Wall Street looting US Social Security

Interesting article entitled 'Wall Street Targets the Elderly: Looting Social Security'.

It's by Paul Craig Roberts, once editor of the Wall Street Journal, not to mention Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. For an ex-WSJ editor, he has a refreshingly robust attitude to the bad guys:

Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail.

Surely there is some application of the negligence or conspiracy laws that would allow us to put Hank and one or two (thousand) of his pals in the slammer?

James Hansen and the inexorable slide toward nuclear power.

On his Storms of My Grandchildren site, James Hansen talks about how intolerable coal-powered power stations are in any realistic future, and claims that:

in most countries, phase-out of coal emissions requires also a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal. Until we have another way to meet 21st century energy needs while eliminating coal and carbon emissions, nuclear power appears to be the only option.

From this he infers that even nuclear power would be the lesser of these two evils, concluding that

The (“3rd generation”) nuclear technology ready to replace the aging 2nd generation reactors in the United States and other counties is inherently safer than existing nuclear power, which already has an exemplary safety record – however, it still burns less than one percent of the nuclear fuel and leaves a long-lived nuclear waste pile. Hansen recommends initiating urgent development of a fourth-generation nuclear power plant. These “fast” nuclear reactors utilize more than 99 percent of the fuel and can “burn” nuclear waste, thus solving the nuclear waste problem that concerns so many.

This doesn't seem to me to follow. Why is he so confident that these fourth-generation nuclear power plants are any less pie-in-the-sky than carbon capture? It's the first time I have heard anyone suggest that the problems of safety and spent nuclear fuel could be a thing of the past. I would very much like to hear Hansen's reasoning. Not that I would like CCS any more than him, but it doesn't make much sense to be asked to choose between two mirages.

But there's a more important assumption in Hansen's commentary. He argues that, if we are to avoid both fossil fuels and nuclear power, then we need 'a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal'. It is certainly a most attractive option. However, my reading of the technical literature leads me to two conclusions. One, such an option will not exist for many years to come. And two, we can't afford to wait that long.

So how is it Professor Hansen can claim that the solution needs to be 'competitive in price with coal'? Given the magnitude of the potential problem - a series of disasters and creeping destruction that will dwarf any previous human experience short of, perhaps, a re-run of the global plague in the 14th century, surely this is like saying that we should have decided our strategy for the Second World War on the basis of whether it would have been as painless as peace.

Plainly this would be nonsense, and as in the case of WW2, there is little doubt what the consequences of continuing prevarication will be. Add to this the impact of ever-expanding resource depletion, ecosystems collapse and 40% more people by 2050, and waiting for another cheap energy source to come along sounds like madness. It would be nice if we were in a position to choose between cheap, friendly, familiar options, but we aren't. Meanwhile, our social, political and economic system is awash with people and interests for which an effective solution would be anathema, if not fatal.

Of course, we are not at war, and such metaphors are as likely to be misleading as helpful. But to pretend that we can reach Professor Hansen's own goals without paying a price and making preparations comparable to a war strikes me as unwarranted optimism, if not self-deception.

Al Gore, Kurt Vonnegut and the siren voices

At the very start of his 2009 book, Our Choice, Al Gore, Nobel Prize winner and darling of so much of the environmental movement, quotes the message Kurt Vonnegut suggested we should leave behind for any passing aliens who may happen upon the wreckage of planet Earth. ‘Carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall’, it would read:

We probably could have saved ourselves, but were too damned lazy to try very hard… and too damned cheap.

When you have stared at our current environmental problems for long enough and marvelled at how little we seem to be willing to do to save ourselves or our children, it is tempting to go along with Vonnegut. But both he and Gore are wrong. We are not too lazy or too cheap and the solutions on offer from Mr Gore will not solve our problems. Neither the problems we face nor the solutions that will deliver us have much to do with technology or making business and governments account for the true cost of energy, manufacturing, agriculture, transport, etc., mass individual action, or any of the other things Gore advocates. Yet it is in many ways a very good book.

The real problem is not our inability to understand or act upon our present problems. It is rather that we are already committed to another way of doing things that prevents us from taking up any of the credible solutions to our environmental problems. Perhaps it’s worth quoting Aldous Huxley again here:

In the nurseries, … the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying’, they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…’

The siren voices of growth, consumption, free markets, entrepreneurship and all the rest are busily pointing us in quite the wrong direction. The resources and system needed to fix our problems are under the control of processes, systems and institutions and in the hands iof nterests that would be completely undone by actually carrying the solution.

So the political powers-that-be, who have spent the last three decades abandoning the idea that the world could be a better place only if it were a different place, would have to perpetrate a genuine revolution to get us onto the right track.

Perhaps the single most important thing is to stop thinking of the problem as primarily reflecting personal selfishness (even of investment bankers). Personal actions are certainly part of both the problem and the solution, but it will only have a peripheral effect so long as we fail to also think of both problem and solution in systemic terms. Vonnegut was writing as a novelist and entitled not to be read too literally. But those who fail to understand the nature of our economic system, and the necessities and pressures it places on individuals, institutions and other systems (e.g., the entire social and political systems) are merely standing on the beach trying to bail out the ocean while the tide is coming in faster and faster.

Remember, Odysseus was forced to listen to the Sirens only because there were no other options open to him. Likewise we have few options that will in any way improve our environmental predicament - unless we change our ship and the ocean we sail. Likewise, even our most venal bankers were only following the system. Given a different system, they might not have had the option of running the ship onto the rocks (oops, different part of the Odyssey).

Consumerism, 1932

I re-read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and what do I find?

In the nurseries, … the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying’, they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…’

£10 to the first person who can explain why this isn't true

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_economy_grinds_to_halt_as

Danny Chivers - Poet Laureate for the Environment

If you haven't already heard of him, take a listen to Danny Chivers. His poems on the environment and on business are brilliant, enthralling, funny and biting. He also knows his stuff, being (according to azclimatechange.com) a professional carbon footprinting consultant based in Oxford with two environmental Masters degrees.

For more on Danny, go to his blog, at A Daisy Through Concrete or his MySpace page. Or watch him on YouTube. And buy his new CD. We did, and it's excellent.

Get him to your children's school, to your local climate change event, to your front room. And pay him lots - we need more people like him.

Will the Volcker Rule work? No.

When the last crisis kicked off, organisations such as Goldman Sachs were not banks, and therefore would not have able to request support from the US government had the proposed Volcker Rule been in force then. In fact they weren't able to ask for government help then either.

So how did the US Government respond to the crises at Goldman, Morgan Stanley and the rest? By making them banks, even though they plainly were not. It was a fig leaf, to bend the rules so that they would not fail.

So if, in order to avoid the Volcker Rule, these same organisations ceased to be banks, and if there were a new crises that threatened them, what would the US Government do? Going by the evidence of 2008, they would allow them to be banks again.

What possible good will the Volcker Rule have done then, other than to create an illusion of safety for the government and allowing the investment banks to engage in dangerous activities until things get too hot, at which point they will be rescued just like they were last time?