Donald Trump and the impossible destination of Globalism (revisited)

Back in 2016 a month before Donald Trump was elected for the first time, I wrote a piece that I'm revisiting here. So much of what I said then still applies that I encourage you to read that piece. My thinking was heavily informed by a lecture by the now late French philosopher Bruno Latour entitled "Why Gaia is not the Globe."

Latour made the case that Trump's perplexing popularity could be traced to his ability to give voice to the anger and fear generated by the effects of Globalism. In fact, Latour noticed that the anger and fear were actually widespread and reflected in Great Britain's exit from European Union and the many right-wing movements in European countries that now are all too familiar eight years later.

I am capitalizing Globalism because it really is an ideology and not the "inevitable" reality that so many of us think it is. In fact, as Latour explains, it is an impossible destination. First, let me lay out a definition of Globalism by quoting from my 2016 piece:

With the discovery and then exploitation of fossil fuels on an ever growing scale, societies everywhere were faced with figuring out how to govern a world with ever increasing energy surpluses. Those surpluses made so many new things possible and in doing so led to rapid social and technological change.

We tried laissez-faire capitalism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism and finally globalism which I'll define as the management of worldwide economic activity and growth by large multi-national corporations which have no particular allegiance to any one country or people. Our belief has been that this arrangement is the most rational and efficient. Therefore, trade deals which bring down barriers both to international trade and to the movement of capital and technology across borders are believed to encourage global economic growth. That growth supposedly will ultimately lift the world's poor into the middle class and enrich everyone else while doing it.

Latour explains the binary trap we have laid for ourselves as a global society. We believe we can move forward toward a future of global economic growth and integration OR we can go backwards to a past of antiquated morals and technological stagnation.

But we already know that climate change, resource depletion, toxic pollution and species loss will prevent us from arriving at the endpoint implied by Globalism. As Latour puts it, the ever-expanding globe of our imagination will not actually fit into the thin layer of life where we live called the biosphere. In short, Globalism cannot be scaled up forever and, in fact, has already exceeded the limits of the biosphere. To continue our journey there is ecological suicide.

What we need to find then is another destination that neither situates us in an unrecoverable past nor forces us into an impossible-to-survive future. The binary trap keeps us locked into a framework with no good answers. As Latour says, we are like people on an airplane whose destination has disappeared and whose city of origin no longer exists. We must first realize this is our predicament, and then find a place to set down. But, to date, "we are extremely poor in inventing futures," he says. It would help, however, if we all starting looking for that third place.

Latour explains the anxiety of those not prospering under the continued movement toward Globalism. They seek protection in the form of work that supports them and their families, a stable community, and a stable identity as parent, spouse, provider and/or nurturer that anchors them in their community. But, the land of the "globe" in Globalism has striped away their protection by sending jobs abroad, damaging their small and rural communities through a loss of people and key institutions (closed schools and hospitals), and a loss of identity—under pressure of jobs losses and retrenchment at significantly lower wages and newfangled notions of gender roles and power—that can be painful, humiliating, confusing and stressful not just to men but also to some women.

The third destination that we are seeking will have to address these needs in order to be satisfying to these disaffected people.

There is also an epistemological disturbance in Globalism that is extremely disorienting. In the past, the lived experience was also largely regarded as reality. In the modernist world of Globalism, our lived experience is discounted and real is determined by "objective" science. In short, if our lived experience runs counter to the ideology of Globalism (often conflated with "objective" reality), we are told that we are ignorant, backward and unscientific, and need to get with the modernist program (even if we think that program is a corruption of our values).

The third destination needs to heal the rift between notions of reality and lived experience.

Latour does not offer a description of this third destination, but rather invites us to think about it and create it. He does not think the backlash against Globalism is actually doing the hard work of creating that alternate destination. But the backlash should not be dismissed as a mere desire to go back to the past. This backlash is actually an incipient recognition that Globalism as a destination is no longer either desirable or possible. What comes next is the political struggle of our age. To respond to that struggle with a reaffirmation of a destination that is impossible is of no use to human society and a failure of imagination.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

An astute journalist I know once described carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a "delay-and-fail strategy" devised by the fossil fuel industry. The industry's ploy was utterly obvious to him: Promise to perfect and deploy CCS at some vague point in the future. By the time people catch on that CCS won't work, the fossil fuel industry will have successfully extended the time it has operated without onerous regulation for another couple of decades.

And because huge financial resources (mostly government resources) will have gone to CCS projects instead of low-carbon energy production, society will continue to be wildly dependent on carbon-based fuels (giving the industry further running room).

The trouble is that the cynical CCS strategy has already been under way and failing for more than two decades already. And yet, it is seeking a renewed lease on life with a proposal for a vast network of carbon dioxide pipelines "twice the size of the current U.S. oil pipeline network by volume." The public face of the effort is a former Obama administration secretary of energy with a perennially bad haircut, Ernest Moniz.

Moniz has a partnership with the AFL-CIO to push the idea. No doubt unions like the project because it would create a lot of jobs regardless of whether it actually addresses climate change.

Just for the record, here's a list of reasons that CCS doesn't work and likely will not work in any time frame that matters for addressing climate change:

1. It's very costly. Many of the pilot projects have been shut down because they are uneconomical.

2. Suitable underground storage is not abundant and frequently not near facilities that produce the carbon dioxide.

3. Long-term storage may fail, releasing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere anyway. After all, one must have injection wells into the underground storage, wells that can leak if not properly maintained. Not least, there is no multi-decade record of successful, leak-free sequestration. And finally, there is no assurance that such storage facilities can be maintained properly for the many centuries required to have them actually protect the climate.

4. The carbon dioxide in some current viable CCS projects is used by the oil industry to flush out more oil from existing wells. That's hardly in keeping with the purpose of addressing climate change.

Energy expert Vaclav Smil did some calculations for an American Scientist magazine article that demonstrate the scale of the CCS challenge:

[I]n order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storages took generations to build. Technically possible—but not within a timeframe that would prevent CO2 from rising above 450 ppm.

Smil wrote that back in 2011. The latest reading in Hawaii at the often-cited Scripps Institution of Oceanography Mauna Loa Observatory is 418 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. The relentless upward slope of the observatory's graph of carbon dioxide concentration shows that the fossil fuel industry's tactics—of which delay-and-fail CCS is just one—are working splendidly.

It is troubling that a key official at the U.S. Department of Energy is taking the CCS plan seriously. One would think that decades of failure would finally make clear the false promises of the industry. But, of course, failure is the whole point of the CCS ruse. What's puzzling is that the failure to date has somehow become a rallying cry to try harder by building one of the biggest boondoggles ever conceived.

When oil drillers descended on North Dakota en masse a decade ago, state officials and residents generally welcomed them with open arms. A new form of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" for short, would allow an estimated 3 to 4 billion barrels of so-called shale oil to be extracted from the Bakken Formation, some 2 miles below the surface.

The boom that ensued has now turned to bust as oil prices sagged in 2019 and then went into free fall with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The financial fragility of the industry had long been hidden by the willingness of investors to hand over money to drillers in hopes of getting in on the next big energy play. Months before the coronavirus appeared, one former oil CEO calculated that the shale oil and gas industry has destroyed 80 percent of the capital entrusted to it since 2008. Not long after that the capital markets were almost entirely closed to the industry as investor sentiment finally shifted in the wake of financial realities.

The collapse of oil demand in 2020 due to a huge contraction in the world economy associated with the pandemic has increased the pace of bankruptcies. Oil output has also collapsed as the number of new wells needed to keep total production from these short-lived wells from shrinking has declined dramatically as well. Operating rotary rigs in North Dakota plummeted from an average of 48 in August 2019 to just 11 this month.

Oil production in the state has dropped from an all-time high of 1.46 million barrels per day in October 2019 to 850,000 as of June, the latest month for which figures are available. Even one of the most ardent oil industry promoters of shale oil and gas development said earlier this year that North Dakota's most productive days are over. CEO John Hess of the eponymous Hess Corporation is taking cash flow from his wells in North Dakota and investing it elsewhere.

So, what has this meant for the state? Not only is the oil industry in North Dakota suffering, but all those contractors who service the oil industry. Beyond that are the housing and public services which had to be expanded dramatically during the boom. Will there be enough people to live in that housing years from now? Will the cities be able to maintain the greatly expanded infrastructure their dwindling tax revenues must pay for?

The state government relies on oil and gas revenues for 53 percent of its budget. So far those revenues are running 83 percent lower than projected for this year. In addition, the pandemic reduced other revenue sources, but those are returning to normal as the overall economy bounces back (at least for now). North Dakota's historically low unemployment rate popped from 2 percent in March to 9.1 percent in April, but has recently come down.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the boom will be the damage to the landscape and the water in North Dakota from years of sloppy environmental practices. While companies are legally responsible for cleaning up their sites and capping old wells, in practice the state's failure to force companies to post bonds to pay for these things means much of the work will have to be done by the state or not done at all. This is because bankrupt companies are just abandoning their wells and other infrastructure. There will be no one left with money to sue to pay for the cleanup in many cases.

What North Dakota may have traded for a temporary boom is a long-lived legacy of tainted land and especially water. Back in 2012 I warned about this danger from the fracking industry in a piece called "Pincushion America: The irretrievable legacy of drilling everywhere on drinking water."

In that piece, I cited a former EPA engineer who said that within 100 years most of the country's underground drinking water will be contaminated. What has happened in North Dakota (and is still happening at a somewhat reduced rate) has likely sped up that timetable considerably for the state. Even with the waning oil industry, the state still has considerable oil to produce and so the damage will only continue to mount.

North Dakota may now experience a long, slow withdrawal from what is called the resource curse. This is the paradoxical notion that natural resource-rich jurisdictions often fail to prosper partly due to the huge swings in prices of their principal products, swings which destabilize their societies. This is because disproportionate amounts of wealth (including labor) are devoted to the natural resource sector and therefore unavailable for other more stable forms of commerce and industry.

In addition, the enormous wealth and influence of those in the natural resource sector are used to thwart environmental protections necessary for the long-term well-being of the population. This influence also keeps taxes on the industry low, depriving the people in the state of the full fruits of the resource boom (and of investments necessary for the day when the resource will be depleted).

Beyond this, governments tend to rely on resource sectors too much for their revenue. This causes them to overspend during booms and face austerity during downturns.

All of the negative effects of the resource curse are now on display in North Dakota and may well get worse. Of course, what North Dakota is experiencing, many resource-rich places around the world are also experiencing in one form or another. The worst thing the state can do now is live by the hope that the oil industry will revive and save North Dakota from its woes. Now is the time to plan a new path to a more stable and sustainable economy.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Cable television news now frames its news anchors with constantly updated coronavirus statistics, usually the number of cases and the number of dead. There is a sense of urgency in those numbers as viewers watch them tick higher. But, by definition those numbers cannot move otherwise since they are totals of past events.

A more useful indicator would be current active cases. But, that would be hard to count since so many cases are mild or at least uncounted among those now ordered to stay home. And, there are not currently enough testing materials to do complete testing of the world's population. As it turns out, the number of people who have had the virus may be 50 to 80 times higher than what is currently being recorded. The best we can do for now is to track the number of new cases identified by tests not yet widely available in many areas and see if they decline.

More than anything public officials want to convey the impression of understanding what we face and having solutions to control the outbreak. What they have done successfully in some places through severe social distancing and stay-at-home orders is to reduce the velocity of the spread of the virus without any ability to reduce the number of people who will ultimately contract it. It is really only a matter of time before all those who remain susceptible will get infected unless they hide in total isolation away from humans for good or until an effective vaccine is available—which may be a long time and possibly never. See here and here.

All the counting and the relentless predictions about when a vaccine might be available are really the result of a narrative that says we will soon return to the world we left when coronavirus arrived.

But counting is not the same as understanding and forecasts are not the same as control. In the midst of this crisis we, of course, respond by attempting to protect ourselves and our loved ones and by simply muddling through. But now, more and more the public wants to know when the crisis will be over. When will the fix be available?

The trouble with that thinking—besides the fact that an effective vaccine my never arrive—is that it fails to take into account the totality of the situation. I've been telling friends that our entire global society looks as if it were designed by a virus. We have dense urban habitats linked by plane flights that put no part of the world more than one day away from any other by air.

We have sea transport that constantly lands cargo and sailors from across the world on every shore. We have land transport—passenger rail, buses, cabs, subways and private automobiles—that can easily move infected persons out in all directions from major ports and inland cities.

We have food systems that move food across countries, continents and oceans. What role this has played in the current outbreak in unknown but thought to be insignificant. That may not be true for future outbreaks of novel viruses.

Which brings us to my point: We are (quite understandably) so focused on the current pandemic that we fail to comprehend that the coronavirus was introduced into a specific social, political and economic context. When we clamor for a vaccine and nothing else, we change nothing that might mitigate the effects and spread of the next novel virus.

Our hyperconnected world is the proximate cause of the rapid, worldwide spread of the coronavirus. Our emphasis on medical fixes neglects the important role of resistance to disease through diet, exercise, good mental health—stress is strongly correlated with disease—and access to competent medical care. We would do well to examine carefully those who are infected but show no symptoms. What do they have to teach us about immunity?

We cannot by definition have a vaccine in advance of the next pandemic. We will have to focus on other factors, factors far more difficult to address than developing a vaccine for the current viral epidemic.

Focusing on all those other factors implies a revolution in the way we think about our health (prevention instead of treatment) and the way we think about our responsibilities to one another. It would be a huge mistake to exclude the poor and near poor from any program to improve overall health through diet, exercise and better overall living conditions through improved economic security (which forms the basis for better diet, exercise, and health care and would also lower mental stress, a major factor in disease). Neglecting this group only means that this is where a novel virus will take hold first. It always seeks out the most vulnerable.

Many people these days are saying that "we're all in this together." Will they remember that when it comes time to pay for the reconstruction and reorganization our societies need in order to actually reflect that truism?

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

It used to be a mantra in environmental circles that "the solution to pollution is dilution." That simply isn't tenable anymore, and it probably never was. The reasons are many:

• We now know that many compounds are biologically active at extremely low levels.
• We know that chemicals, radiation, and biological agents can and do act synergistically to magnify their effects on humans, animals and plants.
• We know that chemicals that were thought to degrade quickly in the environment such as glyphosate may persist for long periods.
• Most people now understand that the industries producing chemical and radiation hazards have spent huge sums to propagandize the public and intimidate and control scientists in order to convince us that the industry's products and the pollution associated with them are not harmful.
• Furthermore, in many cases, the dangers have been known from the beginning and been covered up.

A little history regarding leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, bisphenol A, and wireless radiation will highlight these conclusions.

Let us start with leaded gasoline which was invented in the early 1920s to increase the performance of gasoline engines—essentially to get rid of the "knocking" noise which also indicates inefficient combustion.

The now infamous inventor of leaded gasoline, chemist Thomas Midgely, certainly knew that the lead compound in question, tetraethyl lead, was poisonous. How? Midgely himself came down with lead poisoning from exposure to the substance.

Later, five workers manufacturing the compound died from lead poisoning. And yet, a task force convened by the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that the levels of lead emitted from vehicle exhaust pipes would be too diffuse to cause problems. The members concluded this even though every driver tested by the panel was positive for lead in his or her blood. The tests took place after leaded gasoline was being widely used.

A crushing blow to the lead-is-safe-in-gasoline story was delivered by a geochemist, Clair Patterson, best known for his work in establishing the age of the Earth. Patterson discovered vastly increased lead levels in industrially contaminated soils and air. Atmospheric lead was now 1,000 times the natural background level. His findings were published in 1965.

Of course, by that time lead residue was everywhere and was especially dangerous to children who are more susceptible to damage from such poisoning and were suffering from behavioral problems, learning disabilities and lowered intelligence.

It wasn't until 1974 that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a schedule for phasing out lead in gasoline. And, it wasn't until 1976 that a U.S. federal circuit court upheld the EPA's action.

It's worth noting that General Motors (GM), the owner of the tetraethyl lead patent, already knew about another solution to engine knocking before it began production. The other solution was ethanol. All one had to do is add ethanol to gasoline. But GM chose not to pursue ethanol as a gasoline additive because ethanol couldn't be patented and therefore the company couldn't make any money on it.

The pattern we see in the history of leaded gasoline has repeated itself again and again, and yet the public is convinced again and again to believe that substances which are inherently harmful are somehow rendered harmless when released into the environment and diluted by wind, water and even the soil.

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One day before the presidential election in 2000, president-to-be George W. Bush told an audience in Bentonville, Arkansas that his vanquished primary opponent, Sen. John McCain, had "misunderestimated me."

That malapropism became one of the most famous of his many linguistic missteps. But, it was Bush, or rather his vice president and Ph.D. advisors, who "misunderestimated" the risk involved in going to war with Iraq. The predicted "cakewalk" into Iraq turned into a bloody nightmare occupation lasting more than a decade. The unforeseen consequences of war are very often "misunderestimated."

I began thinking about "misunderestimated" risks this week when I read an article about the U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration slapping a more visible warning on popular sleeping pills. I went through a serious bout of insomnia many years ago. For months I only slept every third night. I understand how desperate people get under such circumstances. But is it wise to take a sleeping pill, the known side effects of which can be driving while asleep and even suicide?

By the way, I never took sleeping pills during my bout with insomnia. I feared their side effects and dependency risks then as much as I do now.

Alongside the FDA announcement the Extinction Rebellion movement burst into the news with its decidedly better ability to analyze risk, in this case, regarding the consequences of climate change. Whether this movement succeeds at its goals, the people behind it understand what is at stake.

While I regard it as unlikely that humans will disappear from the Earth even with unchecked climate change, it seems quite plausible that billions of them will die early deaths as a result and that the population will plummet. That by itself would likely destroy our current complex, industrial civilization if the die-off were compressed into a few decades.

It also seems plausible that the infrastructure we have built—dams, reservoirs, roads, electric grids, seawalls, water systems, and other industrial and agricultural systems—will not withstand intact the heat, drought, floods, sea level rise, severe weather and other problems that unchecked climate change will bring with it. At the very least, we are unlikely to be able to reliably grow enough food to feed all of us.

How is it that the awareness of risk has become so blunted among so much of the world's population? Of course, for the poorest among us—those who barely make it from one day to the next—risk is immediate, personal and abundantly clear. Lack of food, shelter, medical care and protection from violence are existential questions that command attention.

For many of the rest of us, we have been living in a fool's paradise in which we have been convinced that risk could be abolished. Take a pill and go to sleep. No need to worry about side-effects or complications. Embrace your cellphone, even sleep with it on under your pillow. There are no risks of harm, physical or psychological, that can come from it. Eat whatever you see on television. Food is just fuel. Why not have anything that tastes good to you?

And, of course, scaling up the burning of fossil fuels to ever greater heights will be good for all of us and increase our wealth collectively. By now most people understand that fossil fuel combustion must decline and dramatically. But it keeps going up.

When there is no immediate personal punishment for any of the risks just listed, we tend to risk even more. We do not understand that we are in a game of Russian roulette. We wrongly believe that the longer we escape consequences, the safer we must be. But just the opposite is true. It turns out that the more often we perform risky acts, the more likely we are to perform one that is fatal.

It is true that living is filled with risks and we cannot eliminate them. But we can distinguish between those that will likely wipe us out personally and collectively, and those that will only harm us in minor ways that we can absorb.

The ultimate question that the Extinction Rebellion poses is this: Why should we care about human extinction? The geologic record suggests that humans will one day go extinct no matter what they do. So, what if that happens sooner rather than later?

The answer to those questions hinges on whether a person defines his or her community strictly in spacial terms and does not include temporal terms. In other words, are we a community of people only by space (and then only weakly at that) or are we a community that extends through both space AND time? In other words, does it matter whether human culture continues?

Those who deny climate change are answering the last two questions "no." If those who accept that climate change is largely human-caused do not see it as an existential question, they may as well be deniers.

The hardest minds to change are those who accept climate change as a reality, but cannot embrace the necessary steps implied by that belief. Will the Extinction Rebellion change that? I'd like to think the answer is yes. But I think a more thoroughgoing change in human hearts and perceptions will likely only come from actual catastrophic consequences hitting much larger groups of people and only if they understand that those consequences are the result of climate change.

I read this book hoping Jaczko would explain why he shut Yucca mountain down. The 2013 book “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste” by William M. Alley & Rosemarie Alley, Cambridge University Press goes into great detail about why Yucca Mountain is the ideal place to put nuclear waste.

I have a lot of problems with Yucca being shut down. How is it safer to have 70,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and 20,000 giant canisters of high-level radioactive waste at 121 sites across 39 states, with another 70,000 tons on the way before reactors reach the end of their life?

Spent fuel pools in America’s 104 nuclear power plants, have an average of 10 times more radioactive fuel stored than what was at Fukushima, most of them so full they have four times the amount they were designed to hold.

All of this waste will harm future generations for at least a million years, all of these above ground sites are vulnerable to terrorists, tsunamis, floods, rising sea levels, hurricanes, electric grid outages, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other disasters.

So Yucca mountain isn’t perfect? Not making a choice about where to store nuclear waste is a choice. We will expose many future generations to toxic radioactive wastes if we don’t clean them up now.

Here is what Jaczko has to say for why he shut down Yucca Mountain:

“There were many technical, political, and safety reasons why the site was not ideal, in fact Yucca failed to meet the original geological criteria. The rock that would hold the nuclear waste allowed far too much water to penetrate; water would eventually free the radiation and carry it elsewhere. In addition safety studies that showed the site to be acceptable were based on infeasible computer simulations projecting radiation hazards over millions of years. Realistically forecasting the complex, long-term behavior of spent nuclear fuel in underground facilities is scientifically impossible. After 35 years, the Yucca mountain project was over.”

Yet Jaczko knows his decision to leave nuclear waste at 121 sites is dangerous:

“As waste piles up, we leave behind dangerous materials that later generations will eventually have to confront. The short-term solution—leaving it where it is—can certainly be accomplished with minimal hazard to the public. But such solutions require active maintenance and monitoring by a less than willing industry. This is already an organizational and financial burden. In 30,000 years when these companies no longer exist who will be responsible for this material?” [my comment: or even 30 years after a financial crash or oil decline]

Thousands of scenarios were modeled at Yucca mountain of every combination of earthquake, volcanic intrusion and eruption, upwelling water, increased rainfall, and much more. Jaczko offers no countering scientific evidence, which I expected to find in his book. Yucca mountain passed with flying colors, here are just a few reasons why:

• Volcanic activity stopped millions of years ago
• Earthquakes mainly affect the land surface — not deep underground storage
• Waste could be stored 1,000 feet below the land surface yet still be 1,000 feet above the water table in an area with little water and only a few inches of rain a year. Rain was not likely to travel 1,000 feet down.
• The entire area is a closed basin. No surface water leaves the area. The Colorado River is more than 100 miles away.
• There’s no gold, silver, or oil to tempt future generations to dig or drill into the nuclear waste.
• The mountain is made of a rock that makes tunneling easy yet at the same time tough enough to form stable walls that are unlikely to collapse.

If Jaczcko’s secret motive was to stop Yucca waste storage so states wouldn’t build more nuclear power plants (6 states won’t allow new plants until there’s nuclear waste disposal), he shouldn’t have worried. The upfront costs to build a nuclear power plant is 4 times an equivalent natural gas plant so banks aren’t going to lend money, no money will be coming in for the minimum of ten years it takes to get permission and fight off lawsuits and NIMBYism, there are uninsurable liabilities, and there are limited uranium reserves left.

And once peak oil production hits, most likely within the next 5 years according to the latest IEA 2018 report, the odds are that we’ll spend dwindling energy on nuclear waste disposal to protect thousands of future generations is nil. That rapidly disappearing oil (at an exponential 6% per year) is going to be spent growing food and wars.

Jaczcko spends a few paragraphs on the hazards of spent nuclear fuel pools and points out that terrorism, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, mudslides, and hurricanes could affect them enough for another Fukushima to happen here.

But if his agenda is to stop new nuclear power plants, he should have mentioned the 2016 report of the National Research Council “Lessons Learned from the Fukushima nuclear accident for improving safety and security of U.S. Nuclear plant” in which it was learned that

“If electric power were out 12 to 31 days (depending on how hot the stored fuel was), the fuel from the reactor core cooling down in a nearby nuclear spent fuel pool could catch on fire and cause millions of flee from thousands of square miles of contaminated land, because these pools aren’t in a containment vessel.”

The National Research Council estimated that if a spent nuclear fuel fire happened at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, nearly 3.5 million people would need to be evacuated and 12 thousand square miles of land would be contaminated. A Princeton University study that looked at the same scenario concluded it was more likely that 18 million people would need to evacuated and 39,000 square miles of land contaminated (see my post on this here).

In the worst case, nearly all of U.S. reactors would be involved if there were a nuclear bomb generated electromagnetic pulse, which could take the electric grid down for a year or more (see U.S. House hearing testimony of Dr. Pry at The EMP Commission estimates a nationwide blackout lasting one year could kill up to 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.

Okay, enough criticizing. Overall this book will interest anyone who is concerned about nuclear power, which comes up a lot now as a potential part of the Green New Deal and a way to provide power without CO2.

Here are some excerpts from the first half of the book, the second half is worth reading too.

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I write this piece primarily to get you to read an academic paper that has attracted relatively widespread attention. It is entitled "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy."

It is remarkable in a number of aspects. First, it was written by a professor of sustainability leadership who has been heavily involved for a long time in helping organizations including governments, nonprofits and corporations to become more sustainable. Second, the author, Jem Bendell, has now concluded the following after an exhaustive review of the most up-to-date findings about climate change: "inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction." Third, his paper was rejected for publication not because it contained any errors of fact, but largely because it was too negative and thought to breed hopelessness.

It is important to understand what Bendell means by "collapse" in this context. He does not necessarily mean an event taking place in a relatively short period of time all over the world all at once. Rather, he means severe disruptions of our lives and societies to a degree than renders our current institutional arrangements largely irrelevant. He believes we won't be able to respond to the scope of suffering and change by doing things the way we are doing them now with only a few reformist tweaks.

That this idea doesn't go down well in sustainability circles should be no surprise. That's because our current arrangements, even if "reformed" to take environmental imperatives into account, are in no way equal to the task ahead. Our existing institutions are structurally incapable of responding to what is coming and so consulting about how to reform them is largely a fool's errand—not the way sustainability experts and consultants want to be thought of.

Instead, Bendell proposes a "post-sustainability" ethic. We must give up on the hope that our society can proceed largely on its current trajectory—with proper allowances, of course, for carbon emission reduction and climate change adaptation—and embrace what he calls "deep adaptation." That agenda calls for resilience, relinquishment and restoration. The words themselves, especially "relinquishment," convey something of the radical approach Bendell believes is now necessary. For details I implore you to read the paper.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this paper is its detailed discussion of what Bendell calls "collapse denial." Understanding the psychology behind the denial of collapse as a possibility and the opprobrium visited on those who speak of it openly is essential for grasping the current discourse on climate change (and many other existential environmental topics).

Hope, it turns out, can be an opiate. It can keep you from thinking about what you might have to do if the worst happens. Whether you agree with Bendell or not about the inevitability of collapse, reading him will likely disrupt your usual ways of thinking about responses to our environmental challenges and likely increase the scope of responses you are willing to consider.

The bad news coming out of the shale oil fields of America could all be put down to slumping oil prices. That is certainly a big factor. But as investment professionals like to say, when the tide goes out, we all find out who's been skinny-dipping.

The pattern of negative news from shale country is not just related to price, however. Oil production, it seems, is being overstated industry-wide by 10 percent and 50 percent in the case of some companies, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The CEO of one of the largest players in the industry, Continental Resources, predicted that growth in shale oil production could fall by 50 percent this year compared to last year. In reality, we should expect worse as the industry for obvious reasons tends to exaggerate its prospects.

The place where the damage to investors has become severe is in private equity firms who hold a large portion of the shale oil industry's high-yield debt. The plan for the firms was always to unload the debt on somebody else when better opportunities presented themselves. But the firms overstayed their welcome and are having a hard time even finding a bid in the market for these bonds.

With the big Wall Street players now questioning the value of their existing investments in shale oil, the industry is finding it hard to raise money. Not a single bond sale has come off since November in an industry which must continuously raise capital to survive.

To add to the problems, the future of U.S. shale oil production seems to be in the Permian Basin in Texas which has been providing the lion's share of oil production growth for the entire country. But ongoing drought in an already arid West Texas has raised doubts about whether the Permian will have enough water to meet all the demand for fracking new wells.

Because of the rapid declines in the rates of production from shale wells, companies must first drill enough new wells to offset the loss of production from previous wells—a task akin to walking up the down escalator.

This was not such a difficult task when the shale boom was just beginning. But with the huge increase in the number of operating wells, companies are having to spend more than half of their capital budgets on simply replacing lost production before drilling wells that add to production. That number is expected to reach 75 percent by 2021. At some point it could reach 100 percent. (For this reason some analysts refer to shale oil development as a Ponzi scheme.)

With rig counts dropping; capital expenditures likely to be cut in the face of low prices; and more and more of that budget being used simply to replace existing production, it's possible that the death spiral long anticipated by the industry's critics has arrived.

Shale players for years have been unable to finance their drilling programs out of operating revenues as free cash flow (operating cash flow minus capital expenditures) remains wildly negative for most companies. In other words, what companies spend on acquisition of leases and land; drilling and well completion; current operating expenses; and general and administrative expenses far exceeds the cash generated by their sales of petroleum and related products from existing wells.

That means the companies must borrow from investors (usually in the form of high-yield debt) or get them to buy new shares in order to raise the money needed not only to drill enough wells to make up for lost production from declining wells, but also to drill enough to grow production—something investors have been counting on to secure the value of their bonds and increase the value of their shares.

If the needed capital is not forthcoming, it means that companies will be faced with declining revenues from declining production. With lower operating cash flow and little access to additional capital, these companies will be unable to drill enough wells to offset declining ones. That means even lower revenues in the future which will mean even lower investment in new wells. That's what a death spiral looks like.

Of course, oil prices could revive and with it investor interest. No one can know for sure. But the big question is this: The next time oil prices do rise, will investors risk getting caught during a subsequent downturn with shale oil company bonds that can't catch a bid in the market (or shares that could end up worthless)?

Of course, if the current downturn in oil prices continues, there might not be a next time for many shale operators.

In a recent conversation a friend of mine offered the following: "There would be no need to vote on anything if we knew the truth." That statement has such profound implications that I will only scratch the surface of it here.

First, democracy presupposes that none of us knows the truth. We have our experience, our analyses, our logic and our intuitions, but we don't have the truth with a capital "T." We may reliably report our names to bank tellers. This is a social and legal designation, a definition backed by a birth certificate, driver's license, and other official documents. Even here we are obliged to provide evidence of the truth of our identity to the teller.

But whether it is wise to subsidize electric cars, legalize gambling, or go to war are issues that are far beyond simple social and legal designations. Our information on such topics is always incomplete, conflicting and quite possibly unreliable. We have difficulty verifying through personal observation much of what we are told. And, we are prone to errors of logic and to misinterpretations.

For these reasons we often turn to experts to do our thinking for us. But they all suffer from the same disadvantages as we do and one additional one: Some are paid to say what they say. It is therefore in the cacophony of debate and consultation that we try to arrive at an approximation of the truth although according to the fallibilist view, we can never be sure that we are even close to the truth.

(There is, of course, the problem of truth in context. It may be true that kicking a football through the uprights on a football field during a football game results in three points for the team doing so. But, the same action will have no discernible effect on a U.S. senate resolution authorizing war.)

Our every action then becomes an experiment in which we try to see if our suppositions (and possibly those of others) bear any resemblance to reality. If we are wise and steady, we adjust as we learn from our experience, trying to get closer to our goal.

Last week a new acquaintance displayed mild astonishment at the volume of my writing. He asked me how I come up with ideas for my pieces. I had to pause to think about that since my process has become more of a reflex that anything else.

My answer was that I have the luxury of time. Despite the heightened pace of my life since moving to Washington, D.C., I continue to leave many hours unscheduled so that I can read, think and write.

I am reminded of Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay entitled "In Praise of Idleness" which critiqued the modern obsession with labor in the age of the machine and with production as an end in itself.

Much of the work in wealthy countries now, however, is in the service industries. Service jobs have always been around, but not as much as they are today. Yet strangely, in an age where a smaller and smaller proportion of the population produces the actual physical objects of life—work that in the past has been associated with long hours of physical labor and repetitive drudgery—many of those engaged in the professions, managerial work, and other white-collar jobs have seen their workday expand almost without limit. We receive emails from workplace colleagues and clients at all hours, sometimes with tasks that must be performed immediately. A dinner with a lawyer friend last week was interrupted by an email from a client who needed a memo that evening for the next morning.

Let's return to Russell for a moment who seems to have a bit of a smirk when defining work for his readers, but hits the mark quite well in my view:

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

The fact that Russell advocated the four-hour workday in 1932 because of the productivity of machines and the importance of free time to the development of the individual tells us just how far we have NOT come. In wealthy countries we still seek to maximize output and consumption as if these two results were the exclusive paths to happiness.

In addition, most of what passes for the so-called information economy today is merely designed to speed up and make more efficient "altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter." As such it is merely aiding and abetting exceedingly risky alterations to the biosphere which include the warming of the climate.

Russell uses the word "idleness" in his title, I believe, in order to be more provocative when he might have used "leisure." (Josef Pieper's later essay entitled "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" then becomes an excellent expansion of Russell's theme.)

The word "leisure," of course, has now been appropriated by the so-called leisure industry described by The New York Times business section as including "tour operations, travel agencies, amusement parks, golf courses, gaming and fishing preserves, sport stadiums, sports teams, movie theaters, dance and theatrical companies, recreational goods rentals and other leisure services." Very little of this seems related to leisure in the classical sense. The Latin term "otium" provides a better formulation of what Russell and Pieper mean since it includes not only rest and recreation, but also contemplation and study, especially as these relate to the arts and philosophy.

The myriad distractions which we call leisure today are mostly made possible by the relentless consumption of energy and resources. If people substituted true "otium" for the leisure most engage in now, we would surely use a lot fewer resources. To make more room for "otium," however, we might need to shorten the workday. This would have to be done without allowing the reduction of basic protections such as health coverage and pensions since doing so would simply send people chasing after the extra hours needed to have these protections. We might produce less and consume less, but we would have more time for true leisure. More people might find themselves with the luxury of time—something that has evolved into a true luxury for the few in our age who value it.

(There is a certain vague sense of this possibility arising from the movement for a universal basic income which could very well finance a reduced workday or workweek while making sure that basic needs are still met.)

Russell points out that reducing the workday might in part resolve the forced idleness of the unemployed by causing more hires at many establishments. That idleness is almost never true leisure for it is filled with constant anxiety borne of insecurity about the well-being of oneself and one's family.

But in order to have true leisure, we must be free of those distractions that prevent it. A friend of mine who teaches college undergraduates informed me not long ago that cellphones had become such a distraction that their use was banned in classrooms at his institution. He discovered through some research that cellphones are actually impeding learning because frequent alerts prevent people from having the downtime that is necessary to consolidate what they learn and store it in long-term memory. Without such storage their can be no actual learning. Sometimes we just need to stare at a wall, he explained.

So much of modern culture insists that constant stimulation is the essence of living. In truth, constant stimulation is merely a tactic of advertisers, app makers, websites and myriad media outlets to hook you on their messages and their products. Leisure requires withdrawal from all that and—this is the key point—learning to derive pleasure from solitude, quiet observation of the world around us and introspection.

Learning to do that takes time and practice. The rewards are subtle, but can be profound. And, because advertisers, app makers, websites and media outlets can't make much money off your solitude and contemplation, they will never encourage you to make time for them. In fact, the thing they fear most is that you will discover during your contemplative hours just how little you actually need the help of those who are vying for your attention on your various electronic devices.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

The naive notion that we can, for example, "just use more air conditioning" as the globe warms betrays a perplexing misunderstanding of what we face. Even if one ignores the insanity of burning more climate-warming fossil fuels to make electricity for more air-conditioning, there is the embedded assumption that our current infrastructure with only minor modifications will withstand the pressures placed upon it in a future transformed by climate change and other depredations.

That assumption doesn't square with the facts. Take, for instance, the Miami, Florida water system. One would think that Miami's first task in adapting to climate change would be to defend its shores against sea-level rise. But it turns out that the most troublesome effect of sea-level rise is sea water infiltration into the aquifer which supplies the city's water.

Once that happens the city would have to adopt desalination for its water supply, a process that currently costs two and one-half times more than current water purification processes. And, of course, desalinating water for a city as large as Miami, a city of more than 400,000 who consume 330 million gallons per day, would require a huge, expensive new infrastructure.

But the problems don't end there. Superfund sites dot Miami and are already contaminating some of the water supply. The rising waters and more frequent floods will only make matters worse, requiring expensive decontamination equipment even before desalination becomes a necessity.

In addition, limestone mining allowed in many places leaves holes which quickly fill with water and allow much freer movement of chemicals through the aquifer.

At this point I feel like one of those late-night infomercials blaring, "But, wait there's more!" That's because the list keeps getting longer.

It felt like opposite day as traders bid up the price of oil last week even as OPEC announced an increase in oil production that should have sent prices downward. The cartel decided it had room to move because of outages in Venezuela, Libya and Angola amounting to 2.8 million barrels per day (mbpd). The increase apparently wasn't as much as traders had expected.

Even though oil prices have drifted upward from the punishing levels of three years ago, OPEC is still interested in undermining the shale oil industry (properly called "tight oil") in the United States which it perceives as a threat to OPEC's ability to control prices. So, it is no surprise that OPEC has chosen to increase output in the wake of lost production elsewhere. OPEC does not want prices to reach levels that would actually make the tight oil industry's cash flow positive.

You read that correctly. The industry as a whole has been free cash flow negative even when oil was over $100 per barrel. Free cash flow equals cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures required for operations. This means that tight oil drillers are not generating enough cash from selling the oil they're currently producing to pay for exploration and development of new reserves. The only thing allowing continued exploitation of U.S. tight oil deposits has been a continuous influx of investment capital seeking relatively high returns in an era of zero interest rate policies. Tight oil drillers aren't building value; they are merely consuming capital as they lure investors with unrealistic claims about potential reserves. (Some analysts have likened the situation to a Ponzi scheme.)

To demonstrate how unrealistic the industry's claims are, David Hughes, in his latest Shale Reality Check, explains that expectations for recovery NOT of proven reserves, but of UNPROVEN resources are exceedingly overblown. Proven reserves are those that the drillbit has shown can be produced profitably at current prices from known fields using existing technology. This number is of necessity smaller than the one for unproven resources as no resource can be produced to 100 percent. Unproven resources are those for which there is currently not a whit of solid data showing that they can actually be recovered economically. Typically, unproven resources that end up in the proven reserves category are only a fraction of the total.

Strangely then, for the Spraberry play in Texas' Permian Basin the forecast recovery is 119 percent of unproven resources. For the Bone Spring play in the same basin the number is 189 percent. For Niobrara play in Colorado, Wyoming and southwestern Nebraska, the number is 565 percent. These are not typos. The projected recovery of unproven resources in these three cases is higher than the estimated unproven resources! To repeat, this is for what are dubbed "resources," meaning they have not been proven by actual drilling to be economically recoverable. Again, keep in mind that typically only a fraction of unproven resources ever actually end up being produced