Look at Glenn Beck (I never said this would be easy.) I’m not sure what he was attempting with his rally at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, but it seems he has ambitions beyond being on Fox News forever. I try to put myself in his shoes. Here’s a guy who used to be a disc jockey and now he’s got a tee vee show, a radio show and his own “university” (however much damage his institution does to our understanding of that word). I’m sure there are people out there telling him he’s a prophet, naming children after him and so forth. It would be hard for me not to get a bit messianic if I was subject to all that and I think my grasp on reality is more tenacious than Mr. Beck’s.

Look across America. The current wave of Islamophobia has given an escape valve to the huge pressure of racism that has run beneath the surface of our continent since Mr. Columbus first made landfall. In Tennessee, western New York, Washington state and Connecticut racists are attacking (respectively) a mosque, a Sufi mosque (Sufis are like the Quakers of Islam, as mild and gentle a people as you’ll find anywhere), a Sikh (who is not a Muslim: what next – attacks on Buddhists?) and a hookah bar (one featuring belly dancers, no less – not exactly Sharia law, dude).

Now look at Vermont. Like Alaska, we had a contested result in our primary last Tuesday. Three Democratic candidates for governor were within two percentage points of each other when the counting was done. The second-place finisher, Doug Racine, called for a recount, as is his right.

Meanwhile, Mr. Racine has joined the first-place finisher, Peter Shumlin and third-place finisher Deb Markowitz in joint press conferences and campaign appearances to express the unity of their positions and to ask voters to support whichever of them ultimately becomes the party’s candidate.

Back in 2002, when then-governor Howard Dean declined to run for re-election, Mr. Racine was lieutenant governor and candidate presumptive. Mr. Shumlin (then and now) Senate majority leader, had hoped to run in 2002, but stepped aside for the good of the party. He ran for Lite Gov instead. Both he and Mr. Racine lost to the current incumbents Gov. Jim Douglas and Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, both Republicans.

Perhaps Mr. Racine should have returned Mr. Shumlin’s 2002 favor and stood aside for the good of the party. For whatever reasons, he chose not to, as was his right. Now the three former rivals campaign together. Two Democratic candidates that finished fourth and fifth last week also pledge their support to the eventual nominee. (Disclosure: I supported Mr. Racine in the primary.)

As for Mr. Dubie, now the Republican candidate for governor, I’ve met him and like him. I believe him to be a sincere man who wants what he thinks is best for Vermont. I disagree with almost all his positions, but that’s politics. (I’ve poked fun at Mr. Dubie, as recently as last week’s post. That’s politics, too.)

I do not like Mr. Dubie’s mentor, Gov. Douglas. I think he has brought an insidiously insincere style of Republican politics to Vermont. I think the people around Mr. Dubie want him to take up Mr. Douglas’s ways. I think they think it’s Mr. Dubie’s best chance of becoming governor.

The general election is still 61 days away. I’m encouraged by the civility and focus on issues and positions we’ve seen so far in Vermont’s 2010 election cycle. I wish the contrast with the rest of the country were not so great. I wish national journalists would pay more attention to the way we conduct ourselves.

There’s a Vermont bumper sticker that reads: “A small state can lead the nation.” Indeed, we must.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

So I was out early this morning, cutting clusters, hoping to get some juice pressed before the day’s (previously scheduled) activities began. The sun was just clearing the trees and it was already hot, having only gone down to 70 or so last night.

The bees were active, heading out toward the fields of goldenrod by the barge canal and hydrangeas of the neighborhood for pollen. The grape arbor is adjacent to the hives and the bee smell was strong in the air. (It’s the goldenrod pollen. My friend Bill says, “People think it stinks. Unless they happen to like it.”) Adrienne calls the bee smell sweet; I think it’s nutty. Either way, it was heavy and cloying in the close morning air. All the odors of the yard – flowers, vegetables, bees and compost – are heady these days with the final fullness of summer.

Grapes don’t ripen simultaneously, even those in the same cluster, so the idea was to find those bunches with the fewest unripe grapes. The big steel salad bowl was quickly filled and many left hanging, but I had at some point to find an accommodation between nature’s agenda and my own.

The grapes are Concords, for which I have a nostalgic fondness. My grandparents grew Concords, among many other things in their copious gardens, whose wonderful fecundity I did not appreciate as a child. We’ve been eating grapes at the table for a week or so, but I really wanted some juice.

I brought them in the house and pulled 348 grapes from the stems. (Yes, I counted. It soothes the OCD.) My neighbor Margaret gave me a conical strainer with a matching wooden pestle, just like the one my grandmother used to use, also nostalgic and I suppose set me up for what happened when I plunged the point of the pestle into the fruit.

The aroma that rose into my face was something I hadn’t smelled for 40 years. It was the same burst of grape I last enjoyed in my grandparents’ kitchen in Fairport, NY. If someone had been smoking a cheap cigar in the basement, the mood would have been complete.

The skin of the Concord grape is Phoenician purple, the meat bright green. The color of the juice somewhere between pink and purple. The taste is tart and rich and distinctly grape.

That the taste of a grape is grape should go without saying, but a backyard Concord in season is miles away from those bland little bags of water, imported from all ends of the Earth, that are displayed in produce sections year-round.

The flavor of Concords is the flavor grape candy and grape soda once attempted to mimic, before they were bastardized into incoherence. When Homer Simpson tells Lisa, “Purple’s a fruit,” he means Concord grape.

I strained the juice a second time (lots of sediment) and offered the first cup to Adrienne. She lifted it in both hands like a chalice and inspired the bouquet, then took a slight sip.

“Wow. That really brings back memories.” Yes, there was a day before high fructose corn syrup. Concord juice is heady stuff, best cut with the juice of white grapes or some other fruit.

These are the best days of the garden. Tomato salad every night, chile rellenos next week, fresh broccoli and cucumbers. I was recently treated to zucchini cobbler. It was delicious — and you’ve got to use the massive brutes up somehow.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

What we had was a five-way contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Our four-term (two-year terms) Republican governor is declining to run for re-election and anyone with ambition and a “D” after their name saw this as their opportunity. (Our congressional delegation consists of two Ds and a lefty I, none of whom is over 90, so no one expects those seats to open soon.)

A five-way primary campaign and everyone was so… nice. Perhaps it was a Canadian contagion; we are a border state. The rivers flow north, the manners head south. Debate after forum, the five limned policy differences so precise one had to be a wonk to appreciate the nuances. (“Oh and before I finish, I’d like to thank my fellow candidates for the great campaigns they’re running…”)

So, of course the national media didn’t pay attention. Where’s the conflict? Who’d care about that race? Vermonters, apparently. Despite moving the date of the primary from September to August for the first time (“Everyone’ll be on vacation!”), voter turnout exceeded all predictions. About 70,000 ballots cast. (“Seventy thousand? I had more people than that in my high school!” I know, I know, but it’s Vermont. We’re tiny.)

Election night served up a three-way tie, with the margin of less than 700 votes between first (Peter Shumlin) and third place (Deb Markowitz) finishers (less than 200 votes between the top two – Mr. Shumlin and Doug Racine). The lead among the top three shifted throughout the evening, allowing each victory party to boogie down, at least for a while.

Two days later, everyone’s still nice. The second and third place finishers have not conceded and are waiting until the vote is made official (probably early next week) before deciding to ask for a recount (as is their right). But it’s good, all five candidates appeared at a unity rally Wednesday, hugging and mugging for the cameras and although there were speeches plenty, none of the candidates took the mike. Political pantomime. When’s the last time you saw that?

The supposed beneficiary of all this neck-and-necking is the Republican candidate Brian Dubie, who’s been Lite Guv for the past eight years and unseen in public throughout the primary season. Although invited to participate in several of the debates with his Dem counterparts, he’s passed on every opportunity. He was to finally meet the Democratic nominee in debate tonight, but now that’s been postponed until 26 September. (Democrats in some form of disarray, Republicans hiding from the public and press – we have that in common with tea-party states.)

As Jimmy Breslin said of the ’62 Mets bullpen, I think he’s afraid to come out. I think the only way our Lite Gov could make his profile lower would be by transferring his residency to another state. The rare glimpse the public gets of his goings-on is when his campaign treasurer is forced to file a fiscal disclosure form, revealing Mr. Dubie is socking away gangs of cash. (He is, after all, Republican.) He was for a while running ads on the New York Times web site saying that Vermont is in 47th place among states friendly to business.

Not to harsh your mellow Brian, but

a) isn’t that what every Republican says about his or her state? (“We HAVE to stop being so mean to business! They paid for this ad!”)

b) ummm, you and your GOP overlord have been running state government for the last eight years. If things are that bad, ain’t it your fault?

c) as one of the Dems, I think it was Doug Racine, pointed out, the states Republicans think are “good for business” exploit their workers and trash their environments. There’s a reason we don’t live in Alabama and it’s not maple syrup. (Well, partially.)

So anyhow (cutting off the digression and getting back to the main point): conventional political wisdom is wrong. Vermont proves American politics don’t need name-calling, mud-slinging or outlandish costumes to engage voters. Multiple-candidate primaries don’t turn people off (although they may confuse them). The decline of decorum in American politics is not the fault of tee vee, it’s the fault of cynical political operators.

The bottom line is good news – we can act like adults if we choose to.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s been four months, a new president is in office and life is returning to normal. Most Poles think it’s time to move the cross away from the palace, others think it should be left where it is. It’s getting controversial. Poland’s constitution separates church and state; those who want to move the cross away from the palace say such a display is inappropriate for a modern secular state. Those who want to keep the cross say Poland is an overwhelmingly Catholic country and the cross represents their interests.

Although I may have an opinion on the issue, it’s not for me to decide. It’s for the Poles to decide.

In the US, our constitution guarantees freedom of religion. A Muslim group, the Cordoba Initiative, wants to build a community center in New York City, two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Some people say this should not be allowed, because the men who attacked the World Trade Center (among other places) were Muslim. This view is clearly anti-constitutional and unAmerican. The people who shout this crap on cable tee vee are either stupid (yes, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, I’m looking at you) or disingenuous (that would be you, Newt).

Some others (the Anti-Defamation League, Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan and five-and-a-half term Governor Howard Dean) say there’s no doubt the Cordoba Initiative has the right to build its community center (called Park51), but that it shouldn’t – because of the sensitivity of the location.

Huh? I’m thinking you people will have to go sit with Ms. Palin over in the area reserved for stupid (although not nearly as far in as her seat). By all reports, the area around the WTC site is littered with bars and strip clubs. If the site of the 9-11 attacks is hallowed ground, then are those establishments sacrilege? No one’s calling for their removal. (Come to think of it, the 9-11 hijackers reportedly spent their pre-attack weeks hanging out at strip clubs – not community centers – so maybe I’m onto something here….)

A new Pew poll shows one in five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, which means I know more about Polish politics than many of my fellow citizens (and – gulp – voters) know about their own country. (“You people in the stupid section! Move over! Make room! Lots of room!”)

In the disingenuous section, Newt Gingrich said allowing Park51 to be built is “like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust museum” and that Park51 should be built when churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia.

(“Holy Cow! I just realized! That cross in Warsaw! It’s four meters high! Four meters equals 13 feet! Thirteen! Is it the work of Satan?” Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?)

Listen, Newt, if you wanna bring some country down to the level of Saudi Arabia, emigrate. Stop messing with my country. And your Nazi comment is crass beyond belief. If you want to know why you will never hold an elective office again, take a peek in the mirror the next time you brush your teeth.

Park51 is a proposed community center, like a YMCA or a JCC. It’s a place for kids’ art classes and pick-up basketball, book readings and potluck dinners. Community centers, as the name implies, build community, whether urban ones like Park51 or rural ones like Grange halls and 4-H clubs. They give kids a constructive place to spend idle hours and seniors a place to come and not feel so lonely.

Community centers are anti-terrorist. They should be places to bind us together, not tear us apart. We should thank God – five times a day – there are people who still want to build them.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Global warming, overfishing, deforestation, uncontrolled release of genetically modified material, nuclear waste.

So cut it down, make it manageable. Choose a single issue – say the release of toxic chemicals into our air, soil, water and our bodies. Reduce it further; only look the effects on human health – in fact, just look at the effect on the health of children.

Even this, perhaps, is more than we can bear.

Poisoned for Profit by Philip and Alice Shabecoff (Chelsea Green, 2010) tours the landscape and history of post-war America’s poisoning of its population, particularly its children.

How can it be? How can a nation that has attained so much and claims such moral high ground in human rights and social values simultaneously pump out poisons that have sent American rates of birth defects, childhood cancer, asthma and diabetes on an ever-rising trajectory?

Laying out their case in the form of an indictment, the Shabecoffs present the evidence, naming names – at least some of them. General Electric, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont. Poisoned for Profit details the manufacturing processes of each of these companies create the poisons that now infest the nation’s human environment.

Detailed reporting reopens old wounds for anyone who has witnessed or been affected by modern toxification. How the industrial feedstock chemicals get into our air and water, invade our bodies, how the bodies of children are so much more susceptible than those of their parents.

The Shabecoffs show how, worse still, the corporations responsible for this pollution – the Dows and Monsantos – knew early on what the likely effects of their activities would be. How those same corporations act – singly and in industry-wide concert – to shift the blame for their poisons onto the victims themselves, to obfuscate issues, distort science and economics and use cohorts of attorneys and war chests of cash to pervert the justice system – all with the single goal of corporate profit. This is the sea that must be drunk dry, if we as a species are to thrive.

To the PR staff at General Electric or Dupont, childhood illnesses due to environmental poisons (not theirs, they’ll stress, maybe someone else’s), is an “unintended by-product” of this late industrial age. As social commentator Joan Dickenson pointed out, there are no “by-products.” There are only products. Whether the corporation intends them or not, cancers and birth defects are products of the corporation, just as much as Teflon or a quarterly dividend.

Poisoned for Profit shows how state and federal agencies tasked with protecting health and the environment are manacled by the same cohort of attorneys, plus lobbyists, plus trade associations. The politicians of the legislative and executive branches, who should intervene on behalf of citizens – children in this case – are trapped, perhaps too willingly, by the need for constant infusions of campaign cash, of a magnitude multinational chemical companies can afford but sick children cannot.

To hold this ocean – or even, say, the Gulf of Mexico – in one’s mouth seems impossible. Perhaps it is, but parents, their communities, dedicated environmentalists and journalists like Phil and Alice Shabecoff are draining this ocean every day.

The appendices to Poisoned for Profit provide helpful information for protecting yourself and your family, beginning from the moment you plan your family and working outward through your home diet and community. It’s difficult and painstaking and it shouldn’t fall to parents to go to such lengths to protect their children from corporations that would poison them, but it’s the only way to drink the ocean dry.

(c) Mark Floegel, 2010

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who says the Supremes are immune to sound bites? If Chief Justice Roberts believes what he wrote, can we fairly extrapolate that he thinks, “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation is to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation”?

Does he believe? Can we extrapolate? Probably not. Mr. Roberts famously told his the US Senate during his confirmation hearings that a judge’s role is to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” Once ensconced in his lifetime appointment, the record of his court has been to pitch, bat and push as hard as it can toward the right end of the spectrum. In Lebetter v. Goodyear, Mr. Roberts and company eliminated workers’ ability to sue for race or gender discrimination. In Exxon v. Baker, the court slashed away 90 percent of the damages Exxon had to pay victims for the Valdez spill and in the infamous Citizens United case, allowed corporations to spend freely on elections, giving First Amendment rights to businesses.

All this matters because federal Judge Vaughn Walker ruled yesterday that California’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. In his ruling, Judge Walker wrote that the ban “places the forces of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians,” reinforces the idea that “gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals” and “gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.” There is no doubt this case will wind up before Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

Judge Walker’s line of reasoning appeals to the equal protection clause of the Constitution, the same clause Justice Roberts appealed to when he wrote that one stops discriminating by stopping discriminating.

In courtroom, the opponents of same-sex marriage argued that one man and one woman make the best parents. That’s clearly incorrect. One merely needs eyes to see good gay and lesbian parents or bad heterosexual parents. OK, maybe you don’t know any gay and lesbian parents, but don’t try to tell me you don’t know some bad heterosexual parents.

Neither hetero- nor homosexuality automatically confers sanctity or evil on couple. Everyone is about the same when it comes to parenthood –or anything else. Thus, the equal protection clause.

Just for fun, let’s momentarily consider that “who makes the best parents?” argument. Is the raising of children the sole reason for matrimony? If people cannot or choose not to have children – or if two septuagenarians fall in love – should they be denied the opportunity to marry? Of course not. An argument to the contrary is ridiculous on the face of it. Just as the argument that men should not marry men or women marry women.

Sadly, the record of the Roberts court seems to shaping as “decide what outcome pleases right-wing ideologues and then try to find a legal argument to support that outcome.

The bottom line could be corporations are people, but gays and lesbians are not.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.

There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.

In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.

Times have changed – somewhat. There’s no phone in this cabin and no cell phone signal. There’s no Wi-Fi and while there’s a tee vee, it doesn’t work. There’s a teenaged girl, deep in the throes of Facebook withdrawal, sure that her social life will have forever left her behind if she can’t check in at least once a day.

So we find a little Wi-Fi now and then. I admit, I log on, too, if for no other reason than to delete unwanted messages, so I won’t have to plow through five or six hundred at once when I get back to town. I try not to get sucked into the news, but it’s hard.

Tuesday evening, the radio in the cabin was tuned to a little station on the New Hampshire line that plays “all the normal songs” (according to the teenaged girl). The CBS Radio News came on at six o’clock. Here was the line up: The leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Afghan war generally, a potential new oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, an update on the BP oil spew, the new CEO at BP, Congressman Charlie Rangel decides he might want to cut a deal on ethics charges after all and the imminent debut of the Arizona immigration law.

I stepped back outside to tend the grill. The sun was starting to decline toward the Green Mountains in the west, the pond lapped softly against the dock. Since it was mid-week, there were few jet skis or speedboats on the water. The older folk in their pontoon boats, canopies rigged, cruised like the Pharaoh’s barges on the Nile.

In it’s odd way, “Nixonland” is a comforting book. It’s thesis is that the seeds of the divisive politics that so wrack our country today were sown back in the ‘60s with Nixon’s invention of the “Southern strategy” and self-pity of the so-called “silent majority.” (If they would only lapse back into silence.)

Somehow, we got through. Let’s hope we always do.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

I was in the Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana in the weeks after the Deepwater Horizon blew out. I’m an environmentalist; I work for Greenpeace. I was there to see for myself what was going on and to talk with people about the consequences of the blowout.

In those weeks, there was much we didn’t know. There’s much we still don’t know.
Here are some of the things I saw.

On Friday, 30 April, I stood at the edge of a crowd of fishermen as they met with NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and Congressman Charlie Melancon (D-LA). The oil spill had yet to come ashore. Neither BP nor the federal government had been providing much information about the spill. (At that time, both BP and the feds were still claiming that only 5,000 barrels per day were leaking from the well.)

The fishermen had been waiting for hours to see Ms. Lubchenco. They were angry that the response they’d seen so far was inadequate. BP crews were stringing orange booms everywhere, then leaving them untended, to be washed away. If the booms should stop any oil, there were no skimmers there to collect it.

“No one’s asking us,” one fisherman told the administrator and the congressman. “We’re the people who know this coast and these bayous better than anyone. You can’t just string up a boom and leave. For one thing, there’s not enough boom to protect the whole coast. You need to ask us. We’ll tell you which bayous and inlets are most fragile and you have to string two or three layers of boom in front of those, because these booms you’ve got aren’t working.”

Mr. Melancon, to his credit, told the men, “Call my office. Tell us what we need to be doing. I’ll get your message through. That’s my job.”

I spoke with many fishermen in Louisiana. At that time – before the oil came ashore – there was still a good deal of denial. Maybe it won’t be that bad. Fishermen and the oil industry have lived side by side in Louisiana for a century. Many families include people who work at each trade. Fishermen and oil worker had always found ways to accommodate each other and in the first week of May, none of the fishermen seemed to want to believe that the oil industry had betrayed them as badly as the news reports coming in every hour seemed to indicate.

The more interaction the fishermen had with BP, however, the more they came to realize they had been betrayed. If they attended one of the sessions required to get cleanup work from BP, the fishermen were given contracts that indemnified BP should a fisherman be injured using BP equipment. In other words, you had to promise not to sue BP, even if they gave you shoddy equipment to work with. The fishermen rebelled and the clause was removed.

BP tried to force fishermen to sign gag orders, that in return for getting cleanup work from BP, they gave up their right to speak to the media. Some fishermen spoke out about the gag order and it too was removed. But the intimidation was still there.

When fishermen participating in the cleanup were sickened by the fumes from the oil slick (they were discouraged by BP from wearing respirators), BP’s CEO told the press that perhaps they’d gotten sick from eating bad seafood. Fishermen. Who can’t judge fresh seafood.

Several fishermen told me they felt the heads of various organizations representing fishermen were being bought off by BP. Such things have happened in Louisiana before. A fisherman who works in both the white and Southeast Asian fishing communities along the lower Mississippi said he felt BP was trying to drive wedges between the ethnic groups.

Boat captains in their forties told me what was the coastline when they started fishing was now four miles out to sea. They told me that Hurricane Katrina had knocked them to their knees and five years later, they were just getting back up. And now this.

The fishermen spoke of their fathers taking them out when they were young and how they were just starting to take their kids out. They wondered what would happen to the knowledge they have of shoals and currents, of when the various fish run and when they spawn. What would any of it be worth anymore? How much, if any would be worth passing along to another generation? Where would they go, what would they do if they couldn’t fish out of Venice or Buras or Port Sulphur anymore?

© Mark Floegel, 2010

The recession. In that May 2008 post, I noted that Goldman Sachs was predicting an oil price of $200/barrel in 2010. But that was May 2008 and by Election Day of that year, the economy had solidly tanked, destroying demand for oil along the way. The price of oil today is around $77/barrel. Even Goldman Sachs gets a money question wrong once in a while.

What happens when (if?) the global recession ends and demand rebounds? Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market that has been the world’s leading authority on business risk for the past 300 years this month predicted “catastrophic consequences” for businesses that fail to adequately prepare for the effects of peak oil.

Lloyd’s and the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs jointly released the report, “Sustainable energy security: strategic risks and opportunities for business.”
The authors’ main points are:
* Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper – failure to do so could be catastrophic
* Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
* China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
* We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
* Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
* Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
* To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
* Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of ‘just-in-time’ models
* Investment in renewable energy and ‘intelligent’ infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

Of course, there are a number of well-educated and well-paid people who fill the columns of business web sites with ridicule for the notion of peak oil. In the same post that mocks peak oil theory as “religion,” the author takes pains to write of “conventional oil.” “Conventional oil”? You know, the black stuff that’s pumped from the ground (or spews of its own pressure into the Gulf of Mexico).

The very fact that peak oil’s critics refer to “conventional oil” means we’re running out of it. The Bradford oil field, the world’s first, for decades provided all the lubricating oil for cars. Only that field – under northwestern Pennsylvania and southwest New York – had the high viscosity oil engines demand and so when it began to play out 20 years ago, synthetic motor oils had to be developed. The same is now true for “conventional oil.” We can no longer rely on the stuff that comes up as oil, we’re going to have to boil it out of tar sands and drill miles below the ocean floor and beneath arctic ice (while it lasts) for “unconventional oil.”

So, in a sense, everyone’s right. Yes, there’s oil out there to be had, at tremendous hassle and expense and damage to the environment. So yes, we can keep on with our oil-based economy and cheap plastic everything and NASCAR as entertainment – at a price. A price that will get higher and higher. A price of money and ecological havoc and blood spilled across the globe.

Yesterday, the body of the 11th Vermonter killed in the oil wars was returned home for burial. How many more?

© Mark Floegel, 2010

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day – is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change
expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” (The entire article is worth reading, or re-reading.)

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms – the bands in which given temperatures dominate – are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article – isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.

(I’m typing this at 6:30 a.m. It’s 82 degrees in northwest Vermont, the only time of day when I can be in my office without dissolving into a pool of sweat. It was 99 at 10 p.m. last night. It’s been above 90 for the last five days in this, the land of no air conditioning.)

None of this is inevitable. We have the technology in hand to substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels and their creation of greenhouse gas. We had those technologies four years ago when Jim Hansen wrote his article. We have not mobilized the political will to use them.

We need to tax carbon. Now. What’s happening so graphically in the Gulf of Mexico is exactly what we’re doing to our atmosphere each and every day, except it doesn’t look the same. The consequences, however, will be worse.

In his article, Dr. Hansen writes about Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina discovering, in the 1970s, the damage done to the Earth’s ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon chemicals (CFCs) and how the global community reacted, via the Montreal Protocol, to phase out CFCs and reduce the damage and eventually, the threat posed by these chemicals. He calls for a similar effort on fossil fuels.

There are several problems here. Although the CFC industry actively lobbied for support from government, we did not live in a CFC economy. We do live in a fossil fuel economy. Oil and coal run the world, any doubts about that should have been laid to rest by the last two presidential administrations taking their marching orders from that industry – one willingly, one with embarrassment.

Second, the fossil fuel industry learned from the ozone crisis. It did not learn how to be a good global citizen and save humankind from the worst effects of our excesses. It learned how to undermine scientists and environmental organizations. It learned how to protect its short-term profits and executive compensation, even at the cost of our civilization. We see that playing out in Congress today as the “representatives” of those most damaged by the latest oil atrocity scream loudest for renewed deep water oil drilling.

This year marks the fourth Hansen Day – there are only six left. Hansen Day should be recognized as a day to take stock of where we have come since July 2006 (the wrong way, really) and think about how far we’ll have to go to avoid the hazards Dr. Hansen outlined in his article.

Maybe the global recession has bought us some time, maybe not. Certainly not enough for us to make up for four years of doing the wrong thing. Since Dr. Hansen’s article was published, China has become a world leader in renewable energy technology, but it has also become the world’s number one greenhouse gas emitter. Not good news at the end of the day – or century.

How many more Hansen Days with pass with no action taken? How many can we afford? As he wrote, we have ten years, not to decide, but to fundamentally alter our trajectory.

Hansen Day is not for celebrating, but it should be noted.

© Mark Floegel, 2010