That’s a half million dollars Americans had to give the government whether they wanted to or not (or at least working and middle class Americans, rich folks seem to have an “or not” clause in the tax code).  That’s the reason for all the indignation.  I think of myself as a cheerful taxpayer; I’m happy to chip in for all those things that we need to share in common.  My own vacations are pretty modest and I don’t want to be forced to send the people who work for me to resorts I can’t afford to visit myself.

At the same time, I don’t need to see a bunch of hearings with Congressmen (who are themselves overpaid and coddled) bloviating at GSA bureaucrats.  That doesn’t make me feel better.  Getting the money back, that’s what’ll make me feel better.  Accountability. Take the top ten people at GSA and charge them $523,000, divide it up however you like.

Can’t do it?  Why not?  You’re Congress or the White House or both.  Write a regulation, put it in the civil service manual, take ‘em to court.  Spending another two million on hearings so politicians with bad comb-overs can posture about excess spending doesn’t help at all.

If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney want a plank to run on, accountability is a good place to start.  Hey, Secret Service agents and Special Forces personnel – you wanna party with whores in Colombia?  You now owe the American people your plane fare, food and lodging expenses and any other additional costs to replace your sorry asses on the mission you just bungled so horribly.  Oh, and please pay your prostitute.  And you’re fired.  What is this “allowed to retire” crap, anyhow?  Allowed to retire on a government pension and then go work for corporate America at twice the salary (and twice the whores) as before?  That’s not accountability we can believe in.

(Let me just say as an aside that I have dealt with the Secret Service, both uniform and plain clothes, active duty and retired and I can say without fear of contradiction that it is entirely in character for them to be the kind of guys to a) solicit prostitutes for sex, b) take them back to a hotel riddled with – d’oh! -security cameras and c) try to cheap out on the price the next morning.  Clint Eastwood, these guys ain’t.)

But I digress. The point is accountability and it should cover the federal (and state and local) government like the dew on a spring morning.  In Afghanistan, we’re apologizing (again) because our troops took frat house photos with body parts.  This after we apologized for burning Korans and that followed the apology for videos of troops pissing on dead people.  Combine stuff like that with kicking in doors in the middle of the night and somehow people will just not want you in their country.

Two years ago tomorrow, the biggest oil spill in US history erupted in the Gulf of Mexico, just weeks after President Obama gave a speech saying those things don’t happen anymore.  Yesterday, that same president’s blue-ribbon commission on the spill blasted Congress for failing to pass laws that might prevent a repeat, while at the same time the administration has granted permission for another giant oil company to drill in the Arctic Ocean, where the Coast Guard says it has no way of responding to, much less cleaning, an oil spill.

This is all from one week.  Four serious incidents, all stemming from the fact that our federal government consistently fails to hold anyone accountable.  No wonder we’re frustrated.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

Less than a week until the end of winter and it’s warm and sunny, supposed to approach 80 degrees here this weekend, but no sermon on fossil fuels and carbon dioxide equivalents (for now).

No, today is also the beginning of (the second round of) the 2012 NCAA basketball tournament.  I’ve got my computer set up so I can check scores this afternoon during the monthly staff meeting.  (I have the NY Times crossword handy too, just in case.)

I’m not a huge follower of college basketball, but I participate in this pool every year, because it’s only five dollars, because I like the challenge of, essentially, trying to pass a test for which I have not studied and because it gives me something to do during at least one staff meeting a year.

Another reason is because my neighbor Margaret is one of the few people in our neighborhood who has cable tee vee.  I know this flies in the face of most American neighborhoods and certainly displeases a teenager of my significant acquaintance, but the point is that Margaret generously allows the whole horde to trample through her sitting room for the Super Bowl, World Series, US Open, NCAAs, Oscars, Emmys, etc. etc. (Not that everyone views everything.)  The local version of the tourney is called “Marg’s Madness.”

Every year at this specific time, I’m struck by the baseless feeling of confidence I have once I’ve made my bracket choices.  I do a bit of homework, Googling search terms like “upset,” but mostly I make uneducated guesses.  (I’m absolutely heartless about this.  I even picked my alma mater to lose its first game.)  Once this is done, I start to wonder how often someone has predicted a perfect bracket, the idea being that I’ve just managed to do just that.

The operative word in the paragraph above is “baseless.”  This is what sells lottery tickets.  I think evolutionary biologists need to get busy figuring out what biochemical my body secretes (endorphins, serotonin?) that make me think – against all available evidence – that I will win this year’s office pool.  (There were a few years in the early ‘90s when I would consistently finish second to rabid hoops fan and seasoned prognosticator Venola Johnson, but have I ever won the whole thing?  No.)

Let me give you an example.  This year’s pool covers 64 teams and excludes the eight-team “play-ins” that preceded the start of today’s action.  Just for fun and to help determine which teams I’d pick in the round of 64, I picked all four games, three of them incorrectly.

Am I discouraged?  Hell no.  As I see it, I’m bound to make some bad calls; I really don’t expect to pick a perfect bracket nor do I need to take first place in the office pool.  By making three bad calls of four in the play-ins, I’m using up my bad calls on games that don’t count.

Does that make sense?  Not a bit.  Do I still feel unjustifiably confident?  You bet (or more accurately, I bet).

(n.b. – As I post – or post up – I’ve got two wins and one lead under my belt, but Montana better get their act together.  Update next week.)

© Mark Floegel, 2012

In the modern world, a stalking horse is a metaphor for some third party that tries out an idea or technique for someone else, to see how it goes over, without exposing the ulterior party to the negative side effects of failure.

The stalking horse is the way to go in the 21st century.  This week’s famous stalking horse is the Heartland Institute of Chicago, Illinois.  Isn’t that such a nice name, the Heartland Institute?  What pleasant folks they must be!

Actually, not.  The Heartland Institute is a right-wing think tank for hire.  If you’ve got cash and a libertarian idea, they’ll be happy to cook up some bogus nonsense to promote it and hide your identity.  There’s the “Free to Choose Medicine” which opposes the Food and Drug Administration’s “extreme tunnel focus on safety,” you know, making sure drugs that are supposed to cure you don’t kill you instead.  How could Big Pharma not like (and contribute to) that?

There’s “Operation Angry Badger,” (no, I’m not making this up) which seeks to save Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker from a recall election prompted by his attack on the state’s public employees last year.  Heartland says, “Successful recalls would be a major setback to the national effort to rein in public sector compensation and union power.”

Heartland, all other looniness aside, is best known as a home for global warming deniers looking for a facade (Hello, Koch brothers!).  This week, an anonymous do-gooder sent a trove of Heartland’s internal documents to DeSmogblog, a web site devoted to pointing out the hunters behind the deniers’ stalking horses.

Among other things, Heartland has been planning to pay a Department of Energy consultant – David Wojick – $75,000 to develop a K-12 curriculum on global warming.  (Things get complex here, so pay close attention.)

A document entitled “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” says Dr. Wojick’s work “will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

Heartland denied this is its document.  A document it does not disown, however, says Dr. Wojick will be paid $75,000 for a K-12 global warming curriculum; it just doesn’t have the inflammatory language about dissuading the teaching of science.

(To be clear, while Heartland did not disown the other documents, it didn’t verify them, either.  A spokesoid said Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast, was traveling and couldn’t verify the other documents.  Which raises the question: if he wasn’t around to verify most of the documents as true, how was he around to verify one as false?  Oh, and another question: if he was traveling and unavailable for verification duty, how did he manage to write the rather lengthy fundraising letter about the leak that went out over his signature the same day the story broke?)

Here’s what caught my eye: “the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain” and “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”  Reminds me of the “intelligent design” nonsense we’ve seen, and still see, across the country.

Was that another stalking horse?  The “creation science” debate was and is preposterous (“teach all the theories”) but it’s been a handy tool for keeping evangelical Christians firmly in the Republican Party, even as their wages erode, their life savings are wiped out by health care costs and their homes are lost to unscrupulous banks.  (Republican operatives refer to these poor folks as “useful idiots.”)

Beyond that, maybe it was a test run for the bogus global warming debate in the schools.  Pick a useful issue, but one not crucial to your primary agenda and conduct your test run, see how well you can manage to undermine real science.  Get the bugs worked out, optimize performance, then apply the lessons learned to something you really care about.

Makes sense to me.  No one ever said these guys were dumb.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

This is also the time of year when I have to start scraping money together to make my annual contribution to my Individual Retirement Account.  It strikes me as perversely appropriate that I make my 2011 contribution in calendar 2012, just as I did the year before and the year before that.

The timing stinks.  I just this morning wrote the check to pay off the credit card bill accrued over the year-end holidays.  (I’m of the age that I don’t yet pay my bills via electronic funds transfers.  I like – well, like isn’t the right word – I need to look at the bill every month, because when I see how much I owe, I always think, “That can’t be right,” then I go through the items and by God, I did spend that much.)  (Yes, I know the email that comes with the EFT is itemized, too, but I’m of an age group that doesn’t pay attention to pixels the way we do to ink.)  (And yes, a good environmentalist should be more avid to save trees.)

Every year, I promise myself I won’t wait until the calendar year is out before making my IRA contribution, so I don’t have the Christmas/IRA collision and every year I never do.  Is having an IRA not forethoughtful enough that I should also be thinking about my contribution in the dog days of summer?

I appreciate the grim humor that accompanies the word “contribution.”  I’m old enough to know how soon I’ll be eligible to draw down my IRA, but my payment doesn’t feel like a contribution.  It feels like another bill to pay and a steep one at that.

I suppose it’s worth it for a million dollars.  That’s right Dr. Evil, one miiiillllliiion dollars!  When I was getting out of college, my dad (and every other male his age) urged me in the strongest terms to get an IRA and make the maximum contribution every year ($2,000 per year then), regardless of the hardship it imposed, because by the time I was ready to retire, I’d have one miiiiilllliiion dollars!

Clearly, this was a cruel joke that I wasn’t in on.  I’m now more than halfway to what for my dad’s generation was retirement, only to find that the concept has gone the way of carburetors and rolls of film, two things once made in my hometown.

Worse still, my IRA is invested in the stock market and controlled by those Wall Street One Percenters we loath so much.  (I have one of those “socially responsible” – read: “under performing” – IRAs.  I may get paper bills in the mail, but I’m not beyond redemption.)  I get statements about my IRA a few times a year and we’re nowhere near one million dollars.  I’m not sure all the money I’ve put in is still there.

Despairing over the poor state of Wall Street, Adrienne and I consulted an investment specialist some time ago.  He told us in a calm (“patronizing,” I thought) tone that the stock market –via IRAs – is always the best investment for people like us (earning less than our peers).

He pulled out The Graph, which showed how – even though there are dips and troughs – the stock market (here his voice dropped to a whisper appropriate for church) outperformed every other investment for… people like us.

Problem with The Graph is that it begins right after the 1929 market crash.  Of course it went up from there, where else could it go?  Second, I don’t care what the market did before I commenced my IRA in 1983, because none of that applies to me.  (Sorry to sound selfish, but this is the market.)

It occurred to me the other day that 1975 was the first year in which IRA contributions could be made. (Such dull occurrences I have!)  If a person was 22 in 1975, just getting out of college, got an IRA and made the maximum contributions every year (now $4,000 per year), would s/he now have a million dollars?  This is the year those people will turn 59 and a half and are thus able to begin drawing down their IRAs.

Two caveats: I know the million dollar thing was a prediction, not a promise and I know that every IRA fund is managed differently and makes different investments.  (Third caveat: the best funds probably wouldn’t take a low-bag schmuck like me for a client.)

That said, is there any diligent IRA contributor out there now sitting on a million dollars?  If you hear of one, let me know.  My guess is they’re living in a gated community with Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

His column was on the European money crisis and the gist of his argument is this: it makes economic sense for Germany (Europe’s economic powerhouse) to bail out Greece (Europe’s irresponsible brother-in-law).

The Greeks have gotten themselves – and are dragging the Euro and the Eurozone nations – into this mess with too little austerity and too many early retirements.  It’s the hardworking ants of the Baltic versus the sun-drenched grasshoppers of the Mediterranean.  It’s in Germany’s self-interest to save the Greeks, because if Europe returns to a patchwork of currencies, then those low-value drachmas and lire and pesetas will buy fewer German products.

The Germans, however, resist this logic not for economic, but moral reasons.  “If we bail you out, how will you learn your lesson?” the Germans ask, “Why would you not repeat your mistakes?”  It’s like the parent, about to punish the child, saying, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” and in this case it might be true.

Here’s where Joe Nocera wouldn’t go: why doesn’t Germany just shut up and bail out the Greeks?  Thank you, my cousins, for shifting the terms of the debate from economics to morals.  Now that we’re in that territory, let me remind you that not so long ago, Germany invaded and occupied Greece, killing thousands of its citizens and sending tens of thousands more off to death camps.  (The people with whom I share half my ethnicity hate it when I bring these things up, as if I’m the one who breached decorum.)

In 1945, the Allied nations agreed that forcing Germany to pay reparations for its crimes did not make economic or political sense.  The heavy burden of reparation imposed on Germany after World War I helped aid the rise of the Nazis.  That was a good call and helped get a ravaged Europe back on its feet, but somehow, it insidiously evolved into a dysfunctional denial of history, as if it’s impolite to mention the bombs and bullets.  Forgetting serves no good purpose.

So here’s my proposal: Greece gets a one-time bailout from Germany.  Does that mean that slate is clean?  No, that slate can’t be cleaned.  It just means no further bailouts or reparations or whatever you want to call it from Germany to Greece.

Am I uselessly holding onto the past, onto grudges that serve no one?  I don’t think so.  True reconciliation requires remorse, forgiveness and atonement.  I have faith in German remorse and the forgiveness of Europe.  In more than half a century, there have been no opportunities for real atonement.  Now one presents itself; Germany should take advantage of it.

So, should Spain get a bailout, because the Nazis warmed up for WWII by using Spanish Republicans for Lutwaffe target practice?  What about Poland, France, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and on and on?  If Germany shores up Greece, we hope those nations won’t need German relief.  What about Italy, now also teetering on the brink?  Does Germany owe Italy?  Morally, no, economically perhaps.  This is the danger when one shifts the philosophical grounds of debate.  (Hey Germany, you started it; I’m just taking the moral debate to a logical conclusion.)

Once this moral/economic argument is engaged, things quickly get complicated.  For instance, if Germany should bail out Greece, does that mean the U.S. should pay reparations to African Americans for centuries of slavery?

Yes, I think it does.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

(By the way,  I don’t think “standard” time is standard anymore, as we observe it for only about four months a year, just as a car’s manual transmission is no longer the “standard” equipment it once was.)

The fact that we shift clocks at all is a symptom of industrial society ruled by measured time.  Real farmers rise with the sun, not the clock.  We change from daylight to standard time (and vice versa) in the middle of a weekend to ease the Monday morning transition.  By the light of the flames, we could see ourselves on the cusp of transition from the global, oil soaked era to a new agrarianism.

My neighbor Malgosia said she lit her fire because when she was growing up in Poland, school would let out in the early days of November so children could help with the potato harvest and in the evenings they would burn the dry, desiccated potato plants in the fields, with tubers roasting in the embers.  The failing light and crisp November air reminded her of those days, so a fire seemed appropriate.  We decided to have a backyard potato roast this weekend (weather permitting); if it goes well, maybe another on Thanksgiving eve.

Then we talked about our gardens, what had and hadn’t gone well in the growing season just past.  We’ve started to refer to our block as “the farm” because so many of us have gardens, fruit trees, bees or chickens.  Malgosia from Poland and Margaret, a Vermont native, (they were born one day apart, um… some years ago) are the resident advisors on growing and pruning, canning and preserving.

We agreed that turning our neighborhood into “the farm,” eating locally, learning about foraging and supporting farmers’ markets are the new activism.  Attempts to head off global warming have not worked.  Nor have we stopped overfishing or deforestation, hard as mainstream environmentalists have tried.

Unsuccessful though we may be, we still have to try.  The consequences we face are too severe to stop now.  At the same time, we can’t pretend everything will be all right.  It’s already too far gone for that.  The effects of global warming, overfishing and deforestation are upon us.  This summer’s fires in Texas burned 22 percent of the American cotton crop.  Corn, wheat, peanuts and beef all took hits as well.  The new activism, my neighborhood farm, is going to look smarter every year.

The old activism, my day job, is important too, if for no other reason than it buys time for the new activism to establish itself.  “I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.  He was referring to violence, but I reach for those words when I feel any burden.  “Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” Dr. King said.

The harvest is in, the days short and the year is winding down.  Our industrial society is failing, so we return to the land in the ways we can and spontaneously find new harvest rituals.  We plan for the next year, the next spring, the next phase of hope.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

My math was not wrong.  I wrote that commentary the first week of October 1999.  What was faulty was my memory or my credulity.  Have I really been writing these damned things since there were fewer than six billion people?  Guess so.  (Hello, new readers!)

I did a bit of surfing on the subject and found this BBC site that lets one evaluate world population in personal terms.  It claims I was the 3,086,987,341st person on Earth when I was born (extrapolate yourself to find out when) and the 76,783,189,538th person alive on Earth since history began (I’m guessing the BBC starts history with the emergence of writing, around 5,000 years ago).

(Note this: when I wrote in 1999, projections were that we would have 12 billion people on Earth by 2050.  The BBC piece predicts 10 billion by 2083, so the growth curve seems to be flattening out.  Or we just can’t agree on our predictions.)

Clicking through the site reveals Qatar is the fastest-growing nation, adding 514 per day and Moldova is the fastest shrinking, losing 106 people per day.  While both numbers reflect respective birth/death rates, they are turbocharged by immigration.

Moldova, with a population of three million, is already a contender for World’s Worst Nation.  Crime-ridden, corrupt and unstable, it is best known these days for sending young women into the global sex trade.  Before world population reaches eight billion, Moldova will inevitably undergo a momentous change.  Not likely to be a change for the better, but how much worse can things get?  Maybe a rich guy will just buy the whole country.

Qatar, however, is an oil-rich Gulf state with a population of about 850,000, but a citizen population of 300,000.  Watch this trend.  Global migration, spurred not only by an another billion people here or there, but economic dislocation and changing climates will not only push people from the Moldovas to the Qatars, but we’ll increasingly see the establishment of legally-separated castes.  If you listen to the Republican presidential debates, you can hear the seeds being planted in North American soil.  I don’t expect to see the bloom this election cycle, but I’ll be surprised if I don’t see it in the 2016 cycle.

As we approach seven billion, there is the usual overpopulation hand wringing.  I see the merit in it; it’s hard for seven billion people to live lightly on the Earth.  As I wrote in an even earlier commentary, “The most burning population question we face today is not the rate at which world population is growing, but the speed with which a small percentage of that population is consuming the earth’s resources.”

The important number here is zero.  Not zero population growth (worthy goal that it is) but zero sum.  In a world of finite resources, every gain for one person is a loss for someone else.  Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute makes the case better than I can.

It’s bad enough when the resources the first world claims are about energy and wealth, but that’s not the story any more.  Now we’re down to food and water and thus we’ll see Moldovas collapsing, Qatars getting feudal and both trends spreading.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The outrage addressed in the August missive was Wall Street banks driving up the price of gas by reckless oil speculation.

“There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply,” he wrote, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. “The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.”

“This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,” he wrote

Bernie Sanders is right.  It’s hard enough to bump up against the fact that the easily recoverable oil is gone, that coaxing anything new out of the ground will be expensive and (even more!) damaging to the environment, but the fact that the same jerks that destroyed the housing market and sent the global economy to the intensive care unit are keeping their boot on our necks and still getting rich off us is more than any of us should be willing to stand.

The same week Sen. Sanders emailed, Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones about the work of University of San Diego economist James Hamilton.  Professor Hamilton notes that 10 of 11 recessions since the end of World War II have been preceded by a rise in oil prices.

All the more reason to resent the speculators, right?  Right, but there’s more to it than that.  For most of those years, we as a society were able to increase oil supply almost at will, by drilling more holes in the places where we know oil to be.  Not so easy any more.

Not only are the giant oil fields beginning to peak, but the new sources of oil – like Alberta’s oil sands or the arctic fields the corporations are so recklessly eager to get their paws on – take years of slow development before they can be turned into gasoline down at the corner station.

Now throw in political instability in places like Libya, Iran and Venezuela and things get even shakier.  Supply begin to run close to demand or there’s rampant speculation in oil futures – or both – the price shoots up, a recession is born, the economy tanks, demand drops, price drops, the economy picks up again, raising the price of oil, sparking another recession, etc. etc.

This all fits under the rubric of “peak oil.”  Peak oil doesn’t just mean the oil’s running out.  It also means that when it gets so difficult and expensive to bring to market – and becomes so vulnerable to the vampire squids of society – then it’s another reminder that we should have listened to Jimmy Carter 34 years ago.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The answers (I won’t make you wait) are 100 and 98.  No statistically significant number of scientists deny the Earth is growing warmer.  About two percent deny humans are the cause.  Many of that minority are funded, directly or indirectly, by fossil fuel industries.

Kudos to presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr. for saying at the Republican debate last night, “in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”  He probably wasn’t going to win the nomination in any case, so why spend the next six months pretending to live in La-La land?

Pollsters for the other Republican candidates could have told Mr. Huntsman that adhering to good science is bad politics.  A few hours before the debate, Kevin Drum reported in Mother Jones that most Americans don’t know that global warming science is a settled issue.  He cites the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication as saying that less than 20 percent of Americans know there is scientific consensus on global warming.  Reading that, I had unsettling flashbacks to the “Elvis is alive” mythconception so popular in the mid-80s.

We don’t need reminding in Vermont.  We’ve had two hundred-year floods since May.  The last one, courtesy of Hurricane Irene (Why Irene?  Why not Exxon? Or Cheney?), destroyed 700 homes and washed out hundreds of roads and bridges.

Such calamities are never welcome, but in this third year of massive recession and government budget shortfalls, this is a real economic gut punch to the state.  Inns are closed, festivals have been cancelled, leaf-peeping season – which despite its too-cute name, is extraordinarily important to the tourist economy – will undoubtedly suffer.  (It was shaping up to be a less-than-stellar display this year anyhow, as it is whenever the summer months are dry.  Ironic, isn’t it?)

We’re also an agricultural state and crops contaminated by floodwater are unsafe to consume for both humans and beasts.  That applies to acres of cattle feed and dozens of streamside community-supported-agriculture farms in this localvore-loving state.  The dairy farmers were late getting their crops into the fields and missed their first cut of hay because of heavy spring rains.  (Ironic again?  You’re goddamned right it is.)

Contractors were already hard-pressed to finish planned road construction projects before winter, now we have several hundred new projects that beg completion before the punishing blizzards arrive.  Given the extent of damage all along the East Coast, even if we had the money to bring in workers and equipment from out of state, I doubt they could be found.

This is what the much-scoffed-at-by-right-wing-politicians computer models predict for the northeast.  Warmer and wetter, but the wetter doesn’t happen in a steady, manageable fashion.  Huge spring deluges, then months of parched soil, then more deluges.

This flood was the last thing people need as they are laid off from their jobs, as they lose their houses.  If Bill Gates breaks his leg, he can afford the finest medical care and has a dozen gadgets to keep working as he sits on the couch.  When a low-income laborer breaks her or his leg, it’s a financial crisis – via medical bills and loss of work – which may push his or her family into poverty for years.  That’s how this flood feels in this state right now.  It’s frightening.  And yet a bunch of Republican millionaires stood on a stage last night and complained that poor people don’t pay enough taxes.

Most of those millionaires deny global warming (and evolution, but let’s leave that for another day).  Worse, perhaps because the media puts a climate skeptic in every “balanced” story, most Americans don’t know there is consensus on global warming and what causes it.

In 1944, as he watched the events he would soon turn into “1984,” George Orwell wrote, “One day there will be a big, careful, scientific enquiry into the extent to which propaganda is believed.”  Even George Orwell didn’t foresee that science would be one of propaganda’s victims.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011