There's been some buzz about a wrinkle in the various Obama stimulus plans being floated around. Here's one of many, notable only for being the one I just read. [via IP]

Obama has advanced from trying to be like Bush to trying to outdo him. WSJ, $300 billion tax-cut plan:

They call it a tax cut, but is it so?

The payroll tax credit is a rebate of payroll taxes for low-income workers. As faithful readers of this blog surely know, an increase in spending coupled with lower tax collections is an INCREASE in taxes. AN INCREASE in taxes. NOT A TAX CUT. If I spend more money and collect less, the government is promising to collect more taxes in the future. It is not a tax cut. Not a tax cut. Not a tax cut. And when you don't cut rates but rather give people a lump sum of $500, there are no incentive effects other than to increase the probability that the US Treasury will be unable to honor its obligations in the future.

I can't wait to see all the studies that show how a rebate creates jobs. What a relief to know that this is just one more example where the Obama administration will not let petty ideological principles get in the way of what works.

It's a one off rebate rather than a tax cut, and that matters. The bill comes due later. You have in effect borrowed money from yourself, and pay interest on the loan. Worse, next year there will be no rebate. The tax rates are unchanged. You can't plan for the future, make investments based on an expectation of lower tax costs, and so there is little if any real economic stimulus.

I've long been intrigued by geothermal energy. It is available everywhere and isn't intermittent so it can supply baseload power. But in most places we have to go a mile or more deep to reach rocks hot enough for large scale systems. It's closer in a few places.

A routine drilling operation for a geothermal power plant on Big Island, Hawaii encountered dacite magma at a depth of 2.5 km. This is the first contact with magma beneath the surface of the Earth – the finding could ultimately lead to the exploitation of the molten rock as an energy source.

“This is like Jurassic Park for geologists, to see this thing in its natural habitat,” said Bruce Marsh of John Hopkins University who, together with Lucien Bronicki of Ormat Technologies and William Teplow of US Geothermal, revealed the findings at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in December. “It’s like seeing a dinosaur frolicking in an open field.”

The scientists calculate that the magma is likely to be 1050 °C, making the site possibly the hottest commercial geothermal well ever drilled. More typically, a geothermal site could expect temperatures of 500 °C at a depth of 5 km. The large volume of high-temperature rock at such a shallow depth could provide ideal to research heat-extraction methods from volcanic systems for energy generation.

I'm not sure why there is so little buzz about geothermal energy, but it's already a significant energy source.

Geothermal energy systems currently in use in the US – mostly in California, Hawaii, Utah and Nevada – produce about the same amount of electricity each year as solar and wind power combined. Unlike solar and wind power, geothermal systems can operate continuously to provide firm power and are not dependent on the weather.

I imagine energy exploration and development companies swithching from drilling for oil and gas to drilling for hot rocks. It seems that the skills and technologies developed for fossil fuel extraction would be useful. As noted in earlier posts ^1,2 there are pilot programs to test the conclusions of an interesting MIT-led study that geothermal "could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact. ." See full report: The Future of Geothermal Energy (pdf).

In Death Cult I observed that "In some disturbing ways Holdren represents the core of the Democrats, their truest expression." Said another way:

It is unclear what ’scientific stature’ Holdren is supposed to have that is so remarkable. He might have started out as a scientist, but he’s made a career out of science policy. We couldn’t spot any science in list of publications. He’s not particularly noted for his commentary outside of the climate debate, famous only really for getting things wrong when teaming up with the Godfather of neo-Malthusianism, Paul Ehrlich.

But there’s something even more curious about the Observer’s commentary - that Holdren’s appointment is supposed to be some kind of victory for ’science’ after the Bush administration. This highlights the vacuity of Bush’s critics (that’s no defence of Bush, by the way). As we can see, this ’science’, isn’t science. It is catastrophism (via environmental determinism and the precautionary principle), with almost no scientific basis. Yet the idea of catastrophe is the only ‘hold’ Bush’s critics have over him. So it’s not science the Observer is talking about at all. If it is a victory for anything, it is a victory for fear-mongery: exactly what critics (many in the Observer) of Bush (and, for that matter, Tony Blair - ‘dodgy dossier and sexed-up documents) criticised Bush for - for his War on Terror: the use of fear to further his political agenda.

In other words, all that separates Bush from his successors is a fiction. They are at least as remote from science and its rational treatment as he was.

It isn't just the Democrats of course. The above quote is from a longish post criticising the brain dead British press. Politics makes you stupid, and the British are very, very political.

Many open letters of advice to the new American administration have been offered. I find this one to be more interesting than most.

America’s First Prohibition, on alcohol, ended in 1933, not because it failed—although it most certainly had. Not because the murder rate in America’s cities doubled during 13 years of the “noble experiment.” Not because the enforcement of a law that attempted to prevent people from doing what they went on doing anyway had corrupted the police, courts, legislatures and businesses of the nation. Not because Prohibition handed a share of the economy to a criminal underworld that grew richer than U.S. Steel without paying a penny in tax. Nor because the federal prison population swelled by more than five hundred per cent to accommodate all those who were caught (a small percentage of the offending total) producing, importing, selling and drinking the devil’s liquid.

No, it ended because the Great Crash of 1929, the banking crisis that followed, the loss of tax revenues from business that had gone bust and millions of workers without jobs made it too expensive. The Great Depression killed Prohibition, because the United States just couldn’t afford it.

When Barack Hussein Obama assumes office on January 20th, he should remember the precedent his party set in 1933 and end the Second Prohibition, on drugs. This will create an immediate tax windfall to give the Treasury back more than it lost on Iraq, the bank bailouts and the annual subsidy to Israel. It would also relieve the American taxpayer of the burden of enforcing laws that Pew Center on the States’ Public Performance Project estimated [pdf] cost federal and state governments $20 billion a year. Not a bad savings, when times are tough, especially when the so-called “war on drugs” is failing as surely as the crusade against alcohol did 80 years ago.

I also think that we would do well to fund medical research to find a way to painlessly remove all those sticks from the butts of the kill joys who promote such laws in some misbegotten attempt to perfect society.

More Edgey stuff.

"Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

I expect to see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few are going to start to freak out. . .

But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. It is that it does so on purpose. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their environment will have changed profoundly. The line separating the natural from the artificial is itself an artifice, and one that changes with time. But this change, different in scale and not necessarily reversible, might finish off the idea of the natural as a place or time or condition that could ever be returned to. This would not be the "end of nature" — but it would be the end of a view of nature that has great power, and without which some would feel bereft. The clouds and the colours of the noon-time sky and of the setting sun will feel different if they have become, to some extent, a matter of choice.

That's Oliver again. I seem to post about his stuff often, and have done so for some time. See this old post Soul Butter which explains my interest in part.

His name doesn't come to mind first when listing nature writers since for him nature is interplanetary and even intergalactic - capital N nature. In the large. . .

Though I am in fact rooted in particular land, fully engaged in a specific place, it is global in Oliver's sense. I have long seen it this way too. It isn't only the carbon but also the nitrates, synthesized in electrical storms and that falls in rain, and other minerals that fall from the dusty skies, carried across the Pacific from China on high altitude wind currents, as well as the things I put on that land - everything from Dutch grass seeds to British cattle genes via New Zealand. Even the weeds are immigrants from every continent - as am I.

I prize a vision of natural systems that explicitly acknowledges all of this in dynamic relationship. To truly see it you need to somehow split your focus to include the micro and macro, the very far and the very near, the past, present and future, all at once. It's hard to do, but worth the effort I think.

I argue with Oliver. I don't bother to argue with those who are deeply ignorant or plainly stupid. Real argument is risky since you must actually listen to the other fellow rather than just waiting politely for your turn to speak again, and so you might be persuaded, might have to change your views, and that can wreak havoc.

I think that he is mistaken that intentional geoengineering is novel. The focus on climate is fairly recent, and the technologies have advanced, but the concept of intentional alteration of the planet is old, an ever increasing expansion of behaviors as old as civilization. What the Romans did with aqueducts and the Dutch did with dykes is not different in intent, just in scope. The Suez and Panama canals have the same root intentionality but are easier to understand as having global impact. In America we have been hacking and carving the earth all along. What was done with the Erie canal to connect the great lakes to the Atlantic ocean, and the continual engineering of the Mississippi river, are two better known examples. We could assemble a list of such engineering efforts from every continent and explain how each has had global impact. For example, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific in Panama has had ecological impacts we are still trying to understand. Unintended consequences of intentional geoengineering is old too.

It may be, as Oliver notes, that climate engineering would make some fashionable views of nature less tenable, but they have always been myopic and provincial - an affected ignorance in service of a supernatural faith. It is only by covering their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting loudly that such views could be held by those who are now threatened by climate engineering.

Oliver knows all of this, but looks at it from a different angle.

Critics of geoengineering approaches are right to stress this governance problem. Where they tend to go wrong is in ignoring the fact that we already have a climate governance problem: the mechanisms currently in place to "avoid dangerous climate change", as the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change puts it, have not so far delivered the goods. A system conceived with geoengineering in mind would need to be one that held countries to the consequences of their actions in new ways, and that might strengthen and broaden approaches to emissions reduction, too. But there will always be an asymmetry, and it is an important one. To do something about emissions a significant number of large economies will have to act in concert. Geoengineering can be unilateral. Any medium sized nation could try it.

In this, as in other ways, geoengineering issues look oddly like nuclear issues. There, too, a technological stance by a single nation can have global consequences. There, too, technology has reset the boundaries of the natural in ways that can provoke a visceral opposition. There, too, there is a discourse of transcendence and a tendency to hubris that need to be held in check. And there, too, the technology has brought with it dreams of new forms of governance. In the light of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many saw some sort of world government as a moral imperative, an historical necessity, or both. It turned out not to be, and the control of nuclear weapons and ambitions has remained an ad hoc thing, a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action that is unsatisfactory in many ways though not, as yet, a complete failure. A geoengineered world may end up governed in a similarly piecemeal way — and bring with it a similar open-ended risk of destabilisation, and even disaster.

The idea of world government is childish, an extension of confusions about national governance. Nations are not in fact governed and never have been. The authoritarian ideal has no empirical support. Yes, authorities stand at the head of the class and make demands, and sometimes impose harsh penalties on the misbehaving children, but the idea that the children are controlled is an illusion. The failures of Kyoto and the IPCC mirror the failures within each nation and locality. No one is in charge or can be in charge. It's time for the authorities to grow up and admit what has been going on all along and will continue in future.

I think that a more accurate view of things decreases the risk of destabilisation, though nothing can remove it. I'm reminded of an old movie I saw - Serenity - a space western in which an overwheening government of an alliance of worlds routinely practiced geoengineering and social engineering - and made an unholy mess of things in the process. [Spoiler] An experimental attempt to perfect one society on one world by dosing the population with some sort of peace drug made the majority of the people too passive to even live - they sat down and died - and had the opposite affect on a small minority, turning them into ravaging demon cannibals with no respect for life.

There is risk in ad hoc governance, "a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action", but I think less risk than in more rigid approaches. The thing to always bear in mind is that while it is possible to imagine a benign and wise authority, none exist, even in theory. Imagination glosses over the difficult bits in a leap of faith, but that's a steam age mechanical view that denies the organic reality of life. Humans have always been imaginative, but in the past the role of god was assigned to inscrutable gods. It was a non-explanation of the unexplainable which provided some comfort by essentially shelving the subject so that people could get on with life. Now that many find such non-explanations unsatisfying we need to be more realistic and face the full complexity of the issue.

I've used this quote before but it is still apt.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

Mindplay is phun, but it is play. We are improved as well as entertained by play, but some part of our consciousness needs to stay grounded in reality so that we don't slip into madness and mistake our play worlds for the real world. The greatest risks we face come not from reality, but from our imaginations. Panicked attempts to remove real risk expose us to even greater risk. Be glad that the best we have been able to achieve is ad hocery, since it is better than what our imaginations promise.

Update:

The link to the Meadows column from the old Whole Earth Magazine rotted and I haven't yet found another copy anywhere. If you can help, please do so. I ripped the quote from my old post Mental Tools (2003) which has more from the column as well as my commentary.

Also, Oliver responds:

I suspect that changes to the boundary condition of a system may need to be thought of slightly differently from changes to components within the system. (I am not sure that I can justify this belief, and I certainly can’t do so off the cuff. More thought is needed.) I am also not quite as negative as Gary is about the chances of rational political action.

Social hacking.

Among the many provocative answers to this year's Edge question, "What Will Change Everything?" my favorite was Sam Harris' "True Lie Detection":

Deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation. Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie. ... Reliable lie-detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. ... We will almost surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation. . .

The greatest transformation of our society will occur only once lie-detectors become both affordable and unobtrusive. . . . there may come a time when every courtroom or boardroom will have the requisite technology discretely concealed behind its wood paneling. Thereafter, civilized people would share a common presumption: that wherever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored. . .

Many people seem to find it relatively easy to find a state of mind where they can "honestly" saying whatever is in their interest to say, no matter what other beliefs their minds may hold. A world of cheap "lie" detectors would reward people with good self-deception abilities, and encourage others to train such abilities. Perhaps we could also develop self-deception detectors, but I expect a murky mess of an arms race to follow.

Precisely. Any system can be hacked. The courtroom and boardroom systems can be used and abused by those who control them, hijacked by clever invaders, and subverted by other technologies - mind shields? - to limit the predations of those in power.

During the election campaign I boggled about seemingly intelligent and putatively educated people swooning over Obama's empty rhetoric. He pandered this way and that incoherently, but that was all they wished for. The problem is that his incoherent promises can't be kept, and that was perfectly clear all along.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail statement, “the advisers will be charged with implementing President-elect Obama’s strong targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050. However, the president-elect appointed a cabinet with diverse views and looks forward to strong debate within the cabinet on how best to achieve those outcomes.” . . .

In a forum at the Brookings Institution a year ago, Mr. Summers said the current moment on climate change was analogous to that on health care in 1992: Everyone agreed that the current system was unsustainable, but there was less agreement on how to address the complexities and costs. There was a general expectation that with the inauguration of a new Democratic president, something would be done.

“In the end,” Mr. Summers said, “what everyone agreed needed to happen didn’t happen in 1993.”

It is trivially simple to find fault with the status quo. That doesn't mean that anything can be done about it. Democrats have punked themselves by advocating lowered emissions. There are two glaring defects with such advocacy: achieving significant reductions will severely harm society and so be massively resisted, and even those massive reductions will have no effect on global climate. It's an exceedingly painful but utterly empty gesture.

This is what I find so distasteful about Democrats. They seem to have no sense. I believe that I have more real concern for many of the issues that they claim to care about, but insist on realistic and effective policies rather than the feel good wanking that seems to be sufficient for them.

As we slid into war after 9/11 I kept hoping that someone with a bully pulpit would call bullshit. War would spill blood and treasure, knock some heads and slay some monsters, but when the dust settled nothing else would be settled. It was an empty gesture. Things have changed, but not in any significant way. Things are just as unsettled and threatening as they have ever been.

Now I am hoping for someone to call bullshit on the climate warriors. I suspect that this hope too is in vain, since none of the players have the courage, or foolishness, to buck the tide and make what might well be career limiting remarks. Only those who have nothing to lose can bear the risk.

The chief effects of the wars have been to make some fortunes for those who were well positioned. The climate hustle has done the same so far - ethanol? - and has no prospect of achieving anything else. That's politics.

Government policy is not just a blunt instrument, it's a toy instrument, a nerf bat, a ceremonial symbol of no value if it has to actually be used. I don't mean that it can't do great harm - we have all of history to provide examples of that - I mean that it can't do good, can't deal with real problems.

But, in a bureaucratic world the response to every serious issue is to kick it upstairs. Not my yob, every underling says, and we are all underlings. The problem is that the penthouse is occupied by sociopaths who don't give a crap about anything but their own well being. It could not be otherwise since any honest and caring person would soon be destroyed by the realization of their inadequacy to the task, their inability to deal with the problems kicked upstairs to them.

I think that this may be why actors and confidence men do well in politics. They are comfortable playing a part. They can be the doctor or super hero or whatever since they don't ever have to actually do anything, they just have to play the role. Give them a script and they can sell it.

We all know this, so how do we reconcile the failure to deal with problems with our continued support for politicians? We have the astounding ability to reshape reality to fit our expectations. With hammer and tongs we torture the facts and with scalpels and dynamite we cut and explode past events until they support the script well enough for us to suspend disbelief. We want to believe and that's enough. Remarkable.

Unfortunately, we currently have two good examples of this: financial problems and environmental problems. Various cures are offered though none of them can work even in theory unless a host of other fortuitous events occur in future, and it may be that such a fortuitous alignment of the planets would work as well without the policy placebos.

Here's a more detailed example of this nonsensical system.

Conservatives, even those vehemently opposed to GHG controls, should like this deal because it is substantially better than the status quo. As a consequence of Massachusetts v. EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency will be required to regulate GHGs, and not just from motor vehicles. The EPA has affirmed the potential negative consequences of climate change too many times for it to avoid making the endangerment finding that triggers regulation under several Clean Air Act provisions. As a consequence, it is only a matter of time before agency is mandated to control such emissions from new motor vehicles and a wide range of other sources, including power plants, factories, and perhaps even non-industrial buildings. Such regulation would be tremendously costly, but not terribly cost-effective, and thus much worse than a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A tax trade of this sort is also the best chance conservatives have to enact pro-growth tax cuts in the current environment.

Will such regulations or taxes actually accomplish any useful objectives? Will GHGs stop accumulating? No. There will be no measurable effects. But we must do something since that's the law, so let's try to find a least harmful do-nothing policy. The more rational approach of changing the silly law is not on. That would destroy the illusions of the audience and put the actors out of work. Won't happen. Worse, GHG problems are intimately connected to all the other problems, notably the financial mess. One fake solution undermines another fake solution so that things won't go according to the script, which isn't too big a deal since it may still be entertaining. We love dramatic setbacks that advance the plot.

Our national rescue policies differ little from cult fantasies - passing UFOs will beam us up and take us on a glorious adventure. But the UFO script doesn't have many viewers, can't pay the bills, so it gets cancelled after playing for a short time in a few houses. We get a few reruns on late night cable or satellite broadcasts. Anyone up at that time is a fringe character desperate for a sufficiently improbable fantasy that even they can suspend disbelief.

But, the little differences matter for ratings. A fantasy about carbon taxes has some juicy parts that advance careers. Leading men (of every gender) with good hair and enough dog in their voices to command attention can wear flattering costumes and pretend to expertise, babelicious ingenues will give them smiles and warm eyes, viewers can project themselves into the fantasy for a while and have a good time.

It won't do to get too upset about the ruse. Things won't change. We have some duty to call bullshit, but we also need to go Buddha about it and smile on the follies of human kind. Some things are invariant if not actually eternal, and the actors are cute. We can get on with the real business of living our brief lives, toiling as necessary, whelping the babes, keeping the faith or trucking or whatever analogy works. Semper Fi.

Oliver Morton, the chief news and features editor of the journal Nature, had an interesting op-ed a few days ago.

The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile.

It takes nothing from the beauty and power of the image, though, to point out that it was the photographer, far more than its subject, who was isolated, and that the fragility is an illusion. The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance — but it does recast it.

That the Earth is small is undeniable. If the inner solar system were the size of the United States, the Earth would be the size of a football field; if the distance to the center of the galaxy were a mile, the Earth would be less than an atom. But if the “Earthrise” photo could have captured our planet in the dimension of time instead of space, things would look different. In its duration, as opposed to its diameter, the Earth demands to be measured on a cosmic scale. At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter’s night are younger than the planet beneath your feet.

Mere persistence is not, in itself, that great a feat. The barren rocks of the Moon have persisted almost as long. But the Earth has not merely endured; it has lived. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited, and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long.

Read the article. The boy can write. In this article and other things that Oliver has written there is an unusual sort of openness and honesty that refuses to collapse complex subjects into simple minded stances suitable for political posturing. If that's what you hunger for then you will find little nourishment in Oliver's work.

It is fitting that one of the major points of his op-ed article is that the earth is an open system.

The science of thermodynamics tells us that closed systems tend toward equilibrium, toward dullness, toward entropy. If the Earth were truly as isolated as it looks, that unavoidable tendency would be the lot of life. But the Earth is as open as the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it, creating endless chances for complexity and improbability, washing the world’s entropy back into space. The flow of energy that unites almost every living creature on the planet is the same flow that connects our environment to the universe beyond.

I saw a semi-hilarious old episode of Mythbusters the other day in which they tested the old saying, paraphrasing, that you can't polish a turd. Oliver is a gentleman. I'm not. I'm a rude bumpkin who calls a spade a freakin' shovel. The Mythbusters episode showed that you can in fact achieve a high gloss shine by patiently smoothing dung or dirt, so perhaps one day I too will be civil.

Not today. I think that seeing the earth in the more accurate context that Oliver patiently explains busts the whole collection of new agey myths that underlie the environmental movement. Environmental awareness and concern has always been appropriate, but the environmental movement was an intellectually and ethically bankrupt political campaign that had little actual relevance to the environment. Worse in some ways, it was aesthetically bankrupt as well, substituting an impoverished cartoon of the earth for something far more majestic and mysterious.

Oliver's concluding remarks, perhaps his intended point, is that our current environmental threats are manageable. We can deal with them if we want to do so. It's a hopeful message, seasonally and situationally appropriate.

“If we can put a man on the Moon ...” quickly became shorthand for society’s failure to achieve goals that seemed far simpler. But still: we put a man on the Moon, and that does say something. Efforts on a similar scale aimed at harvesting the energy flowing about us are entirely appropriate, and could make things a great deal better. We cannot solve all problems; some climate change is inevitable. But catastrophe is not.

I don't entirely disagree - current threats are not as dire as the hysterics claim - but I'm much more invested in open systems. Our progress to date on environmental issues has been made in spite of the environmental movement, not because of it. Society’s failure to achieve goals is the invariant outcome of a political definition of society as a collective that somehow decides on goals and persues them. That's not how societies work. They can't be directed, they can only be inhibited, misdirected, impeded, crippled by the attempt to control them - the SNAFU principle.

Worse, even after the errors of the collective approach become obvious it takes collapse to allow a change of direction due to the Concorde fallacy, the sunk-cost fallacy, the inability to make decisions based on current information without regard for past investments. And worst of all, policies adopted by societies are resistant to change since they are based on a previous consensus and it is that consensus that is the true goal. Admitting that the policies are mistaken destroys the hard won consensus, destroys the legitimacy of the commanding elites.

An energy moon shot won't help. That's just a distraction, a circus to entertain the simple minded and enrich politicians and their cronies. But the system is open and solutions will be found, emerge if you will, since the true genius of humanity is a reflection, albeit pale, of the larger genius of the earth itself which has lived for billions of years by finding improbable solutions that seem obvious in hindsight. To have a useful grasp of the dynamics of the system and ourselves we need to hold the mark, retain the mental openness of the moment of insight when what seems improbable morphs into something obvious. We need to be aware of that hindsight bias and not assume that any directed effort could have done as well. It's unsettling, even frightening, to actually listen in this way since we are most comfortable ignoring the external inputs of an open system. But, we need to have some courage.

Those who have been expecting relentless nastiness and intellectual bankruptcy from Obama have been mostly disappointed until recently, just as his most rabid supporters who longed for such excesses have been disappointed . . . until now.

Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Unless, that is, one of your friends goes on to become the science advisor to the President of the United States.

It is worrisome, but the rest of the Obama administration worries me too . . . not that McCain would have been much less worrisome from my perspective. They are politicians and both parties are mainly populated and supported by wackos obsessed with power, and both have a cavalier attitude to truth and good governance.

But, Holdren may be the monster that has most to do with the things that I care about, so I anticipate the dreary task of commenting on his idiocies many more times.

I am truly puzzled how such people continue to find employment. If they were medical doctors it seems that they would have had their licences stripped. If lawyers would they not have been disbarred? They are clearly incompetent, and mean spirited as well.

Now that we have compulsive regulators back in power can we look forward to some sort of accountability and penalties for malpractice? No, of course not. In some disturbing ways Holdren represents the core of the Democrats, their truest expression. One party is aloof from the tragedies of the world, the other is ecstatic about them. One fiddles while the fires burn, the other is transfixed as if in an ass-trance.

Just don't think about it.

Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers

Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

Pouget says that Kahneman's approach was to tell a subject that there was a certain percent chance that one of two choices in a test was "right." This meant a person had to consciously compute the percentages to get a right answer—something few people could do accurately.

Pouget has been demonstrating for years that certain aspects of human cognition are carried out with surprising accuracy. He has employed what he describes as a very simple unconscious-decision test. A series of dots appears on a computer screen, most of which are moving in random directions. A controlled number of these dots are purposely moving uniformly in the same direction, and the test subject simply has to say whether he believes those dots are moving to the left or right. The longer the subject watches the dots, the more evidence he accumulates and the more sure he becomes of the dots' motion.

Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.

"We've been developing and strengthening this hypothesis for years—how the brain represents probability distributions," says Pouget. "We knew the results of this kind of test fit perfectly with our ideas, but we had to devise a way to see the neurons in action. We wanted to see if, in fact, humans are really good decision makers after all, just not quite so good at doing it consciously. Kahneman explicitly told his subjects what the chances were, but we let people's unconscious mind work it out. It's weird, but people rarely make optimal decisions when they are told the percentages up front." . . .

Another main advantage is that when we finally reach a decision, we have a sense of how certain we are of it—say, 60 percent or 90 percent—depending on where the triggering threshold has been set. Pouget is now investigating how the brain sets this threshold for each decision, since it does not appear to have the same threshold for each kind of question it encounters.

I think it may be important to use the right tool for the job. Our brains may be kind-of-sort-of Bayesian inference machines for some tasks - and so is a dog's brain - but there are a lot of problems that won't yield to this sort of tool set.

Or, your brain may starve.

A new study from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine has found when the brain doesn't get enough sugar glucose -- as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain -- a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer's.

Robert Vassar, lead author, discovered a key brain protein is altered when the brain has a deficient supply of energy. The altered protein, called elF2alpha, increases the production of an enzyme that, in turn, flips a switch to produce the sticky protein clumps. Vassar worked with human and mice brains in his research.

The study is published in the December 26 issue of the journal Neuron.

"This finding is significant because it suggests that improving blood flow to the brain might be an effective therapeutic approach to prevent or treat Alzheimer's," said Vassar, a professor of cell and molecular biology at the Feinberg School.

A simple preventive strategy people can follow to improve blood flow to the brain is getting exercise, reducing cholesterol and managing hypertension.

Exercise helps with hypertension too. Balanced cholesterol (hdl/ldl) seems more important than reduced cholesterol.

Bear this in mind during this time of feasting and reduced outdoor activity, at least for some of those in the N. hemisphere, since it seems to be hard on the brain. The man who splits his own wood warms himself twice, and perhaps will have the wits to appreciate it.

For your green buddies.

The system consists of a personal techno-garter -- inspired by the Opus Dei cilice popularized in Dan Brown's Davinci Code -- worn on the thigh, communicating wirelessly to a set of low-power sensors measuring the wearer's personal energy consumption. If the wearer's electricity use exceeds a certain limit, the device plunges stainless-steel thorns into the wearer's thigh, a reminder of their complicity in the planet's demise, and perhaps their own mortality.

Techno-wimps. In the day we made do with self scourging. OTOH, there should be some green jobs manufactured for the manufacture and maintenance of these conspicuous consumption gadgets. Gore needs one, but it should be the necklace version.

Here's an interesting review of the effects of returning wood ash to forests.

The ash generated as a by-product of combustion, whether for heat or power generation, has potential use as a fertilizer in forest systems. . . The key determinants of wood ash chemistry are the tree species combusted, the nature of the burn process and the conditions at the application site. Wood ash from hardwood species produces higher levels of macronutrients in their ash than conifers, and the silica content is frequently lower. A furnace temperature between 500 and 900°C is critical to the retention of nutrients, particularly potassium, and determines the concentrations of potentially toxic metals including aluminium in the ash. Fly ash, the lightest component that accumulates in the flue system, can contain high concentrations of cadmium, copper, chromium, lead and arsenic and this ash should not be used as fertilizer. The form of the ash at application is important, with loose ash releasing Ca, K and Na more rapidly than granulated ash. Heavy metal, radionuclide and dioxin contamination of wood ash-based fertilizers is minimal and unlikely to affect ecosystem function. The effects of wood ash are primarily governed by application rate and soil type. The benefits are maximized at low dose rates, with possible toxicity from applications in excess of 10 t ha–1. For most forest sites, a single wood ash application per rotation could replace all the nutrients lost after whole-tree harvesting (excepting N). Long-lasting positive effects on tree growth have been observed on shallow peats, in which the humus is slowly mineralized in response to elevated pH and increased nutrient availability. In contrast, wood ash application to podzols is only effective in enhancing tree growth when nitrogen availability is non-limiting. To date, published research of wood ash effects on trees growing in clays and loams is minimal. A lag time for positive tree responses to wood ash application is often observed, and may be the result of phosphorous limitation at higher soil pH. The greatest reported adverse ecological effects are to acidophilic ecosystems, particularly the constituent bryophyte, soil bacteria and ectomycorrhizal communities.

Emphasis added. Farming trees for biomass energy must return nutrients to the soil after harvest to avoid degrading soil. Using the ash generated from burning a harvest for some of those nutrients is sensible. Using only the bottom ash (not the fly ash) reduces concentration of toxic metals, though I wonder if those vendors who mix the two end up with no greater concentrations than were in the original forest, so it doesn't accumulate.

Even better, in my view, would be if the wood was used in CHP pyrolysis systems. They operate at moderate temperatures and so retain macronutrients, and the char residual produced would be even better than ash, though there is some char in bottom ash.

Human geoengineering is being linked to past climate change.

That idea, debated for the past several years by climate scientists, holds that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming. . .

"Between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide started an upward trend, unlike during previous interglacial periods," explains Kutzbach. Indeed, Ruddiman has shown that during the latter stages of six previous interglacials, greenhouse gases trended downward, not upward. Thus, the accumulation of greenhouse gases over the past few thousands of years, the Wisconsin-Virginia team argue, is very likely forestalling the onset of a new glacial cycle, such as have occurred at regular 100,000-year intervals during the last million years. Each glacial period has been paced by regular and predictable changes in the orbit of the Earth known as Milankovitch cycles, a mechanism thought to kick start glacial cycles.

"We're at a very favorable state right now for increased glaciation," says Kutzbach. "Nature is favoring it at this time in orbital cycles, and if humans weren't in the picture it would probably be happening today."

I wonder if this human induced warming accounts to any significant degree for the Medieval Warm Period (~800-1300 AD), and if so why did it end? Perhaps that too is human influenced.

Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands-abandoned as the population collapsed-pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, known as the Little Ice Age.

"We estimate that the amount of carbon sequestered in the growing forests was about 10 to 50 percent of the total carbon that would have needed to come out of the atmosphere and oceans at that time to account for the observed changes in carbon dioxide concentrations" . . .

What they found was a record of slowly increasing charcoal deposits, indicating increasing burning of forestland to convert it to cropland, as agricultural practices spread among the human population-until around 500 years ago: At that point, there was a precipitous drop in the amount of charcoal in the samples, coinciding with the precipitous drop in the human population in the Americas.

So perhaps the Little Ice Age (~1400-1900 AD) that followed the Medieval Warm Period was also human influenced. It's as if the old and new worlds were separately working to warm the world and fight off the overdue ice age, developing and increasing until they met and swapped spit. Then half of them died from disease and the fields reverted to uncultivated wilderness in the Americas, allowing the ice to advance again.

This is a land use narrative driven by agriculture rather than an industrial narrative driven by fossil fuels. It's interesting that the effects have been beneficial for life on earth since ice ages are generally bad for living things. There are other factors - Milankovitch cycles, solar variability, volcanoes, long duration circulation cycles of atmosphere and oceans - that complicate the narratives and make the effects highly contingent. It explodes the simple minded narrative of a return to a pre-industrial equilibrium, while reinforcing the concept of human influence on climate.

21st century intentional geoengineering seems less radical given that we have always done unintentional geoengineering, but we need a great deal more information in order to have some hope of predictable outcomes.

The skies cleared for a moment today after a couple of days of cold rain and occasional small hail. The mountain tops are gleaming white with snow and the pastures are frosted. Tonight the pipes may freeze as what little heat we have radiates into space. In the noon day sun the soaked old wooden fences are steaming as they exhale water they absorbed yesterday.

The old iron wood stove greedily consumes my dwindling pile of squaw wood that accumulated over the summer. It falls from the trees whenever the wind blows hard - self-pruning is the old joke - and I haul it up to the pile near the bunkhouse. Then, in winter, I burn it in the stove. Days like today renew the old affection for radiant heat. It's a comfort to mind and body in a time when there are few others.

It's enough.