The world is flat and very crowded.

Yes, thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress, I have been reading Thomas Friedman again. In particular, I want to call attention to this excerpt from his OpEd today at the NY Times.

According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

People always get anxious about what you are going to say next when you start talking about population, especially when you think that they might all want to have the same consumer that so many Americans buy so much of. Add it up and try to calculate just how much climate change is going on. This can not be sustained and those who deny, doubt, delay action should be held criminally culpable for any and all failures, just as the Army Corps of Engineers has been held responsible for the flooding of the 9th Ward by Katrina.

With all of the other economic crises facing us, we can not afford the price of inaction. The time for civil disobedience is now.

Fundamental problems

The economy is in disarray. By any measure, this has been the worst year for the economy that most living Americans have experienced and it has not ended. While the government is trying to resuscitate the banking system, Whirlpool today announced that they were cutting ~5000 jobs because their products, the necessities of a good kitchen, just are not selling.

I will try to expand on this as part of my argument that Greens should be making the most of this situation, but are not. Click Read more! to get rest of the info.


It is easy, as Obama is wont to do, to blame this all on George W. Bush and the Republican Administration. McCain's running a messy campaign makes that easier. There is a connection between the current Republican administration and Congress, the raft of Grover Norquist funded libertarian leaning think tanks in Washington and the general idea that the market is more effective than government in creating what is good and the regulation only stands in the way of prosperity forever. Even Alan Greenspan operated on that premise from the time he first read Ayn Rand until the last couple of weeks.

Buried in this is the fact that Wall Street and the banking system had been turned into a bucket shop looking a lot like a NY OTB betting parlor. They would play a 'futures' game betting on the future price of a stock without actually owning it. By the early 1920's there were outlawed. This was just plain gambling and both state and federal laws prevented it until the year 2000. In that year, the Federal law was changed to allow what we have all heard of as credit default swaps.

Some explanations that I have heard of credit default swaps compares them to buying an insurance policy against losing your money. However, there was no regulation and you did not actually have to own the obligation (in this case mortgages) in order to get the insurance. That is rather like buying and selling insurance on your neighbor's house. Now, when the prices fell, everyone wanted to collect their money but it wasn't there to be collected. We now know why our grandfathers outlawed the practice.

As early as April of this year, the word was out. This should not have been a surprise.

The sacrosanct free market would supposedly regulate itself. The problem with that approach is that regulations are just rules. If there are no rules, the players can cheat; and cheat they have, with a gambler's addiction. In December 2007, the Bank for International Settlements reported derivative trades tallying in at $681 trillion - ten times the gross domestic product of all the countries in the world combined. Somebody is obviously bluffing about the money being brought to the game, and that realization has made for some very jittery markets.

So, we blame everything on Bush when this practice was signed in Federal law by Bill Clinton and he is no Republican. Better yet, the Federal law stipulated that no state could regulate the practice either.

Where does this have to do with Greens? It would seem to be a great time to go forward with an alternative. We know the problems, we should be telling everyone what will get us out of the mess, but we are not. We are not even making much of an effort to do so.

Greens have never come to any agreement on a set of fiscal policies. There Greens who are socialist, communists, anarchists or just generally convinced that big corporations are inherently evil. We need to be really clear about the alternative. We need to understand just what we mean by a Green Economy. It is not just, as Van Jones or Thomas Friedman (God, I hate put them in the same box) would have us believe: an economy based on global warming and energy, though that is part of it.

Even Ralph Nader comes off as being only an activist against some vaguely evil corporate state. His CounterPunch OpEd on the bailout outlines some steps to a remedy, but there are NOT based on any idea of what a Green Economics would really look like. It is only tweaking a broken system with any systemic modification. Still, that is more than I have seen from our leadership.

Republican have a Free Market ideology with a little bit of policing. Democrats have a different public ideology, but it looks a lot like the Republicans, only with more policing because they know that the Republicans are evil. Greens have no common understanding of either economic or fiscal policy and, for that reason, are not able to take advantage of the current turmoil to advance our cause.

Just look at the various committees that we have in the national party. None of them deal with economic or fiscal policies.

Friedman on ET (Environmental Technology)

Thomas Friedman does more than write columns for the NY Times. He also writes books and then does a very good job of promoting them all over the media. His latest book is Hot, Flat and Crowded and he has been promoting it with vigor: Sunday on Meet the Press, this morning on GMA, and also on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Click read more to read Lorna Salzman's very articulate commentary after listening to Friedman on Fresh Air.


Commentary on Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded, and the upcoming election:
by Lorna Salzman.

Today Terry Gross interviewed one of my least favorite journalists on her show: Thomas Friedman, someone that most of us do not regard as an environmental friend. But Friedman spoke with fervor and guts, and emphatically put his finger on the utter failure of American energy policy, due to Bush, the Republicans, the oil companies, and on the absence of incentives for reducing energy consumption or increasing renewable energy.

What he didn't do, however, was to include the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Barack Obama, in his stern lecture.

He criticized Sarah Palin, the Repubs' VP candidate, for denying global warming even as parts of her state melt away. He criticized Republican senators in Ohio and New Hampshire for opposing renewable energy tax credits even though their states harbor two leading renewable energy companies, who, as a result of the loss of tax credits, are moving operations abroad. He criticized the fact that utilities make money from a rate structure that encourages selling more energy rather than less. He bemoaned the fact that there is no tax on carbon, with revenues being rebated to the public through abolition of the payroll tax. And so on.

What he didn't do, however, was rake Obama and the Dems over the coals on the energy issue. This is an amazing oversight, given that everyone agrees that the economy and jobs are going to be the key issues in the election. Obama has hedged and fudged on domestic oil drilling, supports "clean coal" and "safe" nuclear power, but has yet to connect these and the things Friedman raised to his campaign or the election.

Once again, the Democrats are running a campaign out of fear, not principle, not science, not equity, not justice. Like their refusal to come all out for a single payer universal health plan overseen by the government and funded through the income tax, they are dropping the the energy ball, even though the energy issue offers them by far and without a doubt a HUGE opportunity to present the public with a serious and comprehensive economic plan to restore jobs and renovate American industry, transportation and infrastructure.

Why are the Democrats self-destructing again? The answer is quite simple. When your opponent is as cravenly hypocritical and inept and wrongheaded as McCain is, there is no point in playing your strong card when you can win with your weak one. Once again the Dems are taking liberals and their party faithful for granted by saying: you guys have nowhere else to go so stop your whining, you know you will vote for us no matter what. This is cynicism and contempt writ large.

So we must ask: where have the liberals been? What have they been doing? Well, we know many of them have been protesting the war. Many of them are defending Roe vs. Wade. Many are pushing gay rights. Many are protesting racism and poverty.

Duh. They have been doing this for years. When was the last time a liberal Democrat walked into her congressman's office, slammed a fist on the table, and said: I want single payer universal health care, I want it now, and I DONT want anything else. When was the last time she walked into that office and slammed a fist down and said: I want a tax on carbon and gasoline, and I want the money from that to replace the payroll tax. I want it NOW and I dont want anything less.

The big question, however, is this: when was the last time a Democrat, or a liberal group or PAC, said to that congressman: if you don't do this, I won't vote for you. And when was the last time a Democrat withheld her vote because her congressman didn't listen to her? Didn't vote for him at all? Or voted for Ralph Nader? When was the last time that a liberal lobby marched into the capitol demanding an energy bill that did all the things that Friedman says we need?...carbon taxes, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, renewable energy tax credits, mandatory energy efficiency standards and measures?

When was the last time that anyone, any GROUP or movement, put energy and environment first? When they finally understood that these issues are the most important and urgent issues of the day? That we have a global ecological crisis that results directly from economic (and population) growth and overconsumption?
When was the last time that anyone but an environmentalist said out loud:
Economic growth must end. What are the chances that the Democrats will say or do anything about these things?

What should liberals do? Here's what they should do. They should make it clear to the Democratic Party and to their Democratic congressmen that THEY WILL NEVER VOTE FOR THEM AGAIN, or for Obama, unless he and the party get off their butts and get serious, and unless the party stops taking them for granted. They should lay it on the line: we don't care if our vote helps McCain win, because the Democrat/Obama energy policy not only isn't much better than McCain's, but even if it is marginally better, it is completely inadequate and, worst of all, dishonest and misleading.

Unless enrolled Democrats and liberals and their pressure groups speak out loud and clear and say that their vote is up for grabs, Obama not only won't win but he won't DESERVE to win.

Don't let the Democrats hoodwink and blackmail you again. Tell the Dems:
defecate or get off the pot.

Lorna Salzman

What do the Danes and the Chinese have in common?

If all you are doing is following the Olympics, you might think it is only badminton or table tennis. However, the real answer is wind. In my previous post, I cited the NY Times editorial call for a sane energy policy. I also mentioned an OpEd by Thomas Friedman. It deserves a separate reference.

Friedman is always looking at the world as though you can tell the future by watching the way international commerce work. I don't want to debated that. However, in his OpEd Sunday, he compares the very practical Danish energy policy with that of the US. There are two very clear points of difference.

First, they view high gasoline prices as a good thing...

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy."

The second is that America, lacking political leadership, is asleep at the switch while other countries are making substantial progress in solving our real problems, not teasing votes from commuters with promised that won't be fulfilled. Here is how Friedman cites one interviewee.

Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.
>
> Why should you care?
>
> “We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

Friedman does not mince word about politicianss.

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

I guess I am not the only one who thinks the Republican magic formula is stupid.

Even the NY Times gets it.

There were two recent items in the NY Times Editorial pages regarding US energy policy. One was an editorial, the other a column by Thomas Friedman. I have cited Friedman before, not always in a complementary manner. However, this time they both have the correct ideas. It is too bad that our presumptive presidential candidates don't read that paper. Maybe they are both like George W. Bush in that regard.

Of course, I always have more to say.

A toxic combination of $4 gasoline, voter anxiety and presidential ambition is making it impossible for this country to have the grown-up conversation it needs about energy.

That is the manner in which the NY Times starts it's editorial. That is also the point I made in my previous post on the stupidity of the McCain / Obama campaigns.

The Times editorial concludes:

Here is the underlying reality: A nation that uses one-quarter of the world’s oil while possessing less than 3 percent of its reserves cannot drill its way to happiness at the pump, much less self-sufficiency. The only plausible strategy is to cut consumption while embarking on a serious program of alternative fuels and energy sources. This is a point the honest candidate should be making at every turn.

If there is to be an alternative, it will have to come from the honest politicians of the Green Party. I am excited that Rosa Clemente was quoted in a yet to be uploaded press release from the GP today.

Green candidates and leaders called Barack Obama's and John McCain's positions on energy policy, gas prices, and global warming a capitulation to corporate lobbies, and urged adoption of the Green Party's plan to reduce fossil fuel consumption, generate new jobs in conservation and new energy sources, and curb the advance of climate change.

We need to have all GP Candidates hammering at the energy issue and the patronizing political playacting of the major party campaign.

Everyone who reads this should be writing their local papers, supporting the Green position and pointing out the lack of respect that Obama and McCain have for voters, playing us for losers and that is what we will all be if either are elected.

When Green is in.

Even neo-con NY Times Columnist Tom Friedman is beginning to sound more like a Green than like John McCain. Take this from his interview reported at Grist today.

... [B]ig energy companies? They're not on Facebook. They're not in your chat room. They're in the cloakroom, and they're in your face. So unless you get off of Facebook, unless you get out of the chat room into the cloakroom where the rules get made, you're not going to have an impact. So I'm all for the blogosphere; I love it. I love the fact that my column gets spread all over the world thanks to the internet, and that I can have this dialogue with so many people. And I love the blogosphere for all the wild, crazy ways it enriches the conversation.

But do not confuse that conversation with having an impact. At some point, the conversation has to stop and the lobbying and the arm-twisting has to start.

It makes me wonder why I keep writing this blog. I guess it is in the hope that some readers just might take the next step and start opening the door to the cloakroom, since the time for that has surely passed me by.

So, if your are reading this... stop... shut off the computer and go do something Green. Here are a few suggestions:

• Attend the next meeting of you local planning commission. That is where developers have their way with your future.
• Send a letter to your congress critter telling them that we don't want Federal Subsidies of Big Agriculture or of Bil Oil. The current farm bill and energy bill are embarrassments designed for short range, future be damned, political advantage.
  
• Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper supporting a Green Party Presidential Candidate: Johnson, McKinney, Mesplay or Swift.
  
• Plant a garden.
  
• Send a letter to the Chairman of Home Depot asking them to remove Monsanto's Roundup from their shelves. Here are some reasons why and here are some more.
  

Bill Moyers on Steroids

The writings of Bill Moyers is a great source. full of things to think about, mull over, and then repeat... repeat often because they seem to fit so many situations. So it is with his recent essay on the Mitchel Report on the use of steroids in baseball.

There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a seat in the bleachers.

I think that the term "level playing field" was chosen with great care. You find it often in the rhetoric of George W. Bush. It forms the basis of almost all discussions of Thomas Friedman's book, "The World if Flat". In the linked Harvard Business Review article, James Heskett asks a number of questions that we need to answer.

Who benefits most from a level playing field? A developing economy achieving productivity gains with volume increases achieved through low factor costs of production? Or a developed economy realizing productivity gains in totally different ways, for example, by leveraging already high factor costs through technology and the education and communication required to use the technology more effectively? Are these two types of economies even competing on the same playing field?

This goes beyond just an knee jerk anti-corporate reaction that I sometimes hear from Greens. I am not sure if that comes from a Marxist or an anarchist perspective and I doubt whether the protesters even know themselves.

If we want to make a serious run for national political prominence, we have start taking the answer to Heskett's question and translate that into specific policies. What do we do about NAFTA? Renegotiate, unilaterally withdraw from the agreement? Gleaned from the comments of those who responded to Heskett on the HBR web site:

Radhika Unni: That doesn't mean I feel that governments should stop the natural market dynamics, but at the same time it doesn't mean that countries should use the term "level playing field" as an excuse for exploitation.

Maybe it is time to re-examine the Platform of the Green Party, especially those section which deal with economic realities.

The Green world view, growing out of the vision of people grounded in the Deep Ecology of Arne Naess, recognizes the interconnectedness of things in the world of social / economic interactions just as much as we do in the world of nature. Not all Greens do. We can not deal with immigration and trade as separate issues. The roots are so intertwined that separation could be fatal to both causes. Does our platform call for a 30 hr. work week when most middle class families have to hold down three jobs just to maintain their standard of living and all the consumerism that this implies.

Moyers has a unique ability to cut through to the soul of this country, to understand and communicate those elements of our makeup that have mythic connotation. The American sense of fair play that Moyers fears we are losing has no better expression than the 10 key values of this party. If we want to move not to the right, nor the left, but forward to a new future, we had better figure out how to tap into these sensibilities.

NY Times Tom Friedman on Oakland 'Green for All'

Some believe that "truth" is only what they read by a big-name journalist in The New York Times. Very well. Now comes a gushing piece by, of all people, the "liberal" hawk, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times about "green" projects in inner-city Oakland, California:

"The Green-Collar Solution" by Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 17, 2007.

Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland is an environmental activist whose views on the "Green" question in poor communities of color are very close to my own.

The idea of the "Green for All" campaign (greenforall.org) is to get federal, state, and local governments to allocate money to train 30,000 young people a year in green trades.

"If we can get these youth in on the ground floor of the solar industry now, where they can be installers today, they'll become managers in five years and owners in 10. And then they become inventors," said Mr. Jones. "The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth and health to low-income people - while honoring the Earth. If you can do that, you just wiped out a whole bunch of problems. We can make what is good for poor black kids good for the polar bears and good for the country."

Read More on My Blog at: http://www.greencommons.org/node/816