What Obama Should Have Said

President Obama held yet another one of those pointless town hall meetings in Montana recently. It did allow him to respond to some of the absolute mythology that the health insurance industry has been promoting, but the format itself is the folksy equivalent of a show trial. There is only the illusion of discussion and thought. Television viewers get the vicarious satisfaction of seeing their views expressed, pro or con, and the president gets to make his case to the .02% of the population as yet undecided.

Here’s one exchange:

Q My name is Mark Montgomery. I'm from Helena, Montana.

THE PRESIDENT: Great to see you, Mark.

Q I appreciate you coming here. It's great to be able to do this.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

Q Mr. President, I make a living selling individual health insurance. (Laughter.) Obviously I've paid very close attention to this insurance debate. As you know, the health insurance companies are in favor of health care reform and have a number of very good proposals before Congress to work with government to provide insurance for the uninsured and cover individuals with preexisting conditions. Why is it that you've changed your strategy from talking about health care reform to health insurance reform and decided to vilify the insurance companies? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, you are absolutely right that the insurance companies, in some cases, have been constructive. So I'll give you a particular example. Aetna has been trying to work with us in dealing with some of this preexisting conditions stuff. And that's absolutely true. And there are other companies who have done the same.

Now, I want to just be honest with you, and I think Max will testify, that in some cases what we've seen is also funding in opposition by some other insurance companies to any kind of reform proposals. So my intent is not to vilify insurance companies. If I was vilifying them, what we would be doing would be to say that private insurance has no place in the health care market, and some people believe that.

I don't believe that. (Applause.) What I've said is let's work with the existing system. We've got private insurers out there. But what we do have to make sure of is that certain practices that are very tough on people, that those practices change.

Now, one point I want to make about insurance: Some of the reforms that we want for the insurance market are very hard to achieve, unless we've got everybody covered. This is the reason the insurance companies are willing to support reform, because their attitude is if we can't exclude people for preexisting conditions, for example, if we can't cherry pick the healthy folks from the not-so-healthy folks, well, that means that we're taking on more people with more expensive care. What's in it for us? The answer is if they've got more customers, then they're willing to make sure that they are eliminating some of these practices. If they've got fewer customers, they're less willing to do it.

So it's important for people -- when people ask me sometimes, why don't you just do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself. The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody is covered and everybody has got a stake in it, and then the insurance companies are able and willing to make some of these changes that will help people who have insurance right now. But thank you for the question. I appreciate it. (Applause.)

Sorry, Mr. President, but that was anemic. Here’s a preferable response.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, I am vilifying insurance companies because they richly deserve vilifying. In fact, when you look at their behavior over the past few decades, you’ll see that they deserve prosecution for fraud. In some cases they probably deserve prosecution for murder, when denial of coverage could easily have been predicted to cause the death of the insured person. Where’s the Tarpeian rock when you need it? Whoops, any classics scholars out there? (Laughter) In ancient Rome they pitched murderers off a rocky cliff, and at least figuratively that’s what we need to do to the health insurance industry. (Applause)

They are playing at cooperation with reform efforts right now. I guess that with the Blue Dog Democrats in their pockets they expect to write in some more subsidies for themselves. They certainly aren’t acting out of the goodness of their hearts, because, well, there’s no goodness in there. Just raw profit motive.

There is ample evidence that they have groups of employees whose sole purpose is to exploit any tiny loophole in their complex contracts to deny people the coverage they paid for and that they deserve. The whole industry is based on suckering people into signing flawed contracts and then breaking those contracts when they think they can get away with it. That’s fraud. It’s also downright immoral. The executives and upper management should consider themselves lucky if they don’t end up behind bars. Once they are in prison I’d make them pay out of pocket for their medical care. (Laughter, Applause)

So, Mr. Montgomery, I consider you the equivalent of a minor errand runner for an organized crime family. Perhaps you do your job with the best of intentions, but thousands of Americans die every year thanks to the efforts of your employers, and millions more suffer pain and hardship. Tens of thousands go bankrupt. If I have my way you will be looking for a new job soon, one that doesn’t involve contractual fraud and sucking the lifeblood from the American people. I hope you enjoy your new anus. I enjoyed tearing it for you. Okay, time for one more question – back there…

In my dreams. Now it seems that the White House is backing off from the public health insurance option. The insurance companies will continue their dominance in the sole industrialized nation without a public health care program. We’ll keep forking over the money and fighting for our benefits. It’s the money, folks, the campaign money.

Wind and Community

Perhaps you have read (those of you who live in Vermont) about the wind power project proposed for Ira, West Rutland, and surrounding towns. A company called Community Wind, headed by a man named Per White-Hansen, wants to develop a wind farm approaching 80 megawatts in capacity on the ridgelines in the area. It has generated intense controversy. Here is a clip from one of the public meetings attended by Mr. White Hansen and his public relations man Jeff Wennberg, former Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. A local resident asks about a device he found on his land:



I know some folks from that area who have attended a number of these meetings. The developers have done just about everything wrong. One could catalog their process into a book: "How to Alienate Local Communities and Botch a Wind Development Project." They started with secret lease agreements with gag orders attached. Then, as noted in the video clip, they (or their consultants) trespassed on people's land and put up monitoring devices without the landowner's permission. They changed their story depending on their audience. And so on.

I relayed this info to a friend of mine who is involved with Renewable Energy Vermont, our state's renewable energy organization. He said that he had already gotten a dozen calls about it from within the organization. The consensus was "These idiots are making us all look bad." Of course, hiring Jeff Wennberg, Governor Douglas’s slap in the face to the Vermont environmental community, was not a brilliant strategic move either. Mr. White-Hansen recently announced that he was scaling back his plans, eliminating turbines around Suzie’s Peak in Tinmouth. He explained it as an enlightened response to public opinion, but the word on the dirt roads is that he couldn’t get key landowners to sign necessary leases.

So these particular developers are making a bollocks of the job. What about the subject in general?

Non-renewable energy is non-renewable, so we are going to be running on renewable at some point. That is a definite end state. Fewer, larger energy systems are more cost effective than many small ones, in general. If we want relatively low cost energy we are going to have to install fewer, larger generators, which will have concentrated impact on particular communities. In the case of wind, these will be communities with specific topography such as the high ridgelines in Ira, Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, and Danby.

It raises questions of local vs. state balance. We could say "Fine, citizens of Ira (or any other town with a good wind site), you want a few small wind turbines for yourselves, so you and the rest of Vermont will endure dramatically higher electricity prices in the future." We could, with appropriate attention to local concerns and reasonable mitigation of effects, ask them to host a megawatt-scale wind farm. The locals would experience a mix of benefits and problems.

We experience this question of balance and localized impact with our power system as it is today. Some people live near large, ugly, dirty conventional power plants. Some people live near large, ugly transmission lines and substations. Not everybody who lives near a power plant or transmission line benefits from it in what they would consider a fair proportion to what they sacrifice. Many of us live nowhere near a power plant or high voltage transmission line but enjoy the benefits thereof.

People sometimes ask me, "Why not just solar? Why do we have to have these huge wind turbines?" I ask them if they are willing to pay five times as much for electricity in the winter, when sun-hours are scarce and wind is plentiful. That's the decision we have to make. We are used to an unending and cheap supply of electricity from far off power plants brought in over huge power lines. We can’t assume that this will be the pattern in the future. In fact, we can safely assume that the paradigm will be exactly the opposite – smaller, decentralized power systems with distributed generation sources, making electricity for sub-regional markets.

That said, we do have to put in place some kind of rational guidelines for wind development so that developers like those presented above don't bulldoze in and screw people around. Conversely, so that one occasional summer resident can't throw a wrench in the works and deny us renewable electricity.

I don’t buy the aesthetics argument against wind power. What is beautiful in a landscape is entirely subjective and changes with time. I happen to dislike the appearance of farm silos. Nevertheless, they appear repeatedly in picturesque photos of Vermont in our premiere tourism magazine, Vermont Life. Why are multi-story unadorned concrete cylinders capped with galvanized steel domes considered picturesque? I like the dark blue Harvestore silos a bit better, but they were considered an aesthetic abomination when they were first introduced. Now they show up in those Vermont Life photos as well. I also dislike the appearance of gas stations, fast food outlets, big box stores, and pseudo-colonial McMansions, but each has its advocates touting economic utility, property rights, and consumer choice. We put up with a huge number of blights on our landscape that don’t actually need to be ugly or imposing simply because some real estate developers or corporate-backed franchisees had their way with us.

The key difference is that a fast food franchise does not technically have to be ugly but a wind turbine has to be tall. The farther the turbine blades get from the ground the faster and smoother the airflow they encounter. Faster and smoother wind means more power and longer turbine life, which means cheaper power. The power available in wind increases by the cube of the wind speed. Double the speed means eight times the power. Even the small increment of speed and smoothness offered by another ten feet of tower makes a noticeable difference. That also means that a wind turbine has to be located where there is decent wind. In Vermont that is a ridgeline between 1600 and 2400 feet high. At greater altitudes than 2400 feet the turbine blades tend to ice up in the winter. Tall and high up means visible, and there’s the rub.

Another constraint is transmission. Put some tens of megawatts of generation somewhere and you need sufficiently large power lines to get that electricity to market. There happens to be a high voltage line going west from Rutland along the Route 4 corridor, right at the northern end of the Ira/West Rutland ridgelines. Not every ridgeline in Vermont has a high voltage line running nearby, so that cuts down the possible locations dramatically.

There is an intellectual dishonesty to saying reflexively “Yes, wind power is important, just don’t put it here.” Not every location where wind is technically and economically possible is also environmentally and socially appropriate. Each citizen has the right and duty to question a developer and hold a wind development company to appropriate standards. But if everyone says, “Not here,” then are we all willing to accept the consequences?

Coal, natural gas, and uranium are getting scarcer by the hour. Someday we will have far less power available to us at a far greater price. In order to have a stable utility grid we will have to base our generation portfolio on the most stable renewable source, hydroelectric power. Wind, solar, wave power (on the coasts), and to a lesser extent, biomass, will make up the rest. In a best case scenario I can see us generating about a quarter of the electrical energy we now enjoy. We will need every kind of renewable energy source available to us. We can’t wait for the economics of scarcity to drive renewable energy development unless we want to endure a desperate interregnum, an electrical Dark Age, while we scramble to develop renewable generation.

That means that we need to start making hard decisions about the location of wind generation right now. The residents of towns with ridgelines and nearby transmission capacity need to realize that their little patch of Vermont was chosen by geologic and human history as one of a handful of viable sites for something we all need. I don’t expect or desire the residents of these towns to roll over and say “Do what you want.” I do expect them to formulate a positive, proactive vision of how they would like to see wind developed. I expect them to pressure the state government to create realistic and workable guidelines for wind development. Otherwise the eventual answer to the question “Got any electricity?” will be “Not here.”

Afghanistan: Corruption is the subject

I just read a post at the always-interesting site Registan about corruption in the Afghan National Police. It is sordid and depressing. It would be shocking if I hadn’t long ago ceased being surprised by what people do with guns and without supervision. I’ll quote the original article from Al-Aribiyah about what British troops found when they fought their way into Helmand Province.

As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.

When the Taliban arrived in the village 10 months ago and drove the police out, local people rejoiced, said Mohammad Rasul, a toothless elderly farmer who keeps a few cows and chickens in a neatly tended orchard of pomegranate trees, figs and grape vines.


Although his own son was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb five years ago, Rasul said the Taliban earned their welcome in the village by treating people with respect.

So, we have the ANP shaking people down like the local branch of the Mafia, and then engaging in brutal sexual abuse. Note that the farmer lost his son to the Taliban and yet prefers them to the ANP.

This is history repeating itself. Why, one might ask, were the Taliban able to take over and hold Afghanistan against all the other warlords? Were they better fighters? Were they better equipped? Better generaled? Nope.

They were honest. Damn them for a bunch of medieval, superstitious, woman-hating sadists, but they were, and are, a very legalistic bunch. Sharia law is a throwback to centuries ago, but it is law, and they rule by it.

After the Soviets were driven out Afghanistan had a not-very-charming civil war among the various warlord factions. From that time until the Taliban took over in 1996, a regular Afghan civilian could expect to be stopped on the road and robbed at gunpoint every few miles by the local militiamen. Businesses paid protection money. It was essentially a country ruled by organized crime, only less organized than Chicago in the 1920’s.

The Taliban, backed by factions within the Pakistani government, made headway in their successful fight for power by simply leaving people alone. If you grew your beard, kept your radio quiet and your women under wraps, you could go about your business in relative safety. Anybody who stole lost a hand, and unlike the previous non-administration, bribes and connections didn’t do the crook any good. Overall the Taliban were bureaucratic sticklers for procedure. It says something about the abysmal level that things had gotten to that Afghans preferred living in the legal equivalent of Europe in the year 1214. It says something about the failure of our efforts today that many still prefer it.

Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic partly because of the general chaos, partly because of our influence (more on that later) and partly because the country is tribal. Tribal societies work on the basis of familial and personal relationships, patronage, and nepotism. Afghanistan seems to have the worst of all worlds – the tradition of favoring relatives and rewarding followers without the original firm social structure that made it work. Endless war, the imposition of alien political structures, and huge flows of foreign cash have broken down the traditional safeguards. I’m not saying that Afghanistan ever had a golden age of lawfulness, just a set of traditions that were coherent enough to organize a society. The key to power in Afghanistan is eliminating corruption, or at least minimizing and regulating it.

How do we eliminate corruption in a country where loyalty is rented?

We could start by not underestimating the Afghans. The primary Afghan values are hospitality and practicality. They may not have progressive values about the role of women but they know how to adapt and survive. I have read accounts of local Afghan judges setting up mock “fair trials” for visiting UN representatives to show how well the reform efforts are going. Then, with the foreigners out of the way, the Potemkin courts get shut down and it is back to bribery and favoritism. They will get away with whatever we let them.

We could also start by cleaning up our own act. Our whole semi-privatized effort over there is riddled with corruption. Contractors are doling out bribes and protection money, which sustains and reinforces the present way of doing things.


Ultimately, we have to be willing to step away from our allies. Afghanistan has held greater importance in the minds of western governments than it really deserves. Great Britain and Russia played “The Great Game” of influence and espionage for decades in Central Asia, to no real advantage for either. We went in, ostensibly after Osama bin Laden, when with a bit more pressure we could have had him for a few diplomatic concessions. Now he is almost certainly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, so there goes that reasoning. Some see our interest in Afghanistan as relating to a non-Russian pipeline route for oil and gas out of the ‘stans. That is one pipeline that won’t get built for a while. The whole deal is such a loser that we could safely threaten Hamid Karzai and the whole wretched crew with abandonment if they don’t clean up their acts. That includes prosecuting the rapist policemen.

The two valuable things that we could offer the people of Afghanistan would be personal security and some kind of consistent justice. Until they see western presence as a source for these things they will find it in the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.

On Dealing With Uncertainty, and a Threshold

My crystal ball is out being repaired. It’s been in the shop for most of my life – starter problems, I think, or maybe the bearings. I share this problem with most of the people who analyze the fossil fuel industry. There are so many factors, so many hands on the steering wheel, that it is essentially impossible to predict price and supply except in long term generalities. Nobody can time the market.

We have been on an undulating production plateau for oil since roughly 2005. World production for all oil-like liquids has been hovering around 84 million barrels a day. Price volatility has stalled the development of new oil fields, resulting in what some commentators refer to as the “practical peak” in oil production. What they mean is that while the world economy wallows in depression, the production of our aging oil fields will continue to decline. This won’t affect prices because of lowered demand, so the new, more expensive to develop oil fields won’t get tapped. When the world economy starts to crawl out of its present collapse, oil demand will increase, bumping up against declining supply. Steeply increasing oil prices will kill the recovery, oil demand, and oil development. Repeat until Amish.

Similar problems afflict natural gas production. Coal energy production has been flat since 2001.

There is a similar problem with global heating due to the combustion of these same fossil fuels. The scientific consensus is that it is upon us and that it is dangerous, but nobody can say with absolute certainty how soon or how abruptly it will happen. Will it be a slow evolution or will it hit a threshold and accelerate wildly? Experts differ.

I have been pondering these dual and balancing uncertainties, fossil fuel depletion and global heating, and I’d like to advocate for immediate, accelerated action.

I like skydiving as an analogy. It has both the elements of risk and inevitability. Imagine that you are a careless skydiver. You jump out of a plane at some undetermined altitude, right into a bank of clouds. You have neglected to wear your altimeter, so you have no way of knowing your distance to the ground. You haven’t checked the weather, so you don’t know how close to the ground the cloud cover goes. There you are, falling blindly through the gray mist. You know the ground is down there, and that you will inevitably be making contact with it at some speed at some time. When do you pull your ripcord? You can’t wait till you break out of the clouds and see the ground. The clouds might be too low, and your chute wouldn’t have time to open. When faced with utter uncertainty and when delay may result in death, the only answer is immediate action. You may spend some time inconveniently floating down through the clouds, but no matter.

Some, especially those who work for fossil fuel companies, advocate a go-slow approach on energy and climate issues. Further study is needed before we act, they say. When you are falling and have no idea when you might go splat, that is no time to convene a committee to study the issue. It is time to pull the ripcord.

There is one strand of that ripcord I’d like to discuss. As a renewable energy consultant and installer, I am always doing calculations, including calculations about the economics of renewable energy installations. This morning I was working up a price quote for a potential customer. I subtracted the Vermont incentive and the federal tax credit, did an idle mental rule of thumb calculation, and had a sudden start.

Due to the economic slump and increased production there is a worldwide glut of photovoltaic (solar electric) modules. The price has dropped by about two dollars per watt over the past couple of years. $8.50 per installed watt used to be the off-the-cuff number for a residential scale solar. Now it is down to around $6.50 per installed watt. Subtract the Vermont incentive of $1.75/watt and the 30% federal tax credit and it comes to $3.33/watt. Now, consider that in Vermont this watt of solar will generate about 1.2 kilowatt-hours per year, or about 30 kilowatt-hours in its module’s 25 year warranted life span. $3.33 divided by 30 equals a levelized cost of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, almost exactly what I would pay today. (What I would pay, but I don’t, because my solar array feeds more back to the utility than I use.) The economics are more complicated than that, but as of now, in Vermont, residential solar electricity is roughly at parity with the electrons we buy at retail. We have reached a long sought threshold.

25 years may seem like a long payback, but that is a 4% return, rising with the cost of electricity, guaranteed as long as the sun rises, and covered under your homeowners insurance. It is a half a percent better for business owners, who can depreciate their solar assets.

H.446, now called Act 45, offers even more with a feed-in tariff that will probably land between 25 and 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. The Public Service Board, the utility lawyers, and the renewable energy and consumer advocates are still making the sausage on how that will play out. Still, the absolute baseline cost for net-metered customers is viable. It can only get better as retail electricity costs go up.

Solar hot water offers a better return than solar electricity, and energy efficiency better than that. Interest rates are low. So what are you waiting for? Pull the fossil fuel ripcord.

Orbits

I was in Philadelphia recently and saw a couple of remarkable things. A philosophical juxtaposition between them occurred to me.

The first was an exhibit at the Franklin Institute, a science museum, on Galileo. It was a traveling exhibit that included artifacts from museums in Italy, artifacts contemporary with Galileo. These included books about mathematics and astronomy, paintings, and scientific instruments. The instruments were made in a time when practical items were made to be beautiful as well as functional, so there was a lot of engraving and gilding to be seen. The premiere artifact, however, was Galileo’s telescope.  It is one of two attributed to him, a copper tube about four feet long, covered in paper and capped on either end with painstakingly hand ground lenses. It is with this instrument that he observed the heavens and exploded the earth-centered theory of the universe.

Before Galileo the dominant theory of the heavens places the earth at the center, motionless, with the sun, planets, and the fixed, crystalline sphere of stars rotating around it. It was called the Ptolemaic system, after the astronomer Ptolemy. There was a problem with this system in its primitive state, however, aside from being patently wrong. It didn’t explain what people observed. Because of the different orbital diameters and speeds of the various planets around the sun, other planets appeared to stop in their tracks, go backwards for a time, then reverse again and go forward. This is known as retrograde motion. Ptolemy worked up a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for this, and managed to cob together a theory that described the actual motions. Imagine walking in a large circle (the cycle) while whirling a ball on a string (the planet) in a small circle (the epicycle) over your head.

Galileo supported the Copernican, or heliocentric (sun-centered) system. When I write that Galileo exploded the earth-centered system, I mean that there was a loud noise and a stink. We have all read in school about how the church came down on him and forced his public recantation. His crime was one of heresy, contradicting church dogma of an immobile earth. It was a symbolic heresy as well. The power structures of the time were all central and hierarchical, with one man at the pivot. All people orbited the central figure, whether pope or monarch, and theology justified this unequal relationship.

This brings me to the second extraordinary thing I saw in Philadelphia. I visited the old section of the city and toured Congress Hall, where our legislators met from 1790 to 1800. On March 4, 1797, it hosted an epochal event – the inauguration of John Adams, the second president of the United States. It was an unprecedented transfer of power. Prior to that date, all major transfers of political power had involved blood. This blood was either literal, in cases of military force and assassination, or figurative, in the case of inheritance.

The inauguration was, as with Galileo, the explosion of a theory. In this case it was a literal expression of Galileo’s figurative heresy. Political power no longer revolved around one man, fixed at the center of lesser beings. The government of a country had become relativistic rather than absolute. However imperfect the new political structure, it didn’t need a complex and arbitrary theory to justify it.

One thing that concerns me about the evolution of our country is the continued focus on that man at the center. I have noticed a tendency in all political institutions to mimic the family. With small groups, committees and the like, I often notice someone trying to make the group into a version of his or her particular dysfunctional family. In the case of our nation, I notice people looking for a father figure, focusing on an individual personality rather than the relationship between the office and the people. People wish that we could get someone out of office or someone else in. That is Ptolemaic thinking. We should be thinking about the process by which an office holder such as the president gets into the position and our relationship with the office once he (so far) gets there. It is that process and relationship that determines the personality and capability of the person in office. The peaceful transfer of power between Washington and Adams was not dependent upon the personality of either man, but the political structure that surrounded them.

Political structure is less interesting to most people than personality and personal narrative, but it is infinitely more important. We have been granted a respite from the worst excesses of the Bush era with the inauguration of Barack Obama, but the president is still beholden to the financial powers that bankrolled his campaign and the campaigns of members of Congress. His presence in office is partially due to the structure of election laws across the country, which favor the partisan over the independent, the established over the new, and those with wealthy friends over those with many friends. We need to be Galilean in our thinking, and focus our efforts on those structures.