The Library Value Proposition

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

-- Isaac Asimov

It’s town meeting time in Vermont, and that means that we all get the town Annual Report in the mailbox. In amongst the repairing of the town road grader and the elementary school budget there are short reports from all the local organizations that want a fragment of our property tax money this year. One is from our local library, the Kellogg Hubbard.

KHL was founded in 1896 when Martin and Fanny (Hubbard) Kellogg left a bequest in their will to build a public library in Montpelier. Their nephew John Hubbard contested the will, but later funded the library and endowed it with a significant trust fund. That fund has been well tended for over a century, but since the economic troubles of 2001 and then 2007 the library has had to ask for more assistance from the local towns. Meanwhile, the library belt, never less than snug, has been tightened.

Reading the report, I was struck by the level of activity. KHL is the second busiest library in Vermont, and the busiest on a per capita basis. We are readers here in central Vermont. To quote the report: “This year patrons checked out 288,876 items, staff answered 39,437 reference questions, and nearly 41,000 computer sessions took place.”

Wait a sec. KHL is open six days a week, minus a handful of holidays. Call it 300 days in round numbers. I looked at their hours of operation and did a little rough calculating and that’s about 2750 hours. Run the numbers and that’s 105 items going across the desk every hour and a reference question every four minutes besides. That doesn’t include all the books and magazines that people read while there, the non-reference questions, and the 800 special events attended by 23,000 people. It’s a wonder the place doesn’t overheat from the mass synaptic activity.

The cost for all this, plus outreach programs, children’s programs, interlibrary loan, and heating, lighting, and maintaining a century old building, runs around $950,000 a year.

This is the estimated cost of maintaining one soldier in Afghanistan for a year, or one three-hundred-forty-fifth of an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. I’ll leave the depressing military comparisons at that.

I was remarking on the relative cheapness of the place to The Librarian, and she noted that many people, when paying their late fees, remark, “Well, it’s cheaper than buying books.” How much cheaper? Consider that these days a hardcover averages $26, and a paperback $16. The library circulates audio books all the time, and those can cost more than hard bound books. Textbooks and reference books tend to push up towards $100. Using $20 as a conservative per-book average, those 288, 876 items kaching out to just under $5.8 million, about 6 times the actual cost of having the KHL. One would have to take up a life of crime to get that kind of return on investment anywhere else. Of course, that 6 to 1 return doesn’t take into account all the internet time, the reading room, the meeting rooms, the reference help, or the special events. – readings, discussions, movies – that are there for free.

I am being financially reductionist here, and that’s an injustice to the library. The value of the accumulated and available knowledge, the arena for discussion, the safe place for kids, the locus of an intellectual community, is beyond numbers.

So stand up for your library in town meeting. Stand up for it in any political venue you have. Write a check directly if you can handle it – many drops make a bucket.

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.  I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.  ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Iran’s Bomb and Fuel Cell Cars – Almost

Your Minor Heretic used to be in the electric car business, in a minor way. I tracked all the developments in batteries, controllers, and other relevant hardware. That included hydrogen fuel cells, the darlings of the engineering geeks. Thing was, practical fuel cells for cars were always ten years away. They still are. And Iran's bomb?

One of my favorite bloggers, The Rude Pundit, just posted a piece about Iran’s supposed quest for nuclear weapons. According to the pundits and military experts, Iran has been two, or three or six years away from having an Islamobomb since around 1984. What an appropriate date. The year of mullahgeddon keeps getting pushed back because, in fact, they have never developed the capability. The general consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies is that they gave up on any effort towards nuclear weaponry as far back as 2003.

A theory that makes sense to me is that Iran doesn’t want an actual atomic bomb. It wants the potential for a bomb. Always the potential. One or two actual bombs wouldn’t really do it much good, strategically speaking. Israel has over 200, with thousands more sitting around in the U.S., France, and the U.K. An actual atomic bomb would just be a shit magnet.

However, uncertainty about Iran’s intentions and development of a bomb is better, albeit a tricky balancing act. Iran is suffering from some imbalance right now, what with sanctions and saber rattling. With Russia and China on its side Iran can expect to survive this wobble. Where Iran would like to be is the center of attention, with the major powers split. It can then use its nonexistent nuclear weapons non-program as a bargaining chip for whatever its priorities are at the time. Nothing like trading something you don’t have for something you actually want. The uncertainty has done wonderful things, by Iranian standards, for the price of oil. The nuclear non-program also plays well internally. A sense of being embattled helps the mullahs keep people’s minds off other issues. (Sound familiar?) If they can finesse the situation, keeping the western powers’ meter on “nervous” but short of “aggressive,” they win.

It works on our side as well. Getting back to fuel cells, a lot of companies sucked up a lot of money almost perfecting them. People wanted to believe, and both investors and taxpayers ponied up billions for that “almost”. The military and security industries must love Iran. If I were the CEO of a major military contractor I’d be sending thank-you cards to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Mahmoud: Love what you do. Insult Israel again, ok? And do a photo op next to a centrifuge. Our 3^rd quarter earnings need a boost.”

Now that Iraq is winding down and we’re looking at an end date for Afghanistan, our war life needs a little spicing up. Iran looks to be the next excuse for bankrupting ourselves and enriching the likes of General Dynamics. It will work out beautifully for Mahmoud, the mullahs, and the millionaires if we can keep things at “almost.”

If They Were Really Persons

A friend of mine and I were discussing the concept of corporate personhood. Yeah, that’s what we talk about here in Central Vermont when we are tapped out on deer hunting, snowmobiles, and how bad mud season was last year.

Review: The Supreme Court decided in Citizens United that corporations are persons and therefore have free speech rights, which means money donating rights, which translates into tanker-loads of cash flooding our already corrupt political system.

I mentioned the sign at Occupy Wall Street that said, “I’ll believe that corporations are persons when Texas executes one.”

My friend raised the concept of corporations as persons having the right to marry. We mused on this for a moment.

I brought up the issue of same-business mergers. Would Americans support an oil company marrying another oil company?

My friend admitted that Exxon/Mobil made him uncomfortable. I had to agree. Many would say that this oil company on oil company stuff threatens and dishonors traditional mergers. I mean, Exxon/Ben & Jerry’s is normal, but Morgan Stanley/Smith Barney just creeps me out. It’s not just same-business, it is polygamy. More alarming, these same-business mergers actually hire professional firms for “recruitment.” They advertise themselves for sale in public offerings. Won’t someone think of the children?

I forget which one of us brought up jury duty. How would we handle that with, let’s say, Lockheed Martin? It employs 126,000 people in the U.S. alone. Do they all have to show up? Jury selection would be restricted to the largest sports stadiums. Can an attorney reject Lockheed Martin as a juror based on the bias of one employee, or would it have to be a majority? The interviews would take months. Does the company get shut down for the duration and get $10 a day for lunch? Or could it be just the board of directors? What if they, as one person, deliver a split decision? Or would it be the stockholders who would have to show up? This corporate personhood thing is more complex than it seems at first glance.

Under the new Defense Authorization Act, persons deemed enemy combatants, or supporters of Al Qaeda, or the brother-in-law of the best friend of the nephew of someone who once talked politics with a guy who shared an apartment with someone who donated money to an Islamic charity can be detained indefinitely without trial or appeal or habeas corpus or even being told why they are being detained.

I think that the thirteen largest banks in the U.S. have supported Al Qaeda. Maybe. Which is good enough, apparently, to have missiles shot at them from drone aircraft without a trial. Can we start with Bank of America? Detain some, blow up some others, see if I care which, as long as we cancel the mortgages and credit card debts.

There are all sorts of slings and arrows we persons have to face, a thousand ills that the flesh is heir to. It’s only fair that corporate persons should have to endure the same. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to make a legal fiction get an annual colonoscopy.

Solar Exceptionalism

My partnership just finished work on a commercial scale solar installation. It is a quarter acre of solar panels that should produce about 48,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. It was a complex piece of work, from design to final wiring. It also presented a difficulty in that we had to install it in December and January. Why would we do something like this in midwinter? Take a seat. I’ll spare you as many technical details as possible.

The owners of this system started out by applying for Vermont’s SPEED program, which requires utilities to pay a higher price for renewable electricity, up to a small percentage of their overall capacity. Response to this program was so overwhelming that the state ended up having a lottery to see who got on the list. Our clients got on the waiting list, but some people above them dropped out, so they made it onto the list last September. We immediately plowed into the permit and incentive process. Because of the structure of renewable energy incentives, we had a deadline of January 31, 2012 to complete the job, get the electrons flowing, and file the paperwork.

The first and foremost obstacle was the Vermont State Historic Preservation Office. The incentive money comes from the feds, and the feds demand a review of possible disturbance of a historic site. Ok, fine, but exceptional. More on exceptional later. Our client called SHPO every week for five weeks, each time leaving a message explaining the reduction of our timeline by one week. On the sixth week he called every day, and finally got a response. They would have to do a complete archeological survey. Game over. We’d never have time to do that and complete the job. Our client expressed himself forcefully on the subject of delay, and they said that they would send someone right over to look at the site. The next day a SHPO employee visited the site, looked around, and said, “Oh, this is no problem. Go ahead.” Six weeks. Face palm. We sprinted ahead.

I have some thoughts on Solar Exceptionalism. We ran into this last year with a client who wanted to put solar panels on the newly metal-roofed shed dormer on his house. Because his house is more than 50 years old, in order to apply for the incentives we had to hire a consultant to determine whether the historic value of the house would be ruined by solar panels. This was an old farmhouse that had additions, an added porch, picture windows, new metal roofing, dormers, and who knows what else tacked on. All of that was done with only an ordinary building permit, and some of it probably without. Nevertheless, the client had to pony up hundreds of dollars for a consultant to write a report on what anybody could see through binoculars. Then we could put solar panels on top of the new raised seam roofing.

Let’s take the example of a ranch house built in 1960. It just makes the 50 year rule. If it was my house I could add, subtract, or divide it any way I liked with nothing more than a standard building permit from the town. I could bulldoze the whole thing and load it into dumpsters. But I couldn’t put solar panels on the roof, or even in its vicinity, without a study and approval from SHPO. Not if I wanted the incentive money. Roughly a third of the houses in Vermont are over 50 years old, and few of them are pristine historic buildings. An insider’s note: no installer in his right mind would try to put solar panels on a slate roof. Historical value aside, the stuff is just too brittle to work with.

If I wanted to build a house on a piece of land, with only an ordinary town building permit I could dig a hole 20 feet wide by 30 feet long and 10 feet deep for the foundation. On the other hand, if I wanted to drill a posthole five feet deep for mounting a solar array, you guessed it; I’d need a full historical review.

Similarly, if I want to build a 5000 square foot Mc Mansion with three stories and a turreted tower and paint it hunter safety orange I can do so with an ordinary building permit. If my neighbors don’t like my design sense they can go ___________. However, if I want to install a six-foot square ground mounted solar array I need to send copies of my Certificate of Public Good application (including a visual impact assessment) to all adjoining landowners, the town planning commission, the town zoning commission, the town select board, the Public Service Department, the Public Service Board, and the utility, as well as SHPO. For one client I sent out fourteen information packets. His solar array was in a clearing in the woods next to his driveway and couldn’t be seen by anyone beyond his property line. That included his adjoining neighbor half a mile away across the river. Any one of them, whether they could see the array or not, had a right to stall the project. We had to wait a month for responses before proceeding with construction.

One of my business partners has expressed his impression that there are more people engaged  in shuffling papers than installing solar panels.

I’m not one of those deregulatory fanatics. Regulation of building projects, solar or otherwise, is right and necessary if we want to avoid ruining our environment or desecrating historic sites. However, we have a problem of proportion.

My general impression, formed over years in the renewable energy business, is that regulations concerning anything that produces power are scaled for multi-megawatt facilities. In a conversation with an official at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about small hydro permitting, he said (without irony), “Five watts or five megawatts, it’s the same process.” As much as anything I think this is a result of legislative inertia.

Forty years ago a new power plant was a huge thing – acres of buildings and tons of concrete. It used trainloads of coal or dammed a major river. The trend over the past few decades has been away from the centralized plant producing hundreds of megawatts and towards smaller, decentralized plants. Among these might be repowered hydroelectric sites producing tens to hundreds of kilowatts, or industrial rooftops and brownfield sites of the same scale. At the bottom of the power production scale is a few thousand watts of solar panels on a residential roof.

There have been advances in the rules regarding small power producers. The process for getting a Certificate of Public Good to generate solar power has been shortened to a few pages for residential systems. Still, there are threads trailing back to the days of megawatt power plants.

A local couple contacted me, interested in producing a few kilowatt-hours a day from a stream in a gulley on their land. I looked at the situation and figured they could get about 450 watts from a micro-hydro generator about the size of a toaster oven. That’s about 10 kWh a day, enough to run a frugal household. Most of the year about 80% of the water in the stream would run past the intake and down the gulley. They might have to throttle the machine back in August and September. So, great, right? Not so fast.

I had to get approval from

The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (water quality permit)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (interconnection license)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (river modification permit)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency (environmental impact study)

I gave it a shot, just as an experiment. Everyone was very polite and helpful, in an unhelpful sort of way. ANR had no fixed process and recommended that I work things out with FERC first. (They are, apparently, on the road to a methodology now.) The guy at FERC (“five watts or five megawatts”) sent me information on publishing my project in the Federal Register and holding a series of stakeholder meetings with “parties with legal standing” and local indian tribes. It was looking like at least a year to get through the FERC process. He also sent me back to ANR, which sent me back to FERC, and so on. Army Corps sent me a ¾” thick book describing the process of obtaining an exemption to a permit for small projects. One teaspoonful of soil moved below the high water line of any body of water triggers their jurisdiction. The nice woman at USF&W said that they would be happy to send an inspector over for only $918 a day. She figured that it might cost $20,000 to get USF&W approval, which was more than the estimated cost of the hardware. So I gave up.

If I had been installing something on the scale of Hoover Dam, this all would have been chump change. It also would have been necessary, given the huge impact of a megawatt scale dam. I was proposing something the size of a toaster oven, so I had to express my regrets to the potential clients and move on.

It makes me think of the old saying that generals are always fighting the previous war. The practical scale of electrical generation has dropped by a factor of a thousand, but the law hasn’t caught on to that fact. All commercial sources of energy in the modern world live or die by regulation and subsidy. If we are going to make the transition to distributed renewable energy before we run headlong into shortages, permitting is going to have to change to deal with the new reality.

Feedback Loop

You may have noticed an article in the Washington Post comparing the popularity of various institutions to that of Congress. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress, at 9%, beats Fidel Castro (5%) and ties Hugo Chavez, but is below the approval for the concept of the U.S. going Communist, at 11%. The fact that at least one in ten Americans is willing to reverse the Cold War is interesting in itself. However, my focus is on Congress, and why even BP during the Macondo oil spill (16%) beats their approval rating.

I have written in earlier posts about the concept of hyperscopic life. (You may wish to review here, here, here, and here.) The short version is that a corporation fulfills all the qualities that scientists use to identify a living organism. My conclusion – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. The problem with corporations is that a duck is a lot smarter than a corporation but a corporation has political power.

Human beings serve corporations, and so naturally corporations have many of the characteristics of human beings. To be more specific, psychopathic human beings, as defined by their behaviors and psychiatric literature. One thing that humanity does very effectively is to modify our environment. We cut down forests, drain swamps, build roads, dam rivers, and blast the tops off of mountains. We build houses and breakwaters and other barriers against the forces of nature. Corporations modify their environment as well, but we must consider that their environment is both physical and legal. We might say that the legal environment is as physical to them as air, water, and land are to us. Law is also DNA and connective tissue to a corporation, meaning that it can modify both its internal and external environment.

As with the physical world, there is resistance to this modification. It is institutional, active, and consequential. By institutional I mean that human beings put into place legal strictures that limit corporate agency. These could be campaign finance laws, lobbying restrictions, conflict of interest laws, and transparency laws. By active I mean groups of citizens actively opposing corporate reach into legislation. By consequential I mean that corporations are too short sighted and narrow of vision to properly calculate the consequences of their actions. If either law or enforcement is inadequate they end up like Enron or Lehman Brothers, collapsing from the excess they pursued.

The tide turned for corporations back in 1976, with the Buckley vs. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court. The Court decided that donating money was the constitutional equivalent of political speech, thus making plutocracy official and ending our progress towards democracy. Corporations have gained ground continuously since then. It is a positive feedback loop. As they gain more political power they are able to reduce the resistance to their modification of their environment. This includes all three of the modes of resistance I outlined above.

The millionaires and billionaires who engage in symbiotic parasitism on the corporate herd have veto power over entry into politics. Candidates have to raise those two-thousand dollar donations in order to stand a chance. This restricts the boundaries of legislation to initiatives acceptable to corporate remoras, which means fewer restrictions on corporate power. Once enough presidents and senators have been elected this way, then the Supreme Court can be stacked, and the Constitution gets interpreted to benefit further corporate power. Witness the Citizens United decision.

Similarly, information (or, more likely, disinformation) is supplied to citizens by a shrinking handful of ever larger communications conglomerates. Citizens can’t oppose what they don’t know about, and they won’t oppose what they have been convinced is in their interests. The internet has provided some outlet for human voices, but the behemoths of the business are always making efforts to fence that in as well. The latest outrage is the ProtectIP/SOPA bills, which would allow the big media players to shut down competing sites without due process.

Even the consequential restrictions on corporate action have been buffered by massive government intervention. Instead of taking over bankrupt financial firms and writing down mortgages to market prices, the government just stuck a funnel in the top of the banking industry and poured in a trillion dollars.

So there is a feedback loop going on. The accelerating accumulation of power by corporations allows the increasing acceleration of their accumulation of power. The problem for corporations in this situation is that some restrictions are necessary to prevent them from destroying their own environment. The idiocy that culminated in the 2007 financial meltdown is one symptom of corporate self-direction. Another symptom is the congressional approval rating.

Corporations are so short sighted and so programmed for self interest that they habitually overreach. Eventually even the cleverest psychopath buries too many bodies in the backyard and it begins to stink. The stink of political corruption has gotten so obvious that even the propaganda efforts of corporate media can’t cover it. In good times a certain amount of corruption can make it past the public with a knowing eye roll, but when everybody knows (or is) someone who is one of the long term unemployed, and when everyone knows (or is) someone on the wrong end of an underwater mortgage, public consciousness shifts. As long as most people were on an upward economic trend, or at least there was a promise of upward mobility for the next generation, people could put up with their lot. Now we’re looking at structural unemployment and underemployment, while college has become too much of a financial burden for too many, with no reasonable guarantee of a benefit. Corporations and their elite parasites have simply sucked too much wealth out of the economy.

This has given them the power to change the economic rules so that they can suck out even more. Up to a point. Another symptom of the ever tightening feedback loop is the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as dozens of other movements focused directly on taking power away from corporations. Review any number of opinion polls from the last decade and you’ll find that a consistent 75% (or more) of respondents say that big business and their lobbyists have too much power. The question is whether these various political movements can turn this sentiment into real action and a real power shift. The corporate grip on the means of communication and legislation is firm. On the other hand, who would have thought a couple of years ago that Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would have pitched out their dictators? I have no conclusion here, except to note that the fight is out in the open now. I guess that’s half the battle.