Global Warming – Page 11 – Auxiliary Memory

We Need A Number

Go do a Google search on this phrase – “Target Atmospheric CO2” – and include the quotation marks, and you will find 2,400 links. The links point to essays discussing a scientific paper by James Hansen and other scientists called “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” The gist of the story: The likely safe high range for CO2 in the atmosphere is 350ppm, and we’re beyond that at 385ppm. Hansen is the NASA scientist that first alerted Congress to the global warming problem back in 1988. Randomly read some of those essays reacting to the paper and you’ll save me the time paraphrasing it. The paper itself is perfectly readable, if you’re patient, but it’s bumpy with scientific speak, so it might be easier to read the commentaries.

Many of the writers act like 350 is the magic number we need, and in some ways that’s true. It gives humanity a very specific goal. It tells everyone that if we want weather like the nice weather we grew up with, then everybody needs to go on a carbon diet and get the atmospheric CO2 below 350 again. However, that does not convey the sacrifice needed to achieve the goal.

I think we need another number. Scientists need to decide what is the fair share target number we all need to stay under personally to get the job done. Recycling paper and buying compact florescent lights are not going to do the trick. I think until we have a personal number to target, along with proper labeling on everything we buy, people won’t understand how much CO2 they need to cut out of their lives.

How much sacrifice do we need to make? If the nations of the world had a crash program to switch to 100% solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and other sources of clean energy, would that solve the problem? Would that be one way to solve the problem without asking individuals to think about the details? Or should governments just kill off some of the most polluting industries? Do we need to give up the beef industry? Or the paper industry? Or the airline industry? Or all of them plus more? Or would it be better to ask the citizens themselves to take on their own share of global warming responsibility and let them make their own decisions on how to clean up their share of personal waste?

If we had a number to measure our personal use against, we could all decide the sacrifices we’d like to make. Some people might be willing to dry their clothes on the line outside for a year to budget flying to New York City for a vacation. Other people might buy high tech cars that put little CO2 in the atmosphere so they can enjoy living in a larger house. Others might choose to walk to work so eating steaks wouldn’t break their personal greenhouse gas consumption budget.

Many people have suggested having a carbon tax to help fund a Manhattan style project to convert to clean energy power plants. This would discourage waste and finance change. Having a tax would be one way to quantify for the public their duty to humanity. It could also simplify the decisions people make. If gasoline with a carbon tax was $12 a gallon, then you’d think long and hard about wasting it. If the price of electricity from coal went to 4x with a carbon tax, it would give utility companies income to build new plants and customers incentives to make their houses energy efficient.

This would be the easy route. What if in the next ten years we screwed around and didn’t do anything and it became frighteningly obvious we need to do something drastic? Would we make bigger sacrifices then? What if we had to outlaw the gasoline powered car? Or outlaw airplanes? Or ration electricity?

There are thousands and thousands of things we can do now by freely making the choices ourselves before the governments of the world have to get heavy. If we knew what our carbon allotment was, it would be easier to make those choices.

Take for instance paper. I have no idea how much paper contributes to the problem of global warming, but I have seen one number that says that junk mail adds 114 billion pounds of CO2 annually. My reaction is to give up paper completely. I’m phasing out my magazine and newspaper subscriptions, I’m doing my best to never print computer documents, I’m working to reduce junk mail, and I’m finding ways to shop for products with less packaging.

If everyone thought this way, paper magazines would disappear from society and everyone would read electronic periodicals. Is this good or bad? That’s a lot of jobs lost. Potentially, it could mean a lot of businesses would go under. I’d hate to see that, but on the other hand, paper really isn’t needed in our computer networked society. My local newspaper just started offering a weekly electronic edition that looks just like the print edition, but costs less than the Sunday only paper subscription. I’m moving to a paperless lifestyle, but even though it’s logical to me, is it what everyone else should be doing too?

I draw the line at magazines and newspapers, but feel that books are worth their environmental costs because we preserve them and consider newspapers and mags disposable. What if that’s wrong. What if there’s a way to have environmental safe magazines? Unless scientists tell us the values associated with all our consumption we won’t know how to make enlightened decisions. If a National Geographic subscription form came with a number – 24 – for 24 pounds of CO2 added to the atmosphere per 1 year subscription then that would be a big step in understanding the problem.

However, unless I know my allotment number, say 1,000 pounds per year, I wouldn’t be able to practically use the 24 figure I got from National Geographic. So Mr. Hansen, it you and your science buddies would be so kind, give us another number. 350 is cool for the world to know, but we all need another number, a number that would tell us how to live by so all 7 billion people riding on spaceship Earth pulls that 385ppm figure down to 350ppm. That number is the maximum amount in pounds of greenhouse gases we can each safely add to the atmosphere in a year.

President Elect Obama, you could help with this too. Instead of offering another general economic incentive package, offer us tax breaks on buying specific clean energy products and services. That would be another way to quantify a solution. Tax what’s bad for the environment, and subsidized what’s good. Get the U.S. to do more than it’s fair share to get the world below that 350ppm number. We owe the rest of the world.

JWH 11-9-8

Future History and Science Fiction

We generally live in the now, washing dishes, typing emails, talking to friends, staring at the television. Looking backwards at history does fill our minds on occasions. Education seems all about looking backwards, and much of fiction is about the past, and even during football games or golf playoffs on TV, commentators will spend time talking about past games and legendary players. Many hobbies dwell on the past including collecting coins, guns and stamps, genealogy, airplane modeling, refinishing antique furniture, learning to play music, art collecting, woodworking, rebuilding old cars, and so on.

Of the past, present and future, we mainly live in the present, and look backwards, but some people like to think about the future. When you buy a lotto ticket you are hoping to change the future. A political election is all about the years to come. But there are little ways to think about the future too. Like waiting for an anticipated job change, or looking forward to your favorite TV show coming back next week, or just thinking about cake after dinner. Overall though, we don’t spend a lot of time on the future. People are notoriously bad about preparing for what’s to come, such as saving money for retirement, eating right for getting old, teeth care to avoid large dental bills, and so on. The future is there and we know it, but we only deal with it in a cursory fashion, like planning your day during a shower, or studying Consumer Reports to pick the best TV to buy.

The past has a sweep of 13.7 billion years to the big bang. K-12 and college years are when we cram in thousands upon thousands of facts about the past. We don’t however dwell on the next 13.7 billion years, that is unless we read science fiction. I’ve always felt that reading science fiction was studying future history. Robert A. Heinlein even called some of his SF stories his future history series. Now science fiction isn’t meant to predict the future, but its alternate name is sometimes speculative fiction. We could also call science fiction, tales of future histories. Science fiction may come true, but that’s accidental, what science fiction tries to do is show what happens if this goes on, regarding a single point of speculation.

I’m not particularly old at 56, but I can remember the Mercury space program and how TV commentators talked of the future Gemini and Apollo programs. I waited a few years and those missions came to pass. Then NASA talked about orbiting labs, space shuttles, robotic missions to the planets, and a giant space telescope called Hubble. I waited and they too came to be. Stuff NASA has been doing since 1958 was vaguely suggested by science fiction going back hundreds of years.

It is possible to change the future through imagination. Take for instance T. Boone Pickens and his Pickens Plan? Pickens, an oil billionaire gets an idea, and now he’s trying to create a future in which his vision unfolds. It helps to be a billionaire if you want a big idea implemented fast, but it also takes a practical idea that millions will support. Whether Pickens’ plan plays out according to his intent still remains to be seen, but I think it’s pretty obvious that energy windmills will start sprouting all across the U.S. midsection like giant dandelions. You don’t have to be a science fiction visionary to spot a money making idea.

There’s a new nonfiction book out called 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker. Wiker is a Christian moralist worried that ideas can be unleashed that adversely affects our culture. I don’t agree with his conclusions, but I do think ideas can be like seeds that blossom into cultural change. Over the years I think science fiction, and it’s earlier incarnations, have planted many of these seeds. Some have taken a very long time to come to fruit, and others won’t blossom until far into the future, and many still, will never germinate at all.

Space Travel

Science fiction’s biggest claim to fame is space travel. Stories of fantastic voyages to the moon, planets and stars go back centuries, but many people give Jules Verne and H. G. Wells credit for popularizing the ideas for the 20th century, which led to modern science fiction, rocket experimenters, and eventually the Russian and American space programs. I won’t dwell too much on this idea because it’s so obvious, but I will say it’s been over speculated. Although the word “science” is part of the label “science fiction” the field has always been weak on the science aspect and heavier on the fiction component. Many readers can’t tell fantasy from speculative fiction. The potential for mankind traveling across the galaxy is there, but it probably won’t look like Star Wars or Star Trek.

The human race is about three years away from its 50th anniversary of manned space flight. Long dormant, manned space exploration has gotten renewed interest with the take-off of the Chinese space program. I think the odds are good for humans returning to the Moon, and slight for making it to Mars during the next 50 years of exploration. For imagining further we need to study both space science and science fiction, and reconcile the two visions.

Robots

Almost as old as space travel are dreams of creating mechanical men. If you watch the science shows on television you will know that the science of robotics is taking off like a Atlas V. Most people are familiar with toy and movie robots, and some even know about industrial robots, but will intelligent, free moving humanoid robots ever appear in the next 50 years? Guessing that involves following a number of scientific breakthroughs.

Electronic and mechanical bodies that are roughly shaped like people, and are as mobile as our species, should be ready within 50 years, and probably much earlier. We have humanoid robots now, but they are slow and limited. Like futuristic cars, battery technology will limit the range of android life. Robots will always be hungry for energy and an AI companion that can go where you go, and for as long as you go, will require some very good batteries.

Next in limitation is intelligence. There will be two levels of intelligence involved. What scientists are working on now is what we might call mammalian intelligence. They need to create a machine with the hardwired wits to survive in the real world like an animal. Currently the progress seems to hover around the development of insects, but I’ve seen one robot that reminded me of a dog in its behavior. Of course the real goal of our robotic dreams is artificial intelligence. We want our mechanical pals to be as smart as Data on Star Trek.

What we’re waiting for is an AI breakthrough, the singularity, like that promoted by Vernor Vinge. Personally I don’t see any laws of science stopping us there, not like Einstein’s laws putting the kibosh on FTL interstellar travel. Like the kid in 1961 waiting for the moon landing in 1969, I feel like seeing intelligent robots is merely a matter of waiting. This is going to have a big impact on society. For a period robots will be like serfs and slaves, but at some point the civil rights of AIs will come up. At what point does your faithful Rosie the Robot maid become too close to a manmade Hazel?

I’m hoping personal robots will be ready by the time I get old and need a caretaker. I’ve watched a lot of people age and lose their independence, so I think the most obvious purpose for a personal robot is as a companion and helper for when we get frail. Interestingly, this overlaps perfectly with another science fiction prediction, life extension.

Life Extension

Science predicts that I should die around age 79. Those are my odds. I might beat them by a bit, or I might cash in early. In other words, on average I can plan to live another 22 years. With the direction my body and mind has taken during the past decade I worry that even those 22 years will not all be good ones. However, I’d like to think that medical technology could fix me up and keep me going. If I had decent health, especially if my mind holds out, I could picture wanting to live to 100 or 110. There’s plenty of science fiction predicting people will live hundreds, if not thousands of years, but for the next fifty years I think those stories are in the realm of the fantastic. My personal fantasy is to double those 22 expected years and live a bit past 2051, and enjoy a 100th birthday.

The odds are against me, but medical science is moving fast. I really don’t want to live to be 100 so much as I want to see what life will be like a 100 years after my birth. Will we make it to Mars. Will intelligent robots be common. Will we make SETI contact. Will space telescopes detect Earth like planets with artificial chemicals in their atmospheres?

With a little bit of life extension, baby boomers might get to see another decade called The Sixties. What will life be like then? Well, we all know what science is predicting for those years, the weather.

Global Warming

Science is usually not in the business of predicting the future, except for the limited time frames of controlled experiments, but climate scientists are now oracles prognosticating quite far into our futures and it isn’t good. Despite the beliefs of climate change deniers, thousands, if not millions of scientists, engineers and technicians are working on the assumption that human activity is changing the climate of planet Earth and they are working hard to engineer ways to stop it. In relation to science fiction, global warming is not an idea that came out of left field, because science fiction has often explored the end of the world through environmental catastrophes.

Global warming, overpopulation and the limits of resources will really determine the true nature of the next fifty years, and those forces could drastically effect what happens with space travel, robots and life extension. If you want to get an idea how bad things could get, and why we should avoid any possible chance that we’re damaging the environment, then take up reading after-the-collapse stories written by some of the more gloomier science fiction writers.

For science fiction to be truly speculative fiction it must consider the laws of science carefully. Will it be practical for 10 billion people to own a robot and live longer? We know we can apply alternative technologies to solve the problems and answer the question in the affirmative, but science isn’t very good at predicting human nature, and that’s the real factor in how our future unfolds.

The reason why I’ve taken side tracks into exploring polarized attitudes and speculating on twin human species is because I’m not sure we can change our habits even with the aid of better technology. If you read Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, you’ll see with some changes in the laws we could dramatically transform society. That transformation will be like the major societal shifts we’ve seen in the last few hundred years. Examples include converting to an industrial economy, the migrations to urban environments, the move from horse power to horsepower, learning to fly, and supplementing our neural brains with silicon thinking. Climate change deniers may have no more impact on slowing change than Luddites or lovers of the horse and buggy did in the past.

If this is true, science fiction has a lot of room left in writing future histories. Despite what conservatives want, and fundamentalists dream, we won’t stay the same or move backwards in social development. Fossil fuels will run out, but new technologies will replace them. The future can be as bright as we want, the question is will we dial darkness or light. If we can unintentionally change the world, can we intentionally change it back?

Adaptability

Humans show a talent for adapting, just look how fast DVDs, cell phones and iPods were adopted. I think integrating robots into society will happen just as fast. Reading science fiction will give us a range of future histories to study on how to handle that problem, from Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics stories, to City by Clifford Simak, and Blade Runner‘s demand for empathy for androids. Space travel is harder to accept because most of us will be paying for a few people to have all the fun. And how many will reject life extension if offered?

Humans are very quick to accept change if it’s cheap and easy. Dealing with Global Warming is more like not smoking, eating healthy, exercising and flossing your teeth. Being disciplined on a world-wide level will require laws because on average we’re not a particularly disciplined species.

I read science fiction to think about all those centuries that I won’t get to see, all those billions of years of evolution I won’t get to study. If you’ve explored the past you know great upheavals are common. It would not be all that hard to write science fiction novels about futures where the number of carbon molecules in the atmosphere doubled and tripled, and the population halved and then halved again, and then again and again. Humans have the adaptability and survivability of cockroaches and eventually we’ll make a comeback.

People do not like change. Overall, we’re all like gamblers who go to casinos every single night hoping to break even. What are the odds on that? We don’t like change, but we certainly have the training for it.

JWH 9/28/8

Two Species of Human Beings

One of my all time favorite experiments dealt with visual perception. I’m recalling this from memory of a book I read long ago, but maybe someone can let me know the original source. In this experiment scientists raised two batches of kittens in different controlled environments. Half the kittens were raised in a room with no vertical lines and the other half brought up in a place with no horizontal lines. After six months they let the kittens out into the normal world. The kittens who were raised without horizontal lines would not jump up onto a flat chair seat or shelves, and kittens raised without vertical lines would walk into chair legs.

When I read this I wondered what was missing from my vision because of my limited upbringing. This current election makes me think of that experiment, because the Republicans are shouting at the Democrats, “Hey, Liberals, can’t you see the vertical lines, they’re right in front of your face!” And the Democrats are yelling back, “Dudes, can’t you see those horizontal surfaces, they’re right there!”

Global warming deniers are making me wonder if there’s two different species of human beings living side by side. Their absolute refusal to see the problem is so adamant that I have to wonder if it’s a matter of failed perception. I don’t know what to say to them. They clutch their false out-of-date data like it was handed down from God on stone tablets and they refuse to look at any new data because they think it’s from false prophets. No matter how much information I’m willing to provide, they deny that it’s valid or that it really exists. They are like the kittens raised without vertical lines that can’t see chair legs.

But the implications are far greater than this. The division of the two species divide other issues like politics and religion. How can we as a nation solve our problems, especially big problems, if we’re always polarized? I wonder if the deniers have an innate sense of the cat in the quantum box, knowing at an unconscious level that as long as they don’t look inside the box the cat will be okay? Will a global warming denier even understand what I just said?

To me the issue has gone beyond global warming. I’m starting to worry that there is an even more dangerous problem than climate change, and that’s this division of perception that polarizes the population. Is it like a law-of-nature barrier that keeps anything from going faster than light. What if the average intelligence of the human race limits how far we can progress as a species? We’re seeing more and more big problems that will require us to work cooperatively if civilization is to survive, but we’ve reach a total impasse on communication, refusing to do anything because we can’t agree.

Let’s avoid the global warming issue for the moment since it’s such a touchy issue. Many of the climate change deniers scoff at climate predictions because various scientists have made predictions in the past that have apparently turned out not to be true. Or appeared that way for awhile. Two books, The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits of Growth (1972) are often used as examples of failed predictions. The trouble is, these deniers didn’t wait long enough to give the forecasts time to unfold.

Forty years later, many people think the world is just fine with 6.7 billion people and figure we can grow much larger, and they don’t think our rich lifestyles show any limits. Perception is everything, but we’re on a roller coaster that’s climbing to the peak of the Kingka Ka, because we haven’t started the blazing ride down yet. Now that China and India have taken up our American consumer habits, and resources are starting to be fought over, and hundreds of little stories tell me that The Limits of Growth is about to come online, I’m getting the feeling that we’ll arrive at the peak of the climb soon. Hold on for the ride down.

The people with rose colored corneas, obviously don’t watch a lot of documentaries, or keep up with diverse science magazines. Conservative news shows tend to focus on the same old tired issues while ignoring the little stories that shows a whole lot of different barometers are all falling. It’s funny that millions welcome the Christian apocalypse, but can’t see the world possibly ending in some other way. The trouble is, the world doesn’t end, we just end up in a big mess that we’ve got to clean up.

It worries me that so many people enjoy the end-of-days stories that are so popular. Why is it so easy to believe that an imaginary superior being will destroy us, but so hard to believe that we can destroy ourselves through pursuing those same old seven deadly sins that that same superior being warned us against? You can not drive a SUV through the eye of a needle to get to your destination.

Maybe it’s a matter of language, and science is not the language to use to communicate across the gap that divides us. I’ve been listening to the Bible this past year, on my iPod. I know it’s an odd thing for an atheist to do, but I consider it learning a language. I find it fascinating that all the things that the New Testament teaches are the things we need to do to change ourselves to avoid problems like global warming, over population and dwindling resources.

I have been thinking for days on how to reply to global warming deniers, and it is now occurring to me that I can’t recommend studying science. That isn’t their language. My reply to them is to buy an iPod and get a good audio edition of the Bible and really listen to it. Listening is far superior to reading, and start at the beginning. Pay attention to what’s happening chapter by chapter. I know you conservatives don’t like the word “evolution” but the Bible shows an evolution of spirit. Pay particular attention to the transition between the Old and New Testament. Fundamental thinking is based in Old Testament philosophy. It teaches about nation building. The New Testament teaches about soul building. For the people of the Earth to survive climate change will require a lot of soul building.

It is my belief that climate change deniers are worried that changing the world requires changing themselves, and they just don’t want to change.

JWH 9/22/8

What If Carbon Pollution Was Visible?

If automobiles had never been invented and transportation still depended on horse power, we’d be knee deep in horse you know what. We’d probably have some very strict equine pollution laws. Now imagine if cars pooped out solid carbon pellets – lets imagine them to be orange and about the size of golf balls so they could shoot out existing tailpipes – then according to CarbonCounter.org my mid-size pickup truck would leave more than 10,000 of these car turds on the highway and streets every year. My house would excrete more than 26,000 of these scat balls piling up around the yard.

Carbon is invisible and goes way up into the atmosphere. It’s easy to think we’re not doing anything to the climate. But if pollution was solid and visible, we probably couldn’t see anything else. What if every kind of pollution was a color coded feces. Methane could be green balls, sulfur could be brown, etc. Try and imagine what our streets would look like. I doubt they would be drivable.

If we could see the invisible pollution we’re putting into the air, or into the sea, we’d realize that we have a huge problem. I don’t want to take the time to do the mathematics, but I bet we’d all be standing pretty deep in piles of colored balls. And the funny thing is, if we had cars that made solid pellets out of carbon we would not need to worry about the greenhouse effect. People are trying to invent technology to sequester carbon underground. To understand the magnitude of that problem, once again picture how many colored balls would be laying around to be picked up and put somewhere.

Think about it another way. What if you had to pay $1 for every pound of carbon you polluted and the only way to get a deduction from this tax was to produce less carbon? If my wife and I worked to be more efficient, we might could reduce $50,000 a year down to $20,000, but that’s still leaving a lot of pollution. And when you think how the standard of living is rising all around the world, we’re quickly back to being waist deep in carbon doo-doo.

When environmentalist talk about rolling things back to how it was before 1990 or 1980, and that means asking Americans to consume 50% less, it would also mean asking a billion people that climbed from underdeveloped to developed to step back into poverty. If Americans could find a mode of transportation that had 1/20th of the impact on the environment, then the rest of the world could come up to our standard – but then we’d all need to cut consumption by half.

The magnitude of the problem is just horrendous. And we really don’t see it because carbon is invisible. How sneaky. I’m a positive guy. I like to believe we can solve this problem. I like to think humans can overcome anything, but if you read Jarrod Diamond you know our track record 0 in N tries. Why didn’t all the brilliant MBAs running Wall Street not see the sub-prime fiasco coming? As a race, civilizations seem to prefer to collapse, and then pull a Phoenix, rather than do a caterpillar and butterfly act.

Lots of people love spectator sports. I like watching all the nations on the Earth play the game of survival. The United States has no trouble facing any odds if it can play the game with guns, but for some reason we don’t want to compete when science is the weapon of choice. Science fiction writers really should help us see what lies ahead, so more people can see the invisible coming.

Jim

The Economics of Inefficiency

During bad economic times people seek ways to get more for their money – in other words they try to become efficient spenders. The trouble with that thinking, it’s bad for the economy. What we want is a thriving economy where there’s a chicken in every pot and the future is rosy. Woefully, a thriving economy is highly inefficient.

Take saving money. All money advisors advise people get out of debt, save a portion of their salary and only buy what they’ve saved up for – good Puritan ideals. If everyone followed this advice we’d fall into a world-wide depression. The economic success of all depends on everyone spending as much money as they can. If we had a world where the only credit card spending was paid off at the end of the month, people wouldn’t buy nine-tenths of the crap that they do. That’s a lot of people out of jobs. And when those folks lose their jobs, even more bad things happen, and a recession becomes a growing snowball rolling down hill.

There’s always a silver economic lining, even to bad things. If everyone was honest we wouldn’t need jails, police, lawyers, judges, counselors, bail bondsmen, mystery writers, cop show producers, and so on, as I’m sure you get the idea. I hate the idea of crime. Crime is the true terrorism in America. But ending crime would be like one of those stories about a person finding a Genie in a bottle and getting a wish that turns out disturbingly screwed up. If someone did get to make that wish and tomorrow all illegal activity stopped we’d have a whole lot of honest people out of work, and a lot of criminals previously not working, would be looking for jobs too. Could the world’s economies handle the impact of so much ethical behavior? I’d much prefer a crime-free efficient economy and the main way to reduce crime is for the economy to produce a lot of good jobs. It’s a Catch-22.

The same reverse philosophy could be applied to the advice about eating right and pursuing healthy lifestyles. If everyone ate healthy, how many people would be out of work when all the fast food restaurants went belly up? Add in the junk food makers, their related industries, vending machines, packaging, salesmen, suppliers, warehouses, etc. And then think about all the health care workers that clean up after we lead lives of poor healthy choices. Sure, we’d produce a lot more sport fitness jobs, but would they make up for all the lost careers selling evil calories?

What if everyone bought the store brands instead of the big name brands? What if everyone jettison their designer clothes and shopped at Target and Penney’s? What if everyone wore sensible shoes and drove practical cars? What if people gave up vanity, putting the make-up makers and cosmetic surgeons out of business? What if everyone stole their MP3 songs and DVD movies?

Certain things in life are vital: air, water, food, shelter and jobs. And maybe jobs should be listed third because getting food and shelter without a job is very difficult. Right now America is in a panic over an economic downturn and we see everything about the future through the spectacles of fear. It doesn’t seem to matter that there’s more peace and prosperity now than at any time during all of history.

Everyone is wailing and gnashing their teeth that gasoline costs $4 a gallon. Forecasters have been predicting that for forty damn years – so why all the tantrums? Nor do people seem to notice that the high price of gasoline comes just at the perfect time when we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels because of war and global warming. It’s a good thing. It’s our second warning before economic hell comes to town. We knew back in the 1970s that living off of cheap oil was like borrowing from the Mafia. Is it so surprising they’re breaking our legs right now? And we really haven’t had a true oil crisis, because no one is going without yet. Wait until there are oil shortages. That’s when they chain cement blocks to us and throw us in the ocean. Are you ready for the day when there will be no gasoline for sale at the pumps? Gas lines are just one terrorist act or hurricane away.

Cheap fossil fuels made for wonderful sensible things like wooden toys made on one side of the planet, practical to sell to people on the other side of the globe. See where the economics of inefficiency come in? We use cheap fossil fuels to move our fat asses, which desperately need exercise, around in 6000 pound vehicles, instead of vehicles, if they were efficiently designed, weighing in at 500-1000 pounds, and use renewable energy instead of molecules sequestered by the Earth millions of years ago to get carbon out of the atmosphere and allow life to blossom.

We may be the smartest creatures in creation, but heck, we ain’t smart enough not to poison our only habitat. When you live in the basket with all your eggs, eating omelettes every day is dangerous.

To pull ourselves out of this economic mess we need to learn to consume more while using less, a Zen koan if there ever was one. Moving music to MP3 files is a perfect example. Distributing MP3 music requires an infinitely small fraction of the resources it took to make and sell CDs. The demise of the CD puts a lot businesses and people out of work, but if the music industry worked it right they could eventually create a lot more jobs. This economic theory fails if you steal the MP3s.

If everyone had solar panels on their roofs it would require the creation of whole new industries and millions of jobs. To feed and educate all the needy people in the world would create more millions of jobs. To build houses that withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and severe weather of the changing climate will create more millions of jobs. There is no end of jobs to be create because of need. There is plenty of economic activity, both efficient and inefficient if you have the vision to see it.

I know a lot of Americans are suffering because of the current economic crisis, but I have to agree with Phil Gramm that part of our economic recession is a “mental recession” and we’re doing too much whining. Hell, we’re not living in Afghanistan. What happened to that American spirit of when the going gets tough, the tough get going? I’m voting for Obama, but I didn’t like his quip about not needing another Dr. Phil. We need all the positive thinkers we can get. There’s lot about McCain that I like, and if he wins I won’t be too unhappy, but his spin-control pandered to voters rather than exploring the point I think Gramm was trying to make.

During election times all voters become beggars looking for handouts demanding that their politicians promise and promise and promise. Politicians get nowhere if they aren’t leaders. Of course sometimes they lead us off the cliff into places like Iraq, but didn’t George Bush take us there because he was playing off the country’s fear? We’re living in the current economic chaos because of greed and the refusal to think and pay attention. Do we really need brilliant hindsight to know that making house loans to people who can’t afford them is silly or owning SUVs are a bad idea when oil was predicted to run out forty years ago?

Our crazy economy reminds me of the classic science fiction story, “The Midas Plague” by Frederik Pohl, where consumerism drives the economy so much that the poor are forced to change clothes several times a day to keep up with production – because to make less would hurt the economy. In this bizarro world, the rich get the freedom to live without being consumers, but the poor must consume like hamsters on a wheel to keep the economy going.

Who’s fault is it if we take the most powerful and prosperous country in the world and run into the economic ground because we all like to make bad choices? For decades we have built an economy on inefficiency. What happens to China when we stop buying all that crap we don’t need? What happens to the U.S. if China suffers an economic chill? It’s like “The Midas Plague,” we could stimulate the economy by forcing the poor to go into debt and buy a new HD TV every month.

Right now everyone is panicking and cutting back on their spending, but if you wanted to help the economy, you should be doing just the opposite. Now, here’s the crucial part – your economic decision has impact. You can make an efficient choice, or a wasteful choice. If you buy a new HVAC that uses 1/3 the energy as your old one, then you have stimulated the economy and reduced the demand on fossil fuels, plus saved yourself some bucks. If you fly to Paris for a vacation, you have helped the airlines, but hurt the rest of us by increasing the demand for oil. You can’t win for losing sometimes. But if you had the choice between flying on a plane fueled by green technology or old technology, your choice could build a new industry.

We need to cowboy up and channel our ancestor’s pioneering spirit. We need to take responsibility for our actions. Like the old Pogo cartoon said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Whether gasoline is $2 or $4 or $7 a gallon, the choice is made by us, we set the price. If you want gasoline to go to $7 a gallon, keep burning oil like there’s no end of it, live like the oil companies will always find new resources, use it like we’ve been doing for the last thirty years. Keep panicking over the economy and oil prices will rise. Keep advocating going to war with Iran and oil prices will rise.

We need to get our heads together, overcome fear like FDR taught us, become frugal like our Puritan forefathers, develop green technologies, and oil prices will come down. If gasoline went to $10 a gallon, but we had cars that got ten times the mileage, it would be like getting $1 a gallon gas. When gasoline was $2 a gallon we could have been driving cars that made it equal to 50 cents a gallon, but we didn’t. We collective decided to drive cars that would force gasoline to become $4 a gallon. Our choice – so why bitch and moan now?

The other lesson of this current economic crisis is the world changes. We built our current economy psychology, retirement system, investment system, and all our financial expectations around the idea that the world won’t change and growth would be predictable. How stupid is that? Our current state of economic fear is because we’re having to deal with change. Change is as constant as time. People hate change, but we’re the dominant species on this planet because we’re adaptable. Humans can handle habitat change that puts all other species into extinction, but that’s at the species level. Cultures go in and out of existence like TV series. Because the U.S. is a very diverse culture, we can take quite a beating and still keep on ticking. Go study your Douglas Adams and Adam Smith, and don’t panic.

Jim