Mutually Assured Economic Destruction

Imagine a bunch of guys locked in a room, each with a grenade strapped to his chest, and each with a forefinger hooked into the pin of some other guy's grenade. If anybody pulls out, somebody else dies and everybody else gets hurt, perhaps killed.

That's the international currency and commerce gig right now. The U.S. of A is trillions of dollars in debt to China, Japan, and some Middle Eastern entities. Part of that is our ever-growing federal budget deficit, and part of that is our trade imbalance. Cheney, Bush and Company have Dad’s credit card, which has the highest limit on the planet. They are buying loads of cool stuff from all their friends in the military contracting business and handing out billions to the fossil fuel industries. Meanwhile, American drivers and consumers are exporting huge amounts of cash to oil producers and overseas manufacturers. We are also going into hock building and buying real estate, although that is slowing down dramatically. All this debt is keeping our economy running for the moment

Oil producers need America to stay economically healthy so they can get that continuous stream of oil revenue to keep their populations (somewhat) happy and stay in power. China needs America to keep buying plastic crap at an increasing rate so the Chinese economy doesn't collapse. America needs China, Japan, and a few others to keep buying our Treasury notes so we don't go bankrupt. America needs dollar denominated crude to keep the value of the dollar from collapsing and bankrupting us that way. Our providers of oil and plastic crap need the dollar to stay strong so that we can afford their oil and plastic crap. The oil producers are buying stuff from Asia, so more dollars are dumped there, which are then loaned back to us.

So, our spiraling debt is making everyone nervous. It's a game of reverse chicken. Every country that has bought our debt wants to be the one that pulls out of the dollar first, but without creating a run on the dollar. Every one of these countries knows that if it makes a major move, there will be a stampede. If the dollar crashes, then we’ll buy a lot less oil and plastic crap, and the planet-wide Ponzi scheme collapses. Millions of Chinese (and Indonesians and Malaysians and Koreans and…..) will get laid off and end up in the streets, starving quickly instead of slowly. Millions of ordinary folks in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Mexico, and other oil producing countries will find their public services and subsidies drying up. You’ll need a program to keep track of the riots and revolutions. For us, the price of everything will jump, along with interest rates. It will be mid-seventies stagflation on steroids.

The alternative to collapse is political suicide for our (semi)elected representatives. They will have to balance the books, mostly on the backs of those who have been making multi-thousand dollar donations to their campaign funds. It’s not about ideology – it’s just that those donors are the only ones with enough money left. We will have to pull out of Iraq and make major cuts to the military-industrial hog trough. We’ll have to roll back those tax cuts for millionaires and corporations, and probably ratchet up their rates back to the levels of the 1950’s. Our economy, which has staggered along on the biggest rubber check writing spree in human history, will go into deep recession. There will be major societal damage, but less than if we let the whole Rube Goldberg machine cartwheel off a cliff. Many members of congress will undoubtedly lose an eye in the ensuing frenzy of finger pointing.

The Republicans have had ideological brain surgery that prevents them from even conceptualizing the possibility of putting the corporate hogs on a diet. Most of the Democrats have been pre-selected by large donors for a similar policy aphasia and spines of the most flexible latex. I’m not optimistic.

We, as citizens, can do a few things:

1) Visualize $8 a gallon gasoline/heating oil/LPG and $20/1000BTU natural gas, and act accordingly.
2) Localize our buying habits.
3) Invest time and money in our local communities.
4) Work on minimizing our personal debts.
5) Utterly harass our elected representatives on the subject of campaign finance reform…no…make that campaign finance revolution. We need mandatory full public financing.
6) Depending on the success of campaign finance revolution, we can then swarm our elected reps on the subjects of debt reduction, including hog trough closings, and sharp reductions in our use of fossil fuels.

Options 1-4 are good things to do no matter what happens, and will begin to mitigate the local effects of international economic turmoil. Options 5 and 6 have a low probability of success, but we need to pursue them anyway, just to maintain our status as conscientious citizens.

Did I hear the muffled click of two pins being pulled?

UPDATE: I have to admit that this essay is substantially wrong, at least in terms of currency economics. I got seduced by the panic-mongers. See this later essay for a correction. I stand by my recommendations for action, especially in terms of campaign finance reform.

Noel Perrin, the Tokugawa Shogunate, and Land Mines

Last Sunday I went to a memorial gathering. It was near the second anniversary of the death of the writer Noel Perrin, and Terry Osborne, his friend and now the owner of his house, invited people to come reminisce and read from his works.

Noel Perrin is best known for his thoughtful and funny essays on rural life, collected in four books, starting with First Person Rural and ending with Last Person Rural. Terry Osborne has edited a collection of Ned’s pieces, called Best Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer. These books chronicle 40 years of a life split between teaching at Dartmouth, writing, and farming. The editor of The American Scholar, Robert Wilson, said that Noel had “the best plain prose style in America.”

Ned wrote a book unlike all his others, ostensibly on Japanese military history. Giving Up The Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, is an account of how Japan enthusiastically adopted and then rejected the use of firearms. Portuguese traders brought primitive matchlock firearms to Japan in the mid-1500’s. The Japanese copied them and improved on them, establishing a firearms industry. By 1600 Japan had more and better firearms than the rest of the world combined. This came at a price.

The new technology allowed a crowd of reasonably well trained peasants to defeat a group of highly skilled samurai. A samurai could no longer step forward from the line of battle, recite his illustrious ancestry, and challenge all comers to personal combat. Some rice farmer could drop him from a distance. Firearms allowed for larger numbers of less skilled, more easily replaced soldiers, which encouraged the building of armies and ill-advised military adventurism, including a disastrous invasion of Korea around the turn of the 17th century..

In the early 1600’s the Tokugawa shogunate that controlled Japan initiated a series of laws that restricted the manufacture and ownership of firearms. By the 1650’s firearms were a curiosity, occasionally used for hunting by the nobility. Japan had turned inward, and experienced 200 years of relative peace and prosperity.

I am not interested in this period of Japanese history as some kind of parable about modern gun control, nor do I see anything altruistic in the actions of the Japanese aristocracy. Neither did Noel. He wrote this book in 1979, when the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was going full bore. The constant rebuttal to arms control proposals was, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Once a technology exists, it will be used.” Noel wrote this book to counter that mindset. The Tokugawas took a second look at a technology and decided that it did not benefit them. The citizens of a democracy could do the same.

So, if not gun control, what am I writing about? First, that we don’t have to passively accept any and all socially or environmentally destructive technologies as an inevitable part of our lives. Second, that taking a laissez faire approach to the development and deployment of technology insures social and environmental damage. There is a direct relationship (which I will quantify another time) between the destructiveness, size, and wastefulness of a technology and the amount of money someone can make from it.

We, the people, need to plan and choose among technologies. Another multi-billion dollar boondoggle weapons system or a better way to collect solar energy? Another me-too cholesterol drug or a way to regenerate damaged spinal tissue? Time, brainpower, and funding are limited, and we need to prioritize. Much of the primary R&D in this country is publicly funded, and we have a right to decide where our money goes. We shouldn’t neglect the technologies that are already out there. We are well along in the process of eliminating ozone-destroying fluorocarbons from our chemical repertoire. Why not plutonium and perfluorates? Land mines and cluster bombs need to go back in the box. Are we going to let ourselves be shown up by a bunch of 17th century samurai?

Genetics, Morality, and Profanity

I recently read about research into the possible genetic influences on our sense of right and wrong. Some scientists believe that a moral conscience is an evolved brain function as much as a learned cultural artifact. I agree. I believe that there are several traits that have evolved in gregarious species, humans included, that interact and balance one another.

The smoking gun for genetically based morality is Tourette’s Syndrome. Tourette’s is a hereditary disease that manifests itself mostly as facial tics, meaningless involuntary vocal sounds, and involuntary body movements. However, in 10-15% of cases, it manifests as involuntary obscenities or aggressive speech. The unfortunate sufferer will suddenly swear, insult someone, or utter an ethnic slur (generally the opposite of how the person feels). It has been called “the uncontrollable urge to voice the forbidden.”

So, here we have an inherited disease that causes people to express what is forbidden. That fifteen percent of TS sufferers do not blurt out “Have a nice day!” Ergo, there is a piece of genetic code that recognizes what is acceptable and what is forbidden. It makes evolutionary sense. Even though there are cultural variations as to what is moral or immoral, our species needs members who can make that distinction.

The immediate counter argument is the wretched behavior of humans throughout history. War, murder, torture, theft, and deceit are always with us. How do we reconcile an inherited neurological understanding of right and wrong with all this?

I propose that there are two other fundamental forces at work, both necessary for survival in their own ways. One, as evidenced by the famous Milgram experiments, is the human tendency to obey authority figures. Stanley Milgram had each of his subjects paired with a “learner” (actually an actor) in a supposed educational experiment. The learner was placed in a room with fake electrodes on him, and the subjects asked him questions, giving him ever increasing shocks (so they thought) with each wrong answer. 65% of the subjects, sternly prodded by the experimenter, “shocked” the learner to the final limit.

Our treatment of authority figures is similar in nature to the dominance relationships in other species. Wolf packs have the alpha male and female, herds of horses have the stallion and the lead mare, and human beings have the doctor in the white coat, the general, and the political leader. Obedience to leaders is a survival trait that served our species well during the hundreds of thousands of years that we wandered around in groups no bigger than wolf packs. It has served us less well as our societies have grown larger and our weapons technology deadlier.

Another intrinsic trait among humans is conformity. Mirror neurons probably have a lot to do with this. Scientists in Italy, studying muscle-activating neurons in monkeys, found that the same neurons fired when the monkey was picking up a peanut or when the monkey saw a human picking up a peanut. Other researchers found the same response in humans, both for actions and emotions. When we observe other people doing things or feeling things, a part of our brain is actually experiencing the actions or emotions. This neurological mimicking is entirely involuntary and unconscious. There are also studies where the opinions of others modify an individual’s behavior or actual perception of reality, on subjects as basic as the color of a projected slide (Moscovici, 1969) or the relative length of two lines (Asch, 1951).

Again, this is a small group survival trait. It promotes unified action and group solidarity. It also motivates members of a group to learn and preserve the customs and taboos that the group evolved to deal with its environment. Of course, the necessary restriction of the individual in a tribal society eventually becomes the mob mentality of the modern nation state.

What we have is a set of innate behaviors that balance one another. The general format is, “Don’t break the rules, unless ordered to by a superior, or if everyone else is doing it, or both.” The balance was important during our long small-group phase. Rigid rule-based behavior would have prevented necessary adaptations to changing conditions. Group cohesion was a better survival trait than moral purity. In tribal societies existing today, the extension of moral relevancy to those outside the tribal group varies, but is often absent.

Our dominance behaviors and mirror neurons have trumped our innate sense of right and wrong in most in-group vs. outsider interactions for eons. There is hope, however. In the experiments by Asch, Moscovici, and Milgram, a number of factors tended to reduce submission to authority and conformity.

Physical proximity to the “learner” in Milgram’s experiment
An ally that also disagrees with the majority
Inconsistency of opinion within the majority
Clarity of evidence – conformity increased with the ambiguity of the information

The findings of Moscovici and Asch indicated that a confident and consistent minority opinion tends to influence people’s actual beliefs, while majority opinion tends to only influence public compliance.

This all points to Margaret Meade’s statement about never underestimating the ability of a small, dedicated group of people to change the world.

The Chinese philosophers of old considered people to be naturally moral and social. The seeds of “jen” (humanity) were in us, and just needed to be developed. They lacked an understanding of genetics and neurology, but they were on the right track. So take some consolation from this in the world as it is. Speak up and stand your ground. Present evidence for your beliefs. Give people’s mirror neurons something positive to copy. Show people the humanity of those they consider enemies. The human brain is ready for it.

Burning Tires and Turning Turbines

Burning Tires and Turning Turbines

You might think that the experimental tire burn at the International Paper (IP) mill in Ticonderoga, NY was only an issue for those of us who live downwind. IP wanted to save some money by augmenting the oil and wood waste in its boiler with shredded tires. There was great outcry from the residents of Vermont, who live generally downwind of the plant, legal resistance from the State of Vermont, and staunch affirmations of safety and economic necessity from IP, the State of New York, and IP employees. As it turned out, IP was unable to burn more than a fraction of the desired Tire Derived Fuel (TDF) without exceeding emissions limits. It looks as if the process isn’t worth the cost for IP. All could be well for the air breathers to the east of Lake Champlain.

The whole IP/TDF issue highlights a greater issue for me, namely the greater good. It brings to mind the wrangling over wind turbines in Vermont. There have been a number of wind power projects proposed for Vermont. All of them have engendered opposition, mostly from those who would have to look at the turbines on a nearby ridgeline.

Both sets of opponents raise environmental issues. The arguments of the IP tire burn opponents are basic – they don’t want soot, heavy metals, and petrochemical residues in the air and accumulating in their soil. The wind opponents raise issues to do with aesthetics, damage from construction and maintenance in sensitive areas and bird kills.

Amid the claims and counterclaims, how do we distinguish the greater good from the lesser special interest? I’d like to offer some basic questions to ask about any controversial project.

1) Is it truly necessary?
2) Is it reversible?
3) How does it stack up against the alternatives?
4) What do the independent scientists say about it?
5) Qui bono? (“Who benefits?” I use the Latin only to illustrate that people have been asking this one for a while)

The answer to the first question, for IP burning TDF, is no. The plant’s spokesperson, Donna Wadsworth, in an interview with the Rutland Herald, stated that the plant was “ …very competitive, in our market.” The 10% savings on energy costs would have added to the bottom line, but it wasn’t make or break for the plant.

The same question applied to wind turbines gets a different answer: Do you need electricity? Right now, a majority of our electricity comes from non-renewable sources – coal, natural gas, uranium, and oil. The supply and energy returns on investment of these resources are going down. That means we’ll be spending more energy to get less out of the ground, and spending more money on the result. Eventually, making electricity by burning stuff that we pull out of the ground will be unaffordable. Renewable sources of electricity will be necessary.

Reversibility: Once those particles of soot, mercury, zinc, and benzene from the tires hit the atmosphere and precipitate into the soils of Vermont, there’s no getting them back. On the other hand, if you don’t like the location of a wind turbine, you can unbolt it from the base, jackhammer the base into bits, and truck the whole deal away. The grass will grow over the fifteen-foot circle.

Alternatives: There are two issues having to do with alternatives to TDF. One has to do with the energy use at the plant. I have insufficient information about what efficiency measures have been implemented and what alternative fuels have been explored, so I won't comment on that. The other issue is the imminent loss of the TDF alternative. Old tires are presently a serious solid waste problem, and using them as fuel is an economically viable disposal method. Not so in the future. Technology is catching up with TDF – there is now a clean process for breaking down old tires into their useful components: crude oil, carbon black, and steel. Scrap tires will soon become too valuable a commodity to burn.

As I stated above, there are no alternatives to renewable energy, including wind energy, in the long run.

The independent expert who I trust on the issue of air pollution and IP was less concerned about the two week test and more concerned about the long term effects of chemical accumulation in the bodies of downwind Vermonters and Vermont soils. This person pointed out that IP’s intent was to see just how much pollution it could get away with without investing in emissions control equipment.

The independent experts that I trust on wind issues say that if designed correctly, sited properly, and installed with care, wind farms are relatively benign in the world of large scale power generation. The aesthetic considerations I give the back of my hand. Tourists come to Vermont and gaze rapturously at our farms – which inevitably have multi-story cylinders of concrete or blue steel rising next to the barns, which are considered more picturesque if they haven’t been painted in a while.

Qui bono? On the TDF side, the shareholders of IP benefit. Maybe not even them, considering that we all share one atmosphere. On the wind power side, the shareholders of the wind turbine and wind farm companies, the property taxpayers of the town with the wind farm, all of us who would suffer from global warming, and anybody who pays an electrical bill.

So why is it that an entire state is unable to even delay a transnational corporation from emitting air pollution as a test for emitting more pollution in the long term, while a handful of people can stall a renewable energy project indefinitely? More on that another time.

Cars, Trains, Energy, and Danger

A couple of striking experiences recently crossed paths for me. One was my attendance at the World Oil Conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (See previous posts). The other event was someone dear to me coming within inches of being hit head-on by a moron who pulled out into the oncoming lane of traffic. The conference had already set me to thinking about alternative transportation. The near miss set me to thinking about the absurdity of our dominant mode of transportation, the automobile.

Most people in the U.S. spend an hour or more a day in a ton and a half steel box on wheels, hurtling down a twelve foot wide strip of pavement. They have to maintain constant attention, stretching the limits of their reaction time and intuitive judgement in order to avoid leaving their lane or running into someone else doing the same thing. Last year, six million people failed to do this, causing 43,000 deaths and 2.7 million injuries. The deaths alone are like two commercial jets crashing each week. Would you fly at all if that were happening? But you drive, and so do I.

Our road system came into being at a time when horse drawn carriages were the established technology, running at 5-10 miles per hour. The turning radii, grades, and sight lines were appropriate for those speeds. In many cases we have just paved over these original tracks. Cars started out as modified carriages, with single digit horsepower and top speeds in the teens. As the road surfaces and automotive technologies were improved, the weight and speed of vehicles went up, along with the death toll.

Given a one-second perception/reaction time, a carriage travelling at 6 mph would travel just 8.8 feet before the driver could yank on the reins. At a modern highway speed of 65 mph, a vehicle travels nearly a hundred feet in the same time. The kinetic energy per kilogram of the modern vehicle at highway speed is 100 times that of the carriage. Free-steering vehicles travelling a mile a minute on roads laid out for horses is a recipe for carnage.

There is also an energy problem.

Even with modern materials and design, cars need a certain amount of mass. One big reason is simply for survivability in collisions. The force of an impact on occupants is directly related to how fast the vehicle decelerates, which in turn is related to the relative mass of the vehicle to whatever it runs into. Of course, it takes energy to move this mass around.

Cars need to be much larger than necessary just to contain passengers and their luggage. All cars have extensive crumple zones, for that precious slowing of deceleration and to prevent intrusion into the passenger cabin. This increase in size increases the air drag of the vehicle, and therefore the energy consumption.

What if we abandoned the concept of a two-ton steel box rolling on a twelve foot wide paved lane? What if we went back to first principles and asked “How do we get a person and a few cubic feet of luggage from point A to point B with the least energy and most safety possible?”

Standard passenger rail is much more efficient than driving, but it has physical and social limitations. Tracks are designed for gross weights per car of up to 315,000 pounds, which is absurdly over engineered for passenger travel. A standard Amtrak passenger car weighs in at 1200 lb. per seat. The sheer mass of both rail bed and rail cars adds to the cost of laying track and running the system. The killer for rail, though, is convenience. We are used to having our vehicles wait around for us, rather than us standing around waiting for them. In rural areas there is also the issue of mass transit without mass population. It is difficult to run a transportation system economically with 80 passenger vehicles when you can’t find 80 people going the same place at the same time.

There is another option in between the private steel box and the massive rail coach – Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT. A number of designs have been proposed and some developed, but they all include lightweight, automated vehicles running on rails, each carrying up to four passengers. (See also PPTProject)

Putting a small passenger vehicle on rails would eliminate a lot of problems, foremost among them the possibility of colliding with other vehicles. A fleet of ultralight rail cars all running at a preset speed could neither head-on, rear-end, nor “t-bone” each other. This would eliminate the need for all that mass and crumple space. Rail vehicles make electrification simple, improving efficiency and reducing emissions without the need for onboard battery storage. Most importantly for public acceptance, travelers could walk into a PRT station, buy a ticket, and hop into a vehicle without waiting. Overhead track would be small enough to penetrate into the heart of a downtown commercial district, eliminating the need for separate local public transport. The whole system could be cheaper per mile than repaving an interstate highway. All this at an energy cost per passenger-mile that is a fraction of automobile travel or standard rail.

We are facing a dramatic increase in the price of oil sometime in the next decade. This will increase the cost of fuel, the cost per kilogram of manufacturing a vehicle, and the cost per mile of maintaining roads. PRT is a promising concept for maintaining affordable high speed passenger transportation despite high energy costs.