Columnist – John Sammon
This letter is a formal apology to the generation to come in the year 2060, for the sorry depleted state we left to you of the world.

Our world.

The world we left to you is sadly a much more drab and inhospitable place because we lacked the courage to do what was right and to work together to curb the greenhouse emissions and resultant global warming and damage that you, the generation of 2060, can now see with your own eyes.

You have a right to hate us for what we did, and for what we failed to do.

Entire sections of the earth, what had been verdant areas, became rainless deserts, wastelands seared by heat. Populations migrated from these formerly productive regions and were forced to jam into the fewer remaining habitable, livable locales. This put strains on what little was left for a decent living, adequate housing, food and resources.

The simple joy of eating a peach became a memory. Massive crop failure caused by pollution and destroyed, dried-up water supplies made the growing of fruits untenable. There were no bees left to pollinate them anyway.

You, the generation of 2060, can view what once was the diversity of earth life on your new telepathic lazer lights, and you no doubt despise us for squandering these natural wonders.

For example:

Massive die-offs of entire species of animals took place and the ocean polluted and fished out to the point that all its former creatures became mere memories. You can say a polar bear is such an exotic animal and needs such a wide habitat free of people that like the dinosaur, it couldn’t exist with humans, it had to give way.

We used to justify this by calling it “progress,” in reality exploitation and then destruction.

But as long as such animals lived in the wild, they also existed in our active imaginations. We knew they existed in the wild, that there still was a wild, and that made the world a more wonderful, colorful place. Without color, you have drab. Variety is the spice of life.

Now, by your time, there is mostly nothingness.

By 2060, the world became a gray neither-world of struggling millions competing for the greatly shrunken prize, a livable existence, with a few power elites living in luxury, the very few, attempting to manage and control the restive masses. This started long ago, in my time.

People started killing each other for dwindling food and power resources, in the forms of war, famine and anarchy. In the end, when people are hungry enough, they kill. When people are hopeless, without hope, they kill. When there’s nothing else left to kill, the forests, the oceans, the very air we breathe. Then we finally kill each other, more than ever before.

We dream amid our diminishing world of sailing to more livable planets, or inventing new gadgetry to rescue us.

I apologize to you, the future generation of 2060, for this fiasco.

It was ultimately the inability of nations to work together and the basic concept of borders and nations pursuing their own separate national interests that proved fatal. The United States often meddled in the affairs of other countries and in sometimes extending its energy by picking fights with smaller impoverished countries, ruled the world like a modern Roman Empire. Failing in positive leadership, we in turn did not select leaders of either imagination or idealism. In what could have been a more productive aspect of control and an extension of our power, we failed to use our influence to ask for cooperation and to line up the mostly smaller countries of the world in a concerted effort.

Half of Americans refused to believe in the alarming decline in the earth’s health that became as plain as the nose on their face, and that most scientists had long-agreed was happening and warned about. Some Americans, close-minded and stupid, didn’t want to be bothered. Some were only concerned about riches and short-term pleasures.

There were some who were alarmed.

But no effort based on supreme urgency won bipartisan support. In this case, the rights and freedoms we enjoyed actually worked against us. Since it’s my right to ignore the problem for my own selfish reasons, many of us chose to do so. Until it was too late.

Ingrained in our souls was the need to accumulate riches and possessions over the need to do right.

Third World Countries could hardly be blamed in the same way. They had less and were motivated by the luxury seeking status we had. We set a bad example. They wanted to emulate our increasingly wrong values.

The end result was the same. The East Coast of the U.S. became a hurricane-lashed hell world of erosion and fleeing populace. The expanding Sahara Desert founded a twin in Texas and Oklahoma. Synthetic, fake meat, bread and poultry to replace the natural kind that had been lost produced more cancers in humans.

The Amazon Basin became a parched salt flat depriving the world of billions of its oxygen-generating plants. Islands disappeared under rising seas, coral reefs disappeared. Especially anything that had color, or beauty, disappeared.

Dullness reigned.

We left to you the generation of 2060 a depleted, exhausted planet eking by on the forlorn hope that new technology will replace the damage. But breathable air and drinkable water and fish in the ocean un-caught and un-poisoned by pollution are very hard things to replace with fake living replicas.

Animals disappeared, water disappeared, abundant crops disappeared. Methane gas escaping from a thawing Arctic Circle poisoned the air. It became a multi-national riot of the few haves versus the many have-nots in an inter-continental collision similar to a long-ago but futuristic movie called “Mad Max.”

Life became again like what it once was in the Neolithic Age, a grim struggle for survival and a short miserable life, but without huge areas to expand.

You, the generation of 2060, can view what we bequeathed to you. You must hate us for it.

I can’t say I blame you.

Could it have been different?

I’ll always wonder. I admit I myself have been a part of the problem. Though it is somewhat reassuring to me that I have already lived most of my life, I can however express sorrow for what happened and pity for future generations.

I don’t expect forgiveness.

Huffington Post: Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) again went after Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) with coarse words on a conservative talk radio show Monday. Houston radio host Michael Berry asked West to play a “free association game” and say the first thing that pops into his mind in an “undiplomatic, unscripted” way. Berry said Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“I need a bucket,” he said.

Berry then mentioned the July 19th incident when West e-mailed Schultz and members of the Democratic and Republican leadership with the subject line: “Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman-Schultz.” [ READ MORE ]

Elsewhere, Fox’s “Narcissist” Bill O’Reilly “explained” to Jon Stewart that he will gladly pay higher taxes as a job creator when the government stops wasting his money. See video below:

Exclusive – Bill O’Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Bill O’Reilly Extended Interview Pt. 2

Bonus NUT-Bag Video

Indecision 2012 – Indecision Edition – Chris Christie’s Answer. The inscrutable Chris Christie continues to confound pundits hoping for a straight answer regarding his intentions to run for president.

Indecision 2012 – Indecision Edition – DING-BAT Sarah Palin Still Deciding. Sarah Palin reassures America that not every possible Republican candidate has made a clear decision.

AmeriFam: Samantha Bee gives a struggling American family all the advantages of corporatehood, with a huge can of “You’re welcome.”

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An Energy Plan and an Energy Future Congruent With Both the Common Interest and Environmental Defense

Almost by convention, an independent engineer is a maverick. A footloose nuclear engineer, even more so, is inevitably revolutionary. Thus, Dr. Arjun Makhijani cannot escape being both interesting and controversial. This profile examines the man, his ideas, his organizational mission, and, in a preliminary way, his recent monograph, a publication that not only flies in the face of established U.S. energy policy. but also casts that challenging gauntlet with both a richly detailed empiricism and a highly honed conceptual framework.

Dr. Makhijani is a rarity among the nuclear priesthood. He has dared to suggest that the denizens of his vocation are other than iconic masters without facing the wrath of excommunication by everyone else in the field. Perhaps his Ph.d in nuclear engineering, with a specialization in understanding fusion, makes him difficult to assail, at least with the impunity that nuclear proponents normally expect when heaping vitriol on their opposites. In any event, when one googles “arjun makhijani” + energy + critics OR criticism OR controversy, one does not encounter the slander and calumny that a Dr. Helen Caldicott confronts as a daily cost of going about her business. I’m sure that plenty of criticism is present, but he does not invite attack, despite the strength of his position against nuclear weapons and energy.

Moreover, his bona fides in regard to energy matters go back a long way. As his official bio states, “He was the principal author of the first study of the energy efficiency potential of the US economy, published in 1971.”

He co-authored the Ford Foundation’s energy report during the oil crisis of the mid ’70′s, A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future. His face page at the National Journal on Energy and Environment, where he is an ‘expert blogger,’ notes that he is a fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor only available to about one out of every two hundred APS members.

Furthermore, he has won awards for his science and prizes for his reporting and kudos for his opposition to nuclear weaponry. And until relatively recently, he believed that the U.S. might need to permit nukes to continue operating to the end of their licenses, a step necessary for us to find a path away from carbon spewing coal-fired electricity, which he believes might possibly doom our place on the planet as a result of climate change, and toward a more sustainable future. Such a position–accepting a likely Faustian bargain with fission–characterized his official pronouncements, according to prominent anti-nuclear activists, until 2005 or so, when a coterie of those who believed in both his intellectual honesty and his brilliant acuity, asked him simply to investigate, as fully as he could without significant funding—DOE, after all, already ‘knew’ the answer to the question posed by the activists–what the possibilities were for a fifty year transition to a sustainable business model, in the form of a practically complete reliance on renewable energy sources.

Readers should not misread this point and think Dr. M. any sort of nuclear advocate: Arjun Makhijani long ago left behind any willingness to countenance nuclear energy as a positive good. He helped to give birth to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in 1987 and has led the organization since then. He and the group pointedly evidenced the multiple intersections of weapons and reactors, as well as the multiple drawbacks of these mutually interdependent technologies.

But as his understanding of global warming grew, so did his willingness to admit that, for a time and to a limited extent, rational humans might have no choice but to keep present nukes operational. Instead of new nukes, he advocated natural gas combined cycle power plants as a bridge. This tolerance for today’s atomic energy generation was at best grudging, however. In 1999, he published both The Nuclear Power Deception – U.S. Nuclear Mythology from Electricity “Too Cheap to Meter” to “Inherently Safe” Reactors, with Scott Saleska and “Stepping Back from the Nuclear Cliff,”in The Progressive.

Nevertheless, until five years ago or so, neither Dr. Makhijani’s frequent government testimony nor his general punditry totally rejected atomic power.

“Never before have I said that a renewable and storage option would be adequate without nuclear.”

Still, roughly two years after he accepted the challenge from friends and collaborators in the anti-nuclear movement, he published perhaps the definitive opus for those who tout solar sources of one sort or another, Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. While the voluble and affable and cogent Dr. M. has managed to appear on just about every major media stage, his book received relatively little upper-level corporate media coverage.

How many readers have heard of the book, I wonder? Even fewer have noted the publication in 2006, marking his shift to an all-renewable option, of “Nuclear is Not the Way,” which the Wilson Quarterly published in its Autumn issue that year. It laid the groundwork for his monograph, a blueprint for a sustainable future that is little known at the level of CNN or MSNBC, and certainly not proffered a favorable spot on Energy Secretary Chu’s reading list.

Unexpectedly given this lack of major promotion, the volume, which he preceded with an entire issue of IEER’s Science for Democratic Action devoted to the topic, has steadily gained readership. A search of the title, “Carbon Free and Nuclear Free,” produces 262,000 hits on Google. And Dr. Makhijani can ply the numbers that he presents; he has gone toe to toe in debates with all manner of personnel for the far-flung pro-nuclear colossus. Some of that fervent cranial battling has made cogent and easily accessible fodder for citizens who recognize that the time is long past when we can simply ‘let the experts decide’ on matters of policy and technology. Readers might examine the following links as exemplary of this available orientation to what our future options are:

•   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqHmzYe5jw&feature=related

•   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0tuErPLKWo

•   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW4VDC35his

These excerpts concern relative costs of power, advantages of renewable sources such as wind power, and his ‘first affirmative’ presentation about taking an all renewable route into the future. Readers can segue from these POV’s to perspectives more favorable to nuclear options at their leisure.

In particular, Dr. M. has had several skirmishes with the former head of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, who underwent a rebirth as radioactive proponent and has been promulgating a “nukes are ‘clean energy’” line that is one of the major propaganda coups of the new century. After all, here is a genuine ‘greenie,’ a dyed-in-the-wool tree hugger and bird lover and proponent of environmentalism, Gaia, and ecology, who now says that the techniques of atomic legerdemain represent the best option for humanity, that our past rejection of using fission to boil water was “a big mistake.”

Dr. Makhijani’s answers are solidly empirical and represent his own “surprise, actually,” that he was able to “f(ind)that we could do (a transition to renewables), rather rapidly actually.” “Wind energy is cheaper today than nuclear,” and the costs are dropping for this proto-solar option. If nukes are better than renewables, then why do we need loan guarantees. To “put sunshine in your tank,” he says, “the foundation is efficiency,” including the ‘smart grid’ that almost all parties to these debates agree is a sound goal. Though decidedly critical of corporate power–an earlier book, From Global Capitalism to Economic Justice: An Inquiry into the Elimination of Systemic Poverty, Violence, and Environmental Destruction in the World Economy, severely criticizes big money and big business–he labels the highly cited French example, which pro-nukers simply adore, as “nuclear socialism,” where the government robs the rate-payers to give to the reactor manufacturers and others attached to the fission feed bag. Basically, Dr. M. says that while markets will continue to bring about thriving growth in wind and solar sources, without massive government support, nuclear electricity will fizzle out and die. As Amory Lovins, green guru extraordinaire has put it, “The nuclear industry is dead from an overdose of market forces.”

Readers who stay tuned will have a chance to read a close review of the book in an upcoming article. When ‘leaders’ at all levels are trying to sell the snake-oil of a ‘Nuclear Renaissance,’ the common people need the guidance that Arjun Makhijani proffers. Then they need to be willing to stand up and speak, and, furthermore, to insist that policy must be ‘of the people and by the people,’ not just, supposedly, ‘for the people.’

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“So, there’s been some buzz in the liberal blogosphere and on CNN over photos and video that show Sarah Palin had some notes written in the palm of her left hand when she was on stage Saturday evening at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

By Sam Vaknin — Author of “Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited“

   Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
The pursuit of “energy security” has brought us to the brink. It is directly responsible for numerous wars, big and small; for unprecedented environmental degradation; for global financial imbalances and meltdowns; for growing income disparities; and for ubiquitous unsustainable development.

It is energy insecurity that we should seek.

The uncertainty incumbent in phenomena such “peak oil”, or in the preponderance of hydrocarbon fuels in failed states fosters innovation. The more insecure we get, the more we invest in the recycling of energy-rich products; the more substitutes we find for energy-intensive foods; the more we conserve energy; the more we switch to alternatives energy; the more we encourage international collaboration; and the more we optimize energy outputs per unit of fuel input.

A world in which energy (of whatever source) will be abundant and predictably available would suffer from entropy, both physical and mental. The vast majority of human efforts revolve around the need to deploy our meager resources wisely. Energy also serves as a geopolitical “organizing principle” and disciplinary rod. Countries which waste energy (and the money it takes to buy it), pollute, and conflict with energy suppliers end up facing diverse crises, both domestic and foreign. Profligacy is punished precisely because energy in insecure. Energy scarcity and precariousness thus serves a global regulatory mechanism.

But the obsession with “energy security” is only one example of the almost religious belief in “scarcity”.

It is only a mild overstatement to say that the science of economics, such as it is, revolves around the Malthusian concept of scarcity. Our infinite wants, the finiteness of our resources and the bad job we too often make of allocating them efficiently and optimally – lead to mismatches between supply and demand. We are forever forced to choose between opportunities, between alternative uses of resources, painfully mindful of their costs.

This is how the perennial textbook “Economics” (seventeenth edition), authored by Nobel prizewinner Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, defines the dismal science:

“Economics is the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people.”

The classical concept of scarcity – unlimited wants vs. limited resources – is lacking. Anticipating much-feared scarcity encourages hoarding which engenders the very evil it was meant to fend off. Ideas and knowledge – inputs as important as land and water – are not subject to scarcity, as work done by Nobel laureate Robert Solow and, more importantly, by Paul Romer, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley, clearly demonstrates. Additionally, it is useful to distinguish natural from synthetic resources.

The scarcity of most natural resources (a type of “external scarcity”) is only theoretical at present. Granted, many resources are unevenly distributed and badly managed. But this is man-made (“internal”) scarcity and can be undone by Man. It is truer to assume, for practical purposes, that most natural resources – when not egregiously abused and when freely priced – are infinite rather than scarce. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins discovered that primitive peoples he has studied had no concept of “scarcity” – only of “satiety”. He called them the first “affluent societies”.

This is because, fortunately, the number of people on Earth is finite – and manageable – while most resources can either be replenished or substituted. Alarmist claims to the contrary by environmentalists have been convincingly debunked by the likes of Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”.

Equally, it is true that manufactured goods, agricultural produce, money, and services are scarce. The number of industrialists, service providers, or farmers is limited – as is their life span. The quantities of raw materials, machinery and plant are constrained. Contrary to classic economic teaching, human wants are limited – only so many people exist at any given time and not all them desire everything all the time. But, even so, the demand for man-made goods and services far exceeds the supply.

Scarcity is the attribute of a “closed” economic universe. But it can be alleviated either by increasing the supply of goods and services (and human beings) – or by improving the efficiency of the allocation of economic resources. Technology and innovation are supposed to achieve the former – rational governance, free trade, and free markets the latter.

The telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the train, the car, the agricultural revolution, information technology and, now, biotechnology have all increased our resources, seemingly ex nihilo. This multiplication of wherewithal falsified all apocalyptic Malthusian scenarios hitherto. Operations research, mathematical modeling, transparent decision making, free trade, and professional management – help better allocate these increased resources to yield optimal results.

Markets are supposed to regulate scarcity by storing information about our wants and needs. Markets harmonize supply and demand. They do so through the price mechanism. Money is, thus, a unit of information and a conveyor or conduit of the price signal – as well as a store of value and a means of exchange.

Markets and scarcity are intimately related. The former would be rendered irrelevant and unnecessary in the absence of the latter. Assets increase in value in line with their scarcity – i.e., in line with either increasing demand or decreasing supply. When scarcity decreases – i.e., when demand drops or supply surges – asset prices collapse. When a resource is thought to be infinitely abundant (e.g., air) – its price is zero.

Armed with these simple and intuitive observations, we can now survey the dismal economic landscape.

The abolition of scarcity was a pillar of the paradigm shift to the “new economy”. The marginal costs of producing and distributing intangible goods, such as intellectual property, are negligible. Returns increase – rather than decrease – with each additional copy. An original software retains its quality even if copied numerous times. The very distinction between “original” and “copy” becomes obsolete and meaningless. Knowledge products are “non-rival goods” (i.e., can be used by everyone simultaneously).

Such ease of replication gives rise to network effects and awards first movers with a monopolistic or oligopolistic position. Oligopolies are better placed to invest excess profits in expensive research and development in order to achieve product differentiation. Indeed, such firms justify charging money for their “new economy” products with the huge sunken costs they incur – the initial expenditures and investments in research and development, machine tools, plant, and branding.

To sum, though financial and human resources as well as content may have remained scarce – the quantity of intellectual property goods is potentially infinite because they are essentially cost-free to reproduce. Plummeting production costs also translate to enhanced productivity and wealth formation. It looked like a virtuous cycle.

But the abolition of scarcity implied the abolition of value. Value and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. Prices reflect scarcity. Abundant products are cheap. Infinitely abundant products – however useful – are complimentary. Consider money. Abundant money – an intangible commodity – leads to depreciation against other currencies and inflation at home. This is why central banks intentionally foster money scarcity.

But if intellectual property goods are so abundant and cost-free – why were distributors of intellectual property so valued, not least by investors in the stock exchange? Was it gullibility or ignorance of basic economic rules?

Not so. Even “new economists” admitted to temporary shortages and “bottlenecks” on the way to their utopian paradise of cost-free abundance. Demand always initially exceeds supply. Internet backbone capacity, software programmers, servers are all scarce to start with – in the old economy sense.

This scarcity accounts for the stratospheric erstwhile valuations of dotcoms and telecoms. Stock prices were driven by projected ever-growing demand and not by projected ever-growing supply of asymptotically-free goods and services. “The Economist” describes how WorldCom executives flaunted the cornucopian doubling of Internet traffic every 100 days. Telecoms predicted a tsunami of clients clamoring for G3 wireless Internet services. Electronic publishers gleefully foresaw the replacement of the print book with the much heralded e-book.

The irony is that the new economy self-destructed because most of its assumptions were spot on. The bottlenecks were, indeed, temporary. Technology, indeed, delivered near-cost-free products in endless quantities. Scarcity was, indeed, vanquished.

Per the same cost, the amount of information one can transfer through a single fiber optic swelled 100 times. Computer storage catapulted 80,000 times. Broadband and cable modems let computers communicate at 300 times their speed only 5 years ago. Scarcity turned to glut. Demand failed to catch up with supply. In the absence of clear price signals – the outcomes of scarcity – the match between the two went awry.

One innovation the “new economy” has wrought is “inverse scarcity” – unlimited resources (or products) vs. limited wants. Asset exchanges the world over are now adjusting to this harrowing realization – that cost free goods are worth little in terms of revenues and that people are badly disposed to react to zero marginal costs.

The new economy caused a massive disorientation and dislocation of the market and the price mechanism. Hence the asset bubble. Reverting to an economy of scarcity is our only hope. If we don’t do so deliberately – the markets will do it for us, mercilessly.

A Comment on “Manufactured Scarcity”

Conspiracy theorists have long alleged that manufacturers foster scarcity by building into their products mechanisms of programmed obsolescence and apoptosis (self-destruction). But scarcity is artificially manufactured in less obvious (and far less criminal) ways.

Technological advances, product revisions, new features, and novel editions render successive generations of products obsolete. Consumerism encourages owners to rid themselves of their possessions and replace them with newer, more gleaming, status-enhancing substitutes offered by design departments and engineering workshops worldwide. Cherished values of narcissistic competitiveness and malignant individualism play an important socio-cultural role in this semipternal game of musical chairs.

Many products have a limited shelf life or an expiry date (rarely supported by solid and rigorous research). They are to be promptly disposed of and, presumably, instantaneously replaced with new ones.

Finally, manufacturers often knowingly produce scarcity by limiting their output or by restricting access to their goods. “Limited editions” of works of art and books are prime examples of this stratagem.

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