-Feminism
-Human Rights
-Systems Theory
-Science fiction
-Important ideas
-And more.