A Civil Conservative

I met Henry Palmer when my parents took their lawn mower to him for repair. Henry was a real Yankee mechanic who could build just about anything out of metal or wood and fix just about anything this side of complex electronics. If he had lived long enough he probably would have taught himself that as well. He was a blacksmith, a gunsmith, a machinist, and a passable fiddle player, despite an incomplete set of fingers. He had left school in eighth grade to support his family after his father died, and had made a habit of teaching himself some new skill every year.

Somehow I ended up spending a lot of time at his shop, across the driveway from the old farmhouse where he and his wife Bea lived, on a back road in Cornwall, Vermont. Despite the fact that I was in junior high and he was in his seventies, and despite our disparate backgrounds, we became friends.

If you have read many of my essays you have a reasonable idea of my political tendencies. Ultra-conservative does not leap to mind. Ultra-conservative was Henry’s description of himself. He didn’t believe in the minimum wage or “coddling the homeless.” Don’t even start on gun control. And yet, we did discuss that. I won’t say we argued, because that implies some level of anger. We debated. In between machining something on his lathe or hammering out a knife on his anvil we discussed the problems of the state, the nation, and the world. We mostly disagreed.

Henry had sixty years on me and much more confidence, but he never tried to bully me. He questioned my facts and my reasoning, but never my intelligence, my sanity, or my morality. He never raised his voice to me. When I discussed this with my father, he said, “Henry is a gentleman of the old school.” Henry was a gentleman of firm convictions, and he showed me that two good people could completely disagree on a subject and remain friends.

I should note, just to flesh out Henry’s political character, that he was perplexed by the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. I can remember him saying, “I always thought women were equal. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

Watching the culture wars of our time, the health care mobs and the tea party protests, I wonder what Henry would think. Ideologically, he would have approved of many of the positions held by the far-right activists of today. Behaviorally, he was a different species. The screaming, the insults, and the posturing on the edge of violence would have completely alienated him.

Where are the Henry Palmer conservatives of today? Have they been pushed aside by the theatrics required for media attention? Has our objection to incivility been blunted by repetition? Is it just a case of the screaming wheel getting the oil?

As Town Meeting Day approaches here in Vermont, I think about the way we deal with anger in political debates. Some towns (which will remain nameless, but you know who you are) have a reputation for verbal brawling at town meeting. However, restraint is the norm. At my own town meeting I have seen accusatory fingers pointed and voices raised, but this is met with disapproval by the crowd and pacification efforts by the moderator. I remember a woman standing up after a contentious debate and sincerely thanking those who had held the minority opinion. She described their opposition as necessary for good political thinking. We haven’t seen that on the national stage.

I’ll speculate that a lot of the problem is narcissism. As a culture we have become focused on the continual satisfaction of the individual. The finely adjusted balance between the individual and society has had a lead ingot dropped on the side of the individual. We want the benefits of a community without the sacrifice and self-effacement required to be a functional member of a community.

It’s a mindset promoted by modern rootlessness, where one can injure some anonymous neighbor and then leave. It’s a mindset of willful blindness to the networks of trust, cooperation, and interdependence that support us as individuals every moment of the day. It is a mindset that lacks historical perspective. People need to be reminded that this is not an overwhelmingly special year in human history, that they are not members of a singularly important generation, and that their favorite political issue of the moment is just one of many that people have contested through the ages. This is not as satisfying as an end-time mythology, religious or political. The benefit is that it frees people from a false urgency so that they can promulgate their opinions without slashing and burning like a horde of Mongols.

Henry Palmer understood that friendship was more important than winning an argument, even with a naive 14 year-old. Living in small-town Vermont, he learned that you can’t walk away from your neighbors. I doubt that we can transfer this ethic directly to the winner-take-all battles at the national level. Perhaps we can promote this civil attitude at the local level and let it percolate up over time.




Personalities and Structures

I get these political emails. I suppose we all do. Most of them are somewhere between mildly funny and moderately offensive. They skewer famous politicians. Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the late Ted Kennedy have all been popular targets.

Back during the 2004 campaign season, scientists at Emory University put some political partisans in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging device to see what parts of their brains lit up when their favorite candidates were criticized. The researchers presented the subjects with information showing their favorite candidate caught in the act of self contradiction. The lead researcher, Drew Westen, summed it up this way: "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

It’s about loyalty to an individual, and it was a key survival trait for most of human history. Group cohesion and strong, unified threat response was vital when we lived in small kinship and tribal units. This social functionality trumped a more nuanced analysis of justice or long term benefit. After all, for much of human existence there was no “long term” for an individual to look forward to. Teenage pregnancy wasn’t a problem, it was a necessity.

The flip side of this loyalty is a hostility and suspicion of those outside one’s group, however that group is identified.

This was very useful for the hundreds of thousands of years we spent roaming around in small bands. It is a serious handicap when we live in societies of millions. Personalities don’t matter at this scale.

Although all labels are inaccurate, you could call me progressive or left wing. Nevertheless, I don’t care if people attack Pelosi or Obama or even Bernie Sanders personally. I am exasperated by people who consider this or that politician a savior. Sure, I was pleased when Obama was elected. I didn’t expect some huge shift in direction, but the eventual cessation of the most destructive policies then in place. As I have written elsewhere, I regarded him as a tourniquet, not a cure. (I see now that I was optimistic even in my limited expectations.) I recognized that he was put in place by the same political mechanism that installed George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan.  

I care about structures. Show me the political structure, the means of selecting the decision-maker, and I will tell you what decision will get made. The personality of the person selected, at least the important core of that personality, is dependent upon the methodology of selection. Our present money-soaked campaign system, dependent upon corporate media, corporate PACs, and millionaires with open checkbooks, dictates particular policy outcomes. As we know from experience, few of these outcomes have long-term benefits for the average schmo.

So don’t hail the new savior, whatever political persuasion that savior may be. For that matter, don’t waste your time reviling the new devil. That person is just acting out a predefined role on the public stage. Examine how these people get to where they are and work on that process. I realize that this is difficult. It goes against how our species has behaved for the past couple of million years. It will be vital if we are to survive another hundred.   

The Oil Ceiling

The expression “glass ceiling” is probably familiar to most of my readers. It refers to that invisible barrier of unwritten rules that prevents women and minorities from being promoted past a certain level. Being an energy wonk, I am interested in an analogous concept I’ll call the oil ceiling.

I recently read an interview on a site called Energy Bulletin with Steve Kopits. Kopits is an energy analyst with a well-respected international consulting firm. He came to the study of peak oil almost accidentally while preparing documents for an investor prospectus. The interview is well worth a few minutes, but here is a major point for me:

Question: Could you tell us about your views on the US oil price threshold for recessions?

Kopits: The US has experienced six recessions since 1972. At least five of these were associated with oil prices. In every case, when oil consumption in the US reached 4% percent of GDP, the US went into recession. Right now, 4% of GDP is $80 oil. So that’s my current view: If the oil price exceeds $80, then expect the US to fall back into recession.

Right now the price of oil is bumping along in the mid 70 dollar range, with occasional excursions into the red zone. As the economies of China and India continue to expand, expect their oil demand to increase proportionally, even as world oil production stagnates. $80 per barrel oil plus some speculative overshoot is predictable.

It seems that our economy is hitting the oil ceiling. The U.S. being such a profligate consumer of oil, sucking up 25% of the world supply, we can’t get around this barrier. The situation seems set up for an endless cycle of recession, partial recovery, a resulting run up in oil prices, and recession again.

I looked around for numbers on the Vermont economy and found that our State GDP is around 25 billion dollars. Our energy expenditures are just over a billion, much of that being oil products, and 90% of that going out of state almost instantly. That puts Vermont right at the 4% limit. Could we be bumping our heads on the oil ceiling as well?

What this tells me is that in order to avoid a perpetual sawtooth graph of economic performance we need to gear up for energy efficiency. In chemistry and economics a process is limited by the scarcest necessary element. That element will be energy. The economic winners of the future will be localities with the lowest energy inputs per unit of productivity. The most prosperous populations will be those with the lowest energy use per capita. Parallel to this, the economic winners will be the places that make the fastest and most coordinated switch to renewable energy sources.

Part of this process will be the simple, usual efficiency practices such as weatherization and industrial efficiency programs. The promotion of public transportation will be important. All this is commonplace.
 
The real differentiator, however, will be the rethinking of mobility and community itself. Some of this is in the realm of municipal, regional, and state land-use planning. People will need to work, shop, and entertain themselves near to where they live. For many people this is presently impossible. In the future it will be a necessity. This requires the rezoning of towns and cities and a coordinated long-term plan for localized economic development. It would help to strengthen our communication network so that people can telecommute – it may become the default for information workers. We will have to reverse the long-term trend of emphasis on increasing mobility in favor of a focus on access. We’ll have to stop thinking in terms of how to move ourselves to something or move that something to us. We’ll need to have what we need on a day-to-day basis close at hand.

Vermont is already one of the least energy intensive states, but we’ll need to do more. The less oil we need per capita and per dollar of GDP, the higher the price of oil (and coal and natural gas) can go before it starts to drag down our economy. If we manage this well enough, oil price at which Vermont suffers can be higher than the price at which other economies go into recession and bring the price of oil back down. I suppose it is selfish, but my thought is that an energy efficient Vermont economy could be prospering while the rest of the world bangs its head on the oil ceiling.

Tritium Leak at Vermont Yankee

It’s been all over the news for the past few days. Water contaminated with tritium, a radioactive substance, has been leaking out of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The discoveries began with water containing 22,000 picocuries per liter (ppl, more on this later) in a test well near the plant, continued with water containing one to two million ppl in an open trench, and keeps accelerating today with a report of 150 gallons at 720,000 ppl in an underground storage room.

Part of the story is that Entergy, the owner of Vermont Yankee, told Vermont regulators there were no underground pipes carrying radioactive materials at the plant. Entergy spokesman Rob Williams claimed that this was a mistake rather than a lie. This merely adds the alternative of gross incompetence to the probability of dishonesty. Entergy is searching for the leak while an underground plume of tritium-laced water heads for the nearby Connecticut River.

Those are the reports so far, but there are a number of basic questions confronting Vermonters, as well as our neighbors downstream. What is tritium? Where does it come from? How dangerous is it? What can be done about it?

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Ordinary hydrogen is made up of one proton and one electron. It is the lightest and most common element in the universe, and, of course, one of the two elements in water. When exposed to radiation, as in a nuclear plant, some hydrogen becomes tritium, consisting of one proton, two neutrons, and an electron. This arrangement is unstable and will eventually decay into helium, releasing beta radiation. Beta radiation is essentially high-powered electrons. Tritium has a half life of about 12.3 years, meaning that if you put 1000 atoms of tritium in a jar and wait 12.3 years you will have 500 atoms of tritium. 500 will have decayed. Another 12.3 years and you will have 250. The rule of thumb for radioactive materials is that they need to sit around for 10 to 20 half-lives (120-240 years in the case of tritium) before they are safe.

So what is a picocurie, and what is a million picocuries in the scheme of things? A curie is a measurement of a radioactive material in terms of disintegrations per second. If a sample of material has 37,000,000,000 (3.7 x 1010) atoms decaying and emitting radiation every second, then that is one curie. A picocurie is a trillionth of a curie, which amounts to 2.2 disintegrations per minute. Thus, a million picocuries per liter (ppl) means that each liter of water emits 2.2 million beta particles a minute.

What does that mean for human health? How dangerous is this stuff? Federal regulations put the safe limit for drinking water at 20,000 ppl. In Europe the limit is 2,000, and in California the limit is 500. I have read that research indicates no safe threshold for tritium. There are a few unpleasant problems with the stuff. Being an isotope of hydrogen, it is part of water molecules themselves. This means it can’t be filtered out of water by any practical means. If it is ingested in water it clears out of the human body in about 10 days, as long as that human body doesn’t drink more tritium-laced water. However, if it is ingested by humans in food it can integrate itself into our tissues and remain for ten years, quietly bombarding us from the inside. It can lodge in our DNA, damaging the genetic code all around it. Its ability to insinuate itself into our systems has caused researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to assign it an RBE (radiobiological effectiveness) ratio of 1.5 to 5 times that of other radioactive materials. That means that given the same ppl, tritium will cause 2 to 5 times the actual damage of something emitting gamma radiation or x-rays.

Tritium causes all the usual radiological effects: cancer, genetic defects, cell death, birth defects, and loss of fertility.

How much tritium is normal? Tritium is caused not only by nuclear reactions in power plants, but also by cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. There is a background level of tritium in water of 3 to 24 ppl. That puts the tritium-contaminated water in that trench at somewhere between 42,000 and 660,000 times the usual background level and 50 to 100 times the federal limit.

My conclusion from all this is that the present tritium leak at Vermont Yankee is no small thing. The material is dangerous at low concentrations, persistent in the human body, impossible to filter, and hard to contain. The leak is limited to the area in and around the plant for now, but I can’t imagine the isolation and cleanup is going to be easy.

I’d also conclude that the management at Entergy should start planning for decommissioning Vermont Yankee on schedule in 2012. Even the Douglas administration, long time servant of Entergy, has reacted strongly. I predict that more damning evidence will come out, more tritium will leak, and Entergy will continue its tone-deaf attempts at smoothing things over. Vermont Yankee is a turkey, folks, and it has been in the radioactive oven for a few decades now. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. Let me update that cliché: Stick a really long-handled fork in it and then carefully encase that fork in concrete and let it sit a couple of centuries.

Update on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:26AM by Minor Heretic

It gets better, or worse, depending on your enjoyment of shadenfreude. An article in the Times Argus this morning reports that VY officials submitted documents showing over 40 buried pipes at the plant. A year ago they said there were none. The scenario of incompetence or ignorance has now been completely superceded by the reality of blatant, unrepentant lying. I would predict that the Vermont Legislature will now stick a fork in Vermont Yankee, hard, with both hands.

Giving to Haiti

As a service to my readers, here is a link to the American Institute of Philanthropy. The linked page gives a list of highly rated charities that are performing earthquake relief in Haiti.

American Institute of Philanthropy Haiti Relief

I offer this in part for people who are wondering where to give, and in part as a guard against "insta-charity" scams. Beware of telephone solicitations for emergency donations. Hang up, go to a site such as the one above, and find out about the organization before giving.