Where Does Surplus Value / Profit Come From in Capitalism?

Marxists say it is stolen from the worker. Capitalists say it comes from risk-taking and managerial work. Who is really doing the work?

One of the pillars of Marxism is that capitalists steal labor from workers. All profits come from excess labor done by workers by the sweat of their brow, which capitalists, through various nafarious means, appropriate for themselves. The workday, for instance, is an artificial construct. What if all the necessary work could be done in three hours? Well, the labor agreement means that the employer has the right to eight. Therefore, employers extract as much value as possible from that time regardless was really needed to fulfill the actual job- value that ends up as profit in the pockets of owners, who do no work at all.

On the opposite side, Chicago school economists hold to a theory of marginal value, where every factor in production is fairly paid for its individual contribution, through the magic of the various markets- commodity, labor, financial, etc.- that they come from. Each of these markets is assumed to be efficient, thus rendering each input to production fairly bid for its contribution, and leading also to a dynamic re-ordering of production systems when conditions change, such as when some inputs become scarce (and their price goes up), or new technologies expand the availability of other inputs, like, say, computation power.

It should be obvious that each of these theories is a fairy tale, (a panglossian one in the neoclassical case), heavily motivated by ideology, while carrying grains of truth. Labor markets are not efficient at all, and businesses work night and day to keep them that way. At the same time, businesses capture profits from countless other streams than the exploited labor of their workers. And in fact, the whole purpose of business is to exploit miss-priced market opportunities- otherwise profit could not exist.

A recent pair of posts on Bill Mitchell's blog delved into the Cambridge controversy- an economist's spat of the early 1960's which was formative in left-wing economics. Many tangential issues came up, such as whether economic growth is more demand-limited or supply limited. But it also dealt with issues of the value of capital, the source of profits, and the accuracy of marginal value theory. To summarize rather brutally, left-wing economists from Cambridge, England argued that business profits were not market-based, but based on social and power relations, cultural tradition, and many other factors besides the markets. Economists from Cambridge, Massachusetts (MIT) argued a classical theory that profits were based in marginal theory on all the market ingredients, and particularly could be approximated by the current interest rate, representing the default alternative to business investment- that is, the marginal value of capital.

The result of the controversy was that the British school successfully pointed out some flaws in the American analysis, which the Americans admitted, to the effect that the general profit rate does not always follow capital intensity, and nor does the individual firm's investment schedule necessarily follow the logic of interest rate-driven margins either. From this molehill, the left made a triumphant mountain, while the mainstream regarded it as a minor hiccup from their ever-more baroque modeling of perfect markets and ideal economies.

Joan Robinson, principal proponent of the Cambridge England end of the Cambridge controversies.

All that said, it is worth being more specific about where profit comes from, and here I confess to going off the reservation of economic convention. While stealing extra labor is surely one of the time-honored methods of making a profit, it is far from the only way. Indeed, businesses can be seen as miners, always on the hunt for those special gems in the environment that cost less than they should, or can be sold for more than they cost. And the opportunities of this sort are endless in variety and scale. 

• difference between supply and demand
• difference between efficient producers and inefficient
• difference between using family members and paying workers from the labor market
• difference between dumping toxic waste and disposing it properly
• difference between hiring an amoral accountant and a lawful one
• difference between buying lower grade inputs for manufacturing
• difference between lying to customers, or not
• difference between running marketing campaigns, or not
• difference between paying taxes, or not paying taxes
• difference between suing competitors successfully, or not
• difference between buying competitors or competing with them
• difference between doing research to find new technologies, or not spending that money, or stealing that technology
• difference between lobbying the government successfully to make protective laws, or not

The scope for finding  money and making profit goes far, far beyond the conventional notion of arbitrage between capital goods and interest rates. Labor is also only part of the picture. Being a typically large part of most company's costs, its treatment and mistreatment is, however, an endlessly fruitful area for losses and gains, not to mention wider social tension. Money and profit can be found under any number of rocks, which is where the mantra of a "business model" comes from. Everyone and every business has some angle by which they make a living.

Are these gems of profit fairly priced in their factor markets? Don't be ridiculous. A coal company only makes money because coal is free. The earth makes no contracts, and nor does the air for the pollution sent up by the power plant that burns the coal. Turning free things, like enslaved or cowed labor, or personal data, or natural resources, or computer power, or shady accounting, or corrupt laws, into money, is the essence of "business models". Finding a way around markets, by collusion, by substitution, by doing without, by corruption, even by clever new technologies, are a business person's top priorities. So not only are markets, when they are used, hardly "fair" in any financial or social sense, but they do not begin to address all the sources of business profit or return to capital.

We can grant that most of this work of finding profitable gems is done by the capitalist or her managerial minions, thus should be accounted to the returns of capital, not to wages stolen from workers. Only in the classical mass industrial enterprise where the raw material costs are negligible and labor is the overwhelming factor would these converge into the same thing as envisioned by Marx. (Though the modern fast food industry, and gig "economy" come to mind as well.) Some of these gems can be valued financially, and can be regarded as capital, obtained via savings and investment and even competitively priced in a marginal accounting. But many cost nothing, and characterize the pursuit of business as more than a dry exercise in accountancy or economics, but rather as a cultural mode, descended from a long tradition of opportunistic ownership / exploitation / employment of others, of technological innovation, trade, and plunder.

Not to put a fine point on it, business is about greed, and in its natural state reverts to rapine and pillage. The Vikings were consummate businessmen, converting earnings into capital- long-boats and other weapons-, which were the backbone of their centuries of pillage all over coastal Northern Europe. Today, we can see a similar process in Afghanistan. The Taliban leverages ruthless terror into power., plundering as it goes along. They can then tell everyone how to live, collect the taxes, and run their many businesses, corrupt or not. 

Whether their state is "business-friendly", their example points to the intertwined nature of state systems and business systems of exploitation. States set the rules, in the ideal case driving business from brutal mafia and gang activities, which are generally socially destructive, if not entirely zero-sum, towards level and transparent playing fields that are at least somewhat constructive, pulling their profits from the mute vaults of nature and its resources instead of from social oppression. But all this depends on the wisdom and foresight of the state. Many "business model" gems mentioned above involve skirting the law, or engaging in activities the law has not even (or yet) contemplated, to make a buck. There is a constant arms race going on, between the "innovation" of private greed, and the capacity of the state to conceptualize, measure, and legislate against new areas of long-term harm. When the business class and Republicans bleat about taxes and "freedom", they (and their pet economists) are explicitly taking one side of this conflict, the side of irresponsible regression to unregulated, irresponsible, and destructive styles of "business". 

• Ready for the Rapture?
• What's happening in the lumber business.
• Is Facebook a state?

Prospects for Hydrogen

What are the prospects for hydrogen as part of a sustainable, green economy?

Hydrogen is perennially spoken of as a fuel of the future- clean, renewable, light. It is particularly appealing in an environment (like that of California) where solar energy is having a huge impact on the grid and causing rising portions of solar production to be "curtailed". That is, turned off. But even in California, solar power has hardly scratched the surface. Only few roofs have solar and the potential for more power production is prodigious. Over time, as more renewable sources of energy come on line, the availability of excess power at peak times will rise dramatically, prompting a huge need for storage, or other ancillary uses for excess power. Many storage schemes exist or are under development, from traditional water pumping to batteries, flywheels, gravitational weights, etc. Hydrogen is one of them, spoken of as a versatile storage and fuel medium, which can be burned, or even more efficiently put through fuel cells, to return electrical power.

A typical day on California's electrical grid. The top teal line is total demand, and the purple zone is power not supplied by renewables like wind, hydropower, and solar. During the mid-day, most power now comes from solar, an amazing accomplishment. Roughly 2 GW are even turned off at the highest peak time, due to oversupply, either locally or regionally. How could that energy be put to use?

Unfortunately, as a fuel, hydrogen leaves much to be desired. We have flirted with hydrogen-powered cars over the last couple of decades, and they have been a disaster. Hydrogen is such an awkward fuel to store that battery-powered electric vehicles have completely taken over the green vehicle market, despite their slowness in refueling. The difficulties begin with hydrogen's ultra-low density. The Sun has the gravitational wherewithal to compress hydrogen to useful proportions, at the equivalent of 100,000 earth atmospheres and up. But we on Earth do not, and struggle with getting hydrogen in small enough packages to be useful for applications such as transport. The prospect of Hinden-cars is also unappealing. Lastly, hydrogen is corrosive, working its way into metals and weakening them. Transforming our natural gas system to use green hydrogen would require replacing it, essentially.

The awkwardness, yet usefulness, of (reduced) hydrogen as an energy currency in an oxygenated atmosphere is incidentally what led life during its early evolution to devise more compact storage forms, i.e. hydro-carbons like fats, starches and sugars. And these are what we dug up again from the earth to fuel our industrial, technological, and population revolutions.

But how useful is hydrogen for strictly in-place storage applications, like load balancing and temporary grid storage? Unfortunately, the news there is not good either. Physical storage remains an enormous problem, so unless you have a handy sealed underground cavern, storage at large scales is impractical. Second, the round-trip efficiency of making hydrogen from water by electrolysis and then getting electricity back by fuel cell (both rather expensive technologies) is roughly 35 to 40%. This compares unfavorably to the ~95% efficiency of electrical batteries like Li ion, and the 80% efficiency of pumped water/gravity systems. Hydrogen here is simply not a leading option.

Does that mean we are out of luck? Not quite. It turns out that there already is a hydrogen economy, as feedstock for key chemical processes, especially ammonia and fertilizer production, and fossil fuel cracking, among much else. Global demand is 80 million tons per year, which in electrical terms is 3-4 tera watt hours. That is a lot of energy, on the order of total demand on the US electric grid, and could easily keep excess power generator's hands full for the foreseeable future. Virtually all current hydrogen is made from natural gas or coal, so the green implications of reforming this sector are obvious. It already has storage and pipeline systems in place, though not necessarily at locations where green energy is available. So that seems to be the true future of hydrogen, not as a practical fuel for the economy in general, but as a central green commodity for a more sustainable chemical industry.

• Unions
• Afghanistan, inexorably going back to the Taliban.

On the Transition to Godhood

Kicking and screaming, humanity is being dragged into a god-like state.

We thought that harnessing electricity would make us gods. Or perhaps the steam engine, or the first rocket ship, or the atomic bomb. But each of those powerful technological leaps left us wanting- wanting more, and wanting to clean up the messes each one left behind. Next are biotechnology, gene editing, and robotics. What to do?

The fact is that we have powers that traditionally were only given to gods. Vast raw physical powers, the ability to fly, and the ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere, instantly, and to know practically anything at a touch. But the greatest of all is our power to derange the entire biosphere- destroying habitats, exterminating species, filling our geologic layer with plastic and radioactive debris, and changing the composition and physics of the atmosphere. 

We have not come to terms with all this power. Indeed half of our political system can't stand the thought of it, and lives in the fantasy that nothing has changed, humanity is not trashing its home, and we can live as profligately as we wish, if only we don't look out the window. Even more disturbingly, this demographic generally holds to a fantasy god- some bearded male archetype- who will either make magically sure that everything comes out OK, or alternately will bring on the end times in flames of wrath and salvation for the select, making any rational worry for the environment we actually live in absurd.

Judgement day is coming!

This, at a moment when we need to grow into our awesome responsibilities, is naturally disheartening. Growing up out of an infantile mind set, where our parents made everything OK, is hard. Adulthood takes courage. It takes strength to let go of fantasy comforts. But the powers of adulthood are truly god-like, especially in this age. We make and remake our environments, look deep into space, into the past and the future, know and learn prodigiously. We make new people. 

Is is clear, however, that we are not taking these powers seriously enough. Overpopulation is one example. We simply can not go on having all the children we want, taking no responsibility for the load they are putting and will put on our home, the biosphere. As nascent gods, we need to survey our domain holistically and responsibly, looking to its future. And right now, that future is rather bleak, beset by irresponsible actors resistant to their higher calling.

• What to do about all the lies?
• Another view of god.
• Don't drive everywhere.
• General breakdown.
• How did South Korea do so well? Rigorous contact tracing and quarantine enforcement.
• Greed in shorts.
• Direct air capture of CO2.

Eugenics, the Catholic way

Woe betide any tampering with God's nature! However, destroying it with overpopulation is OK.

The current Supreme Court battle puts a spotlight on Catholicism in law and ethics. With the impending justice, six of the nine will be Catholic. The more rightward Catholic justices are coming from a culture that has some peculiar views on itself, on key ethical issues, and on the future of the world. First is its self-righteousness. Fundamentalist Catholics like Antonin Scalia and Attorney General Barr are confident that they come to government service steeped in the most exacting and time-honored moral code- that of the church which has been in existence going on two thousand years. It is a church that has weathered millennia of political turmoil and tectonic shifts of philosophy. But does all that history make it right? Does durability imply anything other than a canny grasp of human psychology, both in keeping its parishioners in the fold, and in keeping the wheels of its authoritarian structures turning? I don't think so. Far better moral systems have been imagined and enacted, and the Church has, time after time, grudgingly taken them up, typically a century after the rest of society. Today, a Catholic woman is nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe in a hundred years, a female cardinal? 

But what is particularly galling is the prating about the sacredness of life. William Barr has restarted federal executions, to add to all his other lying and subversions of justice, giving one a curious impression of this "culture of life". What is obviously a simple policy of patriarchal power is dressed up in gilded rhetoric of concern for "life", which, maddeningly, is swallowed as gospel by the women who are its victims. For opposition to contraception and abortion are foremost attacks on the agency and full personhood of women, who are demoted to vessels for male procreation. But the Catholic church's policy is not just patriarchy of a demeaning and sexist kind, it also constitutes a eugenic policy. Ron Turcotte, one of the great horse jockeys, born in a family of twelve children in French Catholic New Brunswick, recalled in his autobiography that the priest would make the rounds of local families and berate every woman who did not have babies in diapers. The Catholic imperative is to fill up the world with Catholics, no matter the suffering of women, families, or communities. The entire biosphere groans under vast overpopulation. And what is the answer of the Catholic church? More Catholics, more oppression, more mental straightjackets. Care for creation apparently does not extend to continence on the part of men, basic personal rights or autonomy on the part of women, or to creation in general.

Just another day at the Supreme Court.

So when I hear "distinguished" lawyers, scholars and ethicists from Catholic institutions pontificate about the evils of genetic engineering, stem cell research, or use of embryos in research, (not to mention abortion or assisted suicide, among many other topics) I can not take them seriously as intellectuals- as anything other than mouthpieces of an antiquated system of oppressive, and now catastrophic, archetypes of political and social power. It is one thing to be a scholar of an artistic tradition full of glorious human expression and yearning quests for deeper connection with whatever power animates the world. But with the loss of humanism, then Protestantism, Catholicism retreated into an intellectual fortress of defense, nostalgia, and counter-reformation. The Federalist societies, the constitutional textualists, the Opus Dei fundamentalists... this ecosystem that has funded and nurtured a conservative assault on US legal institutions, apparently heavily Catholic, all are backward time machines fixated on dead controversies and traditional, frankly eugenic, policies of world domination. 

Nominee Barrett's textualism, following Scalia, seems to endanger the last century or two of constitutional interpretation. Whatever is not explicitly enumerated in the text is not, by this view, in the federal government's power. This could include women, (other than the 19th amendment; notably, the word "he" is used repetitively to refer to the president, representatives and other officers), federal regulatory authority in countless areas such as labor, antitrust, and finance, and the very meanings of concepts like cruel and unusual punishment, militias, privacy, due process, "needful rules", and "general welfare". The constitution and statutes are frequently vague, precisely so that society can construct its meanings according to the spirit of the document, not a cramped view of its letter, or a psychoanalytic plumbing of its mental conditions of origination.

Nor is Catholicism alone in this backwardness and revanchism. Islam shares its authoritarian, righteous, patriarchal, misogynistic, domineering mentality, even while lacking a pope. It goes the Catholics one better by approving of polygamy, another eugenic gambit. Consequently, Islam has even higher birth rates than Catholicism, immiserating its populations, stoking misplaced resentment, and imperiling the biosphere. However, Muslims in the US are not at this time constructing legal pipelines into US federal judgeships or dominating the Supreme Court, so their similarities in this regard are of global, but not federal, concern.

• Yes, religion is an issue here.
• Extended video of Barrett expressing her views, as also linked above.
• Abortion was perfectly fine in colonial America.
• Our feudal future, clarified by the GOP.
• Donald's hair is charged to the taxpayer. Also, Ivanka.
• Maybe the whole business deduction system should be scrapped.
• What happens if ACA dies?
• State of our politics- getting people to not vote.

Science Says ...

What are facts, and how can we respect them?

The recent and prevalent locution of "science says ..." is grating to everyone- scientists, civilians, red, and blue. We get the shorthand meaning, but it has unpleasant, domineering overtones. Yet, sadly, something needs to be said, if facts can not make themselves heard. The "science says ..." mantra means that not only is something a fact, but it is widely, perhaps unanimously, recognized as a fact by experts who know where such facts come from and what they mean. Lately this usage has been in flood due to the pandemic, a way for data-driven people to criticize their more negligent neighbors.

The problem is that facts are not always totally clear or secure. So we have to fall back on arguments from authority, to support what we believe are important actions, based on other values. Masks were originally denigrated - by scientists! - as not very useful for protection against viruses that were small enough to easily pass right through typical cloth. But as more data came in, it became clear - to scientists - that even partial filtering and simple dispersion of infectious aerosols was quite helpful, not only for others facing a possible asymptomatic carrier of SARS-COV2, but to mask wearers themselves, by reducing the infecting dose. This is especially true in a setting with decent ventillation. Evidence piled up from epidemiological studies as well as mechanistic studies of mask wearing, that even lax masking is better than none. Now a shorthand for all that is "science says...". 

But the evidence is hardly 100%. Small studies and suggestive trends in disease data from well and poorly-masked populations make for important public health recommendations, but not quite facts. More detail and mechanism will be helpful, including the relative amounts of virus capture and dispersion by masks, and the role of the infectious dose in the severity of disease- the race that is run between viral replication and immune defense. Few people are themselves directly conversant with all this work, which means that most have to appeal to the authority of those that are. But then any blogger can claim to be an authority, and declaim a different set of conclusions and thus facts. 

We seem to have mostly settled down about these facts, tentative as they are, when it comes to the coronavirus, even though actually respecting them and changing habits comes hard to some. But climate change has been a different matter, being so economically important and implicated in everyone's current way of life. One's conservatism is directly related to resistance to changing one's way of life, which necessarily implies denying and disbelieving the once-subtle, now overwhelming evidence that "science says" assigns blame for accelerating climate change to us and our production of heat-trapping gasses.

Facts? What facts?

This is where the "science says ..." mantra becomes politically fraught and adversarial. If reality is knocking on your door and telling you to repent, confess your sins, and change your ways, experience tells us that is has to knock extremely hard. Addicts tend to change only after they have hit rock bottom, and see death in the eye. Listening to a bunch of pointy-heads and libtards go on about the biosphere, arctic ice, and obscure species is just not compelling. Quite the opposite- it is often taken as offensive and completely out of touch with a fossil fuel addict's immediate struggles and attachment to basic habits and ways of being.

And who cares about facts anyhow? Not the modern Republican party, not our president. Whether "science says" those facts or their own eyes behold them, the social facts of political control in grossly unfair setting of US power structures, and continuing support from the morally unmoored rich and their corporations, are far more significant than any global risks that all will bear with increasing pain over the coming decades. The social facts of the right wing media's blizzard of propaganda are likewise shaping a totally different world, in both values and truths and facts, than what scientists are perceiving. The mantra of "science says" then comes to mean a set of values rather than just facts, that we should perhaps attend to non-human species and ecosystems instead of worrying about a war on Christmas; that expertise is more valuable than con-jobbery and lying propaganda; that worrying about the vastly excessive human population on Earth might be more important than saving every fertilized egg for the patriarchy. For science is a value system, both in its methods and its objects. It is largely and generously funded by society, but naturally has its own agenda, which seems far-sighted and logical enough to its practitioners, but is, in the end, a set of values, which themselves will be judged by society as worthy of propagation, or not.

• An example of how the science has to be parsed pretty carefully, by expert observers. Masks, planes, and time.
• Our degraded country.
• That tired Taliban, ready to take over all of Afghanistan.
• Medicare advantage, or disadvantage?
• Are we great again, or what?
• Climate action and inaction.. still highly insufficient.

De-carbonize it

... Sung to the tune of Peter Tosh's "Legalize it". How are we doing on greenhouse gas emissions? Not very well, if the goal is zero.

Climate heating has, over the last few decades, changed from a theoretical spectre to a universal reality. The seasons have shifted. The weather is more extreme. The fires have ravaged whole regions. The arctic is melting, the corals are dying, and the wildlife is thinning out and winking out. But our emissions of CO2, far from declining, keep reaching yearly highs. Humanity is not facing up to this crisis.

Global CO2 emissions keep going up, while the climate has already gone out of bounds.

The goal needs to be zero. Zero emissions, not in 30 years, but as soon as humanly possible. Here in California, we pride ourselves in a progressive and leading-edge approach to climate policy. So how are we doing? A graph of CO2 emissions shows that California emissions have been going down since a peak in 2004, and now are roughly at 85% of that peak, despite increases in population and GDP. That is laudable of course. But we are still emitting hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 per year. Millions of tons that will be extremely difficult to recapture, as we inevitably will have to if we want to restore the Earth's climate to a semblance of the form it had for the last few million years of evolution across the biosphere.

California CO2 emissions. Going in the right direction, but far from zero. Note the Y axis cut off at 400 million metric tons CO2 per year.

Breakdown of California emissions. Note how refinery emissions alone are higher than all household emissions (principally heating).

Can we get to zero? Yes, we can if we are serious enough. There are two ingredients to get there. One is policy to drive the change, and the other is the technical means to get there. One optimal policy is a stiff carbon tax. California already has a sort-of carbon cap/pricing system, covering a fraction of emitters and using a market-based mechanism that has sent prices under $20 per metric ton. This is not enough to make a difference, being the equivalent of about 15 cents per gallon of gasoline. To be serious, we would wish to triple the cost of gasoline, which would get users off of fossil fuels in a hurry. Such a tax would come to about $700 per metric ton of CO2 emissions- an unprecedented level when you look at carbon pricing schemes around the world, but if we want results we need to think about serious policy to get there. In order to insulate such tax systems from cost-shifting to other countries, they would need a complex system of boundary taxes to make sure that imported goods and forms of energy are all subject to the same effective carbon taxation, so that in-state sources are not penalized. This is an important goal for international agreements like the Paris accords, to make such boundary taxation normal and systematic, preventing races to the bottom of emissions regulation. It is the only way that any jurisdiction can set up a strong carbon taxing/pricing system.

Can we get to zero? The technical means are not all in place, but given enough motive force from policy, we can get there very soon. The key is storage. Fossil fuels not only hold huge amounts of solar energy, but they have stably locked them up for tens of millions of years, just waiting for humanity to mine them out and burn them up. Their storability turns out to be as significant as their energy density. Solar and wind energy do not have that property, and we are just beginning to devise the means to store their energy at scale, whether by chemical means (batteries, hydrolysis of water to hydrogen) or mechanical (pumping hydro stations, spinning rotors). Whether nuclear energy enters the mix is another and very appropriate question as well, as new, safer reactor designs become common, and a strong carbon tax makes them economically viable again.
 
Natural gas is not a transitional fuel- it is another fossil fuel, only slightly less bad than coal. Another fix for an addicted economy, like switching from heroine to oxycontin. We need to break this addiction, and as fast as possible, with strong policy that takes the problem seriously. Elizabeth Warren aims her policy at decarbonization by 2030. Bernie Sanders aims at 2050. Donald Trump says to hell with us all.

• January sets another heat record.
• Bumble bees are dying.
• Quote of the week: "Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved. What evils? Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent." - Plato's Republic

Power

And lack of power.

The recent power shutdowns in California were maddening and disruptive. They also showed how utterly dependent we are on the oceans of fossil fuels we burn. With every convenience, gadget, trip, comfort, appliance, and delivery we get more enmeshed in this dependence, and become zombies when the juice is suddenly cut off. Not only is our society manifestly not robust, but every drop of fuel burned makes the problem still worse: the biosphere's decline to miserable uninhabitability. The children are right be be pissed off.

Do we have the power to kick this habit? This addiction makes opioids look like amateurs.  It won't be a matter of checking into rehab and going through a few weeks of detox. No, it is going to take decades, maybe centuries, of global detox to kick this problem from hell. Living without our fix of CO2 is impossible on any level- personal, social, political, economic, military. And the pushers have been doing their part to lull us even further into complacency, peddling lies about the risks and hazards they deal with as an industry, their own research into climate change and what our future looks like, not to mention our complicity in it.

Do we have the moral and political power to get off fossil fuels? Not when half of our political community is in denial, unwilling to take even one step along the 12 step path. I am studying the Civil War on the side, which exhibits a similar dynamic of one half of the US political system mired in, even reveling in, its moral turpitude. It took decades for the many compromises and denials to play themselves out, for the full horror to come clear enough that decent people had had enough, and were ready to stamp out the instution of slavery. Which was, somewhat like the fossil fuels of today, the muscular force behind the South's economy and wealth.

Do we have the technical and intellectual power to kick this habit? Absolutely. Solar and wind are already competitive with coal. The last remaining frontier is the storage problem- transforming intermittant and distributed forms of power into concentrated, dispatchable power. And that is largely a cost problem, with many possible solutions available, each at its price. So given a high enough price on fossil carbon, we could rapidly transition to other sources of power, for the majority of uses.

A 300 MW solar power plant in the Mojave.

Does the US have the power to affect climate change policy around the world? We don't have all the power, but have a great deal. If we were to switch from a regressive laggard to a leader in decarbonization, we would have a strong effect globally, both by our example and influence, and by the technical means and standards we would propagate. We could amplify those powers by making some of our trade policy and other relations more integrated with decarbonization policy.

Do individuals have the power to address these issues? The simple answer is no- all the virtuous recycling, biking, and light-bulb changing has little effect, and mostly liberates the unused fossil fuels for someone else to use at the currently criminally low prices. Individuals also have little power over the carbon intensity of the many products, services, and infrastructure they use. Maybe it is possible to eat less meat, and avoid fruit from Chile. But we can not unplug fully from this system- we need to rewire the system. It is fundamental economics that dictates this situation, which is why a stiff carbon tax and related regulation, with the associated political and moral will are so important.

Finally, does the State of California have the power to take responsibility for the PG&E mess? Absolutely, but probably not the will. The power shutdowns led to a common observation that the state should just buy PG&E at its bankrupt price and run it in the public interest. But keen observers have noted that the state's politicians would much rather have someone else to blame, than be saddled with a no-win institution that puts the blame on them. Power lines are going to cause fires in any case, unless we cough up the billions needed to put them underground. Customers will always complain about the price of utilities, so it is hard to see the state stepping up to this mess, or even reforming the public utilities commission, which has been so negligent as well.

• Why did the GOP nominate, and the American people elect, a Russian asset to the White House?
• Battle lines on health care.
• Point to Bernie.
• The church and psycho-social evolution.

Goal: One Billion

The Earth can't take 10 billion people. 

We have environmental and cultural problems at all scales, from the local to the global. From water shortages, drought, plastic pollution, overfishing, and species extinction, to global warming, authoritarianism, social fraying, anti-immigrant fervor, and gridlocked traffic and real estate markets. There is a common thread, which is that there are way too many people. We have (at least in some places) remediated some of the worst practices we used to take for granted, like killing whales for oil, using explosives for fishing, or dumping chemical wastes into rivers and soils. But there are are few practical ways to remediate our carbon emissions, water scarcity, or need for vast farmlands. We need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that the Earth can't take it, and we are the problem- the shear number of us.

Consider the range of problems like housing costs gone wild, traffic choked to a standstill, rising education costs and competition, and political gridlock. Are these related to overpopulation as well? I think very much so. Real estate is self-explanatory. As the old saying goes, they aren't making more land. Even while plenty of land is worthless, the need for people to live near other people means that we need to live together in what have become increasingly choked megalopolises. While rich metropolises like San Francisco and London struggle with traffic congestion and decaying public services, poorer ones like Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Mumbai had few services to start with and attract ever widening circles of destitute slums.

Lagos

A deeper issue is why our political systems are breaking down as well. Public services are decaying for a reason, which is that solidarity has weakened. Half of the US electorate has checked out of communal projects of good governance, rational and positive foreign policy, and caring for others. After two centuries of extraordinary growth, first sponsored especially in the US by a marvelously depopulated New World, and then again by bounding over technological frontiers such as fossil fuels, electricity, and the green revolution, we seem to have reached a general growth plateau, (barring development of robots who will do everything for us, but burn ever more fuel in doing so), and the expansive mood has ground to a halt. One consequence is that the elites of the culture, principally the rich, no longer subscribe to an egalitarian ethic. Growth can not be relied on to lift all boats, rather it is now every class for itself. Which class wins, when money runs politics and the media, and has been turned into "free speech" by the supreme court, is obvious.

It used to be, in the "population bomb" 1970's, that we thought that famine would be the limit on population. But it turns out that, given enough fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer production, machinery, and clearing new arable land, plus a green revolution in crop breeding, food is not the limiting factor. It is a thousand other things that we are doing to the biosphere and to our societies. The tide against immigrants is clearly borne of fear, that the number of the poor who want to flee their wretched conditions is essentially limitless, and thus that prosperous countries, i.e. Europe and the US, can not offer the relatively free immigration conditions they have heretofore. The US gained vast goodwill throughout the world over the last couple of centuries by admitting countless immigrants and playing a central role in many of the technological improvements that have allowed populations to grow everywhere.

But that process seems to have reached an end point. We have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, and have come up against insurmountable barriers. Fusion power has not happened. Space colonization is completely impractical. Even electricity storage is presenting tremendous difficulties, making a large scale switch to renewable electricity virtually impossible. And the biosphere is being degraded every day. We have come up against Malthusian limits that are more subtle than famine, but need to be heeded, lest we relentlessly immiserate ourselves.

There are two general political responses to all this. The Left response is to cooperate as best we can and tighten our belts to fit in a few billion more. Open borders, save the children, conserve water and reduce electricity usage, so that all can have at least a share of whatever resources are left. The Right response is to deny that there are significant ecological limits, cast whatever limits there are in economic terms and compete to take what we can while we can, and devil take the hindmost. Neither response is very forward-looking. One can make the argument that development is the only proven way to reduce demographic growth. Therefore, we should promote development, and bring everyone up to first world standards of resource consumption, which will in turn bring birth rates down to what in Europe and Japanare less than replacement rates. But the Earth can't take that policy either. Global heating is already having dire effects. The biosphere is already decimated and impoverished.

Thus we need an even more impractical, impolitic, and direct strategy, which is to aim to dramatically reduce the human population. A rigorously enforced one-child policy over three generations would get us from the current 7+ billion people to 1 billion, which, I think, given the current technological state, is reasonably sustainable. China did an amazing thing with its one-child policy, nipping in the bud its most significant problem- that of vastly too many people for its capabilities and resources. China is now reaping the rewards of that policy, though it hardly went far enough, and China remains heavily overpopulated and rapacious as it ascends the ladder of development.

If combating climate change is a problem from hell, structurally diffuse and resistant to responsible policy, then population control is far more so. National power is to a great extent dependent on economic and population size. We have for centuries had a mania for growth, embedded in every fiber of our economic policy and national outlook. We are Malthusian to the core, and our major religions are even worse offenders, propagating the most Darwinian of reproduction policies, even while they so ironically decry Darwin's intellectual bequests. No, it is not an easy problem. But at very least, we should not fear declining birth rates as some existential catastrophe and sign of general decline. No, they should be welcomed as the least we can do, and a small part of our path to a sustainable future, for ourselves and for the biosphere that is our home.

• Jupiter flyby.
• Accounting for Iraq.
• What the Kochs and their ilk have wraught.
• Are the Taliban more trustworthy than Donald Trump?
• Have richer people have become more handsome?
• Bonus quote of the week, from "If We Can Keep It", by Michael Tomask.

We are in trouble. Our political culture is broken, but it is not broken for the reasons you often read that it's broken- because Washington is 'dysfunctional' or because politicians have no 'will'. No. It's broken because some people broke it. It was broken by the people who pushed the economic theory on the rest of us that has driven trillions of dollars that were once in middle-class people's pockets to the comparative few at the very top. Who refused to invest in the country anymore. Who will not even negotiate real investment. Who have been telling us for years that the market will take care of all our needs, while the market has in fact left thousands of towns and communities strafed and full of people addicted to drugs- the drugs, by the way, tht the same free market is pumping out in vastly greater quantities, and for vastly greater profits, than it did twenty years ago. And who have built up a parallel media universe in which any of these commonsense assertions are dismissed as socialist, and in which anyone who doesn't endorse the thesis of Donald Trump's greatness is denounced as un-American. 

They broke it. They broke it to gain power and to remake society in a way that was less communitarian, explicitly less equal, than the society we were building from 1945 to 1980. And- let me not forget this part- less democratic. I wrote earlier of Donald Trump's contempt for our institutions, our processes, put another way, for the democratic allocation of power. Many observers (me included, sometimes) have wondered why this didn't make Republicans recoil. The typical explanation has to do with fear of his base, but I've come to believe that the simplest explanation is the best: They didn't recoil because they're not especially bothered. They find him embarrassing at times, and they disagree with him here and there, but his demagogic approach doesn't really trouble them on the whole. They- not all of them, but certainly a critical mass of elected officials, operatives, and billionaires- no longer want to compete with and merely defeat liberalism on a level democratic playing field. They want to destroy it. This is why they do things like aggressive gerrymandering, the voter suppression laws, the attemt to change the way we elect senators, the blocking of Merrick Garland- all of which preceded Trump. They want to change the rules so they they never lose. And if destroying liberalism requires breaking the system- as it surely does- then so be it as far as they're concerned.

What Happened to the Monarchs?

Monarch butterflies are in crisis.

Flying over the Midwest, it is easy to see the impact of humans. The land is neatly tiled into monoculture farms, with hardly a wild spot in sight. Unseen is the chemical crusade that has happened over the same time period, making insects and weeds sparse on this land as well. All this has contributed to a phenomenally productive agriculture, making our food with almost factory-like consistency using a variety of high-tech machinery, chemicals, and plenty of CO2 emissions. But each of these assaults on nature has also multiplied the plight of (among many others) the Monarch butterfly, which eats weeds, is an insect, and migrates over astonishing distances in a multigenerational trek to communal wintering sites. While Eastern populations of Monarchs are in decline and in peril, the condition of the separate Western population, which circulates up the Sierra and back down the Pacific coast, is dire, headed towards extinction.

"... the Midwest lost more than 860 million milkweeds between 1999 and 2014, mostly in agricultural fields" -Entomology Today

Monarch butterflies have a curious method of migration. While birds live several years, and thus may commute several times over their lifespan, (for instance from Northern breeding grounds to Carribean or South American wintering sites), Monarch butterflies live only roughly a month. But they also migrate over long distances, either from Mexico up through the Eastern US and Midwest, or from Coastal California across Central California, to the Sierras, then North to Oregon and Washington, then back down in fall. Like birds, the Monarchs use these routes to move through optimal habitats as the Northern Hemisphere goes through its seasons. But the migration must encoded in their genes, not learned from experience or from others, since it takes several generations to make the trek, somewhat like the colonization space ships of science fiction, which would go through many generations to get to, say, Alpha Centauri.

Now a rare sight.

It also means that Monarchs rely on suitable environments (which is to say, the milkweed) every step of the way. And our technologies of weed, insect and physical habitat extermination are making enormous swathes of their routes uninhabitable, not to say lethal. The Western population is down from millions in the 1980's to 30,000 today. This is not sustainable, and likely to drop to zero unless big changes happen to render the landscape less lethal. Thankfully, there are many milkweed species, many of which can grow widely in the region, if allowed to.

But this is just a small example of the harm humans are doing to the natural world. We are a plague, and have initiated a new age in biology- the Anthropocene, complete with our own mass extinction event. While the process is well underway here in California, it is only beginning in regions like the Amazon and Africa, whose human populations are growing steadily and whose natural environments are being decimated and whose wildlife is declining, including being directly killed and eaten. Climate heating will kill off far more species, until we end up in a world of mega-cities separated by monoculture croplands and nature reserves that will be faint shadows of a vanished, and richer, world.

• A study in lying, corruption, debasement, and character.
• And going back in time, ditto.
• The mess Arthur Burns left behind.
• But is the Fed overly skittish now?
• Should we be giving foreign aid to the Targaryens?
• How about we fly less, and let the Monarchs fly more?

Patterns of American Extremism

John Calhoun and the coming of the Civil War. Review of "Heirs of the Founders", by H. W. Brands.

Our politics are straining under back-breaking burdens. We are still saddled with several undemocratic compromises of the founders, are corrupted by money and corporate interests, and profess a democracy which in even its best incarnations is, historically, a brief reprieve betwixt tyrannies and oligarchies of various forms, inevitably brought down by the greed, fears, and passions of its subjects. We are experiencing division to a degree not seen since the civil war, and corruption, even treason at the highest levels of government. Where is all this going?

A recent multi-biography focused on the leading politicians of the early to mid-1800's: Daniel Webster, from Massachusetts, Henry Clay, from Kentucky, and John Calhoun, from South Carolina. Yoking them together this way is common in the teaching of this era, but it does something of a disservice to their strikingly divergent contexts and paths. Webster was a natural supporter of Northern interests, including Union, tariffs, but not abolition. He eventually agreed with the compromise of 1850 that enforced the fugative slave policy of the South, since that policy was written explicitly into the constitution. Clay was the most ambitious of the set, leading the Senate through decades of policy and legislative compromise. His lodestar was also Union, made increasingly difficult by the relative economic decline of the South, the entrenchment of slavery, and the fatal compromises that had already been made in the original constitution.

Mysterious, Romanesque bust of John Calhoun, senator and vice president from South Carolina.

John Calhoun was different altogether. While the others tacked repeatedly to maintain the Union and its institutions, Calhoun lit out towards a bitter and uncompromising pro-Southern, pro-slavery position. He was the one who repeatedly threatened secession before the Congress. He was the one who turned intellectual and moral summersaults to defend slavery as consonant with the constitution, the founders, and human decency and progress. This was a time, of course, when Native Americans did not even get this level of discussion- they were packed off to Oklahoma with hardly a bleeding heart on their side. Racism was endemic, and the point of America was not harmony, but the manifest destiny of the Europeans who were remaking the continent. Still, the blatant FOX-news quality of Calhoun's arguments is unmistakable. Here he compares the state of African Americans in Massachusetts to those in the South:

"By the very latest authentic accounts, there was one our of every twenty-one of the black population in jails of houses of correction, and one out of every thirteen was either deaf and dumb, blind, idiot, insane, or in prison. ... The condition of the African race throughout all the states where the ancient relation between the two races has been retained enjoys a degree of health and comfort which may well compare with that of the laboring population of any coiuntry in Christendome; and it may be added that in no other condition or in any other age or country, has the negro race ever attained so high an elevation in morals, intelligence, or civilization."

All this led to a clear break:

"I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have, on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of each of the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed, with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a period where it can no longer be denied or disguised that the Union is in danger. You have thus forced upon you the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the Union be preserved?"

Calhoun brooked no embarrassment or qualm about slavery. As an institution, it was good, not bad; growing, not dying. While Clay and the founders generally hoped that it would wither away, though economic evolution and plain moral decency, Calhoun stood for its unrepentant expansion. The constitution was also behind him. The constitution gave Southern states the representation of 3/5 of its slaves, but none of their voting. The constitution said nothing about any powers the Union might have to restrict slavery in new states. The constution explicitly forbade the harboring of runaway slaves. The country had lost sight of its duties to the South, and were the abolitionists not muzzled from speaking their inconvenient moral truths, the South would have no more of it.

It is a story of a whole section of America gone off its moral rocker, in service of plain greed and conservatism. A religion has also evolved in the South that seems to blend the authoritarianism and social conservatism of Catholicism with independent elite governance and a scrim of protestant theology. When the South did secede, the Union government let loose a torrent of progressive legislation. One senses strongly that we could and would do the same today but for the anchor of a Southern political culture still petrified by true equality, dedicated to feudal economic relations, and to defend itself, still spouting the mantra of state's rights. The map of Red states tells the story.

Political divisions over the last sixty years, by presidential election.

But it is the media and media leaders that serve to normalize immoral positions. Climate change is only an example, but perhaps the clearest and most dire of our time. Failure to act is simply criminal- an act of sabatoge against the future of every citizen and the entire biosphere. A fair portion of our culture, driven by right wing media and its nexus of money and fear, drives an utterly immoral political culture of denial, mean-ness, and blind conservatism. Trump has nowhere near the intellect or facility of John Calhoun, but the brazen support of palpably destructive policies, the headlong divisiveness, the antipodean moral compass have a certain resemblance.

• It isn't just Trump who is nuts.
• How much does China love us?
• The upstairs-downstairs society.
• Corruption and health of institutions.
• MMT and left economics.
• Mainstream economics is in a rut.
• Technical thoughts on deficits and seigniorage ... in a world where governments are forced to sell bonds to "back" deficits.

At the Climate's Mercy

Volcanic eruptions have interrupted our fragile existence.

A recent research article made the news, telling of the worst year to be alive: 536 AD. This was surely the darkest moment of a dark age, and scientists have tracked its source to volcano(s) in Iceland. It darkened skies around the world, led to a ~4ºF drop in temperature, and crop failures throughout Europe and the near east, and crop delays in China. There seem to have been repeated eruptions over the ensuing years, though perhaps volcanos elsewhere contributed. The result was the coldest decade in at least 2,000 years, and a plague in 541-3 that wiped out at least 1/3 of the Byzantine population, among others. It took decades for Europe to recover, notably shown by ice cores with high lead pollution about 640 AD, showing that silver mining in France had recovered, presumably being pursued for minting coins.

Turner's "Chichester Canal", of 1828, thought to reflect some of the atmospheric effects of the  1816 global volcanic pall.

There have been several similar, though less extreme, events, like the "year without a summer" in 1816, due to the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia. This vocano is estimated to have ejected 40 cubic miles of material, but only lowered temperatures in Europe by about 3ºF, yet caused substantial famine, snowfalls in June, frost in August. A much smaller eruption, of Krakatoa in 1883 also caused dramatic sunsets and world-wide cooling, but had far less devastating effects, being smaller, and because it happened in August, and did not affect the following summer as severely.

Are our agricultural systems robust enough to withstand such an event today? I doubt it. We have optimized and stretched in every direction, supporting vast urban populations, without a thought given to adverse events of global scope. The only significant failsafe is that most agricultural production goes to supporting livestock, which under duress could be used directly for human consumption.

Conversely, we are engineering a permanent climate disruption of equal proportion but in a warming direction, by our emissions of CO2. Will temperatures go up by 3ºF? 4ºF? 5ºF? We are already at 2ºF, (vs temperatures at 1900), with much more baked in from our past emissions, and from their relentless continuance and growth. Will we survive if agriculture has to move to Canada and Siberia? If Florida and New York are under water? Sure, but at what cost to ourselves and more importantly, to the natural world?

• Doonsbury's Duke, in real life.
• On the way to modern capitalism: guilds.
• We are not as prepared as we think we are.
• Medical pricing in the US is insane. Weren't insurance companies supposed to solve this problem?
• Asset? Yes. And where is the outrage?

Solar Power is Not as Easy as it Looks

Adding the first increment to the grid is far easier than adding the last, if we want to decarbonize electricity. Review of "Taming the Sun", by Varun Sivaram

Global warming is no longer a future problem, but a now problem, and getting rapidly worse. We need a total societal focus on extricating ourselves from fossil fuels. Putting aside the brain-dead / know-nothing ideology of the current administration, the world is broadly, if grudgingly, onboard with this program. What is lacking are the political will and technical means to get there. California now gets 29% of its electricity (including imports from other states) from renewables, of which 10% is photovoltaic (PV) solar power. The grid operator shows a pleasing daily graph of solar power taking over one-third of electricity demand around mid-day.

A typical day on California's power grid. at mid-day, and fair portion of the state's power comes from solar power (teal). But come sundown, many other plants need to ramp up to provide for peak demand.

 
Varun Sivaram's book is an earnest, somewhat repetitious though well-written and detailed look at why this picture is misleading, and what it will really take to go the rest of the way to decarbonization. Solar power has very bad characteristics for electrical grid power- the grid operator has no control over when it comes in, (it is not dispatchable), and it all tends to come in at the same time of day. While this time (mid-day) is typically one of heavy usage, it is not the peak of usage, which comes during the transition to cooking and evening activities, from 5 to 7 PM. This means that not only does the rest of the grid have to work around solar's intermittency, but the rest of the grid has to constitute a full fleet of power plants for peak needs- solar will not reduce the need for either baseline or peak power capacity.

This is extremely disappointing, and means that adding the first 10% of solar to the grid is relatively easy, but adding more becomes increasingly difficult, and offloads rising expenses to other parts of the system. We do not have the technical means to economically address these issues yet. Solutions come in two basic forms- energy storage, or alternative modes of non-CO2 emitting generation.

Storage technologies by current capacity and capability. Pumping water uphill into reservoirs is the only existing method of storing power in grid-scale amounts over long periods.

Storage is easy to understand. If we could only bottle all that solar electricity somehow, all would be well. Even if we can't save summer power for winter, but save it only for a few days, we could build enough solar generation capacity (at the current cheap and falling prices) to cover our needs at the lowest production time of year, and throw away the excess the rest of the year. This assumes that, over a suitably large geographic area, there will not be so much extended cloud cover that this could not be reasonably planned. But such storage technology simply does not exist yet. The diagram above mentions some of the major candidates. The best known are chemical batteries, like lithium ion. This is how off-grid and home backup systems manage the intermittency of solar power. But these are expensive, which is why it is cheaper to buy power from the local utility than to go off-grid, and also cheaper to build a grid-tied solar system than go off-grid. The most mature grid-scale storage technology is hydropower- pumping water back uphill into a reservoir. This is obviously not available in most places where storage is needed.

Where various storage technologies are in development.

Other methods like flywheels, raising and lowering rocks, etc. are all on the drawing board, but not yet in practical deployment at grid scale, or even demonstrated to be economic at that scale. Making fuels like hydrogen or hydrocarbons from solar energy is another prospect for storage, but again are not currently economical. Hydrogen has been touted as the all-around fuel of the future for many uses, but is so difficult to handle that, again, it is far from currently practical. Getting there will take money and effort. 2050 is when we need the power sector substantially decarbonized, world-wide (if not sooner!). It sounds far off, but it is only about 30 years- a very short time in power technology terms. The scale needed is also gargantuan, so we need these solutions to get off the drawing board as soon as possible- there is no time to waste.

The alternative methods of no-carbon generation are currently wind and nuclear, with CO2 storage (sequestration) from fossil fuel plants as a further option. Carbon sequestration is not a new technology, and is something that would be directly motivated by a carbon tax, though it is also phenomenally wasteful (as are many of our more adventurous methods of producing fossil fuels, like tar sands)- a fair fraction of the energy produced goes right back into compressing and pumping the CO2 back underground. Wind is also getting to be a mature technology, and shares with solar the problem of intermittency, so is not a solution for dispatchable or baseline power. Sivaram does note at length, however, that a helpful technology for both solar and wind is long-distance DC transmission, which would allow rich sources, like the plains states, or the Sahara, to be connected to heavy users.

The dream of the next generation of nuclear power, which has not been demonstrated at grid scale.

That leaves nuclear power as an important element in future power systems. Generation IV nuclear power promises cleaner, proliferation-proof, more efficient, and more sustainable nuclear power. China has several programs in development, as does the US. Again, as with all the other necessary technologies for a fully sustainable grid, these are not mature technologies, and need a great deal of research and development to come to fruition. I will not even delve into fusion power, which is not demonstrated terrestrially in principle, let alone development.

The point of all this, as made at some length by Sivaram, is that the key to getting to a decarbonized future (for electricity, the easiest energy sector to deal with) lies not simply in scaling up the PV present into a glorious future. Rather, it lies in further intensive research and development of a variety of complementary technologies. The next question naturally is: will the private sector get us there, even if there were a carbon tax? The answer is- unlikely. The Silicon Valley model of venture capital is not well-suited to the energy sector, where innovation comes in small increments, the regulatory weather is heavy, and the scale in time and capital to money-making deployment is huge. There needs to be continued, and vastly expanded, government direction of the research, along with much other public policy, to address this crisis.

• Fed still fighting the last war, or the one before that, or a class war. But good policy it is not.
• IRS heading towards total impunity.
• Justice is in peril.
• What a year...

Fight For the Biosphere

The Story of the Earth Liberation Front: If a tree falls.

What is sacred? No one lives without deep values, whether conscious or unconscious. When I recently travelled to a small midwestern town, I was struck by its devotion to its institutions of reproduction- the high school, the church, the football game, the picket fences. Small town American is under perpetual siege from the outside, from the Amazons, Wallmarts, cheap drugs, bombarding media, and changing values. From capitalism in general, though no one would put it that way. Getting young people to stay instead of heading out to the big city or the coast is one challenge. Another is facing a flow of poorer immigrants who do want to come, but who drop the bottom out of the local labor market and are difficult to assimilate. The FOX and Sinclair propaganda channels harp constantly on "traditional values", as though applying a magic incantation against change (even as they and the right end of the political spectrum work to remove what fetters are left on capitalism, and to destroy the public goods & institutions that these communities rely on). No wonder Trump found a fearful and responsive electorate.

But everyone has their god- communists worshipped the sacred revolution, into whose maw millions were fed. And into the bargain had their trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. To others, capitalism is a glowing, sacred value, and to some extent for good reason. The adoption of capitalism in China has brought about the most massive and rapid transition out of poverty, ever. (Even though the means to get there has been ecocidal technology.)

But these major ideologies and religions are weakening in our time. People are becoming disaffiliated with the cultural structures and institutions that used to cultivate sacred values, whether those of explicit religion or of its various modern ideological substitutes. The balance is often made up, on a personal level, by "nature". This is our instinctive and "natural" religion- the groves of the pagans, the auspicious birds and other animal spirits, the awesome scale and impurturbability of the surrounding vista, not to mention our own mystifying biology.

A fairy ring in a wooded grove.

The dedication to conservatism that pervades small town America is deeply in conflict with respect to this deeper set of values, as well as being counter-historical. A mere six or seven generations back, these lands were peopled by Native Americans, before being invaded by pioneers. These pioneers found, in their westward expansion, an undreamt-of natural abundance of game, fertile soil, and plant and wildlife of all sorts, which they promptly set about chopping down, shooting, poisoning, and generally extirpating. The illusion of stasis upon which rural Americans are so intent on staking their politics belies tectonic shifts to their natural surroundings and supporting ecosystem.

For the world is on fire. It is not just the loss of wolves, and the invasion of exotic species, and the relentless spread of pesticides, and countless other piecemeal assults that are degrading what we imagine to be perennial nature. It is global warming that is making nature itself a shadow of her former self. California has been literally on fire the last couple of years. Seasons are palpably shifting. Droughts are spreading. The Arctic sea ice is dwindling. Corals are dying en masse all over the world. Wildlife has been halved over the last half-century. Forests continue to be burned and clear-cut.

Those who see the sacred in nature are deeply appalled and affronted by all this. In the late 90's and early 00's, the Earth Liberation Front formed to take direct action against this desecration, not just by protesting, but by attacking those responsible for the clear-cutting, especially of old growth forests. The Northwest is full of roads that have a thin screen of trees to shield the innocent driver from vast clearcuts hidden behind. What are called "National forests" are in reality more tree farms than forests.

El Dorado "national forest"

The documentary "If a Tree Falls" is a moving story of a fight in defense of sacred values, against the modern Maloch of the timber industry. Whether this fight is noble or not is one of the themes of the piece. But the timber cutters have another set of values, more in line with the conventional property and rapine program of American capitalism, and get to brand the ELF activists as "terrorists".

The irony of the ELF actions is sadly unmistakable, using fossil fuels like diesel oil to burn down the buildings of the forest destruction complex, (i.e. the forest service and the timber companies), which will be immediately rebuilt using yet more timber. The bulk of the film profiles one of the last holdouts from Federal investigation and prosecution, Daniel McGowan. A pudgy, unprepossessing terrorist indeed, he gradually comes into focus as unshakable in his deep sense of sacred values which are in total opposition to the established order. Likewise, the prosecutors and investigators are profiled at some length, embodying their dedication to the values of law and order under the existing system. Yet they are visibly uncomfortable with what those values ultimately stand for and accomplish in this case.

Capitalism is fundamentally amoral, and exists to serve whatever we as private people want to have. It is a tool, not a value system. If we want houses made of wood, it supplies that wood, no matter the incidental cost to public lands and the animals and plants that live there. If we want electrical power, it will burn the coal to supply that power, and transmit it over fragile lines that regularly cause devastating conflagrations in high winds, abetted by global climate heating. We can not blindly trust capitalism to safeguard our long-term interests, let alone our sacred values, from our short-term needs. That is the work of government. And the last people to whom we can entrust that government are those who own and benefit from the capitalist system.

• Conservation vs conservatives.
• Pakistan shows who its friends are.. the Taliban.
• "Free speech" in Europe is a little different than in the US.
• The media is not so great in Britain, either.
• Facebook remains a cesspool. 
• Burn it up. The destruction of social trust favors Republicans.
• Fellow sleaze, in a completely illegal appointment.
• The US excels in diagnosing and treating rare diseases.
• Economic graph of the week... Left cities are economically more equitable, which is perhaps not saying much.

Economic mobility in various cities, vs overall employment growth.