Why doesn't government get Peak Oil?

Image by n2teaching via Flickr

Good article on peak oil in the Christian Science Monitor. And even the execrable "Marketplace" program has one here. The question is this: Why are such articles otherwise so rare and so little discussed by governments?

This is from an interview with Colin Campbell, one of the founders of the Assn. for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) after the recent ASPO international conference in Denver:

Question: The peak oil message doesn’t seem to be heard in the halls of government and in corporate board rooms. Why?

Colin Campbell: The question of peak oil is a difficult, sensitive one. There are many people, especially in government and industry, who’d prefer not to know it. The reason is quite logical: they’re looking for expansion, for economic growth, for prosperity, and for a continuation of the successful epoch we’ve lived in. To suddenly wake up and say, well, things are changing radically and we don’t really know what it means, is not something an executive would wish to say. And yet I think behind the scenes they are beginning to plan and prepare in sensible ways. You’ll find the oil companies, for example, are selling and disposing of secondary marketing chains, secondary refineries and so on, because they know full well that the supply is going to lead to surplus refining capacity. I think if you look elsewhere, the airline businesses is changing radically because it’s so dependent on cheap oil. We see hidden messages that do deliver the correct reading of all of this, but it’s not something people really want to talk about.

Question: What about the notion of making America energy independent?

Campbell: It can’t be done voluntarily. To make America energy-independent is not something I think any government can achieve. But within 50 years that’s what nature will deliver. Countries will have to be energy independent. They have no alternative. Some may get there quicker than others, but it’s not something some government will say, well this is our plan of action. It will delivered to them by the force of nature. So America will indeed be energy independent and probably quite soon if these imports dry out. What that means and how they react to such a situation is another day’s work.

Given the way we've organized industrial oil-dependent societies, government officials who ignore the looming rapid collapse of oil exports (as producing nations keep more and more of their oil for their own uses) is guilty of gross negligence and supreme indifference to risks of harm to the people they supposedly serve.

New magazine of note for people who want to eat better food at lower cost with less risk

Cool.

URBAN FARM^TM

New from the editors of Hobby Farms and Hobby Farm Home!

It doesn’t take a farm to have the heart of a farmer. Now, due to a burgeoning sustainable-living movement, you don’t have to own acreage to fulfill your dream of raising your own food. The new Urban Farm™ magazine, from the editors of Hobby Farms, will walk you down the path to self sustainability.

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<<We're following urban farming in the news>>

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Urban Farm™ magazine’s mission is to promote the benefits of self sustainability and to provide the tools with which to do it on any size property. Urban Farm™ reaches out to those in the city and suburbs, those who are inspired by the local food movement and who want to start raising chickens and growing food for themselves, supporting local agriculture and living more sustainably.

Urban farms are popping up all over America. However, things are different on an urban farm, versus a rural hobby farm. With less space to work with, projects must be scaled down, efficiency becomes crucial, and one must be resourceful to use every inch of space and recycle every unused object into something useful.

Urban Farm™ is informational and inspirational, filled with how-to projects, profiles of urban farmers across America, “green” and innovative products, and of course, recipes for preparing your homegrown vegetables, eggs and other farm bounty.

Green Holiday Fair

Workers sorting fair-trade coffee in Guatemala. Image via Wikipedia

Get nice things for others to celebrate any of the holidays that come in the dark times leading up to Solstice, when we mark the commencement of the return of the light.

Sunday, Nov. 22, 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Sustainable Holiday Market
Cone Field House at Sparks Field, Willamette University (Corner 12th & Bellevue Sts)

Shop for recycled, chemical-free, locally made, fair trade, and energy- and water-saving gifts to give to your friends and family this holiday season. Also, learn about tips to make your holiday celebrations more earth-friendly, have the kids make gifts for family members at our "Earth-Friendly Elves" station, and enjoy live music! Buy raffle tickets to win sustainable gifts donated by our vendors; all proceeds benefit FSELC's environmental education programs. No admission fee.

NOTE: Vendor spaces still available; please contact Lisa, 503-391-4145 for more info.

A "must-have" for your reader: Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air

Image by ~~ zorro ~~ via Flickr

"Numbers are better than adjectives."

If you are confused by corporate greenwashing or uncertain about all the soothing claims you hear floating around about how this or that innovation is going to make all this concern about climate unnecessary, or how this or that breakthrough will solve the peak oil predicament, it's always good to check in with David Mackay, author of "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air," which you can download for free if you like.

A very worthwhile site to add to your newsreader.

The Old Misdirection Play by PGE (Pollution Generating Enterprise)

The #1 polluter in Oregon, happily profiting by destroying the climate. Image via Wikipedia

Magicians trick us by getting us to watch the wrong thing. So too with corporations. When challenged for numerous bad acts, they like to focus your attention on the one that they have a ready response for, which has the effect of directing the conversation away from the most serious problems and focusing it on the one that they'd prefer you think about:

PGE did right thing
A letter to the editor Oct. 10 regarding the Boardman power plant ("Boardman must close") makes a good point: Pollution from mercury is a significant environmental and health concern.

That's why Portland General Electric participated in and supported the most comprehensive study of the sources of mercury pollution in Oregon to date, several years ago, in cooperation with the Oregon Environmental Council. That's also why we've agreed to install new emissions equipment that will allow the Boardman plant to meet one of the most stringent mercury control standards in the nation.

Cleaning up mercury in our environment from human sources -- mine wastes, cement kilns, power plants and other industrial activities -- is good public policy. We're working hard to aggressively reduce the Boardman plant's environmental impact while keeping this dependable source of electricity available for our customers.

REUBEN PLANTICO
Southwest Portland
Plantico is director of environmental policy for Portland General Electric.

Thus, with PGE, which is starting to grudgingly come out of the dark ages on the neurotoxic mercury emissions from its Boardman coal plant---the better to avoid discussion of the plant's CO2 emissions (the biggest in the entire state of Oregon) . . . emissions that the mercury control equipment will actually increase!

That's because all the exhaust-pollution control equipment on the emissions stream at Boardman will reduce the plant's operating efficiency, meaning that it will burn more coal to produce the same amount of power. For PGE, the goal is ensuring high profits from combustion of "cheap" coal (only cheap because they don't have to include the cost of sending the climate into a chaotic new unstable state) for decades more -- even as they pass every dime of the cost of the p0llution controls onto ratepayers.

It's lemon socialism at its finest --- PGE creates the problem, we have to pay to clean it up, and they get to profit even MORE from both creating the problem AND from what we spend to clean it up (the cost of the pollution control equipment is considered "capital investment" by PGE, so it shows up as "their" investment when rates are set, so they get a bigger flow of cash every year in return for using our money to fix only the smallest part of their pollution problem and ignoring the truly critical CO2 problem). Nice, eh!

The letter also shows how nicely Oregon's environmental groups have been coopted and outplayed by PGE--- they do most of the misdirection work for PGE for free, persuading people to focus on tiny incremental improvements in the plant's pollution output, while not mentioning the only solution that makes sense from an economic or environmental point of view: shutting down Boardman ASAP.

A worthy group we'll all need one day

Roman cremation chest. Image by mharrsch via Flickr

Funerals are one of the biggest ripoffs in modern America. Nearly five decades after Jessica Mitford's expose of mortuary greed and wheeling dealing, it's only become worse. Luckily, there's an alternative for those of us in Salem (and elsewhere in Oregon):

The consumer-run non-profit called the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Oregon, part of a national network. They do one thing: help people make plans for the handling of their remains in a way that suits them (including in more environmentally friendly ways) so that nobody falls prey to any of the vicious operators who use grief and shock as tools to separate families from staggering sums of money.

Join. Make your plans (but don't prepay!). Contribute to FCAO. You can participate in managing the alliance if you wish. Just don't put it off -- by the time you need this, it's too late.

Funeral Consumers Alliance of Oregon

FCA of Oregon is dedicated to protecting a consumer’s right to choose a dignified, meaningful and affordable service at end of life, whether it be a funeral, cremation, or memorial service.

This is the place to find free information to help you plan end of life services for yourself and family members.

Click on “Join” to download a membership form which you can complete and mail to FCAO.

You can obtain free educational materials, brochures and information about funeral choices. See “Member Options”.

The companies listed under “Participating Mortuaries” have all agreed to provide FCAO members with reasonably priced arrangements so that members may plan their funerals in advance.

Our organization welcomes opportunities to provide speakers at small or large groups (churches, civic groups, retirement homes, hospice, etc.) increasing public awareness of funeral options.

Our membership is open to residents of western Oregon or southwestern Washington. To find an FCA affiliate in other areas of the USA please look at the national FCA Affiliates Listing.

e-mail: fcaoregon@gmail.com
Portland Area: (503) 647-5590
Toll Free: 1-888-475-5520
13038 SE Kronan Drive, Clackamas, OR 97015

My Hero(in)es!

"We know what you read, and we're not saying."

WORD: Pundita commits truth in print -- on the way out the door

Sad to see her go, but there's no way she can stay in the obese media after she dares to write stuff like this:

Longing for a middle class

WASHINGTON -- The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation.




The idea does not find voice in the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. It has no place in the media’s daily digest of gossip, false controversy and ideological cant. It is barely mentioned in the halls of power, where the very officials who capitalize on the economic angst of working people to win election forget that this raw anguish -- not the sophisticated arguments of lobbyists and campaign donors -- is supposed to motivate them every day.

It is easy to blame the financial crisis, Wall Street’s breathtaking bonuses or the culture of excess that glittered until we found ourselves on the precipice of a second Great Depression. In truth, we’ve been dismantling the economic foundation of the middle class for more than three decades.

How many of you, having previously held a presumptively secure job with a solid company, are now working as a “contractor” or “consultant“? The trend toward taking employees off the payroll only to hire them again as contractors -- without health benefits, pensions, sick days, vacations -- began in the 1970s with janitors, construction workers and truckers. Now highly skilled technology workers who helped transform the global economy are among the downsized, the outsourced, the contracted-out.

When IBM was an icon of American enterprise, I could not imagine that I would one day follow veteran IBM workers through the halls of Congress as they buttonholed lawmakers. They’d been stripped of their promised pensions and told to make due with a less generous “cash balance” plan that effectively reduced benefits for the most experienced and loyal workers. Nor could I anticipate that after a fatal airline accident we would learn -- as we did after the crash of a Continental Connection flight near Buffalo last February -- that overworked pilots on regional carriers earn $20,000 a year or less.

No one could have foretold that eight years after 9/11, hundreds of thousands of rescue workers and residents of Lower Manhattan would suffer serious, chronic -- and often deadly -- diseases from their exposure to the hazards at Ground Zero. Many are unable to work and have lost their health insurance. Others have fought for workers’ compensation in a system that offers none to independent contractors -- or to those whose labor was subcontracted to so many companies that no one firm is held responsible. Some are now impoverished.

“While you’re waiting for your workers’ comp, and you’re waiting for your Social Security disability, you have no money,” says John Feal of Long Island, an injured 9/11 construction worker who started a foundation to help others. “You don’t even have gas to get to the doctor.”
They were heroes, we said. But now they are just cogs in a new economy in which business seems to have unilaterally rewritten the rules of the workplace.

Example: Hundreds of companies stopped making contributions to employee 401(k) retirement plans in the wake of the financial crisis. There is no way to force a resumption of funding when the economy rebounds.

The government has abetted all this with decades of hands-off regulation. Example: At current staffing and budget levels, it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 133 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction one time, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project.

Soon the political discussion will shift from the need to keep propping up the economy to the need to reduce the deficit and debt. Then we are certain to hear that Social Security and other “entitlements” are the problem and must be curtailed. In fact, Social Security has sufficient funds to pay full benefits through 2037 -- a cushion no other government program can claim. Medicare, while under financial strain, has done better at containing costs per beneficiary than private health insurers, according to government studies.

The myths that led us to this pass did not materialize by chance. They were conjured up by conservatives intent on dismantling the New Deal society that reigned through the 1960s -- a society that produced the world’s most robust middle class. They are fed by lawmakers in both parties who depend on campaign contributions from powerful interests.

Fight the myths. Break the back of the corrupt campaign finance and lobbying systems. These are hard political tasks. But being pushed further down is harder, still. Because no one knows where the new bottom lies.

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This is my final column. Thanks to my loyal readers and dedicated regional editors who have kept a place in their papers and in their minds for the kind of journalism I have worked to provide.

Get ready to coop-erate one last time! The final push for urban hens in Salem

October 26. Be there, aloha. Tireless urban hens advocate Barb Palermo writes:

Thank you to everyone who sent the Mayor an email. Many of you forwarded copies of your letters to me and they were all wonderful. Again, thank you so much! If you haven't sent one yet, please consider doing so in the next two weeks. Mayor Taylor's email address is: jtaylor@cityofsalem.net. The more she gets, the better, and hopefully these will help to win back her vote (she voted for chickens in the past, then changed her mind).

According to the City Recorder, two different draft chicken ordinances will be discussed and voted upon on October 26. City staff will provide the councilors with the two proposed chicken ordinances they requested and, if I understand correctly, one of the following three things could happen that night:

1. They could vote for the proposal that would allow 3 hens (as livestock) but they would be taken out of the Land Use section of the code and put elsewhere. This would mean amending the city's code, which could require another public hearing before chickens become legal.

2. They could vote for the proposal they are calling "The Cannon Beach Approach" which would allow 3 hens (as pets) but they would still be regulated under the Land Use section of the city code. This would not require an amendment to the code and therefore would not require another public hearing.

3. Both proposed chicken ordinances could fail to get enough votes, in which case Salem will remain one of the few cities in Oregon that does not allow backyard hens.

This coming Friday afternoon a copy of the two above-mentioned proposals will be
available online and I will forward that to you. The councilors will also receive these materials a week in advance, but there will be do discussion or vote until October 26th.

I know it's a lot to ask you to come to city hall once again (this will be our 9th presentation), but this is the most important one. I was able to get more notice than usual, so we have two weeks to arrange our schedules so that we can have as many people there as possible. I will make a point of asking everyone who supports chickens to stand. When council deliberates, they will feel the pressure with all eyes on them and seeing a room packed with eager chicken supporters could get us that last vote we need.

PLEASE DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO ATTEND AND BRING FRIENDS AND FAMILY WITH YOU!

Monday, October 26 at 6:30 pm
Salem City Hall - 555 Liberty Street - Room 240

Interesting series at Mission Mill

The once (and future?) source of fine woolen goods. Image by Travel Salem via Flickr

The Mission Mill Museum is a Salem treasure . . . and, possibly, a serious resource with an already-installed water power source for a lower-energy future. They're offering an interesting series on the "other" settlers we don't often hear so much about:

Mission Mill Museum’s Sesquicentennial Fall Speakers’ Series
Immigrant Experiences in a Multi-Ethnic Oregon

Though much has been written about those pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail to start a new life in the Oregon Country, these were not the only people who traveled many miles, facing trials and tribulations to settle in our State. This lecture series, starting October 17th at 2 p.m. and running for six consecutive Saturdays, will present to the audience some of the ethnic/immigrant group experiences in Oregon. This lecture is made possible in part by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation. Admission to each lecture is $5 for Non-Members, $2 for Museum Members, Children (17 and under) and students (with IDs).

October 17th, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: Kam Wah Chung Archaeology with Nancy Nelson
In the community of John Day, Oregon, we find a historic Chinese medicinal herb shop, which was operated by Dr. Ing Hay and Lung Ong from the 1870s through the 1940s. Archaeologists conducted investigations on the grounds of the Kam Wah Chung within the last few years, and evidence of John Day’s “ China Town” will be highlighted. This story is presented by Nancy Nelson, an archaeologist for Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department. She received her education from Oregon State University and the University of Oregon in Anthropology.

October 24th, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: Mexicanos in Oregon with
Erlinda Gonzales-Berry
The number of Latinos residing in Oregon has increased dramatically in the last decade, leading one scholar to speak of the “browning of Oregon.” This, however, is not a new phenomenon, for there has been a settled-out, Mexican-origin population since the 1930s. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry explores the seventy-five year history of migration and settlement of Mexicans in Oregon, highlighting their sustained practices of community building, struggles for integration, and contributions to the cultural and economic landscape of the state.

October 31st, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: Finding Freedom - African Americans in Oregon with Elizabeth McLagan
Economic opportunity and personal liberty were dreams common to westering immigrants. Free land was available. Barriers of class and perhaps gender and even ethnicity and race might be lifted. However for African Americans, as presented by Elizabeth McLagan of Portland Community Collage, the adversities went beyond the struggle of the journey and the difficult road to prosperity. We will examine some of the special challenges and remarkable achievements of Oregon’s African American citizens.

November 7th, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: Jewish Oregonians with Ellen Eisenberg
Gun totin’ rabbis? Jewish homesteaders? In popular culture Jews are so strongly associated with New York that western Jewish images strike some as oxymoronic. Yet Jews have, since before statehood, been Oregonians. This talk by Ellen Eisenberg, the Dwight and Margaret Lear Professorship in American History at Willamette University, explores who they were, why they came, and the reception they found here. Several snapshots of Jewish Oregonians will be used to illustrate their experiences as immigrants and as native sons.

November 14th, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: The Japanese in Oregon with June Schumann
Immigrants from Japan were among many groups from throughout the world…across the Atlantic as well as the Pacific Ocean who settled in Oregon and were participants in the growth and development of the state through the years. Through historic photographs from Oregon families, June Arima Schumann, the former executive director of the Nikkei Legacy Endowment, gives us an overview of early Japanese settlements and touches on one of the important chapters in American (and Oregon) history. This talk explores how the history of people of Japanese ancestry is part of the larger American experience. It also suggests how this history is relevant to discussion about civil liberties, how we understand our country’s past, and how we might better understand issues facing us today.

November 21st, 2 p.m.
Immigrant Experience: Swedes in Oregon with Lars Nordström
Swedes began filtering into the Oregon Territory with the first wave of white settlers. At first, their numbers grew slowly, but after 1883, when the railroad connected Portland to the national grid, the flow accelerated. Swedish-American author Lars Nordström will explain that by1910 Swedes were the second-largest foreign-language immigrant group in the state. The influx diminished by the end of the 1920s, and ever since, Swedish immigration toOregon has been a tiny but steady trickle.

Mission Mill Museum 1313 Mill St SE Salem, OR 97301
(503) 585-7012 fax (503) 588-9902