Political Irony

Think we don’t need any government? Oops!

What I find hilarious is that while we all heard on the news how terrible things were in Atlanta — people stranded all night in their snowed-in cars, students forced to sleep on the gym floor at their schools or on school buses because they could not get picked up, babies being born on the side of the highway because pregnant mothers couldn’t get to a hospital, mass chaos on the order of an apocalypse — the reality is that Atlanta got a freaking two inches of snow. That’s right, two inches. Now that’s a state of emergency! Kudos to those rugged individualists who don’t need a nanny state.

Maybe next time they won’t ignore those pesky governmental weather forecasters and will actually prepare for bad weather.

Meanwhile, remember the Texas school board? The people who approved teaching students that the words “separation of church and state” do not exist in our constitution? And who eliminated any mention of climate change from science classes (you know, the thing that is causing all this freakish bad weather)? Well, good news. The board has approved new rules that will help reduce the influence of politics and religion on our public schools. I for one applaud this move to stop trying to make our young people stupid.

The prevailing discourse about energy is particularly interesting to me as an example of the politics of scarcity. The conventional wisdom (based on rampant misinformation) is that we are running out of energy, which is why we need to fight expensive and terrible wars for oil, pollute our air and water, build costly pipelines to bring tar sands and shale oil to market, drill offshore, ramp up the use of coal, etc.

This is so obviously insane. We are actually bathing in energy, including wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy, tidal energy, and many others. Our oldest form of fuel is burning wood, which means that energy literally grows on trees!

We spend far more money propping up our arcane petroleum industry than researching more sustainable alternatives to it.

Which is why it is nice to see reports coming out of non-oil companies taking matters into their own hands and coming up with promising solutions. For example, here’s a report about research funded by Boeing and an airline. Why are Boeing and airlines funding fuel research? Because as the cost of aircraft fuel goes up and up and the quality of the fuel goes down, that’s a big problem for them.

So here is the good part. They researched using common plants called halophytes to produce biofuels, and made some amazing discoveries. The reason they picked halophytes is because they are plants that have adapted to grow in deserts using salt water, so they don’t use up valuable agricultural land or scarce fresh water (unlike corn ethanol). But the spectacular thing they discovered is that halophytes are actually far easier to turn into biofuels than other plants, so they will be dramatically easier and cheaper to process. This is because halophytes are lower in lignin — the part that makes plants stiff, and which must be separated out before the plant sugars can be turned into fuels (the same thing that keeps us from eating wood for food). And even better, the resulting fuels are actually higher quality than fuels made from crude oil.

They are building a two-hectare pilot production facility in Abu Dhabi right now. And even cooler, they will be using the waste outflow from aquaculture (the farming of fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and aquatic plants). The problem with aquaculture activities is that they produce sea water containing large amounts of fertilizers, which causes algal blooms and other serious problems. Instead, they will be using this waste water to grow halophytes, which significantly reduces the fertilizer levels, reducing pollution. Wow, energy production from waste pollution!

Win, win, win, win. As the researchers put it, this has the potential to be “the big gamechanger for biofuels”. And not just for aviation, but for all fuels. And remember that biofuels are carbon neutral, since plants remove carbon from the air.

But there is an added ironic part. Go read the comments on the article, where you will see a bunch of trolls desperately trying to cast doubt on this development.

My favorite comment is:

Snag is mass conversion of large deserts to greenery will almost affect climate and could well cause some sort of devastation somewhere else.

Ignoring this person’s weak grasp of language, right now we are creating new deserts like crazy. Converting some of those deserts back into green areas is a good idea, and will not “almost affect climate”.

© Tom Tomorrow

I think Osama bin Laden made a (literally) fatal mistake. I mean, he was rich. He should have bought up a bunch of American corporations (including of course some media companies). After all, look at what big corporations have done to our country (and we are only looking at recent events): yes, they negligently poisoned the water supply of hundreds of thousands of Americans, but what about investment bankers nearly destroying our country’s economy, killing millions of jobs and wiping out seniors’ retirement accounts, not to mention costing us billions of dollars to bail them out?

Corporations also spent an estimated billion dollars on a propaganda campaign to deny climate science and convince us to keep using fossil fuels — estimated because 75% of the funds are untraceable. Who knows, maybe some of that money came from terrorists.

Or bin Laden could have taken over the automobile industry and brought it to its knees, requiring another bailout. Or how about causing a housing bubble, creating widespread homelessness? Oh wait, he didn’t need to do those things, we did them for him!

Internet network neutrality was dealt a severe blow last week by a federal court. This means that internet providers are now free to charge whatever they want to provide you with individual content, just like cable companies do. Verizon, who brought the suit, claims that killing network neutrality is required in order to allow “innovation”. Yeah, right. We’ve already seen what that kind of innovation looks like — purposely slowing down or even blocking services (like Netflix) that compete with their own higher priced offerings.

There is a solution, but will the FCC have the guts to implement it and piss off the powerful companies that stand to gain from the loss?

Otherwise, companies like Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast and others will be allowed to control what you can see and say over the internet. I think that is intolerable.