An eternal document

I make it a point every year to read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July. It is a reminder of our origins as a nation, the spirit of those times, and our ever-present responsibility to the ideals of democracy. Fireworks, parades, ceremonies – these are all merely symbolic events. The Declaration is the intellectual and emotional foundation of the American experiment.

Courtesy of earlyamerica.com, here is the complete text of the Declaration of Independence. Please take the time to read the whole document. While we, today, concentrate on the first section, the list of grievances was most important to those who wrote it and signed it. You will notice several complaints that could apply to the behavior of our present George.

(Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776)

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Source: The Pennsylvania Packet, July 8, 1776

A solar revolution?

Amidst the depressing news of war, global warming, nuclear proliferation, and the possible literary execution of Harry Potter, there is a glimmer of hope. No, not Rush Limbaugh’s arrest for possession of unauthorized Viagra. I’m talking about the possible transformation of the solar industry, and by necessity, the electric utility industry.

A friend in San Francisco forwarded me an article about the solar startup Nanosolar. The company has developed a method of making photovoltaic (PV) cells by printing them roll-to-roll, like a newspaper. To understand the significance of this, here’s a little primer on the technology.

The modern photovoltaic cell was invented at Bell Labs back in the mid fifties. The technology has stayed basically the same ever since. The manufacturer grows a single crystal of highly purified silicon and slices it into thin wafers. The wafers get “doped,” or infused with slight impurities. The junction between the layers in a wafer, when exposed to sunlight, act as an electron pump, moving the electrons out through a grid of wires applied to the surface. Voila, electricity from the sun. Manufacturers have improved the process, growing thin wafers instead of slicing them, growing multicrystalline wafers, and even applying a microthin layer of doped silicon to rolls of stainless steel sheet metal. It’s still purified silicon, and it still requires lots of energy, high heat, a vacuum chamber, and a precisely controlled environment. That is what makes the things so expensive, between $4 and $6 per watt retail.

The researchers at Nanosolar have used a newer chemistry, Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide, which doesn’t need any purified silicon. Their new process doesn’t need all that high heat and vacuum. It is a thin film process, so it doesn’t use much copper, indium, gallium, or selenium, either. They can print out PV cells by the yard on thin foil. They claim to be able to make PV modules for a fifth the cost of present technology. Their heavy hitting worldwide investors enhance the believability factor.

So what does this mean for you? It means that the cost of a PV system could drop by 40% That’s a better discount than any of the PV rebate programs out there. A good average price for a utility tied PV system is around $8 a watt. A 2,000 watt system would set you back $16k. Around New England you might get around 2,550 kilowatt-hours a year, or 7 kWh a day from this. A 20 year system life would work out to 51,000 kWh total. Divide that back through and you get an average lifetime electricity cost of $0.31 per kWh. Not thrilling. But, knock the Nanosolar 40% off and you get $0.19 per kWh. Add the new 30% federal tax credit and you are buying your solar electricity at $0.13 a kWh. Friends of mine pay more than that right now, and ten years hence we will all be as nostalgic about that price as we are for $1.50 a gallon at the pump. In short, it will be stupid not to install as much PV as you need to meet your personal demand.

A PV boom like this will have a number of effects. First, it will be license-the-technology-or-die for all the silicon-based PV companies out there. Second, it will halt a lot of investment in new conventional power plants and electrical transmission infrastructure. Hey, if people are making it at home…. Third, it will require some rethinking of the way power companies and regulators run our regional electrical grids. The present paradigm is huge centralized plants that produce power on demand 24-7, with scheduled yearly breaks for maintenance. In a Nanosolar America, a larger and larger percentage of the electricity going into the regional power pools will come from individual customers and vary according to daylight hours and local weather. Handling this will take some regulatory changes and technical innovation. Also, the increased demand for PV modules will increase the production of the electronics that connect them to the utility. Suppliers will multiply, production will ramp up, and costs will drop for that technology as well. This is the break that renewable energy advocates have been waiting for.

Cheap PV panels on millions of roofs would mean a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain, and atmospheric mercury. It could end mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachians. The nuclear industry would look even more like a dumb idea. We’d need fewer of those huge power lines marching across the countryside. Finally, it would move us closer to that inevitable transition from non-renewable to renewable energy.

Smile – the future looks sunny.

Change regime

Regime

• noun 1 a government, especially an authoritarian one. 2 a systematic or ordered way of doing something. 3 the conditions under which a scientific or industrial process occurs.

— ORIGIN originally in the sense regimen: from French, from Latin regimen ‘rule’.

(From the Concise Oxford English Dictionary)

The word “regime,” as used in news reports, has bothered me for some time. It seems to be used as a term of disapproval, tagging a government as repressive and illegitimate without having the guts to actually say so. I recently decided to use the Google News search engine to see how this noun gets thrown against the wall in contemporary journalism. “Regime” by itself offered up 17,200 hits. I did a number of “name + regime” searches, but in certain cases the countries were only loosely connected to the offending noun in the stories. What follows is a mix of actual numbers and my qualitative impressions.

Top running dogs in the regime contest are Iran, Hussein’s Iraq, Syria, and North Korea. A search for “Iran regime” came up with 7,800 hits and “Iranian regime” netted 5,630. Probably some overlap there, but you get the idea. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq came in second at 6,320. Syria popped up with 1,950 hits. North Korea trailed the four horsemen with 1,460.

There were a group of countries that came up many times, but nowhere near the gang of four. They are, in order of precedence:

Burma/Myanmar 654
Zimbabwe 395
U.S. (under Bush) 256
Belarus 133
Israel (“Zionist regime”) 129
Phillippines (“Arroyo regime”) 111
Afghanistan (under present government and Taliban) (Hard to determine an exact number, but significant legitimate mentions)
Uzbekistan (“Karimov regime”) 36
Venezuela (“Chavez regime”) 32

There were a dozen or so regime mentions each for the Palestinian Authority, East Timor, and Iraq under the present government.

Quite a number of governments received just a few tips of the gold-braided hat, namely:

Mauritania
Egypt
Russia (“Putin regime”) 8
Saudi Arabia (“Saudi regime”) 9
Rwanda
India
United Kingdom (“Blair regime”) 6
Nepal
Pakistan
Armenia
Turkmenistan (under Niyazov)
Sri Lanka

If you have any familiarity with a number of these governments, you are probably saying, “Wait a minute…” Sure, Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are eligible for the Amnesty International Seal of Disapproval. But Venezuela and Uzbekistan neck and neck? You may agree or disagree with Chavez’s economic policies, but he was democratically elected and spends a lot of money on poor people. Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov is a classic iron-fisted thug who actually boiled two political opponents alive.

The Palestinian Authority recently had internationally approved elections, however badly they came out for the U.S. and Israel, but it beats out the politically repressive and unelected royal family of Saudi Arabia by a mile on the regime front.

The United Kingdom under Blair is in the pack with Rwanda and Pakistan, just behind the Saudis. Ok, so he’s Bush’s lapdog and kind of obnoxious, but he’s an elected Member of Parliament.

When I look at the relative number of mentions vs. the actual state of democracy and human rights in any countries below the top six, it confirms my suspicion that “regime” is more an insult than a descriptive term. Witness the incidence of “Zionist regime.” Love Israel or hate it, you have to admit that this is meant as an emotionally charged religious slur.

Note to news writers: Expunge this term from your vocabulary. The word regime is a stealth term, so common in news items that it doesn’t grab our attention. Still, it leaves an emotional bruise on our interpretation of events. Repeated often enough, it taints the names associated with it. Just use the word “government.”

If a country lacks fair elections, spies on its citizens, initiates aggressive military actions against other countries, and denies fair trials to certain religious minorities, then come right out and call it “repressive” “undemocratic” “militaristic”, or “authoritarian.” As in: “The undemocratic and militaristic government of George W. Bush.” Ok, you saw that one coming, but I did express my opinion directly. I didn’t resort to an insult sent in under the radar. Those who use the title “journalist” or “reporter” should be so forthright.

The ethical bottom line

I belong to an organization called Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR). The name explains the mission. The organization offers education for owners and managers, networking opportunities, holds conferences, and lobbies the Vermont legislature on relevant issues. The key expression in the group is “the triple bottom line.” This means that a business can, and should, judge its performance not just by the financial outcomes, but also by social and environmental outcomes. Sounds good.

The problem with this philosophy is the body of law on fiduciary responsibility. Corporate officers are required by law to attend to the financial well being of their company. They can be criminally liable if they don’t keep their eye on the financial bottom line. Given two business practices, one that makes the world a better place and another that makes more money, they could find themselves prosecuted for choosing the first. Even the most well meaning CEO has to pause and think about the relative financial implications of socially responsible and irresponsible practices.

The hard fact of the matter is that socially and environmentally sound practices are generally at odds with financial gain. Sustainability is a marathoner’s strategy in a sprinter’s world. The pressure of the fourth quarter financial report is in direct opposition to the traditional Iroquois consideration of the effect of today’s actions on the seventh generation hence. By law and practice, the traditional bottom line wins.

It isn’t practical to try to change existing fiduciary constraints on corporate officers, at least in the short run. The institutional inertia on that subject is huge. Millions of investors have placed their money in stocks with the assumption of fiduciary priority. What we need is a new option for people forming corporations. Call it an E-corporation, to contrast with the usual S-corporation.

An E-corporation would be formed in the same general way as an S, with a registration, bylaws, officers, and the like. The essential difference would be in the focus of corporate responsibility. The laws establishing the E-corp would specifically place the social and environmental responsibility of the corporate officers above their fiduciary responsibility. The rule would be, “If you can’t make money with practice X without destroying the environment or being unjust, then do something else.” Investors in an E-corp would expect that while their financial investment would gain value in the long run, the benefits they receive from it would be a combination of financial, environmental, and social. The corporate charter would be established for a particular period of time, or for the accomplishment of a particular task. The renewal of the charter would not be a mere matter of paperwork, but a substantive process of review and evaluation. The corporation and its officers would be judged by the achievement of numerical goals (not necessarily financial) and adherence to rules laid out at the time of incorporation. The periodic charter review would give management, employees, and stockholders an ongoing incentive to monitor and correct the behavior of the corporation.

So why would an investor, by definition someone trying to make money, want to put money into an entity that places social responsibility above finance? The answer lies in a sentence in the third paragraph above: “Sustainability is a marathoner’s strategy in a sprinter’s world.” More socially conscious companies generally don’t rocket up the charts, but they have been shown to be stable performers over time. A socially and environmentally conscious company will tend to retain trained and productive personnel, avoid lawsuits and labor actions, and have lower energy and waste disposal costs. A socially responsible company will not become the next Enron. Every portfolio should be diversified between higher performance, higher risk and lower performance, lower risk investments. An E-corp can be part of that low risk anchor at one end of the portfolio.

The establishment of an E-corporation law would give entrepreneurs and investors a bona fide socially responsible alternative to the S corporation and its fiduciary straightjacket.

The jump not taken

You're standing at the open door of an airplane, three miles up. You have a sewing machine under your right arm, and a bundle of nylon cloth under your left. Your assignment: to jump out of the plane and invent the parachute on the way down.

This is, of course, completely insane. You have no chance of success. This is how we’ve handled nuclear waste disposal in America.

After a twenty year hiatus in building nuclear power plants, the Bush administration is promoting a renaissance for the nuclear industry. There are two problems with this: It's dangerous and it's unnecessary.

First, the danger. There is no geologically stable place to put the highly radioactive waste and store it for 25,000 years. The federal government has approved a plan for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but there are still arguments about whether it will contaminate the aquifer beneath it. A disquieting number of scientists are saying that those promoting the site "cooked" their research. Many Nevadans don't want it, and I don't blame them. On the face of it, the concepts “geologically stable” and “25,000 years” are contradictory. A short 10,000 years ago, my hometown in Vermont was submerged beneath part of the Atlantic Ocean. The fact remains: there is no place for the radioactive waste we're producing right this second, and we don't know when there will be one. Experts on all sides admit that it is many years away. Even if Yucca Mountain gets built as planned, all the space in it is already booked. In the next decade, three quarters of our nuclear plants will run out of room in their waste storage pools.

Social and environmental stability could be a bigger problem than geological stability. Can we predict what the climate will be in even a hundred years? The groundwater levels? The politics? The economy? Will our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, have the resources to safely maintain the mountains of radioactive waste we're leaving them? We don't know, so we're gambling their lives for our own wasteful habits.

More power plants, including nuclear plants, are unnecessary. Europeans have a standard of living equal to ours while using just over half the energy per person. We have inefficient buildings, lights, appliances, industrial motors, you name it. Before we start making more radioactive waste we should eliminate our electrical waste. Efficiency programs typically cost half as much per kilowatt-hour as generating electricity. They can be implemented quickly, and have zero risk. Efficiency could displace our entire nuclear generating capacity. Why juggle with hand grenades when tennis balls are so readily available?

And then there’s wind power. Large-scale wind farms are able to sell electricity at the same price as natural gas fueled plants. Unlike natural gas and uranium, the price of wind never goes up, and the supply never runs out. The United States has enough potential wind resources to equal twice our present electrical use. Wind power could easily provide the same percentage of our power as nuclear does now.

Some people object to the aesthetics of wind turbines and their effects on the land where they are placed. It’s tough to argue a subjective issue such as aesthetics, but I’ll take a few steel towers over a pile of nuclear waste. The fundamental point is that wind turbines are reversible. If we decide that a wind installation is a bad idea, we can take down the towers, break up the concrete foundations, and let the forest grow back over it all. Once we dig up the uranium ore and purify it, we’re stuck with it for a thousand generations.

The bad news is, we've already jumped, and we're in for a hard landing. We have to deal with the radioactive waste we've created. The good news is, we have alternatives that we can use right now: efficiency and renewable energy. The sooner we start, the less weight we'll be carrying when we hit.