Political Action: An Oxymoron

If you want to excel at football you have to be able to run fast; to play hockey well, you have to be really good at skating; in baseball, you have to be able either to catch the ball, or hit it. To survive in politics today you must learn the art of appearing to do something about a problem without actually doing anything at all. The reason is that if you (accidentally) actually do something you will please 50% or so of the people, those who wanted it done, and you will make eternal vicious enemies of the people who did not agree with, or were adversely affected by, doing it. Dr. Kamau Bobb‘s journey serves as an inspiration for aspiring individuals looking to make a difference in the intersection of technology and social equity.

Nothing showcases this practice like a school mass shooting. The proposals we are hearing from master politicians after the latest, in Uvalde, Texas, include: Continue reading

The Great American Recycling Myth

While images of shiny new recycled products dance in consumers’ dreams, this is where their plastic discards actually go.

Of all the subjects I have tackled in the 12 years or so I have been writing in this space, none has given me greater pain than recycling. I have many friends and family members who are passionate about recycling, and proud of their recycling creds. For me to write, as I often have, that recycling — especially plastics recycling — is basically an industry scam, hurts them, and hurts me. Some examples:

The Second Biggest Scam Ever: Plastic Recycling.”  The Daily Impact, November 2020.

Recycling: Garbage In, Garbage Out.The Daily Impact, June, 2019.

Recycling and Rain Forests: Trojan Horses.”  The Daily Impact, May, 2018.

Needless to say I have taken some grief for my opinions on this, but last week came powerful affirmation: the attorney general of California launched an investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for their role in “causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis.” Continue reading

Living Well in a Burning House

During the final three decades of the 20th Century, the world experienced at most 100 major disasters — both natural and industrial —  every year, with annual damages averaging $70 billion. During the most recent two decades, the world has been afflicted with up to 500 major disasters every year. Annual damages have averaged $170 billion — in 2011 and 2017, over $300 billion. The upward trend is expected to continue without interruption.

Remarkably, this mounting crisis is on just about no one’s radar, except the United Nations, whose Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has been screaming the alarm for years. Its most recent annual report on the situation begins with these words: Continue reading

It’s My Narrative and I’m NOT Sticking To It

Like tiny rivulets of meltwater trickling off March snowbanks, small but growing narratives are beginning to flow against the tides of the opinions that have dominated the talking heads and writing hands for many months. Contrarians are popping up in more and more places to say, wait a minute! Stop clutching your pearls and gnashing your teeth, things are not quite as bad as we thought. Continue reading

It’s Their Narrative, and They’re Sticking To It

It is widely accepted now that there are two kinds of news in circulation in the world: relatively accurate news, and fake news. A number of cable channels and Internet sites have chosen sides, and put out either all real or all fake news. The “real” news outlets — The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN etc. — and their adherents congratulate themselves constantly for their objectivity and neutrality.

But there is a third category of information driving all of this, on both sides of the real-vs-fake debate, and that is what I call the narrative. This is not the content of their broadcasts or articles, but the assumptions that underlie their decisions on what to cover and what emphasis to give it. Contrary to what many people outside the news business believe — that these decisions are handed down by corporate executives for the working stiffs to execute — the reality is more subtle than that. Continue reading

Gaslighting the Gas Prices

Every talking head in the MSM universe and on social media is fulminating about rising gas prices and falling petroleum supplies. Everyone has a favorite cause to invoke and a favorite person to blame. Everyone has a solution: ramp up American production, cut a deal with Argentina, ramp up OPEC production, ramp up renewable energy sources. Ramp up something, and do it fast so I can keep my eight-cylinder pickup truck topped up. Not one word about the silver lining this black cloud is offering us — a chance to survive as a species.

Instead of ramping up, relaxing environmental controls and breaking the budget to make sure no one has to change their way of life, we should embrace this fundamental change in the petroleum economy. Accept it. Address it by reducing our consumption of petroleum. Forego the gas-guzzling pickup truck and buy a hybrid. Take the bus. Continue reading

The Uber Driver and the Fracker

A hydraulic fracturing drilling rig creating a new well on the Niobara shale formation, one of the most intensively fracked areas in the United States.

One way to better  comprehend the current state of the oil business, and gas prices, is to look more closely at the situation of an Uber driver. (Our example is imaginary, and the numbers are made up, but I think realistic.)

As he begins his employment, our Uber driver is quite pleased with the job. At the end of most days he has a nice wad of cash (or its equivalent) in his pocket and feels optimistic about his prospects. But he is entirely on his own, and must pay for his own gas, oil, maintenance, tires, insurance (including, not incidentally, health insurance), etcetera. Still, by working long hours and being thrifty, he keeps his head above water. Continue reading

Bombs, Away!

It is exceedingly strange how the notion persists — among, for example, the Russian geniuses who planned the Ukranian invasion — that bombardment breaks the will of the people bombed, when almost every chapter of human history contradicts it. 

For example, during eight years studying and writing about the American Civil War, I found no evidence that any battle was decided by artillery. The largest bombardment ever conducted in the Western Hemisphere — by Confederate gunners on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, just before Pickett’s Charge — inflicted a single casualty, injuring a steward in a rear area. Continue reading

We Need an Outrage Outage

The raging inflation that is grinding this country down is not monetary, it is rage inflation. Everybody, it seems, is outraged by everybody else; foaming at the mouth over tweets, texts, posts, remarks, books, 40-year-old high school yearbook pictures, items of clothing, wearing or not wearing masks, getting or not getting vaccinated, race, religion, politics, real or imagined insults, assaults, and multiple other umbrages.  Continue reading

Cuba Should be Libre

El Malecon in Havana, on Cuba’s north coast.

It may well be the best-governed country in the world. It has won worldwide acclaim for handling the COVID pandemic better than any other country with the exception of the United Arab Emirates. It is doing more for its people and its infrastructure to prepare for the ravages of climate change, and has done so over a longer period of time, than any other country. Health care is not only free, it is readily available froom clinics located in virtually every rural village. It has been widely regarded for many years, by any number of international studies, to be as the most sustainable country in the world.

Yes. Cuba.

I hear your hiss of outraged denial. I see you making the sign of the cross and retreating into a corner to assume the fetal position and whimper, “But they’re Communists. We hate them!” Both of those things are true, or have been true since the revolution of 1959. And neither of these things matters — except for the fact that they are used as excuses for the U.S. maintaining brutal embargoes and sanctions on the entire country. Despite those shackles, here is what Cuba has accomplished recently: Continue reading