Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

Guest Post - Jamie B Musing

With all that's been happening in the news in politics lately, it's been a while since this blog hosted a true culture article. In the spirit of both this and advancing the blogosphere, I present you a guest post from the esteemed Jamie B Musings of "Culture Shock: Everything Pop Culture 5 Days a Week." The above blogger image is authorized for use on this blog only.

Back in college, I was listening to the radio when I heard a story that disgusted and irritated me. It was about two boys, ages 15 and 13, who were molesting their 8-year-old half sister. The mother had left the girl in her brothers’ care while she was at work, and the child reported it to a teacher at her school. The boys claim they got the idea from watching Jerry Springer. It wasn’t just the molestation of a child that bothered me. It was also the fact that, once again, someone is blaming their own actions on media and this case would more then likely stir yet another debate on the effects of media of small children.

This is not the first time this has happened. Different forms of media have been blamed for everything from rape to armed robbery. Different songs by artists such as Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne have been blamed for suicides. Not only that, but the artists have been sued because of it as well. Then there was "The Catcher in the Rye", which has been linked to several celebrity stalkings, including the death of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of former President Ronald Reagan. Once, Christopher Pike, an author of young adult horror novels was asked if he felt responsible for the suicide of a kid who had read some of his books, even though he never promoted suicide in his work. In fact, he portrayed negative consequences for the act in his "Remember Me" Trilogy. What is even worse, many conservative groups use these cases as ammunition to censor certain materials which is not the answer and one step towards creating the world Ray Bradbury wrote about of Fahrenheit 451. What it all comes down to is too many people are trying to use the media to make excuses for the crimes they commit.

I find it hard to believe any sane and rational person would commit a crime just because they saw it in the media. It is time for people to stop searching for the easy answer. Let's face it... there are no easy answers in life. The human mind is a complex machine and I believe when someone commits violent acts, we need to look much deeper than the media to understand them. We also need to be more aware of what's going on around us and act accordingly instead of burying our heads in the sand. Look at the Virginia Tech shooting, for example. The shooter was known to be a problem on campus and had scared more than a couple of students and teachers and that wasn't the first time something that that had happened somewhere. Nothing will ever stop all violence, but I really do believe that we can only make it better if we're willing to look deeper than media to solve the problem.

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Chapter 5: The Parable of the Green Fool

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"Someone in the crowd said to him, “Liberal, tell my brother to divide the tax money with my solar power company.”

"¹⁴ Comrade Stalin replied, “Individuals, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Can't you tell I have the general will to look out for...” ¹⁵ Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; you might turn in to a conservative! But for now you're just a useful idiot...”

¹⁶ And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain country yielded an abundant economic harvest. ¹⁷ He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no way to prevent the world from changing.’

¹⁸ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my coal power plants and build bigger solar panels across miles of beautiful, open Desert, and there I will have my electricity. ¹⁹ And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of power laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

²⁰ “But the general will, now extended to include the cute, furry creatures of the forest, said to him, ‘You fool! Yellowstone will erupt this very night, cover the Western United States with lava and block the sun for 50 years. Then where will this stable world you have prepared for yourself go to?’

²¹ “This is how it will be with whosoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards the general will."

Meet the Proles

Public Domain image by Pearson Scott Foreman

One thing that never ceases to shock me is the tendency of the electorate to hold on to oft repeated lies, even resfuse to hear statements to the contrary of them, and with no candidate has this been more true then Sarah Palin. What do people get out of speaking venom and lies against her? What is it about Palin that makes people not only swallow the lies about her hook, line and sniker, but then dismiss any challenge to those lies as unworthy of their hearing?

In "1984", there were some, shall we say, non-characters called the Proles. They are humans who are non-people, are so lost in their hate, anger, fear and willful ignorance that they will simply hate upon without question whoever the small elite decides as a target, not even quoting their own memories against it. They can be controlled by a single broadcast of the radio.

I don't know what brought America to the brink of becoming Oceania, but something did. Something made us so thoroughly lose ourselves in hate, anger and political parties that we will ignore all reasoning thereafter. Something made us that lazy, that cowardly, that inhuman. I'll leave you to figure out what it was, but when was the last time that someone attacking Sarah Palin gave a good reason why?

Any particular lies you would like addressed will be handled in the comment section.

UPDATE 10/5/2011: Sarah Palin will not be seeking the highest office in the land. She announced that family concerns have simply become too great. The only person in the world who can defeat Sarahcuda is her own daughter, and it seems that she has proved this adage once again.

Abolish Property Tax Now!

Thames Tow Boat Company, New London, CT, 1975. Source: Wikimedia, public domain.

Imagine you are a rancher, on 10,000 acres, about what is needed to have a profitable Cattle ranch. You and your fathers have lived on this land for many generations, essentially since there were Europeans in the area. You don't have any debt, and you wake up every morning to a Montana sunrise against the rockies before a hard day of work.

Unfortunately, a bunch of wealthy Los Angelinos find out about these beautiful Montana sunrises, and move in to megahouses just next door. Your property values go through the roof. The government forces you to sell, as otherwise you can't pay your taxes. You never really owned the land to begin with.

Then we cry and scream about poor people who can take out loans that they can never pay off, but if those poor peoples property values ever went up, they would be driven off their land anyways, and at least they KNOW how much the bank will charge them (or think they know.) But why should they have a balanced checkbook? What benefit do they get? Why should they work hard and save when nothing truly qualifies you as an owner.

And then there are city councils that limit what you can do with your land, telling you you can't raise chickens, you can't raise horses, you can only have two dogs. People next to you decide that because they want high property values, they can tell you what to do with YOUR land. I think if George Washington saw modern suburbia, he would be perfectly ashamed.

And no, I'm not a property owner myself. I live in a 15 by 15 foot room that I rent, and I am offended and ashamed that my country, which call itself the "land of the free, home of the brave" destroys freedom and cowardly avoids productive activity in the name of land values. This is cowardice, and slavery, both.

These behaviors finally culminated in the Kelo decision. The city of New London, a long eclipsed New England city that was once a powerhouse of industry, decided it was going to make "hard choices" to improve its economy. Naturally, these choices were made with other peoples land. They took, by eminent domain, land from many owners, including Kelo, who challenged the constitutionality of this decision. By a narrow majority, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional for the "public use" of reselling to a developer who will make "better purpose" of the land. In a twist of irony, the taken lands are now unused and fenced off, a decaying brownsfield, and I cannot help but think that the wrath of God is at work.

But then there's practicality. Supporters will argue that property taxes are neccesary for the funding of city coffers, but in reality property taxes are a very unreliable source of revenue that have impoverished far more cities then they have made wealthy. The desolation of the inner cities in the 1950's occurred because of wealthy whites fleeing the city, causing land values to fall rapidly. The city then raised property taxes, driving out business, and impoverishing it further. And it is not high property values that define a city. Rather, a city is defined by being the best place for business, a place to buy and sell, manufacture, import and export, a distribution center is the essence of a city, so why not tax THAT? The overall tax burden need not increase, in fact a thorough review of city budgets in the current political climate will likely lead to cuts.

In reality, property taxes serve no one but the wealthy attempting to eliminate the "riff raff" of their town, and those with a vested interest in delegitimizing the right to property. It violates the natural and legitimate right of property, harms the poor by providing subpar, underfunded city services, and encourages a mentality that can lead only to tyranny.

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.