Sane Energy Policy Can Only Come From Honest Government
If we are to achieve a sustainable energy future, it will come as a result of our having found a way to create a viable working relationship between the public and private sectors. The private sector alone will not make any more than a token investment into enterprise whose upside potential is purely long-term, as doing so will not achieve the demand for quarter-to-quarter earnings required to keep its management team employed. Moreover, the most powerful forces within the private sector stand to lose far more than they will win in the face of a migration from fossil fuels.
But how credible is it that government will participate in an honest and helpful manner? I hate to sound cynical, but I’m not a believer. Government has its own incentives and motivations that run counter to the public it ostensibly serves; its short election cycles mean political death for anyone brave, honest, or foolish enough to stand up for a long-term energy policy that will provide overall benefit to society.
It’s also true that government in today’s world operates unfettered by the checks and balances of old; one of the aspects of our current culture that frightens me most is how the media seems to go along with the most outrageous actions coming from the public sector. All around us, we see ridiculously shameful behavior that the media seems to either ignore or actively embrace. Are they asleep? Incompetent? Controlled? Some combination? I’m not sure.
Here are some of top-of-mind items of the past couple of years that the media of 50 years ago would have ripped into like a hungry bear out of hibernation lights into a salmon:
• The executive branch’s arrogation of powers clearly intended for legislative and judiciary.
• The U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, giving corporations the right to spend as much as they wish to influence our elections.
• Proposed legislation that would outlaw our military’s ability to pursue its strategic interests in biofuels.
• Legislators who receive huge campaign contributions from the oil companies voting to continue federal subsidies to their paymasters.
• The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act which provides broad authority for the federal government to use the military in domestic operations in order to detain Americans indefinitely and without trial, nullifying the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the natural rights of Americans.
One’s life goes by in the blink of an eye, doesn’t it? It seems like only yesterday that we had sharp, brave reporters on the case, defending society against its most oppressive forces. The 20th Century was rife with great cases that will live in our memories, in which the media seemed to have saved us from runaway tyranny; in fact, I very firmly believed that they did in fact, do just that.
But let’s take this discussion of “looking the other way” back a few thousand years. I’m reminded of a story I came across the other day about Tiberius, the emperor of Rome who reigned for 23 years after Augustus Caesar died in 14 CE. Apparently, the Roman senate thought a great deal of Tiberius, so much so that they sent him a message explaining that they would approve any measure he wanted to pass. But Tiberius, who may have been flattered by this, was quite troubled. He shot back a note to the effect that this was a very foolish concept. He asked, “What if I go crazy or for some other reason cease to make my decisions based on fairness and reason?”
But again, the senate re-issued its statement, encouraging Tiberius to offer up a wish list that they would immediately rubber-stamp. And again, Tiberius demurred.
After yet a third nearly identical round of this give and take, he sent a messenger onto the senate floor who, standing in the middle of the chamber, barked loudly, “Tiberius says: How eager you are to be slaves!” With that, the messenger immediately turned, and strode out.
Here in the 21st Century, we can pretend we don’t notice the vast and growing corruption by which Big Money buys the political favors it needs to maintain its entrenched positions. We can ignore the cozy relationship between the government and the media that has fallen into its lap. In short, we can mind our own business (whatever that means). How eager we are to be slaves.
With your Today’s say, i think I would stop reading from your Blog. Thinking this way indicate Intellectual poverty. Innovations alone can change the future and it can not be forced. Policy can not force innovations (to happen). So start Searching for them. Your Views are More religious than real.
Your story about Tiberius reminds me of the U.S. wanting George Washington to be king after having fought the revolutionary war to free ourselves from a kingdom. Fortunately for us, much like Tiberius, Washington declined.
” It seems like only yesterday that we had sharp, brave reporters on the case, defending society against its most oppressive forces. The 20th Century was rife with great cases that will live in our memories, in which the media seemed to have saved us from runaway tyranny; in fact, I very firmly believed that they did in fact, do just that.”
Very good.
The media have really gone down hill. In slightly earlier times, the media did a much more thorough job and included considerable background information with their reporting. No more. The purpose of the media no longer is to provide information, but rather, to maximize profits. To maximize profits, they have to maximize the audience size which they do by entertaining rather than providing essential information. If the media air something controversial, they risk irritating their audience and sponsors thereby reducing their profits.
In general, PBS does a better job than the commercial media, but they also have problems. In all their reporting on nuclear power, they have failed even to mention using thorium instead of uranium, even though an examination of viewer responses (which are readily available on the PBS web site) shows that many viewers have called their attention to the need to cover thorium and its considerable safety and economic advantages over uranium.
Frank — Would add to your analysis about media going downhill the fact that actual reporting costs money. I have seen a lot of good reporters handed their walking papers simply because they cost too much money. When managing editors are told to cut costs without thought given to a decline in the quality of the reporting, everyone loses.
Bill – That’s a viewpoint that I had not previously heard, but it makes sense. That seems to be an additional reason for poor quality reporting.
Perhaps I should relate a story in which I was involved. After a somewhat unnerving encounter with someone who was unsuccessful in his attempt to rob me, I was interviewed by a newspaper columnist. His article was filled with quotation marks, but not even one of the “quotations” was valid. When I later confronted him, he asserted that what’s enclosed within quotation marks need not be verbatim, it just has to be approximately what was said. That was in 1971 and was instrumental in making me understand that the news cannot be relied upon. A few years later, a similar thing happened to me with a different newspaper, i.e., the quotation marks were not what I said verbatim. On another occasion, I was asked to write a letter to the editor. When I expressed reluctance on the ground that it might be edited in a way to make me look like a fool, the requester said that he knew the editorial staff so we could go to the newspaper office and no changes would be made to the letter without my approval. However, changes were made without my approval.
There have been other incidents which have confirmed that my distrust of the media is justified.
Excellent article, Craig
Thanks for this
In the great and laudable effort in which so many of us who frequent this site find ourselves engaged – the forwarding of renewable energy and the transition of our infrastructure from fossil sunlight to the modern stuff – it is and will remain crucial to recognize, define, discuss and tackle the hurdles that stand so potently in the way of reasoned progress.
Craig has mentioned a few of the most glaring signs that sane goals are not the priority of our current leadership – whether in the executive, legislative or the judiciary. That fact is bipartisan.
We who are interested in steering our own governance must strive to contend with a political structure that was never insulated purely from the effects of bribery. While the people of this nation have repeatedly stood up, fought for progress and achieved some measure of it over the past century – moneyed interests have worked their wiles ceaselessly to frustrate and negate that progress. Examples from our history are legion.
Back in the 1930’s particularly, workers organized and rose up against cruel exploitation and deadly workplace conditions, and they successfully demanded safety and child labor laws, the 8-hour day, the 5-day workweek, overtime and holiday pay, vacations and pensions – progress that we have long taken for granted.
In the 1960’s, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves saw all the old injustices of racism perpetuated in their lives by narrow-minded whites. Women had seen their mothers enjoy new freedom in joining the workforce during WWII. Students saw their lives squandered in misguided warfare. Each group organized and marched and demonstrated and fought for justice, for peace, and for equality – each with no small measures of success.
With the aid of the newly widespread computer technology (achieved largely through research and development in public institutions), especially among larger businesses beginning in the late 1970’s, worker productivity soared and profits streamed in at ever accelerating rates, until an annual rate of growth of 20% became the demanded norm in boardrooms.
Yet as productivity rose, wages flattened. Just as they had done in the 1920’s, the executive staff and ownership took the money and ran, and the gap between the worker and the people at the top once more widened to a yawning chasm. While tycoon J.P. Morgan had recommended no higher ratio than 12-to-1 for executive to worker pay, that ratio rocketed from 41-to-1 at the end of Carter’s term to 326-to-1 by the beginning of Clinton’s, up to as much as 500-to-1 in recent years.
Wives who once saw a job as an option for greater fulfillment now see it as a necessity to preserve minimum living standards. Children have now long been raised by schools and television and in the malls – and only during a few short hours in the evenings and on weekends by a pair of drained parents. As entities with no patriotic soul sought cheaper labor in foreign lands, the great manufacturing base that once sustained 70% of our economy has fallen to 10%, and the dominion of financial institutions has swollen from 10% to 70% of our economy – one hallmark of this transformation is that the predominant focus of GM is its credit business, and the making of cars is merely a sideline.
Corporations meanwhile have begun openly buying our statesmen again, and as part of the massive return on that investment in bribery they have shrunk their tax contribution by 86%. The gap between wealthy and worker is greater today than at any time since the late 1920’s, just before the Great Depression, and recently – even before the “Great Recession” – the average worker has been making at least 7% less in buying power now than during the widely prosperous 1950’s when tax rates for the wealthy and for corporations were so much higher.
Through the history of our nation, freedom of the press has only occasionally been a potently operative concept. A student of history will recall William Randolph Hearst’s media empire and the political clout he wielded as a result. He was not alone. HL Mencken observed wryly that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. There remained, however, thousands of small publications across the country with somewhat independent voices that were not so easily herded into towing the lines of the power elite that held the economic reins. Today, nearly the entirety of the traditional media – in both video and print formats – is now firmly in the grip of six entities – AOL-Time-Warner, News Corporation, Vivendi Universal, The Disney Company, Bertelsmann AG and Viacom. General Electric is also a strong player in this realm, and energy companies wield great influence upon this small media cartel.
The interests of the various corporate interests in our nation and across the globe are more convergent than they are diverse, and the alignment of their goals and strategies has rendered public discourse a matter more of fetters rather than freedom. This very thoroughly consolidated mass media, having already succeeded in convincing all of us that we each require an ever-expanding variety of products to express our personalities, has now carved us up by generation, by income strata, by social group, and by political persuasion, to achieve an escalating variety of deepening divisions across which we are increasingly reluctant and unable to build bridges.
However, there is this wonderful outgrowth of government-backed research called the internet. For now at least, this technology presents an unprecedented opportunity for We the People to communicate and organize. We are now more able than ever to select goals and form strategies and organize to pursue them together, if we wake up and choose to do so.
Neither private nor public interests can exist alone and independent of one another. Each is necessary to the prosperity of the other. Those fictions that speak contrary to that fact hold despotism as our destiny. We are now well down the path to an empire of aristocracy. We must abandon the tattered constructs of political party by which we have for so long been deceived and muzzled, and we must identify and pursue the blend of private and public interest that best serves the health and prosperity of the global population. We must keep our internet liberties and use them to combine our strength against the narrow interests of the power elite who have enforced status quo, and instead impose and ensure the establishment and survival of a truly representative government based on noble aims and empirical data.
The first step on the path to that noble empirical representative government is the elimination of bribery in all its forms – from conflict of interest, to campaign contributions, to lobbyist armies. No progress can be made without that accomplishment.
Money is not free speech, and corporations must not be allowed to take possession of our birthrights as persons.
Hi Cameron Atwood,
Yes a huge gulf exists between the rich and the poor. Yet technology has gone a long way (A very long way) towards reducing that gap. I remember the days when one of my friends, had built a huge home theater in which to show movies and enthrall his friends, a few years later, it was horribly out of date. At one time having a phone in the house was a sure fire symbol of respectability, no more ! The list goes on and on, until finally all that is left are the basics ! And the basics are FREE ENERGY ! If we can all have free energy, that does not harm the planet, class distinctions are going to die out, there will be no more rich and poor, but only “What is he doing that I am not!’
New Energy, Free Energy, Renewable Energy , Sustainable Energy, is, what I sincerely hope, what will free us from this cycle of exploitation that we have been caught up in since the industrial revolution. We will , with free energy, nurture the earth, instead of killing it. So, Let us strive to make the world a better , more beautiful place. It is all about mother earth.
Au contrair, technology has NOT reduced the gap between rich and poor. It has provided the illusion of a difference. Just because cutting edge technology last year is now cheap does nothing to reduce the economic disparity between the rich and the poor. By example, I realized a few months back when Powerball was over $500 Million, that even if I won, I would be making less per year than the board of directors at a typical fortune 50 company. Yes, that is correct $500 million in 30 years is less than the CEO of my employer makes. How does technology reduce that? It doesn’t. What it does, thanks to media and advertising, is provide us the illusion of prosperity because we can do all of these neat little things with our neat little devices. Neat little devices that rich people apparently also use. That isn’t being rich, that’s being self delusional. Just because I can buy last year’s hot item this year for 1/4 the cost doesn’t make me as rich, it just sets me a year behind the curve.
I seem to recall an article saying that typical Japanese CEOs don’t make more than 20-1 over their lowest employees, I wonder how much things would change if that ratio was used here. Where I work, that would reduce my CEO’s income to about 1/2 million a year down from about 22 million a year. The CEO of McDonalds would probably make about 300,000 a year.
That reduction in income would go a long way towards reducing the cost of goods and services and reducing the political clout of the richest ones. But like the end of lobbyists, instituting term limits, and politicians actually following through with campaign promises, I don’t see any of this changing in my very long lifetime.
Keying off your line, “how credible is it that government will participate in an honest and helpful manner?” I think that if you look at what’s happening in countries OTHER THAN the US, there’s reason for optimism. In Japan, South Korea and the EU, governments are working with companies for everyone’s benefit.
The fourth estate is no longer acting in the interests of its name. It has become embedded within the same dynamic that the public and the private now share. I would like to believe that the independent voices, the blogosphere if you will, have filled the void, but the reality of that soapbox is considerably diminished in comparison to big media. A truly free society needs an independent media with no allegiance to other than fact. Much like free elections, that is difficult to come by.
Craig,
You nailed it again! We have become a truely commercial society and the business cycle is 2, 4 and 6 years, the terms of office. And as you note, all political motivation runs on that cycle. And always take into account how much political advertising contributes to the fourth estate’s bottom line, so much for a free press.
I don’t believe we are slaves, but serfs would be very appropriate since we still have the illusion of being free. You may have a deed to your property but don’t pay your taxes for a year and you see who actually owns your property!
I do believe if benefits ( ie taxbreak or similar to our now Popular Corporate Welfare System already in place) were the Order of the Day…..WE WOULD be walking down a Very different and Safer Road….LONG Ago….If Some in Washington were not Lining Their Freezers ( ie…Going Green / I mean Going Greenbacks ) ‘Nuff Said….Don’t Think Anyone Has To Read ‘Between’ These Few Lines….Election Time Could Really Make ‘A CHANGE’ ( LIKE CHANGE EVERY SEAT)….doesn’t Matter What The Color……FRESH new AIR……Like A Breath Of….!!
LongTime Reader…..First Time Poster……Wyoming
Recently the installed capacity of Wind Power in the US has passed the 50 GW mark, with the Government withdrawing tax incentives for the wind sector effective the end of this year, there are speculations that investors wanting to cash in before the boom falls, could raise the installed wind power capacity to 60 GW by the end of this year. But, is it really fair to blame the Government ? The Bonneville Wind Power plant in Oregon, has an installed capacity of 3.6 MW, the estimated cost of installing the turbines is thought to work out at a staggering 3 billion dollars. Yet on certain days there is zero output and during the rest of the time average output is less than 30% of the installed capacity. So, is it sustainable. Obviously not ! Before you jump to the conclusion that I am a rabid anti-renewable energy proponent, let me tell you that I myself have a company called Green Initiative, that is dedicated to the cause of renewable energy. The key to sustainable energy is to invest in technology that will yield the kind of dividends that are competitive with the existing grid solution output and not to invest huge amounts till the results have been calculated.
Sorry, Instead of 3.6 MW read 3.6 GW my bad!
An excellent article and an excellent point that our renewable energy problems cannot be separated from the larger problem that rich, well-connected recipients of government largess have taken over our government.
We need a revolution to fix this because both political parties have been captured by these forces. Unfortunately our news media have also been captured so the public is apathetic about making the changes we need. Structural change like a runoff election could enable a 3rd party but such a change would be blocked by those in power.
Hi, Tom. Thanks for the kind words. You’re exactly right in what you say here, btw; the people in power have figured out a way to stay there.
Great article but also great comments, especially Cameron, a lot of deep thought and common sense in my opinion.
Yes, Cameron is one of a kind, isn’t he? I’ve known him a long time, and his writing never ceases to amaze me.