Steady Current

Many years ago I was talking with a family friend at a party, an economics professor at Middlebury College named Klaus Wolff. I was in high school and the U.S. was in the middle of the energy crisis of the 1970's. Professor Wolff assured me that the next great and world changing inventions in energy technology would be in the field of energy storage, not energy production. I think that history will prove him right, although more in terms of the problem than the solution.

Our planet faces the imminent decline of the rate of production of oil, coal, natural gas, and perhaps even uranium. As we extract less and less energy per year out of the ground we will have to use less and extract more out of the sky. That is, we will become more dependent upon direct and indirect solar energy, whether that is from photovoltaic panels, solar hot water collectors, wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, biomass fuels, or wave and tidal power.

The problem with these burgeoning forms of energy collection is that they are variable and intermittent. The sun and wind come and go as they will, and are only very roughly predictable in their intensity from day to day. Hydroelectric production varies from season to season and rainstorm to dry spell. Tidal power is eminently predictable, but has pauses at its high and low points. We are used to tapping into millions of years of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, which allows us to have a continuous flow of power into our homes and businesses. When the sun isn't there, it's called night, and nobody thinks anything of it. When the electricity isn't there, it's called a power outage and the phone rings off the hook at the local utility.

In the case of heating with biomass, the storage of renewable energy is no big deal. Lots of houses in Vermont and elsewhere have a big stack of firewood in a shed or under some tin roofing out back. In the case of electricity, it is a huge problem. Batteries for storing solar electricity are large, heavy, expensive, and all too mortal. Our regional power grids are far too large to use batteries as a solution for intermittency. There is no storage in the system. At present we use natural gas fueled turbines to adjust to the variability in electrical demand. The multi-megawatt output of these turbines is ramped up and down as millions of people push down the toast in the morning or turn off the lights at night.

As natural gas production drops off in the near future (See my earlier essay Gloom and Sunshine), the cost of this conveniently adjustable natural gas fueled electricity will become prohibitive. What then? Coal and nuclear power plants do not adjust their output efficiently or quickly, and those fuels will eventually, inevitably become scarce themselves. We need to go elsewhere for our variable power needs.

Several options make sense. The simplest, at least in terms of existing technology, is hydroelectric power. While hydro can't be ramped up beyond the limits of seasonal water flow, it can be adjusted within its limits to a variable demand. There would have to be some financial arrangement between hydroelectric plant operators and utilities to reimburse the operators for unused capacity, but convenience always has its price. In Vermont we have 137 megawatts of hydroelectric power in operation and somewhere between 15 and 25 megawatts of prime hydroelectric sites waiting to be developed. There are many more existing dam sites that could be developed economically in anticipation of increased electricity prices. (There are also 550 megawatts of hydroelectric plants on the Connecticut River that our Governor, Jim Douglas, recently failed to buy. Give it ten years and this failure will be recognized as the lost opportunity of the century.)

Another option is load shedding. Large buildings could have their air conditioning systems placed under joint control of the building manager and the utility. In the event of a high peak load in the summer, the building could have its thermostat raised by a critical degree or two for a critical hour or two in mid-afternoon. Added to a thousand other large buildings with the same system, the savings could shave the top off of an untenable electrical demand. Industries could coordinate the timing of their energy intensive processes with each other and the utility to smooth out the overall power demand curve. A business with enough flexibility might schedule an activity to correspond with a predicted sunny day or windy night. It would be a new way of thinking about business practice and energy use, but a necessary adaptation to the decline of unconstrained fossil fuel supply.

There is one technology that is just appearing on the market that offers great promise. That is Stirling cycle cogeneration. I'll spare you the physics of the Stirling cycle engine, except to explain that it is a 200 year old design that has finally come into its own with the advent of modern high temperature materials and computer aided thermodynamic design. Heat one end of the engine and cool the other and you get power output. The fuel can be anything from diesel to wood pellets. Cogeneration is the practice of burning fuel in an engine to make electricity and then collecting the waste heat to do something useful, such as heating your home. Cogeneration is common in Europe, and less so here, but usually confined to industrial-scale operations. The technology hasn't been available to make small cogeneration economically viable. Enter the Stirling cycle furnace. A homeowner would be burning something anyway, just to heat the house or a tank of hot water. Why not extract some electricity along the way? Such furnace/generator combinations are soon to be being marketed in Europe and Asia. It would make perfect sense, especially if the devices were paired with some hot water storage and the same kind of shared control as the load shedding I mentioned above. A utility could call on a few thousand homes for a few megawatts of instant power, and the homes would get credit on their electrical bill plus a tank of hot water.

It's not a matter of choice, actually. As natural gas gets more scarce and expensive, power producers and consumers will have to get more imaginative about balancing the ever changing supply and demand. Eventually we will either have to change our expectations about continuous electrical supply or manage the challenges of entirely renewable generation.

Breaking the grip

(It occurs to me that I should reference the essays that lead into this one. If you haven't already read them, I would recommend that you go first to The Stonemason and the Gunman, then Hyperscopic life, and then Sharing the bottle.)

In my last essay on hyperscopic life I wrote about the importance of law in the physiology of the corporation. It is the sinew that holds together the physical assets of a corporation, the DNA that defines its structure, and the set of boundaries that restrict its actions. The problem we face is that corporations presently have overwhelming influence in making the laws that define and restrict them. Given the blind pursuit of growth and profit that characterizes corporations, it is akin to letting crack dealers and addicts write drug laws.

The influence of corporations over lawmaking is threefold. First, corporations and their highly paid managers provide most of the money to an electoral system that has been designed to require large infusions of private cash. This acts as a filtration system, mostly eliminating those aspirants to office who might be threats to corporate interests. (See my earlier essay, First Things First) Second, corporations provide selected information to these preselected officials through a system of lobbyists. The services of these lobbyists are expensive, thus giving the most access to the minds of government officials to those entities with large lobbying budgets. (See my earlier essay, Second Things Second) Third, most informational outlets in this country have been consolidated under the ownership of five corporate conglomerates, some of which have extensive business interests outside of the news business. Most U.S. citizens receive their information about the world and government policy through a corporate-controlled filter. As a result, much of the information truly necessary for making informed political decisions never makes its way to your average American.

This is a powerful, interlocking triple threat. The question that confronts us is how to break the corporate grip over corporate law and wrestle that power back into the hands of the majority of human beings in this country. There is a reason I titled me essay on campaign finance reform “First Things First.” Media consolidation is a problem of law that is not resolvable while media conglomerates have such influence over legislation. Lobbying reform likewise. That brings us to the catch-22 of campaign finance law. Money is the lifeblood of political campaigns, and the ability to bring the largest quantity of money to a campaign is the determining factor, nine times out of ten.

So how can we convince those selected by the big money system to abandon the big money system? It is going to have to be analogous to the civil rights movement. It will be easier, in a way, because we'll have 99.9% of Americans naturally on our side of the line, instead of being partially split on racial lines. The movement will have some necessary characteristics.

It will have to be a movement outside the two party system and the legislative system, but bringing pressure to bear inside the system. It does not have to run its own candidates for office, but it will have to review and approve or disapprove of party candidates according to its principles. The pressure mechanisms will be the bundling of votes and, to a lesser extent, money. Despite all, they still need our votes to get elected. We need to organize a voting bloc dedicated to getting the money out of politics. It might take the form of a pledge by individual voters to exclude from consideration any candidate who fails to make campaign finance reform a priority. At the same time, we can influence some campaigns by bundling our small donations into large ones dedicated to reform candidates.

It will have to do most of its communications and outreach outside the usual news media system. The movement can expect to be ignored, misinterpreted, belittled, or savaged by the mainstream news media. Thankfully, we still have a relatively free internet. Since this is not a movement of the wealthy, all communications methodologies will have to pass the cheapness test.

It will have to be decentralized, but linked by common principle. National movements with charismatic national leaders are vulnerable to intimidation, assassination, and co-option. They also tend to waste a lot of time on internal politics and a lot of money on national infrastructure. (The present national parties are more money vending machines than associations based on shared principles.) The movement I am proposing would have a few fundamental principles about electoral reform, honest practices, and non-violence carved in stone, and that's it. If you agree with and practice the principles, you're in. All other belief systems are optional. I could see an association of state or sub-state organizations cooperating on whatever levels work for a particular project.

The methodologies used by the movement would have to be non-demanding in terms of the time and money of individuals. Everybody seems to be working extra hours for less money these days. Driving long distances to rallies is out. Long weekday evening meetings are out. Buying TV airtime (see above) is out. The movement needs to lay out strategies at the beginning, make them adaptable to local conditions, and provide them in an easy to use format to interested people. The movement needs to have a learning mechanism built in to modify strategies as it runs up against obstacles.

In actuality, we would be creating a dispersed hyperscopic political organism. It would be designed to spread its democratic, egalitarian genes. It would operate in the environments in between those dominated by corporate media and corporate politics. Most importantly, it would be focused like a laser beam on the means by which we select our political representatives.

Anybody can lie on a bed of nails, but nobody can lie on a bed of one nail. The physics behind the bed of nails trick is that the performer's weight is distributed over hundreds of nails. No one nail exerts enough pressure to do damage. So it is with politics. A flurry of effort on a flock of issues is like firing a cannon full of feathers.

People who are dissatisfied with the way decisions are made in Washington need to focus on how the decision makers are chosen. If we can change that, then we can focus on how the decision makers are influenced, both in terms of lobbying and news media. Then, and only then, can we have a chance of curing the other ills of society. I propose an acronym for ending political squabbles withing the movement: A.C.E., meaning (We'll fight that one out) After Clean Elections.

I have to admit that I am taken aback by what I am proposing. It is nothing less than an inter-species war for power. The concept of hyperscopic life is probably tough enough for people to accept all by itself. Add to that the concept that we have to engage in mortal combat with this species within which we live, whose existence we didn't even consider, and that we can't directly perceive. It is, however, necessary for homo sapiens to gain dominance over the corporate species if we are to survive.

Medical news you will like

I guess that pain is the mother of knowledge. Your all-too-human Minor Heretic was felled by a virus last weekend and has spent the last several nights engaging in the following minute-by-minute ritual:

1)Clutch ribcage
2)Cough up lung(s)
3)Retrieve and reinsert lung(s)
4)Moan quietly

I tried every cough remedy readily available to me – Robitussin, zinc lozenges, slippery elm lozenges, inhaling steam, hot tea, hot peppers, honey and lemon, honey and whiskey, just whiskey – all to no avail.

I spoke to a friend on the phone, a physician's assistant, who recommended an asthma remedy called Proventil, which apparently outperforms codeine, the champion of cough suppression. Codeine is prescription-only and tough to get, due to its narcotic and addictive properties. I hit the Internet and started researching. I went to sites such as Medline, which provide abstracts of clinical studies for practicing physicians, in order to get something beyond marketing and superstition. What I found on the cough suppression front was both sweeping and surprising.

First, anything that you can get without a prescription at your local pharmacy or supermarket is no better than a placebo. The clinical results range from “placebo” to “statistically indeterminate.” That includes the standard products containing Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin.

Some of you may say, “But I use NyQuil, and it gets me to sleep.” Of course it does. NyQuil is 50 proof alcohol (whiskey is 84 proof) mixed with Doxylamine succinate, an antihistamine/hypnotic. It's good old Thunderbird and downers in a socially acceptable and convenient package. To paraphrase the advertising slogan, its the cheapjack-wino-garbagehead-junkie-so-you-can-sleep-in-a-box-in-an-alley medicine.

Proventil failed in the double blind studies, but another asthma inhaler succeeded. Atrovent, generically Ipratropium bromide, actually provided relief from coughing. It has two problems. First, it is a prescription drug, and second, it costs $90 a bottle. So much for that.

Then, in the process of searching for better Atrovent pricing, I found the Holy Grail of cough suppression research. According to researchers from Imperial College London and Royal Brompton Hospital, there is a substance that is 33% more effective than codeine – theobromine. Theobromine is one of the chemicals naturally found in chocolate. The London researchers used 1000 mg of theobromine, roughly the amount found in two to three ounces of dark chocolate or two cups of cocoa. Sometimes life is kind.

Of course, if you want this treatment to work you can't use the brown crayon that passes for chocolate in much of the U.S. Ordinary milk chocolate doesn't have enough cocoa in it to pack sufficient theobromine punch. Go for the high-end 80 to 90% cocoa chocolate bars, or better yet, make yourself a cup of cocoa from 100% bakers cocoa. The hot liquid version will have less fat and you can add just enough sweetener for your taste. I'd also recommend that you look for “Fair Trade” cocoa and chocolate to insure that the folks on the other end of your medicinal supply chain got a fair shake.

As I write this I am sipping from a mug containing 1 cup hot water, 3 tablespoons Equal Exchange 100% bakers cocoa, and a tablespoon of honey. My lungs are staying in their proper place.

I am reminded of a scene in the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper.” Allen's character has been woken up from several hundred years of suspended animation and finds himself in a science fiction world of the future. The doctors in charge of him are discussing his strange requests for wheat germ and organic carrots. One of them asks, “Doesn't he know about health foods such as deep fat and hot fudge?” Woody got it half right.

Sharing the bottle

I recently wrote about the concept of hyperscopic life – life forms too large to be seen from an individual's perspective – and our cellular role in them. I am focusing on one hyperscopic life form - the for-profit corporation. Admittedly, what I am writing in these short essays is the merest summary. Libraries full of books have been written on the history of corporations, their influence in the world, and theories as to their proper place and operation in our economy. I am attempting to lay out the framework of a theory about their biology and how we as a species can compete successfully with them.

There are a variety of forms of this species, but they all share particular important characteristics. They all seek to increase profits. They all attempt to grow. They all seek to minimize or externalize costs. They all attempt to modify their environment to their own advantage. They all use resources and produce modified byproducts of their internal processes (waste). They all have an immune system that accepts or rejects human beings according to their compatibility with the needs of the corporation. If you follow the thesis of Joel Bakan, Jennifer Abbot, and Mark Achbar, the makers of the movie “The Corporation,” a corporation mimics the behavior of a human psychopath. I have explored the behavior of corporate management in an earlier essay, noting that the corporate system selects for amorality.

I tend to think of corporations as yeast. Yeast, as any brewer can tell you, is extremely useful. What a brewer does, essentially, is put water, flavoring, and sugar in a container with a special species of yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide. This continues until 1) There is no more sugar, and the yeast starves, or 2) There is too much alcohol, and the yeast is poisoned. The yeast has no brains, so there is no yeast environmental committee to sit down and say “Y'know, the alcohol level is getting kind of high and members of our species are dying in increasing numbers. Maybe we should think about slowing things down, or controlling our population, or something.” They blindly consume and excrete till their beery doomsday.

So it is with corporations. Absent controlling regulation, they blindly consume and excrete without limit. The unfortunate part is that we share the bottle with them. Corporations themselves are essentially immortal, shedding the parts rendered useless by their reckless behavior and acquiring new people, infrastructure, and resources. Those of us inhabiting the macroscopic world suffer the consequences. Corporations have the benefit of our intelligence, or at least the portion of our intelligence that doesn't conflict with their mission of uncontrolled growth and consumption. We give corporations an advantage that yeast doesn't have – the ability to modify the environment.

A corporation has two environments, the physical and the legal. Much of the corporation is made up of actual physical things, such as people, buildings, mines, and farmland. The legal environment is key, however, because it is both the sinew that connects these physical entities, the DNA that creates the form of the corporation, and, as with us, the rules that circumscribe its behavior.

Corporations are far ahead of us in the field of genetic engineering. A corporation can transform itself from one type to another and modify its internal structure almost at will. Corporations can and do alter the laws that prescribe their form and function. They regularly slice off parts of themselves and attach that part to another entity. It is a feat of shape shifting only seen in science fiction movies. The pursuit of favorable legislation is a very profitable way to spend their resources. A relatively small investment in lobbying and political contributions has historically netted them huge returns. One part of these efforts has been the institutionalization of political corruption in the form of campaign finance and the revolving door between corporate employment and government service. As I have noted in another essay, the present system of political fund raising filters out most politicians with anti-corporate views.

We find ourselves trapped in a closed environment with a group of enormously powerful entities. They have no direct consciousness or moral values, but do have an extraordinary ability to modify themselves and their environment in order to grow and gain even more control over their surroundings. The legal framework in which we live favors the for-profit corporation over other economic structures and allows such corporations a range of behavior that threatens our survival.

The key to our survival, then, lies in our ability to restrict corporate behavior. Our highest priority is restricting their own ability to influence the laws that govern them.

Just as a reminder: You may subscribe to the Minor-Heresies email notification list by going to the subscription page, entering your email address, and clicking the subscribe button. You will get an email containing a brief excerpt whenever I put up a new essay.

Hyperscopic life

In my essay before last I wrote about the way people view ownership, the past, and the future. My conclusion was that the structures within which we live tend to determine our worldview. A friend commented that my conclusion about being aware of the structures that shape our worldviews was valid, but didn't point in any particular direction. He used the word “flatulence,” I believe. The question the essay raises is “What do we do, then?”

Part of my intent in writing these essays is offering ideas that help people see the world in new ways. As another friend pointed out (quoting, I think), “You tilt the kaleidescope just a little, and the whole picture changes.” Part of my motivation for this exercise is simply the joy of writing, part is the satisfaction of sharing ideas, and part is the hope that I can make some incremental change in the world. Those of you who have been reading my essays for a while are experiencing a kind of drawn out manifesto, put together almost at random. I'm not promising a well structured book in web-based installments, but I am going to try to be more strategic about the progress of my essays. I'll be circling in on that call to action. The following essay is part of the background theory for my thinking. It may seem less like a slight tilt of the kaleidescope and more like a 180 degree spin. I'd like to point out that you are living within a set of overlapping structures, some at odds with each other, each making a different set of demands on you. I'd also like to propose that these structures are different in their nature than most people suppose.

A fundamental question: what is life, in the biological sense? Life is GRIM. GRIM is a mnemonic device meaning Growth, Reproduction, Irritability, Metabolism. There is still argument in the scientific community about where genetic material leaves off and life begins, but this is a good working definition. Living things grow, have the capability to reproduce others of their own kind, respond to their environment, and extract energy and mass from their environment using chemical reactions. These qualities are common from viruses to whales.

A basic observational dichotomy is between microscopic and macroscopic life. We can see individual whales, ladybugs, moose, mushrooms, buttercups, and maple trees with the unaided eye. Microscopic organisms such as bacteria require magnification to be seen individually. I'd like to propose a third category: Hyperscopic organisms. These are living things so large that they cannot be seen as individuals from an individual perspective.

Consider the E. Coli bacteria in our guts. They actually outnumber the cells in our bodies. Cell for cell, we are walking minorities in our own skins. If we could somehow endow these bacteria with consciousness, how would they view their world? Their universe would be a dark, generally linear, wet place, with nutrients coming from one direction and some members of their species exiting in the other. I would doubt that they would view themselves as part of a bipedal mammal trillions of times their size. We would be hyperscopic to them.

We exist in similar circumstances, yet more complex. We simultaneously occupy multiple hyperscopic life forms. They are human associations. Some are for-profit corporations. Some are political entities such as towns, states, and nations. Some are social organizations, non-profits, and cooperatives. Some are families and tribes. All of them have the capability to reproduce others of their own kind, respond to their environment, and extract energy and mass from their environment using chemical reactions. They do this through the use of our persons, natural resources, and our built infrastructure. Many of the “bodily” functions of human associations are analogous to those of macroscopic and microscopic life.

There is a double relationship between law and human associations. Law is both connective tissue and DNA. Disparate physical structures, people and other living things, land, and materials can be bound together into an active, living entity by law. At the same time, law provides the design of the structure, its patterns of growth, and limits on its behavior. When I use the term law, I mean it in the broadest sense. There is law published in books by political entities, there are customs and traditions passed down by word of mouth, and there are unstated assumptions about behavior that we absorb by observation and imitation.

The physical structure of such an entity is, as I mentioned above, made up of living organisms, land, buildings, machinery, stored materials, underground deposits of resources, and communications networks. Some entities have physical presence stretching across continents. In their complexity, environmental pervasiveness, and fluid boundaries they both match and exceed macroscopic and microscopic life.

Different human associations have different levels of definition and strength. They bind us in various parts of our lives and can be obtrusive or nearly unconscious. Some are almost exclusively economic, some suck up most of our waking hours, and others merit only occasional interaction and have next to no consequences if we withdraw from them.

I belong to a biological family and several groups of friends. I also belong to three cooperatives. I am a board member of an S-type corporation. I am a member of a town, a state, and a nation, several business associations, and a few charitable nonprofits. I am also an ongoing customer of a handful of corporations and an intermittent or single-incident customer of countless more. I have a symbiotic relationship with each of these associations and the other human members of each.

At this point you may be thinking, “Oh, come on! Great metaphor, but you don't expect me to believe...” Yes, I do. To exercise a famous cliché, “If it quacks like a duck...” Scientists who work for NASA have studied the question of defining life so that if they find something strange on another planet they can make a judgment as to whether it is alive. They have come up with formulations analogous to the GRIM mnemonic. The fact is that we have found these overlapping, life form sharing, symbiotic entities on our own planet instead of on the surface of Mars.

It isn't out of character for our planetary ecosystem. Bacteria form biological mats that increase their chances of group survival. Archaic single celled microscopic organisms once joined together and specialized to form more complex organisms that evolved into yet more complex forms. Why shouldn't more complex forms of life such as homo sapiens then join and specialize into the highly complex and interwoven net of human associations that cover the globe? It is our talent as generalists and our external genetics of law and culture that allow each of us to inhabit multiple associative life forms. History and archeology allow us to study the emergence and evolution of new associative species in response to changes in the legal, cultural, and physical environment. Just as in the familiar macroscopic environment, hyperscopic life influences and shapes its environment to enhance its own survival.

This last principle, the drive of hyperscopic life forms to modify their environments, is the crux of the problem we face. I'll discuss this in another essay.

Update: There are essays that follow this one, namely Sharing the Bottle and Breaking the Grip.