Press release from Governor Ritter’s office: http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=GovRitter%2FGOVRLayout&cid=1251580722546&pagename=GOVRWrapper.
Congratulations to Lockheed Martin of Denver and United Launch Alliance of Littleton (both bordering on my state house district, on opposite sides) for being awarded two of four NASA contracts awarded nationally, highlighting one of Colorado’s most vibrant and inovative economic sectors. We need to preserve the policies that have made Colorado so attractive for economically vital enterprises such as these two, which include attention to infrastructure, to quality of life, and to vibrant cultural and educational facilities.
A marine bacteria that very robustly pumps carbon out of the atmosphere and into a permanent oceanic carbon sink. From The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/16990766.
To sumarize, when marine life dies, some of the carbon in the remains dissolves into the ocean, 95% of which can’t be metabolized (called “refractory”). Since it can’t be metabolized, it can’t be turned back into carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, making it an actually and potentially enormous carbon sink that has been largely overlooked by marine biologists until recently. The quantity of carbon stored in these refractory molecules is about equal to the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere.
It had previously been discovered that a certain kind of bacteria (abbreviated AAPB) produces these refractory molecules when it metabolizes certain common nutrients, but on a far more robust scale than previously realized. (The main source of food for these bacteria is phytoplankton, which plays a crucial role in the marine food chain and itself is affected in complex ways by global warming).
Until now, the only known way to stimulate carbon absorption into the sea was to seed the sea with iron in order to stimulate the growth of planktonic algae. However, the introduction of iron has some serious negative side effects. With the new discovery of this very robust carbon pump (the AAPB bacteria, which pumps carbon from the carbon cycle into an apparently premanent carbon-sink), new potential exists for organically pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and into the sea, which has a large capacity to absorb it with ecological damage. How this might be done, exactly, is not yet known.
This story is interesting in its own right, but what appeals to me most is that it highlights the complex systemic nature of the world in which we live, and the value of understanding it for working with those systems to find solutions that both serve our own particularly human interests, and simultaneously restore disrupted systems to a sustainable dynamic equilibrium.
Humanity faces a daunting challenge: Billions of people desperate to live even in what Americans would call an extremely modest level of comfort and security, and a global integrated system (comprised of biosphere, and the anthrosphere within it; the hydrosphere; the atmosphere; and the lithosphere) already strained by the relatively few who already do. For the wealthy and comfortable few to attempt to condemn the rest of global humanity to perpetual poverty in the name of environmental sensitivity is completely untenable for both humanitarian and pragmatic reasons (you want more violence and instabililty? Try that strategy).
Our paltry attempts to solve our environmental problems with what are truly systemically superficial strategies are not going to rise to this challenge. We are going to need to effectively redesign our economic and technological systems to become more integrated with the ecological and natural systems within which they are ensconsed, and upon which they depend.
Economically, it means “internalizing the externalities,” incorporating into the prices of our goods and services the environmental costs that are currently not incorporated. Technologically, it is going to mean integrating an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the systems which comprise our world into the technologies which interact with those systems. Together, economically and technologically, it will mean constructing closed systems, in which the waste produced is the in-put in another process, and in which imbalances are addressed by tweaking the human and natural systems through which we operate in ways which restore and maintain the balance that had been disrupted.
First, of course, we need to overcome that faction of humanity more to the indefinate continuation of immediate, on-going, destructive, unsustainable, self-indulgent greed and mutual indifference. Once again, though the challenges we face together are daunting enough, it is the armies of Organized Ignorance among us who ensure our inability to confront and surmount them.
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Another step forward for Colordo’s New Energy Economy? http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16086540
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The Denver Post today published an editorial on the current legal and legislative battles around embryonic stem cell research (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16075319). I’m not interested in getting into the weeds concerning the legal interpretation maneuvers required to circumvent the “Dickey-Wicker Amendment,” which prohibits the use of federal funds in any research that results in the destruction of human embryos, or the history of Diana DeGette’s stem cell research bill, twice vetoed by GW Bush. I’m interested in discussing the essence of the issue, and the essence of the two fundamental sides defined by it. This is an issue over “loving life” as a moralistic dogmatic abstraction which condemns conscious human beings to continued suffering, or loving life as the expression of empathy and compassion for creatures that think and feel and are aware of their own existence.
The argument over whether (human) life begins at conception or birth is clearly a semantic game, and clearly dodges the messy functional truth: Human life is a thing in constant formation, even after birth, and, in some ways, even before conception. If we identify the newborn infant as something that is unambiguously a human being deserving of all rights and protections accorded to human beings (something that is pretty well settled at this point), then the messy fact is that that human being comes into existence, as a human being, at some indeterminate point between conception and birth. Regardless of the sophistry employed, the cluster of cells that is a zygote is not a “human being” in any sense that applies to our legal and social structure, whereas (as inconvenient as it may be for people, like myself, who are staunchly pro-choice) the only difference between a late-term fetus and a new-born baby is location (though that locational difference has huge legal implications, and huge implications for what it means to have individual rights).
While I think there is some moral complexity to the issue of late-term abortions, in the final analysis, for both pragmatic and moral reasons, it’s simply not tenable to reduce pregnant women to the legal status of incubators. The bright line, legally, has to be drawn at birth, as it generally has been throughout human history, and as our laws have evolved around. But the complexity that makes that a not completely unproblematic solution simply does not apply to the issue of embryonic stem cells. The embryos involved are not on the newborn side of that indeterminate point in a pregnancy when a cluster of cells becomes a baby. Those embryos are just clusters of cells, in anything other than a mystified perception divorced from the true complexity and subtlety of the real world we live in.
So the question is whether one is the kind of person who loves life in an abstract and dogmatic manner that does not flinch at condemning conscious human beings to continued suffering from paralyzing injuries and diseases that would otherwise be far sooner curable, or the kind of person who loves life as the state of consciousness that makes it so precious, and embraces the sincere empathy of caring about the sufferings and joys that attach to those embued with such consciousness.
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In Sunday’s Denver Post, an editorial asked the title question “Political Theater or Poor Policy?” of President Obama’s proposed new transportation-sector stimulus spending (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16036527). While admitting that Keynesian economists would answer that the proposed spending is too little rather than too much (implying that even Keynesians would have to oppose it on that basis), the author(s) sagely concluded that accruing more debt in order to invest in infrastructure and pump some capital into the economy is absolutely wrong. But there is no transparency of the reasoning behind this conclusion; we are left to assume that the wise editorial staff simply knows.
How, exactly, did the Denver post editorial staff arrive at a cost-benefit conclusion without having done any cost-benefit analysis? How, exactly, did the Denver Post editorial staff arrive at this economic conclusion without having done any economic analysis? This is what we don’t need more of, and particularly not from our information leaders.
It may be the case, or it may not, that taking on more debt now to invest in infrastructure and stimulate the economy costs more than it’s worth. It may be the case that it’s worth more than it costs. Professional economists are lined up on opposite sides of the issue, clustered around a much tighter and better informed battle-line than those whose wisdom is more arbitrary and less disciplined.
Wouldn’t it behoove us all if our last remaining major metropolitan newspaper in Denver were also among those clustered around the much tigher and better informed battle-line of economic literacy, rather than yodelling in the ideological echo chamber of arbitrary opinion?
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John emailed me that he had trouble posting (anyone having difficulty that isn’t resolved by the “tips” page, please email me). He wanted to post this:
I’d have asked your readers what they thought of my idea posted as a comment on:
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16044516?source=bb I’d also ask your readers why they thought the discussion was at such a low level on DenverPost.com. Is it because they allow anonymous posts?
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Henry Dubroff and John J. Huggins, in “From Great Recession to Great Reset” in today’s Perspective in The Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16039375), described the restructuring of the American economy that is occurring as a result of our recent financial sector meltdown. The authors view the loss of home ownership as a reliable investment whose growth in value can be depended on to finance future costs such as children’s college tuition and retirement, the decreased mobility due to a significant portion of homeowners owing more on their homes than they are worth, and the increased structural unemployment rate due to a long-term (or at least medium-term) downturn in new home and commercial construction, all conspire to create an enduring new economic context of slower GDP growth, increased savings, decreased spending-as-percentage-of-GDP, and decreased mobility.
Few would argue that some of these changes are not necessary and desirable in the long-run (e.g., increased savings and decreased reliance on consumer spending for economic vitality), and few would argue that increased structural unemployment is not undesirable (unless it was only the unemployment of people in a relatively smooth transition to new employment, which the authors argue is not likely to be the case in this scenario, in which the construction sector has around 25% unemployment, involving workers not easily positioned to retrain for the more robust communications technologies and health care jobs on the horizon). But what about decreased job-driven mobility and a slower growing GDP, two conditions that most economists would probably identify as undesirable? Are they really?
There are at least two silver-linings to those two interrelated clouds: 1) We need to transition into a more sustainable, eco-friendly, and, for both moral and pragmatic reasons, distributionally just global economy, which is going to have to place a higher value on ensuring that everyone has access to a modest means of sustenance than on the ability of some to achieve extraordinary heights of wealth and consumption; and 2) this country is in desperate need of a renewed sense of community, a renewed recognition that we are not just a collectiion of mutually irrelevant individuals, but are in fact a society of neighbors and fellow citizens, with a shared fate, shared challenges, and in a shared enterprise. The slower GDP growth in what is by far and away the most consumptive nation on Earth contributes to the former necessary global economic adjustment, while the decreased job-related mobility contributes to the latter necessary cultural adjustment in our own country.
The challenge we face is to transition into ever more sustainable and fair political economic systems, without compromising economic vitality to the point that we are only achieving a sustainable and fair condition of universal destitution. We need to create an economy robust enough to feed and shelter and educate and, in general, nourish the bodies, minds, and souls of the human population, but fair enough that it does not acomplish this for some by denying it to others, and sustainable enough that it does so in a symbiotic coexistance with rather than parasitic destruction of the natural context upon which our very existence depends.
The Denver Post today printed an interesting op-ed today (“Green Homes Are Not So New”: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16036555), describing the history of sod houses on the prairie, with sunflowers growing on the roof, as well as past uses of passive solar technology in architecture, and implicitly comparing and contrasting that use of “green technologies” to today’s more sophisticated New Energy technologies.
Aside from presenting a fascinating little detail of Colorado history, the story also reminds me of the fact that much of what progress is involves rediscovering the essence of what we were and where we’re coming from, and applying it in more sophisticated ways to what we are becoming and where we’re going. Ultimately, we “emerged from” ecosystems (and remain, despite our delusions of exceptionalism, mere products of nature still ensconced within ecosystems), and are now striving to reintegrate ourselves in systemically sustainable ways back into those ecosystems, without sacrificing the prosperity that our rapacious exploitation of Nature’s bounty has enabled us to enjoy.
It is my belief that our social institutions and our technologies will increasingly come to resemble nature’s forms and functions ever more closely, eventually becoming fully reintegrated into the natural systems of which they are inevitably a part, preserving the benefits to us, while finding ways to eliminate the costs to the natural context which sustains us. In the process, we will better mimic the far-greater sophistication of natural systems, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our own human systems by doing so.
…the ‘them’ are those who believe in extremism.” This is a statement just made in closing by a participant in a discussion of American Muslims on “This Week,” discussing the anti-Islamic ferver in America today.
More generally (and currently even less attainably), I would argue, the “us” are those who are global humanists who strongly identify with no other in-group/group distinction, and the “them” are insular “tribalists” who live in a world most saliently defined by the intersection of their various in-groups (racial, national, ethnic, socio-economic, religious, sexual orientation, etc.), and all of the out-groups against whom they stand in opposition.
Of course, as with all such things, it is not really such a tidy dichotomy, but rather a set of interacting continua, with individuals falling at different points along different continua, some being quite nationalistic but not very racist, or quite classist but not very concerned with sexual orientation. However, those who tend to be “in-group/out-group” oriented in some spheres tend to be so oriented in others, because it is a way of viewing the world more than it is a set of positions on discrete issues.
Being committed to a non-tribalistic orientation does not mean being ignorant of current realities: We live in a world divided in many ways (politically, religiously, culturally, socio-economically, etc.), and those divisions have real consequences, and real implications for what kinds of public policies we can and should pursue. We can’t legislate globally, because we have no global government. We can’t magically create universal non-tribalism by embracing non-tribalism ourselves, as individuals. The question we should always address is, “What decisions, among those that I can make, best serve global humanity, given the current realities of the world?”
