Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Time to wake up

This is one of the best I have seen. The author is not your usual resource oriented person. I suggest this to everyone.

Time to wake up: Days of abundant resources and falling prices are over forever

by Jeremy Grantham

Published by The Oil Drum on Fri, 04/29/2011 - 08:00

Original article:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853

Published on Energy Bulletin

http://www.energybulletin.net/print/57163

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Business As Usual

A local manufacturer of solar hot air heating panels has received millions of dollars in federal money to put these panels on low income homes. They received a 2.2 million dollar federal grant. Earlier this year, the same company received a 300 thousand dollar federal grant to build a manufacturing facility.

It is the installing of this fluff that I find a waste.

This is the editorial comment I sent to the newspaper:

To Tell the Truth

The 600 megawatts of annual energy from the RREAL solar “furnaces” does not subtract the necessary fossil fuels, heavy equipment and toxic chemicals to extract the minerals (coal, copper, aluminum, etc), process, transport, manufacture parts, transport, assemble, transport, install and run the necessary blower. So this is a misleading number. To see pictures of some of the equipment necessary - http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

To give the numbers in megawatts seem to imply electricity is made. It is heat only. And this number is a computer estimate; it may be more or it may be less. Figured in gallons of propane – it is 80 per year; in fuel oil, 60 per year. Money payback? A decade? To payback the energy expend to make them – a decade? Wise use of resources?

These devices with their heavy use of fossil fuels, materials are not green nor clean. There are massive machines that gouge the earth for these materials. With fossil fuels becoming more and more precious both geologically and politically, these devices are not sustainable. And because they cannot reproduce themselves without fossil fuels, they are not renewable.

These devices work only part of the year, during the winter. These devices work only part of part of the year - no sun at night or cloudy days, no heat. No electricity because of storms, no heat.

I am not being mean spirited about the poor. These homes have been upgraded with insulation as well as windows and doors where needed by the federal weatherization project. I ran the first weatherization program in Minnesota back in the mid 1970s. A program I still support.

Our state and federal budget are hemorrhaging, yet we are funding millions for these impractical, feel good devices instead of infrastructure like roads, sewage, bridges, water systems.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Don't Confuse Me With the Facts

Having thought about the energy and environmental future for over 40 years, I have two main concerns. One is NOT our physical ability and creativeness to cope with less energy and other resources. We are an incredibly resourceful animal.

My two concerns are population and tribalism. We must figure out how to separate pleasure from reproduction or no matter what comes down the pike, it will be same old, same old. We will overshoot again and again like all life.

Tribalism, us against them, is a natural part of being a necessarily social animal. With any restriction of resources, real or imagined, this divisiveness will raise its head. Couple population overshoot potential and tribalism and nothing changes. Religion could save us (not necessary existing ones) but may well be the hammer of the future.

This article from Mother Jones need not to have been about science. It applies to all our belief for most of us. There are life circumstances that facilitate this myopia but that is the subject of another essay.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

By Chris Mooney | Mon Apr. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [1] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [2] in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.

Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. First, the "boys upstairs" (as the aliens were sometimes called) did not show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted?

At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!

From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. "Their sense of urgency was enormous," wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more certain of their beliefs.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience [5] (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia [6] of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber [7] of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt [8]: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers [9] (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

That's a lot of jargon, but we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If I don't want to believe that my spouse is being unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away behavior that seems obvious to everybody else—everybody who isn't too emotionally invested to accept it, anyway. That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses—what that great 17th century theorist of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, dubbed the "idols of the mind." Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

Scientific evidence is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Giving ideologues scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation. Giving ideologues or partisans scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Sure enough, a large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs. In a classic 1979 experiment [10] (PDF), pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies: one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological critiques of the fake studies—and in a scientific sense, neither study was stronger than the other. Yet in each case, advocates more heavily criticized the study whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing the study that was more ideologically congenial as more "convincing."

Since then, similar results have been found for how people respond to "evidence" about affirmative action, gun control, the accuracy of gay stereotypes [11], and much else. Even when study subjects are explicitly instructed to be unbiased and even-handed about the evidence, they often fail.

And it's not just that people twist or selectively read scientific evidence to support their preexisting views. According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan [12] and his colleagues, people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific consensus" to lie on contested issues.

In Kahan's research [13] (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: "The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert." A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert "depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another." The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that "expert," in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study [14] (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario. A hierarchal individualist finds it difficult to believe that the things he prizes (commerce, industry, a man's freedom to possess a gun to defend his family [14]) (PDF) could lead to outcomes deleterious to society. Whereas egalitarian communitarians tend to think that the free market causes harm, that patriarchal families mess up kids, and that people can't handle their guns. The study subjects weren't "anti-science"—not in their own minds, anyway. It's just that "science" was whatever they wanted it to be. "We've come to a misadventure, a bad situation where diverse citizens, who rely on diverse systems of cultural certification, are in conflict," says Kahan [15].

And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

Take, for instance, the question of whether Saddam Hussein possessed hidden weapons of mass destruction just before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. When political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler showed subjects fake newspaper articles [16] (PDF) in which this was first suggested (in a 2004 quote from President Bush) and then refuted (with the findings of the Bush-commissioned Iraq Survey Group report, which found no evidence of active WMD programs in pre-invasion Iraq), they found that conservatives were more likely than before to believe the claim. (The researchers also tested how liberals responded when shown that Bush did not actually "ban" embryonic stem-cell research. Liberals weren't particularly amenable to persuasion, either, but no backfire effect was observed.)

Another study gives some inkling of what may be going through people's minds when they resist persuasion. Northwestern University sociologist Monica Prasad [17] and her colleagues wanted to test whether they could dislodge the notion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were secretly collaborating among those most likely to believe it—Republican partisans from highly GOP-friendly counties. So the researchers set up a study [18] (PDF) in which they discussed the topic with some of these Republicans in person. They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as well as a statement in which George W. Bush himself denied his administration had "said the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda."

One study showed that not even Bush's own words could change the minds of Bush voters who believed there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

As it turned out, not even Bush's own words could change the minds of these Bush voters—just 1 of the 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim changed his or her mind. Far more common was resisting the correction in a variety of ways, either by coming up with counterarguments or by simply being unmovable:

Interviewer: [T]he September 11 Commission found no link between Saddam and 9/11, and this is what President Bush said. Do you have any comments on either of those?

Respondent: Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn't have any proof of it but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.

The same types of responses are already being documented on divisive topics facing the current administration. Take the "Ground Zero mosque." Using information from the political myth-busting site FactCheck.org [19], a team at Ohio State presented subjects [20] (PDF) with a detailed rebuttal to the claim that "Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist-sympathizer." Yet among those who were aware of the rumor and believed it, fewer than a third changed their minds.

A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. "It is quite possible to say, 'I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'" explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick [21]. Indeed, there's a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly "rational." In certain conservative communities, explains Yale's Kahan, "People who say, 'I think there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well."

This may help explain a curious pattern Nyhan and his colleagues found when they tried to test the fallacy [4] (PDF) that President Obama is a Muslim. When a nonwhite researcher was administering their study, research subjects were amenable to changing their minds about the president's religion and updating incorrect views. But when only white researchers were present, GOP survey subjects in particular were more likely to believe the Obama Muslim myth than before. The subjects were using "social desirabililty" to tailor their beliefs (or stated beliefs, anyway) to whoever was listening.

Which leads us to the media. When people grow polarized over a body of evidence, or a resolvable matter of fact, the cause may be some form of biased reasoning, but they could also be receiving skewed information to begin with—or a complicated combination of both. In the Ground Zero mosque case, for instance, a follow-up study [22] (PDF) showed that survey respondents who watched Fox News were more likely to believe the Rauf rumor and three related ones—and they believed them more strongly than non-Fox watchers.

Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast [23]" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."

A predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming? Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.

If you wanted to show how and why fact is ditched in favor of motivated reasoning, you could find no better test case than climate change. After all, it's an issue where you have highly technical information on one hand and very strong beliefs on the other. And sure enough, one key predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming is whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. The two groups have been growing more divided in their views about the topic, even as the science becomes more unequivocal.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that more education doesn't budge Republican views. On the contrary: In a 2008 Pew survey [24], for instance, only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.

Other studies have shown a similar effect: Republicans who think they understand the global warming issue best are least concerned about it; and among Republicans and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the issue doesn't increase one's concern about it. What's going on here? Well, according to Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook, one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues. "People who have a dislike of some policy—for example, abortion—if they're unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand," says Lodge. "But if they're sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counterarguments." These individuals are just as emotionally driven and biased as the rest of us, but they're able to generate more and better reasons to explain why they're right—and so their minds become harder to change.

That may be why the selectively quoted emails of Climategate were so quickly and easily seized upon by partisans as evidence of scandal. Cherry-picking is precisely the sort of behavior you would expect motivated reasoners to engage in to bolster their views—and whatever you may think about Climategate, the emails were a rich trove of new information upon which to impose one's ideology.

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according to Anthony Leiserowitz [25], director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication [26]. It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a significant loss of trust in scientists. But—as we should expect by now—these declines were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans, conservatives, and those with "individualistic" values. Liberals and those with "egalitarian" values didn't lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. "In some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test," Leiserowitz says, "with different groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very different ways."

Is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism.

So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [27]) and numerous Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy [28] and Jim Carrey). The Huffington Post gives a very large megaphone to denialists. And Seth Mnookin [29], author of the new book The Panic Virus [30], notes that if you want to find vaccine deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.

Vaccine denial has all the hallmarks of a belief system that's not amenable to refutation. Over the past decade, the assertion that childhood vaccines are driving autism rates has been undermined [31] by multiple epidemiological studies—as well as the simple fact that autism rates continue to rise, even though the alleged offending agent in vaccines (a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal) has long since been removed.

Yet the true believers persist—critiquing each new study that challenges their views, and even rallying to the defense of vaccine-autism researcher Andrew Wakefield, after his 1998 Lancet paper [32]—which originated the current vaccine scare—was retracted and he subsequently lost his license [33] (PDF) to practice medicine. But then, why should we be surprised? Vaccine deniers created their own partisan media, such as the website Age of Autism, that instantly blast out critiques and counterarguments whenever any new development casts further doubt on anti-vaccine views.

It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?

There are some clear differences. Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right—once you survey climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right, and stem-cell and biomedical matters. More tellingly, anti-vaccine positions are virtually nonexistent among Democratic officeholders today—whereas anti-climate-science views are becoming monolithic among Republican elected officials.

Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological differences between the left and the right that might impact responses to new information—that conservatives are more rigid and authoritarian, and liberals more tolerant of ambiguity. Psychologist John Jost of New York University has further argued that conservatives are "system justifiers": They engage in motivated reasoning to defend the status quo.

This is a contested area, however, because as soon as one tries to psychoanalyze inherent political differences, a battery of counterarguments emerges: What about dogmatic and militant communists? What about how the parties have differed through history? After all, the most canonical case of ideologically driven science denial is probably the rejection of genetics in the Soviet Union, where researchers disagreeing with the anti-Mendelian scientist (and Stalin stooge) Trofim Lysenko were executed, and genetics itself was denounced as a "bourgeois" science and officially banned.

The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature itself?

We all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature?

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan's work at Yale. In one study [34], he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—"Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming" and "Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming"—and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

Links:
[1] https://motherjones.com/files/lfestinger.pdf
[2] http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781617202803-1
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2270237
[4] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/obama-muslim.pdf
[5] https://motherjones.com/files/descartes.pdf
[6] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lupia/
[7] http://www.stonybrook.edu/polsci/ctaber/
[8] http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
[9] https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf
[10] http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/lord_ross_lepper79_JPSP_biased-assimilation-and-attitude-polarization.pdf
[11] http://psp.sagepub.com/content/23/6/636.abstract
[12] http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/DKahan.htm
[13] https://motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognition_of_scientific_consesus.pdf
[14] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=fss_papers
[15] http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/blogs/communicatingclimate/transcripts/Episode_10b_Dan_Kahan.html
[16] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
[17] http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/prasad/home.html
[18] http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf
[19] http://www.factcheck.org/
[20] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/FactcheckMosqueRumors.pdf
[21] http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick/
[22] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowcasting
[24] http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming
[25] http://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz/
[26] http://environment.yale.edu/climate/
[27] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html
[28] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857.html
[29] http://sethmnookin.com/
[30] http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439158647-0
[31] http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy-live-on/article_print
[32] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext
[33] http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and_SANCTION.pdf_32595267.pdf
[34] http://www.scribd.com/doc/3446682/The-Second-National-Risk-and-Culture-Study-Making-Sense-of-and-Making-Progress-In-The-American-Culture-War-of-Fact

Friday, March 11, 2011

Transitions


A generation of people face depression, despair and meaninglessness as the full significance of the resource constraints of fossil fuels, water, land and food coupled with environmental degradation and overshoot of the global population become a loud noise that can no longer be ignored. This is trauma in the true psychological meaning of the word.  

Many of us will encounter failed attempts when our efforts of the past produce no viable results. In fact, we will experience a disconnect between the then and the now. We will see no light at the end of the tunnel. Filled with the emotionality of grieving, our anger and fear will motivate our choices, narrow our tolerance and send us searching for scapegoats. Many of us will become entrenched in magical thinking and condemn the unbelieving.


This one is a guide to the changes we are going through. Trying to make sense of it.

William Bridges has written a wonderful book called Transitions (with a name like Bridges it is only appropriate). Bridges divides transitions into three parts; endings, neutral zone, beginnings. He emphasizes that we must deal with endings to have healthy beginnings. According to Bridges there are four categories that encompass how we involve in the world. These are: engagement, identity, orientation, and enchantment. They weave together in our lives.

Engagement is the multiple ways we meet the world and the world meets us; our network of kin, friends, work mates, intimates, places, things. The inner aspect of this is our identity. Identity is the working image we form of our self through outer feedback and inner self-consciousness across time. Orientation is the interaction of engagement and identity giving us a social and physical sense in time and space. Enchantment is the cloth of engagement, identity and orientation with the threads that 'this is the way the world works' as the border.

Bridges describes four disturbances experienced during endings. These lead into the transition (neutral) zone. The fundamentals of who we are get disturbed. We experience disengagement, disidentification, disorientation, disenchantment. Experiencing any one of these evokes the others. Our relationship to ourself (identity), others and the world (engagement) have been our compass and map. When we give those up we become disoriented. We don't know how we belong. We don't know where we are going. Time speeds and stands still in strange ways.

Disenchantment is the core. Disenchantment brings a sense of futility. That all we have done is a lie, useless, without meaning. The survivor self will raise his head in rage or "poor me". The defenses will scream to be used. The emptiness of disengagement, disidentification, and disorientation pales next to the feeling of meaninglessness.
What each of these areas adds up to is our vision of reality. They are built on childhood injunctions, fixed false beliefs, family relationships, cultural coloration and societal directives. As they are challenged and as they disintegrate we are thrown into emotions. Fear, or its undifferentiated aspect panic, can seize us. Anger, or its undifferentiated aspect rage, can fire us and cloak other emotions giving a false sense of power. And of course sadness.

It is important not to confuse disenchantment with disillusionment. Jane marries Sam, he abuses her. She finally leaves and then marries Joe. He abuses her. She leaves and then marries Phil. Jane is trapped in her enchantment about how the world is, what she deserves, what relationships are, women’s place, etc. She is disillusioned in each case but not disenchanted as it is being defined here. (The difference between disillusionment and disenchantment is similar to “first order” and “second order” change in Watzlawick,P.; Weakland, J; and Risch, R. 1974. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. Norton. N.Y.)

Not all change is devastating. Moving from a negative position (say an abusive relationship or alcoholism) to a healthier lifestyle still evokes the need to know and reflect on the previous engagement, identity, orientation and enchantment. This process takes time and has its own steps. The most obvious is the lack of patience with those still contained in similar spaces.

This writing is focused on the changes forthcoming in the availability of energy and materials in our lifestyle. For some this is absolutely devastating and means the end of at least civilization or even humankind. For others this is the answer to the saving of the natural world. And of course there are the many shades in between.
On the other side of our transition, we will be engaged differently; we will fit ourselves newly into the web of our environment. We will be tender. It is important now as always to be gentle with ourselves.

On the other side of our transition, our basic core will still be ourselves. Yet the four aspects will be newly shaped. This time of transition it is very difficult because life does not stop. It is similar to at best trying to change the oil or the spark plugs in a car while driving at 60 mph down the road. So it is important to be gentle with ourselves.

We are talking about "making the river crossing". When we are on the ending or “old” side of the river, we can barely make out the other side through the fog. Where we are is familiar to us. It is the known. To cross, we take a raft. In the middle of the river, we can not see either side clearly. The raft becomes our focus. We examine its making. Perhaps, we question its soundness. We commit its structure, its smells, its sounds to memory. Once upon the other shore, we can see where we have been because the fog has lifted. The beginning is another reality. It is critical that once on the new shore that we don't carry the raft on our back. Adapted from the Philosophies of India. Heinrich Zimmer. edited by Joseph Campbell. World Publishing Co. 1951

This is simply a model. The map is not the territory. It does give some guidance and structure to a very human and very difficult process. It coupled with the awareness that most changes of any magnitude brings a grieving can help understanding. Naming is often the first step in deeper knowing.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS
by Portia Nelson
I
I walk, down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewald.
I fall in
I am lost . . . I am helpless
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

II
I walk down the same street.
There is deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III
I walk down the same street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.
my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V
I walk down another street.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Do Lemmings Grieve?

The part of the below was written in the late 90s, I think for the old RunningOnEmpty mailing list.

Do lemmings grieve? Do they deny the cliff? Do they bargain with silicon chips or with the god of technological progress? Do they fall into the hole in their heart counting the ways to die, the percentages, the exact time? Do they rant in the face of their helplessness?
(yes, I know lemmings do not commit suicide, it is a metaphor)

I grieve. My grief is for my species. My grief is for the glory of our achievements, our soaring. My grief is for my way of life. My grief is for the next ones. And the inevitability of it all. And the spiral/cyclical nature of it all.
And my grief is deeper now. Perhaps informed by my age and the bone deep sense of my own leaving.

I have known of the population/resource depletion/environmental degradation interplay for 30 years and have taken many steps to honor it. It has been a grand adventure. Yet, the dull drag of some distant future collapse has turned into the gravity of Jupiter pulling at my insides. The peak is not the end of oil that my mind had prepared for that would have cause disruption sometime just beyond the end of my life. The peak is yesterday or today and is a shrill grinding of the machinery reacting to the cliff of no oil. Preparing like lemmings to eat,chew, bomb even nuke each other as we rush the cliff.

Today, I have dinner with two dear friends with four children who have lived similar to me (off the grid) almost as long as I have. They know the information I know. They are in deep denial. Denial is of course the psychological equivalent of the shock that the body experiences with trauma. There are little denials; there are big, life blinding denials. They, we, live in life blinding denial because it hurts deep in the marrow of our bones like a fever of 103. And we can only do this, because to come to the acceptance of the inevitability, to wrap our minds around the magnitude of the hurt takes an acceptance that I have not reached.

And we will laugh and play and kid around. We will talk about the coming gardening season (she is a master gardener). We will talk about the renewable energy and sustainable farming fair we are involved in putting on. I will tell them of my plans to build a self contained cabin on my friends land by the lake.

Will we be lying? No, we will be humans who love each other, who enjoy our lives, who are enjoying the moment as humans have done forever.

My life has been a grand adventure thus far as I said. I have dared where some would not have. I have done many things and enjoyed many people.

I love to eat greasy fried chicken. To split wood for my heating and eating. To explore new ideas and learn new things. To smoke a good joint now and again. To ride/fly my recumbent bicycle down a hill. To watch my new puppy Streak bugging my older dog, Bandit. To enjoy ecstasy with another. To hear the geese heading back to Canada. So much, so full. The joy, the humor, the sadness, the anger all of it must be inorder to honor for my own fullness.

I have tried to set up a model (not an ideal). I live using 3/4 kilowatt of electricity a day and live well. Have designed my home/land for my living today and for someone else's tomorrow. I plant fruit trees that I may never see bear. I have developed a library so just perhaps all will not be lost.

So much of the discussions on this list, on energy resources and on the old ROE had/has an implicit dream/hope of maintaining our level of living at the top of the energy pyramid. Ah, denial. Yet, there is much that can be done at a much lower level of energy consumption that can make life less brutish. A 1/2 horse power 12 volt DC motor can pump my water, grind my grain, vacumn my home. 100 gallons a year of ethanol can rototill the garden, blow snow, cut wood.

I have proposed this measure before. It is one I first saw in Odum's Energy Basis for Man and Nature. It is the Human Energy Equivalent (HEE) which is 10000 joules or 2388 kilocalories. This is the energy we need to live daily in food intake. (yes, I know that nutrition is not just quantity, it is also quality). What level above this could we use individually and in community to not have a brutish life. 10 HEEs? 20HEEs? And in suggesting that we consider this, I give away the obvious, yes, I still dream about our future. Yes, I still hold hope because that is what I do. I am human.


Since writing the above:
In February 2003, I was diagnosed with lung cancer and given little time to live and poor odds even if I did treatment. I did radiation and chemotherapy at the same time. It took almost four years to get over the debilitation of the treatment. I thrive.
My partner, now of ten years, and I are developing a orchard and truck farm. We have reconditioned an old home on the place for living and a small country store. (We live on a nearby lake). We are developing this for the next generations.


The below was written as the notes to myself for a speech at the cancer RelayForLife.

The theme is hope. To me Hope is Doing.
I am a back to the land hippie from the 60s. During treatment for the cancer, I was splitting wood because I needed to cook and heat. My neighbors did do most of it but I still need to do some.
For me, hope is not words all though the kind ones and the prayers are welcome. Hope is not statistics.
Hope is doing. It is doing the things you have to, for me like splitting wood. And it is doing the things that arise in you and really are doing you. First, for me it was talking to kids all around Minnesota about not smoking. Now it is putting in an organic orchard for future food for people. This isn't heroics it is living.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Curmudgeon Report

The Curmudgeon Report

Maybe, just maybe, a couple billion people have some awareness of climate change. Maybe, just maybe, 500 million to a billion people have some awareness of peak oil and fossil fuel depletion. Maybe 100 thousand really have knowledge of these and other defining issues. Maybe a thousand people are writing about these issues. It is all speculation and it doesn’t matter one iota.

We will do anything and everything to maintain our present personal level of energy use and the comfort it affords us. We will do anything and everything to the earth, to other people and even to ourselves to continue on this path. And if we don’t have the energy level we see others have, we will do anything and everything to the earth, to other people and even to ourselves to attain that level. The proof of this assertion is simple; we are doing it.

There are relatively few who are personally doing something major to confront these problems. They are uncountable because you will not hear from them. They are not writing on computers or blogging or selling books.

It isn’t about guilt. That is moral stuff that has nothing to do with real the human animal. We, as any life form, will fill the niches where energy and materials are available to sustain our lives. For some it may be about rationalization in the classic defense mechanism definition. Or we may use other modes of self-image defenses to fool ourselves. (See list at bottom)1

It could be hypocrisy. There certainly is a tinge of that. An old tale from the 1970s, a major energy person while flying to an energy conservation conference figures he will use the last drop of gas on the way. Peak oil aficionados and global warming protagonists each flying to and fro to enlighten the world. The humility of self-importance?

Is there self-delusion about our preparedness physically? Perhaps. Self-delusion about our preparedness psychologically? Absolutely. Is it the old standby of cognitive dissonance, a piece of that for sure. It is more like accepted schizophrenia where one foot is in the present world and a toe or two of the other foot is in the future.

The fossil fuel resources we are using will not be available for future generations. The seventh generation concept can easily be narrowed to one or two. They may have access to non-fuel minerals in junk cars and dumps. I remember a woman in a gated community in Arizona during an interviewed in 1974 saying, “I got mine, let them get theirs.” So little changes, aren’t we saying/doing the same thing?

We will believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts.2 The old “my mind is made up don’t confuse me with the facts” act.

It is about power for those of us at the top of the per capita energy pile because our power militarily and economically allows the continuity. It is about privilege because of the circumstances of our birth and the power we are nested within. It is about accepting responsibility for what we are willing to continue to do to the earth, to other people (them) and to ourselves to maintain this lifestyle. We will gouge the earth, pump contaminating chemicals into ground water, poison our rivers, kill our oceans, poison our food, kill our land, pollute our air, kill millions of people, enslave millions more, stuff ourselves to exploding, and cram ourselves into hives far from our natural connections. We are choosing to do this.

Oil Sands Could ‘Delay’ Peak Oil - Candice Beaumont

http://www.hardassetsinvestor.com/features-and-interviews
/1/2419-candice-beaumont-oil-sands-could-delay-peak-oil.html
** from a portion of the interview****

Ludwig: Where else are oil sands located besides Canada?

Beaumont: There are some oil sands in the United States as well. In Utah there
are some oil sands, and in West Texas. But it's harder to produce in the U.S.,
because it's still environmentally very difficult.

In Canada, it's in very remote places, it's 40 below zero, nobody is
going to that neighborhood. In the U.S., in West Texas, people live
where the oil reserves are and so you couldn't have the type of
environmental impact that they are doing in Canada, where they are
basically destroying the environment. If a bird flies over a river near
the oil sands, the bird dies just from flying over the river. It's that
toxic. They are just dumping all the waste into the waterways. If you
did that in the U.S. you would be in jail.

Ludwig: Is that going to be an issue over the long term?

Beaumont: It's an issue. But because it's in remote areas and not
inhabited, they aren't worrying about the pollution, because nobody
lives in that area. So, they can do it.

We do live there, it is the earth.


Few will speak to the problem of population; to the problem of overshoot.3 There are too many of us fostered by fossil fuels, chemicals from fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. It is not sustainable. What to do about population is a two edged sword. On the one hand we need to reduce the population and keep it reduced. Reducing it may be “nature’s job” in the long run. Keeping it reduced is a conundrum that reeks of eugenics.

On the other hand, if we honor the natural world, then do we let nature take its course? Do we continue to populate the planet to bursting and let the remainder after the die off be evolution’s babies? There are those who believe upgrading women’s positions in the world, which is an admirable goal that I support, will bring about a natural leveling of births. Is this possible in a diminishing resource environment? Is this possible given some of the creeds manifest around the world about women’s place?

Population has two facets. There is population density, which is how many people per square area. There is population pressure, which is how much does an individual use of resources. Both demand to be addressed. Both are essentially against our animal nature to address.

There are those who charge that community is the answer. I agree. If each and every community can achieve food, water, housing, clothing and security then once the population concern is settled, then all will be well. We will all live in utopian splendor, having trading fairs and exogamous matings. Hmmmmm. We simply cannot get there from here.

If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter. She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought. This same 100-year-old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution. And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics. Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence.4

I hope those that are guiding people towards internal strength and spiritual connection are accomplishing their goals. We are dealing with addictions and obsessions that have been ingrained in each of us since birth. It is the WAY we know. There is a good reason why most addiction counselors have walked the walk. They have been down the hole, have climbed out and know the games.

We all hope for a light at the end of the tunnel. That the world can be like the cooperation that took place during World War Two. I fear it will be more like the world during the fourteenth century during the time of the black death. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.

When I was four years old, I went to my mother and told her there was no Santa Claus. We lived in Florida with no snow, no chimney, it simply didn’t make sense. She said, “You are right, but don’t tell the other children.” Kids, there is no Santa Claus.


NOTES
1 Our mind uses these to protect our view of ourselves and/or the world around us. It is the same sort of protection that the body does to maintain its wholeness including the shock we go into when badly injured.

DEFENSE MECHANISMS

ACTING OUT: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by acting without reflection or apparent regard for negative consequences.

ALTRUISM: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by dedication to fulfilling the needs of others, in part as a way of fulfilling his or her own needs.

DENIAL: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by refusing to acknowledge some aspect of external reality that would be apparent to others.

DEVALUATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by attributing exaggerated negative qualities to self or others.

DISPLACEMENT: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by generalizing or redirecting a feeling about or a response to an object onto another, usually less threatening, object.

DISSOCIATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by temporary alteration in the integrative functions of consciousness or identity.

HUMOR: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by emphasizing the amusing or ironic aspects of the conflict or stressor.

INTELLECTUALIZATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by the excessive use of abstract thinking to avoid experiencing disturbing feelings.

PASSIVE AGGRESSION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by indirectly and unassertively expressing aggression toward others.

PROJECTION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by falsely attributing his or her own unacknowledged feelings, impulses, or thoughts to others.

RATIONALIZATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by devising reassuring or self-serving but incorrect explanations for his or her own or others’ behavior.

REACTION FORMATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by substituting behavior, thoughts, or feelings that are diametrically opposed to his or her unacceptable thoughts or feelings.

REPRESSION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by being unable to remember or be cognitively aware of disturbing wishes, feelings, thoughts or experiences.

SOMATIZATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by preoccupation with physical symptoms disproportionate to any actual physical disturbances.

SUBLIMATION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by channeling personally unacceptable feelings or impulses into socially desirable behavior.

SUPPRESSION: The individual deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by intentionally avoiding thinking about disturbing problems, wishes, feelings, or experiences.

Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers
by George E. Vaillant, 1992

2 “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions” Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. factsBackfirenyhan-reifler.pdf

3 Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.

4 http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html
This is a paper I wrote around the middle of the 1990s.