California Burning

On the northwestern edge of Los Angeles, where I grew up, the wildfires came in late summer. We lived in a new subdivision, and behind our house were the hills, golden and parched. We would hose down the wood-shingled roof as fire crews bivouacked in our street. Our neighborhood never burned, but others did. In the Bel Air fire of 1961, nearly five hundred homes burned, including those of Burt Lancaster and Zsa Zsa Gabor. We were all living in the “wildland-urban interface,” as it is now called. More subdivisions were built, farther out, and for my family the wildfire threat receded.

Tens of millions of Americans live in that fire-prone interface today—the number keeps growing—and the wildfire threat has become, for a number of political and environmental reasons, immensely more serious. In LA, fire season now stretches into December, as grimly demonstrated by the wildfires that burned across Southern California in late 2017, including the Thomas Fire, in Santa Barbara County, the largest in the state’s modern history. Nationally, fire seasons are on average seventy-eight days longer than they were in 1970, according to the US Forest Service. Wildfires burn twice as many acres as they did thirty years ago. “Of the ten years with the largest amount of acreage burned in the United States,” Edward Struzik notes in Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, nine have occurred since 2000. Individual fires, meanwhile, are bigger, hotter, faster, more expensive and difficult to fight, and more destructive than ever before. We have entered the era of the megafire—defined as a wildfire that burns more than 100,000 acres.

In early July 2018, there were twenty-nine large uncontained fires burning across the United States. “We shouldn’t be seeing this type of fire behavior this early in the year,” Chris Anthony, a division chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told The New York Times. It has been an unusually dry winter and spring in much of the West, however, and by the end of June three times as much land had already burned in California as burned in the first half of 2017, which was the state’s worst fire year ever. On July 7, my childhood suburb, Woodland Hills, was 117 degrees. On the UCLA campus, it was 111 degrees. Wildfires broke out in San Diego and up near the Oregon border, where a major blaze closed Interstate 5 and killed one civilian. The governor, Jerry Brown, has declared yet another state of emergency in Santa Barbara County.

How did this happen? One part of the story begins with a 1910 wildfire, known as the Big Burn, that blackened three million acres in Idaho, Montana, and Washington and killed eighty-seven people, most of them firefighters. Horror stories from the Big Burn seized the national imagination, and Theodore Roosevelt, wearing his conservationist’s hat, used the catastrophe to promote the Forest Service, which was then new and already besieged by business interests opposed to public management of valuable woodlands. The Forest Service was suddenly, it seemed, a band of heroic firefighters. Its budget and mission required expansion to prevent another inferno.

The Forest Service, no longer just a land steward, became the federal fire department for the nation’s wildlands. Its policy was total suppression of fires—what became known as the 10 AM rule. Any reported fire would be put out by 10 AM the next day, if possible. Some experienced foresters saw problems with this policy. It spoke soothingly to public fears, but periodic lightning-strike fires are an important feature of many ecosystems, particularly in the American West. Some “light burning,” they suggested, would at least be needed to prevent major fires. William Greeley, the chief of the Forest Service in the 1920s, dismissed this idea as “Paiute forestry.”

But Native Americans had used seasonal burning for many purposes, including hunting, clearing trails, managing crops, stimulating new plant growth, and fireproofing areas around their settlements. The North American “wilderness” encountered by white explorers and early settlers was in many cases already a heavily managed, deliberately diversified landscape. The total suppression policy of the Forest Service and its allies (the National Park Service, for instance) was exceptionally successful, reducing burned acreage by 90 percent, and thus remaking the landscape again—creating what Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist at the Forest Service, calls an “epidemic of trees.”

Preserving trees was not, however, the goal of the Forest Service, which worked closely with timber companies to clear-cut enormous swaths of old-growth forest. (Greeley, when he left public service, joined the timber barons.) The idea was to harvest the old trees and replace them with more efficiently managed and profitable forests. This created a dramatically more flammable landscape. Brush and woodland understory were no longer being cleared by periodic wildfires, and the trees in second-growth forest lacked the thick, fire-adapted bark of their old-growth predecessors. As Stephen Pyne, the foremost American fire historian, puts it, fire could “no longer do the ecological work required.” Fire needs fuel, and fire suppression was producing an unprecedented amount of wildfire fuel.

Climate change, meanwhile, has brought longer, hotter summers and a series of devastating droughts, priming landscapes to burn. Tree-killing insects such as the mountain pine beetle thrive in droughts and closely packed forests. The most recent outbreak of bark-beetle infestation, the largest ever recorded, has destroyed billions of trees in fourteen western states and much of western Canada. Dead trees make fine kindling for a megafire.

Invasive species also contribute. The sagebrush plains of the Great Basin, which spreads across six states in the Intermountain West, are being transformed by cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), a weed that arrived in contaminated grain seed from Eurasia in the nineteenth century. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, grows rapidly, and is nearly indestructible. It has a fire return interval—the typical time between naturally occurring fires—of less than five years. Sagebrush, which is slow to reestablish itself after a fire, is unable to compete. Cheatgrass, with its ferocious fire cycle of burning and quick regeneration, now infests fifty million acres of the sagebrush steppe. Farther south, cheatgrass and other invasive weeds are threatening the towering saguaro cactus and, in California, the Joshua tree.

Nonnative species can also be a fire risk when they are deliberately introduced. Portugal has been tormented by wildfires, including an inferno last summer that killed more than sixty people, partly because of the flammability of eucalyptus, which is native to Australia and has become the mainstay of the national wood industry, transforming the Portuguese countryside, according to an environmental engineer who spoke to The New York Times, “from a pretty diverse forest into a big eucalyptus monoculture.”

In the United States, exurban and rural property development in the wildland-urban interface has been, perhaps, the final straw—or at least another lighted match tossed on the pile. Most wildfires that threaten or damage communities are caused by humans. Campfires, barbecues, sparks from chainsaws, lawnmowers, power lines, cars, motorcycles, cigarettes—the modes of inadvertent ignition in a bone-dry landscape are effectively limitless. Let’s say nothing of arson. Houses and other structures become wildfire fuel, and vulnerable communities hugely complicate forest management and disaster planning. In his panoramic 2017 book Megafire, the journalist (and former firefighter) Michael Kodas observes pithily that “during the century in which the nation attempted to exclude fire from forests, they filled with homes.”

Starting around the 1960s, the Forest Service and its sister agencies, including the National Park Service, did eventually come to see some of the deep flaws in the policy of total fire suppression. The virtues of “prescribed burning”—deliberately set, carefully planned fires, usually in the late fall or early spring, meant to reduce the amount of fuel and the risk of wildfires—had become blindingly obvious. Still, prescribed burns were, and are, a hard sell. People don’t like to see forest fires or grass fires, particularly not anywhere near their homes. Downwind communities hate the smoke, quite understandably. Politicians lose their nerve.

On rare occasions, a prescribed burn escapes the control of firefighters, and those disasters tend to be remembered. The 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, in New Mexico, started out as a prescribed burn. It escaped, destroyed four hundred homes, and nearly burned down the Los Alamos nuclear research facility. Political support for prescribed burning took a heavy hit. Bruce Babbitt, then secretary of the interior, suspended all federal prescribed burning west of the 100th meridian, which basically meant the entire West.

For backcountry fires, the wisdom of “let it burn” also slowly became clear to forest managers. National parks started calling wildfires that didn’t threaten lives or structures “prescribed natural fires.” Firefighters might herd a blaze in the direction they wanted it to go, but would otherwise let it run its course. This enlightened policy hasn’t always survived political pressure either. In 1988, a drought year in the West, hundreds of wildfires erupted in Yellowstone National Park. President Ronald Reagan denounced the wait-and-see response of firefighters as “cockamamie.” His interior secretary, Donald Hodel, ordered the park’s officials to fight the fires.

“Prescribed natural fires” were abandoned, and as many as nine thousand firefighters fought the Yellowstone megafire, which burned for four months. John Melcher, a Montana senator, told The New York Times, “They’ll never go back to this policy. From now on the policy will be putting the fire out when they see the flames.” The Yellowstone effort cost $120 million ($250 million in 2018 dollars). Cool weather and autumn snow ultimately put out the fires. Surprisingly few animals perished, and the land soon began to regenerate. The “let burn” policy took somewhat longer to recover.

This alternation between firefighting and wildfire risk reduction continues. But since wildfires are getting steadily worse, stop-it-now firefighting always gets more funding. The Forest Service spent 16 percent of its budget on fire suppression in 1995. In 2015, it spent $2.6 billion—more than half of its budget. In Stephen Pyne’s formulation, we’re getting more bad fires and fewer good fires. As resources are drained from the forest management side, the buildup of dangerous, unhealthy forests continues, fueling more terrible fires, many of which will need to be fought.

Into this breach, a small army of private contractors has streamed, ready to feed firefighters, wash their clothes, and rent them, at prices sure to make a taxpayer’s eyes water, anything from helicopters to bulldozers to twelve-stall shower trailers. Politicians, never eager to tramp along on a smoky prescribed burn or wade into the woods with crews doing mechanical brush-thinning, are generally happier to be seen calling for military aircraft, say, to drop retardant on a raging blaze. Firefighters call these “air shows.” Aviation has an important part to play in certain types of fire suppression, usually early in the course of a wildfire, but commanders on the ground have learned that it can also be necessary to let the governor or congressperson appear to be riding to the rescue of his constituents with a fleet of C-130s, no matter how expensive and unhelpful they may be. In Southern California, Representative Duncan Hunter, whose district is near San Diego, is known as the region’s leading wildfire showboat.

In Wildfire, the journalist Heather Hansen embeds herself in an elite crew of wildland firefighters based in Boulder, Colorado. The crew, known as Station 8, primarily works in the wildland-urban interface of Boulder and the surrounding Rocky Mountain Front Range, but its members also travel to every corner of the country to help fight wildfires. It’s a reciprocal arrangement—when they need help on a fire at home, hotshots from those far-flung places will show up. Hansen learns and shares some fire science and fire history, filling in the background of the current crisis. She describes the crew’s punishing training and their powerful camaraderie, and recounts their stories of fires fought, disasters survived, lessons learned.

Then she goes out on a prescribed burn near the edge of Boulder. It’s an eighty-five-acre open ridge on city-owned property, a small project, but not far from thousands of homes. The crew’s preparation has been long and meticulous, including outreach to the neighborhood. “You’re a hero when you put out fire but not when you start one, especially if something goes wrong,” the fire operations manager, Brian Oliver, tells her:

Boulder is a very smart community, a lot of PhDs, and they understand what we’re trying to do with the fuels reduction and the thinning…. In theory they are very supportive and receptive, but then, “Wait, you’re going to light fire on purpose? That’s weird. We don’t want you to do that.” Or it’s, “We want you to do it but we don’t want to be impacted.” As soon as the smell of smoke gets in their window it’s, “What are you guys doing? I can’t believe this, you’re terrible. My curtains smell like smoke; who’s going to pay for my dry-cleaning?” Or “Yeah I support prescribed burns but this is the trail I run on every day. You’re ruining my workout.”

The prescribed burn on the ridge is tense, unexpectedly dramatic. Dozens of firefighters from surrounding stations show up to help. Station 8 has made a close study of the diurnal wind patterns on the ridge and kept its own weather station up on the site for two months, but the wind this morning is fluky. They do a test burn, then quickly shut it down when an unexpected scrap of south wind puffs. They try again, and the wind whips harder. Oliver orders it shut down again, and this time it takes several minutes of furious water-spraying and hacking at burning stumps to put out the small test fire. That’s it. The burn is a no-go. Maybe they’ll get this ridge next year. Fire crews in today’s drought-plagued West have to work with “laughably small burn windows,” Hansen says, referring to the periods in which prescribed burns can be safely attempted. The burn windows in Boulder amount to eleven days a year.

by William Finnegan, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Joe Sohm/Visions of America

This Japanese Shrine Has Been Torn Down And Rebuilt Every 20 Years for the Past Millennium

Every 20 years, locals tear down the Ise Jingu grand shrine in Mie Prefecture, Japan, only to rebuild it anew. They have been doing this for around 1,300 years. Some records indicate the Shinto shrine is up to 2,000-years old. The process of rebuilding the wooden structure every couple decades helped to preserve the original architect’s design against the otherwise eroding effects of time. “It’s secret isn’t heroic engineering or structural overkill, but rather cultural continuity,” writes the Long Now Foundation. (...)

Japan for Sustainability’s Junko Edahiro describes the history of the ceremony at length and reports on the upcoming festivities:

This is an important national event. Its underlying concept — that repeated rebuilding renders sanctuaries eternal — is unique in the world. 

The Sengu is such a large event that preparations take over eight years, four years alone just to prepare the timber.

Locals take part in a parade to transport the prepared wood along with white stones—two per person—which they place in sacred spots around the shrine. In addition to reinvigorating spiritual and community bonds, the tradition keeps Japanese artisan skills alive. The shrine’s visitor site describes this aspect of the Shikinen Sengo ceremony:

It also involves the wish that Japanese traditional culture should be transmitted to the next generation. The renewal of the buildings and of the treasures has been conducted in the same traditional way ever since the first Shikinen Sengu had been performed 1300 years ago. Scientific developments make manual technology obsolete in some fields. However, by performing the Shikinen Sengu, traditional technologies are preserved.

As Edahiro describes, oftentimes local people will take part in the ceremony several times throughout the course of their lives. “I saw one elderly person who probably has experienced these events three or four times saying to young people who perhaps participated in the event as children last time, ‘I will leave these duties to you next time,’” she recalls. “ I realized that the Sengu ceremony also plays a role as a “device” to preserve the foundations of traditions that contribute to happiness in people’s lives.”

by Rachel Nuwer, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: N Yotarou
[ed. The author László Krasznahorkai took part in the ritual rebuilding of a Shinto shrine. There he witnessed ancient tradition, and the toll it takes. For one disciple, “his job is to plane this piece of hinoki cypress, and he planes it all day. And the master comes at the end of the day and he throws it away. And he keeps on planing and planing it…until the master decides that it’s OK. That’s tradition. But there’s no nostalgia in that.” (The Economist). 

Also, from the JFS Junko Edahiro link (above): As many as 10,000 Japanese cypress trees are needed each time the Jingu sanctuaries of Ise are rebuilt. How have people secured so many Japanese cypress trees every 20 years?

The Jingu Shrine itself owns a large parcel of land 5,500 hectares in extent, and over 90 percent of this land is covered in forest. This forest, called the "Misoma-yama," was created as a result of learning from experience in the past. Timber was formerly taken from this forest to use for the Sengu rebuilding ceremony as well as for firewood. In the Edo Period (1603-1867), about 7 to 9 million people - about the same number as in modern times -- came to worship at Jingu Shrine every year. Firewood was needed for these pilgrims, who normally stayed near the site for several days. As a result the local forest was increasingly exploited, and the timber resource became depleted.

During the Edo Period, the central government (the shogunate) designated a forest in the Kiso area owned by the Owari clan in today's Nagano Prefecture to supply timber to Jingu Shrine. However, toward the end of the Edo Period, this forest became Imperial property, and after World War II it was designated a national forest. Jingu Shrine is given priority in purchasing timber for the Sengu ceremony from this forest, but it is not the only buyer of this rather expensive timber.

Thus it became more and more difficult for Jingu Shrine to depend entirely on domestic resources for the Sengu rebuilding ceremony. This possibility was foreseen by shrine staff, who started taking action 90 years ago. Thinking that the shrine should have its own forest to provide timber for reconstruction, the shrine secretariat ("Jingu Shicho," part of the Interior Ministry) formed a forest management plan during the Taisho Period (1912 - 1926), and started planting trees. At the time, the nominal purpose of the project was said to be landscape conservation and enhancement of the water resource recharging function of the Isuzu River, but Japanese cypresses were also planted on southern slopes.

This afforestation plan encompassed a 200-year time-scale, and aimed to start semi-permanently supplying all the timber for the Sengu ceremony from Shrine-owned forest within 200 years. This plan made it possible to obtain one-fourth of the necessary timber for this year's Sengu ceremony from Shrine lands. This proportion will increase every 20 years. Although the remainder must be purchased from other domestic sources, shrine forests are expected to be able to provide all the timber for future reconstruction ceremonies earlier than originally planned.

The Sengu is such a large event that preparations take over eight years, four years alone just to prepare the timber. Logs are soaked in a lumber pond for two years after felling, a method known as "underwater drying," used to leach extraneous oil out of the logs. The logs are then stacked outside for a year to acclimatize them to the severities of the four seasons. It takes another year to saw them into shape, and finally to cover them with Japanese paper to keep them in good condition until the ceremony.This long curing process strengthens the timber, prevents it from warping or cracking, and prepares it to play its proper part in the ceremony with its central concept of protecting life.]

The “Next” Financial Crisis and Public Banking as the Response

In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis, and public banking as an alternative to the current system.

Paul Sliker: Michael Hudson welcome back to another episode of The Hudson Report.

Michael Hudson: It’s good to be here again.

Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.

Can you explain what the yield curve signifies, and if all these signals I just mentioned are forecasting another economic crisis?

Michael Hudson: Normally, borrowers have to pay only a low rate of interest for a short-term loan. If you take a longer-term loan, you have to pay a higher rate. The longest term loans are for mortgages, which have the highest rate. Even for large corporations, the longer you borrow – that is, the later you repay – the pretense is that the risk is much higher. Therefore, you have to pay a higher rate on the pretense that the interest-rate premium is compensation for risk. Banks and the wealthy get to borrow at lower rates.

Right now what’s happened is that the short-term rates you can get by putting your money in Treasury bills or other short-term instruments are even higher than the long-term rates. That’s historically unnatural. But it’s not really unnatural at all when you look at what the economy is doing.

You said that we’re entering into a recession. That’s just the flat wrong statement. The economy’s been in a recession ever since 2008, as a result of what President Obama did by bailing out the banks and not the economy at large.

Since 2008, people talk about “look at how that GDP is growing.” Especially in the last few quarters, you have the media saying look, “we’ve recovered. GDP is up.” But if you look at what they count as GDP, you find a primer on how to lie with statistics.

The largest element of fakery is a category that is imputed – that is, made up – for rising rents that homeowners would have to pay if they had to rent their houses from themselves. That’s about 6 percent of GDP right there. Right now, as a result of the 10 million foreclosures that Obama imposed on the economy by not writing down the junk mortgage debts to realistic values, companies like Blackstone have come in and bought up many of the properties that were forfeited. So now there are fewer homes that are available to buy. Rents are going up all over the country. Homeownership has dropped by abut 10 percent since 2008, and that means more people have to rent. When more people have to rent, the rents go up. And when rents go up, people lucky enough to have kept their homes report these rising rental values to the GDP statisticians.

If I had to pay rent for the house that I have, could charge as much money as renters down the street have to pay – for instance, for houses that were bought out by Blackstone. Rents are going up and up. This actually is a rise in overhead, but it’s counted as rising GDP. That confuses income and output with overhead costs.

The other great jump in GDP has been people paying more money to the banks as penalties and fees for arrears on student loans and mortgage loans, credit card loans and automobile loans. When they fall into arrears, the banks get to add a penalty charge. The credit-card companies make more money on arrears than they do on interest charges. This is counted as providing a “financial service,” defined as the amount of revenue banks make over and above their borrowing charges.

The statistical pretense is that they’re taking the risk on making loans to debtors that are going bad. They’re cleaning up on profits on these bad loans, because the government has guaranteed the student loans including the higher penalty charges. They’ve guaranteed the mortgages loans made by the FHA – Fannie Mae and the other groups – that the banks are getting penalty charges on. So what’s reported is that GDP growth is actually more and more people in trouble, along with rising housing costs. What’s good for the GDP here is awful for the economy at large! This is bad news, not good news.

As a result of this economic squeeze, investors see that the economy is not growing. So they’re bailing out. They’re taking their money and running.

If you’re taking your money out of bonds and out of the stock market because you worry about shrinking markets, lower profits and defaults, where are you going to put it? There’s only one safe place to put your money: short-term treasuries. You don’t want to buy a long-term Treasury bond, because if the interest rates go up then the bond price falls. So you want buy short-term Treasury bonds. The demand for this is so great that Bogle’s Vanguard fund management company will only let small investors buy ten thousand dollars worth at a time for their 401K funds.

The reason small to large investors are buying short term treasuries is to park their money safely. There’s nowhere else to put it in the real economy, because the real economy isn’t growing.

What has grown is debt. It’s grown larger and larger. Investors are taking their money out of state and local bonds because state and local budgets are broke as a result of pension commitments. Politicians have cut taxes in order to get elected, so they don’t have enough money to keep up with the pension fund contributions that they’re supposed to make.

This means that the likelihood of a break in the chain of payments is rising. In the United States, commercial property rents are in trouble. We’ve discussed that before on this show. As the economy shrinks, stores are closing down. That means that the owners who own commercial mortgages are falling behind, and arrears are rising.

Also threatening is what Trump is doing. If his protectionist policies interrupt trade, you’re going to see companies being squeezed. They’re not going to make the export sales they expected, and will pay more for imports.

Finally, banks are having problems of they hold Italian government bonds. Germany is unwilling to use European funds to bail them out. Most investors expect Italy to do exit the euro in the next three years or so. It looks like we’re entering a period of anarchy, so of course people are parking their money in the short term. That means that they’re not putting it into the economy. No wonder the economy isn’t growing.

Dante Dallavalle: So to be clear: a rise in demand for these short-term Treasuries is an indication that investors and businesses find too much risk in the economy as it stands now to be investing in anything more long-term.

Michael Hudson: That’s exactly right.

Dante Dallavelle: OK. So we have prominent economists and policymakers, like Geithner, Bernanke Paulson, etc., making the point that we need not worry about a future crisis in the near term, because our regulatory infrastructure is more sound now than it was in the past, for instance before 2008. I know you’ve talked a lot about the weak nature of financial regulation both here at home in the United States and internationally. What are the shortcomings of Dodd Frank? Haven’t recent policies gutting certain sections of the law made us more vulnerable, not less, to crises in the future?

Michael Hudson: Well, you asked two questions. First of all, when you talk about Geithner and Bernanke – the people who wrecked the economy – what they mean by “more sound” is that the government is going to bail out the banks again at public expense.

It cost $4.3 trillion last time. They’re willing to bail out the banks all over again. In fact, the five largest banks have grown much larger since 2008, because they were bailed out. Depositors and companies think that if a bank is so crooked that it grows so fast that it’s become too big to fail, they had better take their money out of the local bank and put it in the crooked big bank, because that’s going to be bailed out – because the government can’t afford to let it go under.

The pretense was that Dodd Frank was going to regulate them, by increasing the capital reserves that banks had to have. Well, first of all, the banks have captured the regulatory agencies. They’re in charge of basically approving Federal Reserve members, and also members of the local and smaller bank regulatory agencies. So you have deregulators put in charge of these agencies. Second, bank lobbyists have convinced Congress to de-tooth the Dodd Frank Act.

For instance, banks are very heavily into derivatives. That’s what brought down AIG in 2008. These are bets on which way currencies or interest rates will go. There are trillions of dollars nominally of bets that have been placed. They’re not regulated if a bank does this through a special-purpose entity, especially if it does it through those that are in Britain. That’s where AIG’s problems were in 2008. So the banks basically have avoided having to back up capital against making a bad bet.

If you have bets over where trillions of dollars of securities, interest rates, bonds and currencies are going to go, somebody is going to be on the losing side. And someone on the losing side of these bets is going to go under, like Lehman Brothers did. They’re not going to be able to pay their customers. You’re going to have rolling defaults.

You’ve also had Trump de-tooth to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. So the banks say, well, let’s do what Wells Fargo did. Their business model is fraud, but their earnings are soaring. They’re growing a lot, and they’re paid a tiny penalty for cheating their customers and making billions of dollars off it. So more banks are jumping on the high-risk consumer exploitation bandwagon. That’s certainly not helping matters.

Michael Palmieri: So, Michael we’ve talked a little bit about the different indicators that point towards a financial crisis. It’s also clear from what you just stated from a regulatory standpoint that the U.S. is extremely vulnerable. Back in 2008 many argue that there was a huge opportunity lost in terms of transforming our private banking system to a publicly owned banking system. Recently the Democracy Collaborative published a report titled, The Crisis Next Time: Planning for Public ownership as Alternative to Corporate Bailouts. That was put out by Thomas Hanna. He was calling for a transition from private to public banking. He also made the point, which you’ve made in earlier episodes, that it’s not a question of ifanother financial crisis is going to occur, but when. Can you speak a little bit about how public banking as an alternative would differ from the current corporate private banking system we have today?

Michael Hudson: Sure. I’m actually part of the Democracy Collaborative. The best way to think about this is that suppose that back in 2008, Obama and Wall Street bagman Tim Geithner had not blocked Sheila Bair from taking over Citigroup and other insolvent banks. She wrote that Citigroup had gambled with money and were incompetent, and outright crooked. She wanted to take them over.

Now suppose that Citibank would had been taken over by the government and operated as a public bank. How would a public bank have operated differently from Citibank?

For one thing, a public entity wouldn’t make corporate takeover loans and raids. They wouldn’t lend to payday loan sharks. Instead they’d make local branches so that people didn’t have to go to payday loan sharks, but could borrow from a local bank branch or a post office bank in the local communities that are redlined by the big banks.

A public entity wouldn’t make gambling loans for derivatives. What a public bank woulddo is what’s called the vanilla bread-and-butter operation of serving small depositors, savers and consumers. You let them have checking accounts, you clear their checks, pay their bills automatically, but you don’t make gambling and financial loans.

Banks have sort of turned away from small customers. They’ve certainly turned away from the low-income neighborhoods, and they’re not even lending to businesses anymore. More and more American companies are issuing their own commercial paper to avoid the banks. In other words, a company will issue an IOU itself, and pay interest more than pension funds or mutual funds can get from the banks. So the money funds such as Vanguard are buying commercial paper from these companies, because the banks are not making these loans.

So a public bank would do what banks are supposed to do productively, which is to help finance basic production and basic consumption, but not financial gambling at the top where all the risk is. That’s the business model of the big banks, and some will lose money and crash like in 2008. A public bank wouldn’t make junk mortgage loans. It wouldn’t engage in consumer fraud. It wouldn’t be like Wells Fargo. It wouldn’t be like Citibank. This is so obvious that what is needed is a bank whose business plan is not exploitation of consumers, not fraud, and isn’t gambling. That basically is the case for public ownership.

Paul Sliker: Michael as we’re closing this one out, I know you’re going to hate me for asking this question. But you were one of the few economists to predict the last crisis. What do you think is going to happen here? Are we looking at another global financial crisis and when do you think, if so, that might be coming?

Michael Hudson: We’re emphatically not looking for “another” global crisis, because we’re in the same crisis! We’re still in the 2008 crisis! This is the middle stage of that crisis. The crisis was caused by not writing down the bad debts, which means the bad loans, especially the fraudulent loans. Obama kept these junk mortgage loans and outright fraud on the books – and richly rewarded the banks in proportion to how badly and recklessly they had lent.

The economy’s been limping along ever since. They say there’s been a recovery, but even with the fake lying with statistics – with a GDP rise – the so-called “recovery” is the slowest that there’s been at any time since World War II. If you break down the statistics and look at what is growing, it’s mainly the financial and real estate sector, and monopolies like health care that raise the costs of living and crowd out spending in the real economy.

So this is the same crisis that we were in then. It’s never been fixed, and it can’t be fixed until you get rid of the bad-debt problem. The bad debts require restructuring the way in which pensions are paid – to pay them out of current income, not financializing them. The economy has to be de-financialized, but I don’t see that on the horizon for a while. That’s s why I think that rather than a new crisis, there will be a slow shrinkage until there’s a break in the chain of payments. Then they’re going to call that the crisis.

by Ives Smith and Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Zero 7 ft. Sia and Sophie Barker

Comcast, Charter Dominate US; Telcos “Abandoned Rural America"

You already knew that home broadband competition is sorely lacking through much of the US, but a new report released today helps shed more light on Americans who have just one choice for high-speed Internet.

Comcast is the only choice for 30 million Americans when it comes to broadband speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, the report says. Charter Communications is the only choice for 38 million Americans. Combined, Comcast and Charter offer service in the majority of the US, with almost no overlap.

Yet many Americans are even worse off, living in areas where DSL is the best option. AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos still provide only sub-broadband speeds over copper wires throughout huge parts of their territories. The telcos have mostly avoided upgrading their copper networks to fiber—except in areas where they face competition from cable companies.

These details are in "Profiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom," a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The full report should be available at this link today.

“Market is broken”

"The broadband market is broken," the report's conclusion states. "Comcast and Charter maintain a monopoly over 68 million people. Some 48 million households (about 122 million people) subscribe to these cable companies, whereas the four largest telecom companies combined have far fewer subscribers—only 31.6 million households (about 80.3 million people). The large telecom companies have largely abandoned rural America—their DSL networks overwhelmingly do not support broadband speeds—despite years of federal subsidies and many state grant programs." (...)

Comcast and Charter

Comcast, the nation's biggest cable company and broadband provider, offers service to about 110 million people in 39 states and Washington, DC.

"All of these people have access to broadband-level service through Comcast Xfinity, but about 30 million of these people have no other option for broadband service," the ILSR wrote.

Comcast's broadband subscribers included 25.5 million households, or about 64.8 million people, based on the average US household size of 2.54 people.

Charter, the second biggest cable company after Comcast, offers service to 101 million people in 45 states. 22.5 million households covering about 57.2 million people were subscribing to Charter Internet, according to the numbers cited by the ILSR.

Like Comcast, Charter offers broadband-level speeds throughout its territory. "About 38 million [people in Charter territory] have no other option for broadband service," the report said.

Comcast and Charter generally don't compete against each other. They have a combined territory covering about 210 million people, yet the companies' overlapping service territory covers only about 1.5 million people, according to the Form 477 data cited by the ILSR. The overlap is mostly in Florida, where Charter purchased Bright House Networks, and may be overstated because an entire census block is counted as served even if an ISP offers service to just one resident in the block.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: ILSR

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

Editor’s Note. This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the “American way of life” in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that “the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division.” If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was “urgently necessary” to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world’s seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change’s second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

Part One 1979–1982

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal, bound in a coal-black cover with beige lettering — one of many such reports that lay in uneven piles around Pomerance’s windowless office on the first floor of the Capitol Hill townhouse that, in the late 1970s, served as the Washington headquarters of Friends of the Earth. In the final paragraph of a chapter on environmental regulation, the coal report’s authors noted that the continued use of fossil fuels might, within two or three decades, bring about “significant and damaging” changes to the global atmosphere.

Pomerance paused, startled, over the orphaned paragraph. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. He reread it. It made no sense to him. Pomerance was not a scientist; he graduated from Cornell 11 years earlier with a degree in history. He had the tweedy appearance of an undernourished doctoral student emerging at dawn from the stacks. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thickish mustache that wilted disapprovingly over the corners of his mouth, though his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height, 6 feet 4 inches, which seemed to embarrass him; he stooped over to accommodate his interlocutors. He had an active face prone to breaking out in wide, even maniacal grins, but in composure, as when he read the coal pamphlet, it projected concern. He struggled with technical reports. He proceeded as a historian might: cautiously, scrutinizing the source material, reading between the lines. When that failed, he made phone calls, often to the authors of the reports, who tended to be surprised to hear from him. Scientists, he had found, were not in the habit of fielding questions from political lobbyists. They were not in the habit of thinking about politics.

Pomerance had one big question about the coal report. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it? If anyone in Washington — if anyone in the United States — should have been aware of such a danger, it was Pomerance. As the deputy legislative director of Friends of the Earth, the wily, pugnacious nonprofit that David Brower helped found after resigning from the Sierra Club a decade earlier, Pomerance was one of the nation’s most connected environmental activists. That he was as easily accepted in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building as at Earth Day rallies might have had something to do with the fact that he was a Morgenthau — the great-grandson of Henry Sr., Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; great-nephew of Henry Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary; second cousin to Robert, district attorney for Manhattan. Or perhaps it was just his charisma — voluble, energetic and obsessive, he seemed to be everywhere, speaking with everyone, in a very loud voice, at once. His chief obsession was air. After working as an organizer for welfare rights, he spent the second half of his 20s laboring to protect and expand the Clean Air Act, the comprehensive law regulating air pollution. That led him to the problem of acid rain, and the coal report.

He showed the unsettling paragraph to his office mate, Betsy Agle. Had she ever heard of the “greenhouse effect”? Was it really possible that human beings were overheating the planet?

Agle shrugged. She hadn’t heard about it, either.

That might have been the end of it, had Agle not greeted Pomerance in the office a few mornings later holding a copy of a newspaper forwarded by Friends of the Earth’s Denver office. Isn’t this what you were talking about the other day? she asked.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged. Pomerance hadn’t heard of MacDonald, but he knew all about the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats. The Jasons’ activities had been a secret until the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed their plan to festoon the Ho Chi Minh Trail with motion sensors that signaled to bombers. After the furor that followed — protesters set MacDonald’s garage on fire — the Jasons began to use their powers for peace instead of war.

There was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

In the decade since then, MacDonald had been alarmed to see humankind begin in earnest to weaponize weather — not out of malice, but unwittingly. During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035. The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and abroad; to industry groups like the National Coal Association and the Electric Power Research Institute; and within the government, to the National Academy of Sciences, the Commerce Department, the E.P.A., NASA, the Pentagon, the N.S.A., every branch of the military, the National Security Council and the White House.

Pomerance read about the atmospheric crisis in a state of shock that swelled briskly into outrage. “This,” he told Betsy Agle, “is the whole banana.”

Gordon MacDonald worked at the federally funded Mitre Corporation, a think tank that works with agencies throughout the government. His title was senior research analyst, which was another way of saying senior science adviser to the national-intelligence community. After a single phone call, Pomerance, a former Vietnam War protester and conscientious objector, drove several miles on the Beltway to a group of anonymous white office buildings that more closely resembled the headquarters of a regional banking firm than the solar plexus of the American military-industrial complex. He was shown into the office of a brawny, soft-spoken man in blocky, horn-rimmed frames, who extended a hand like a bear’s paw.

“I’m glad you’re interested in this,” MacDonald said, sizing up the young activist.

“How could I not be?” Pomerance said. “How could anyone not be?”

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

MacDonald spoke for two hours. Pomerance was appalled. “If I set up briefings with some people on the Hill,” he asked MacDonald, “will you tell them what you just told me?”

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging. The men settled into a routine, with MacDonald explaining the science and Pomerance adding the exclamation points. They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.

Press’s office was in the Old Executive Office Building, the granite fortress that stands on the White House grounds just paces away from the West Wing. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting. He decided to let MacDonald do all the talking. There was no need to emphasize to Press and his lieutenants that this was an issue of profound national significance. The hushed mood in the office told him that this was already understood. (...)

MacDonald’s voice was calm but authoritative, his powerful, heavy hands conveying the force of his argument. He was a geophysicist trapped in the body of an offensive lineman — he had turned down a football scholarship to Rice in order to attend Harvard — and seemed miscast as a preacher of atmospheric physics and existential doom. His audience listened in bowed silence. Pomerance couldn’t read them. Political bureaucrats were skilled at hiding their opinions. Pomerance wasn’t. He shifted restlessly in his chair, glancing between MacDonald and the government suits, trying to see whether they grasped the shape of the behemoth that MacDonald was describing.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions. A young geochemist named Charles David Keeling charted the data. Keeling’s graph came to be known as the Keeling curve, though it more closely resembled a jagged lightning bolt hurled toward the firmament. MacDonald had a habit of tracing the Keeling curve in the air, his thick forefinger jabbing toward the ceiling.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.

In 1974, the C.I.A. issued a classified report on the carbon-dioxide problem. It concluded that climate change had begun around 1960 and had “already caused major economic problems throughout the world.” The future economic and political impacts would be “almost beyond comprehension.” Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

“What would you have us do?” Press asked.

The president’s plan, in the wake of the Saudi oil crisis, to promote solar energy — he had gone so far as to install 32 photovoltaic panels on the roof of the White House to heat his family’s water — was a good start, MacDonald thought. But Carter’s plan to stimulate production of synthetic fuels — gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands — was a dangerous idea. Nuclear power, despite the recent tragedy at Three Mile Island, should be expanded. But even natural gas and ethanol were preferable to coal. There was no way around it: Coal production would ultimately have to end.

The president’s advisers asked respectful questions, but Pomerance couldn’t tell whether they were persuaded. The men all stood and shook hands, and Press led MacDonald and Pomerance out of his office. After they emerged from the Old Executive Office Building onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Pomerance asked MacDonald what he thought would happen.

Knowing Frank as I do, MacDonald said, I really couldn’t tell you.

In the days that followed, Pomerance grew uneasy. Until this point, he had fixated on the science of the carbon-dioxide issue and its possible political ramifications. But now that his meetings on Capitol Hill had concluded, he began to question what all this might mean for his own future. His wife, Lenore, was eight months pregnant; was it ethical, he wondered, to bring a child onto a planet that before much longer could become inhospitable to life? And he wondered why it had fallen to him, a 32-year-old lobbyist without scientific training, to bring greater attention to this crisis.

Finally, weeks later, MacDonald called to tell him that Press had taken up the issue. On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

Pomerance was amazed by how much momentum had built in such a short time. Scientists at the highest levels of government had known about the dangers of fossil-fuel combustion for decades. Yet they had produced little besides journal articles, academic symposiums, technical reports. Nor had any politician, journalist or activist championed the issue. That, Pomerance figured, was about to change. If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.

by Nathaniel Rich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Becker
[ed. See also: We Were Warned and How Not to Talk About Climate Change]

The Queer Art of Failing Better

‘What? You just said you have never shopped for a fucking mattress?!’—Jonathan Van Ness, Queer Eye, Season 1

Such an effort
If he only knew of my plan
In just seven days
I can make you a man
—Dr. Frank-N-Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Some things are just too pure for this weird and wicked world. That video of the golden retriever failing an agility test. Golden retrievers in general. Political science majors who truly believe they can change the system from within. And Queer Eye.

Queer Eye is a cultural intervention masquerading as a Netflix series. It has rapidly become essential to the well-being of a great many good and decent human beings who had otherwise stopped turning on the television for fear of the horror leaking out of it. I’m only slightly exaggerating: you’ve got to wonder what will become, for example, of the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman—who has now written a heart-wrenching daisy-chain of Queer Eye columns—if the show’s producers don’t make a third season. Which they will. I promise. Nobody panic.

Queer Eye is wonderful and terrible and probably the last significant statement to be made in reality television. The show, a Netflix-produced reboot of the original, squealsome mid-aughts judge-your-jeans extravaganza, instantly launched a thousand memes when it premiered in February, and the new second season has been a huger hit than anyone expected. In a culture awash in both mawkish reality vehicles dripping with kitsch and nostalgic reboots of shows from a softer world, Queer Eye is both. It manages to exceed the sum of its parts by not actually being about what we’re told it’s about. It’s not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins.

On the surface of things, it’s a straightforward quest for “acceptance,” supposedly of homosexuality, dramatized via the no-longer-so-outlandish vehicle of sending five gay men on an outreach mission to small-town Georgia with a vast interior design budget and a vanload of affirmations. What it turns out to be, though, is a forensic study of the rampaging crisis of American masculinity. In each new installment of the reboot, queerness is gently suggested as an antidote to the hot mess of toxic masculinity under late-stage capitalism. I am absolutely here for it, as long as we all get paid.

The basic formula has barely changed: five gay men in an SUV descend on one hapless, shlubby, usually straight guy and sort his life out. In seven days, Jonathan Van Ness, Bobby Berk, Tan France, Karamo Brown, and Antoni Porowski give him a whole new look, redesign his home and wardrobe, teach him some basic kitchen skills, and provide scripted space to talk about his feelings with the cameras rolling.

In its aughts heyday, the original Queer Eye was catty and consumerist, with a side-order of snide eye-rolling and dreadful puns. The gimmick, the selling point, was that gay men are actually fun and fabulous and it’s safe to let them in your homes, because they might redecorate. The reboot follows the same beats with a more compassionate melody, and this time the gimmick is different. The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities. The men typically featured as the show’s reclamation projects remind me of some of the men who I see on Tinder, sitting on that touring reproduction of the Iron Throne, staring into the middle distance, while in their real lives, and certainly on Queer Eye, they sit on ugly, painful furniture, faux-leather recliners that damage their backs, couches soaked in cat urine.

People on this show are extremely sweet to one another. That is rare enough within the reality TV genre, where “reality” is usually flattened into an exaggerated Hobbesian melee of shark-eyed competition and high-stakes back-stabbing. Most reality shows replicate the ruthless dogma of the age whereby life is made up of winners and losers and the trick is to hammer the other guy into the ground before he can do the same to you. On this show, men do not compete with each other. They touch each other, a lot, and seeing that brings home just how horrifyingly rare that is in untelevised reality. They cry and admit to one other how much it hurts to be alive while a handsome stranger teaches them how to make guacamole. There are no winners on Queer Eye—just better losers.

Failing with Style

Now and then, I get accused of not being able to enjoy anything good and pure, like a fluffy reality show, without subjecting it to rigorous political analysis. This is cruel and only slightly accurate—in fact, subjecting things to rigorous political analysis is exactly how I get off, and I’m far from alone in that. Like the Fab Five, I’m just lucky that my job is also my hobby.

What the Queer Eye guys seem to be gently teaching their subjects (and, by extension, their viewers) is that it is possible to live well without a woman to take care of you—and if you’re lucky enough to have one offer to do so anyway, maybe you should show her some consideration by picking up after yourself and learning how to apply the business end of a comb. When you put it like that, it sounds simple. But two thousand years of socialization and half a century of profit-oriented self-dealing throw up a few mental hurdles.

This show isn’t about how to win at life, but how to fail with style. It’s about giving straight guys permission to be more gracious losers. It helps that the show doesn’t actually have winners. This is not the ruthless, dick-smacking, alpha-primate pursuit of victory-for-victory’s sake that provides a plot line for most American reality television as well as for American politics, presuming you can still see clear water between the two. No, this is an oddly compassionate exit interview for the middle-managerial caste of straight dudes who are no longer steering a culture that prizes their skill set above everyone else’s. (...)

In 2018, Queer Eye is no longer necessarily “For The Straight Guy,” as it was in the aughts, but being a straight mainstream white guy now seems to come with an elevated risk of panic in the face of basic life-skills like learning to clean your room and deal with your childhood traumas. Up till now, this was the demographic that was always told that if they just hung on long enough, someone else would eventually do it for them. Probably a woman.

by Laurie Penny, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding a (Good!) Therapist

The process of finding a good therapist is unlike the process of finding most professionals. If your dentist nags you to floss more every time you see them, it's annoying, but unlikely to really affect the quality of their work. In therapeutic work, however, most of the work comes from the bond between therapist and client. If you find yourself worried about your therapist judging you or don't trust them to bring up important parts of your life, you won't be able to get the most out of therapy. Of course, this can make the process of starting therapy intimidating! It is very important to know that you can always talk to your therapist about changing what they're doing or referring you to someone else -- something I've written about previously in my guide to termination. Here, I'll instead talk about the first in these two bookends on therapy: finding a therapist.

The first thing to remember in finding a therapist is that if you have a bad experience, it is more likely that the therapist is a bad fit than "therapy doesn't work for me". Finding a good therapist is more like dating than it is like finding a mechanic, because of the emotional trust and freedom from judgment that I mentioned above. This means you may have to try a few times before finding The One, and once you do find someone good, there is no guarantee that they will be affordable, available, or local. Part of the reason I am writing this guide is that I am hoping the advice below will reduce the number of tries it takes to find someone who works for you.

What are your needs?

In order to find someone who works for you, you have to know what your needs are. The most obvious needs here are the practical: fees, location, timing, insurance, and accessibility. If you don't have much to spend on therapy, you may be confined to clinics and whatever your insurance covers. However, it is important to know that if you're working through insurance, they are required to find you someone who meets your practical and therapeutic needs, or else they must cover someone who is otherwise out of network. So if you're looking for an OCD specialist and nobody on your insurance has availabilities, they are still required to help you out. Working with insurance can be frustrating, for both therapist and client. Fees are often so high because a therapist working with insurance may get less than half of what they charge. Associates, Interns, and Trainees often have much lower fees, though they are significantly less likely to take insurance because they are prelicensed.

When it comes to therapeutic needs, we usually have a sense of what issues we're struggling with. However, there is much more in this category that many are unaware of before starting therapy for the first time. For starters, there is a difference between having expertise, knowledge, or familiarity with the important issues. On some directories, therapists may list any and all issues they have familiarity with, even if they don't have training or expertise. Checking their personal website (if they have one) may provide more information, but otherwise, this may be an important thing to ask in an email or over the phone. Someone who is struggling to come out as trans may need a gender specialist, while someone else who has already transitioned and is looking to work on something else may only require that their therapist be familiar with trans issues.

One of the most difficult areas to assess in ourselves is what we need the therapist to be doing in the room. There are so many theories and techniques, and often times, the websites that therapists advertise on don't explain what any of them mean or what they look like. Most people have a clear image of old school therapy (lying down on the couch and talking about your dreams and childhood), but this is only one school of therapy (psychodynamic, specifically). If you look at what sorts of introspection and regulation interactions and activities work for you, often times those are linked to therapeutic techniques. What many people think of as a "pros and cons list" is called Cost Benefit Analysis in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and if reflective listening feels most helpful, Rogerian Therapy (also called Person-Centered Therapy) is based in just that. If you have found a CFAR technique that works well for you, I can almost guarantee that there is a therapeutic technique that it is based on that you may find works as well.

There are a few parts of the therapeutic process that are not often spoken about, but can make a huge difference. One example is that some therapists allow you to text them to schedule and reschedule appointments, and this can make a big difference for someone who has phone anxiety. There is also who leads conversations and how much, and focus on solutions vs introspection. A therapist who listens and tries to prod on introspection isn't going to help someone who wants guidance and solutions, just as a therapist who leads and looks for solutions isn't going to help someone who needs to work through their emotions first.

For those who need a low fee therapist, there are training clinics associated with universities where prelicensed therapists practice under the supervision of a more experienced licensed therapist. If you find someone who calls themselves an Associate Therapist or a Therapy Intern, they are probably prelicensed and in training. You will find prelicensed individuals at training clincs run by universities and in private practice, though they rarely take insurance. This is a good way to get therapy for cheap, while still receiving all of the experience of the therapist's supervisor.

Finding a Therapist

Two of the most common ways to find a therapist are through insurance or through a directory. Insurance websites don't actually have much information on the therapists beyond location and a few areas of expertise; websites like Psychology Today and Good Therapy allow therapists to explain their practice in ways that are specific to their target clientele. Because of this, not all therapists have their own websites, but many (especially newer therapists) will. Psychology Today's therapist finder lets you search by insurance, though it is less reliable as to whether the therapist actually takes your insurance than going through your insurance company directly. It also lets you search by specialty, modality, gender, and much more. As I mentioned above, a therapist's listed specialty may not actually be something they're certified in, so it's often best to ask directly if this is important to you.

Another way of finding a therapist is through referrals. Most commonly, people get referrals through their general practitioner or psychiatrist. Sometimes, you can get a referral through a friend, though this can pose a problem if you and a very close friend are seeing the same therapist, and some therapists may refuse to see someone close to a client due to the possibility of each coming up in the other's sessions. This is also why you usually cannot have the same therapist for couples and individual counseling, or for individual for you and your partner. I am currently compiling a list of professionals in the Bay Area approved by those in the rationalist community, and other communities often times have similar lists (for LGBT, poly, kink, fat-friendly, etc). Often times, the best referrals come from an existing professional. All therapists have referrals ready in case they end up with a client who can't see them anymore, for any reason. The better and more well connected the therapist, the better their referrals are going to be. Thus, advice I often give for finding a good therapist is to find someone who is the best match for you (ie someone who wrote a book on your niche issue or did an important research study on a technique you love) and ask them for referrals (unless you luck out and they are available and affordable).

Online therapeutic services are getting more and more common. Some websites function as referrals, like Reflect (which matches people in SF and the East Bay to therapists who match their personality via video chat consultations). Others allow you to chat directly with a therapist, like Better Help. Some, like 7 Cups of Tea, match you to a trained listener rather than a therapist, so they can provide therapeutic services for free. There are also websites like Mood Gym, a CBT self help tool that is particularly helpful in pointing out bugs. Many therapists also do video sessions. This can be very important for people with chronic illness, disabilities, or social anxiety; you can get help without even leaving the house.

Once you've found someone, you can sometimes figure out whether or not they're a good fit based on online profile alone. If you want a tech-savvy therapist who can recommend apps and online tools, a therapist who doesn't have a website or doesn't check email very often is probably not a good fit. A therapist's website or directory profile often has a blurb that is directed at their target clientele. These tend to contain phrases like "Do you feel lost in your life?" and "It can be difficult to find a safe space to express our feelings". If a therapist's blurb doesn't speak to you, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be a bad fit, but one that does is more likely to be a better fit. Sometimes, the blurb can give us insight into ourselves. You may read a sentence like "Do you ever get anxious and push people away?" and realize that yes, you absolutely do that. This is a good sign that this person may be a good fit, because the blurb is meant to attract the kind of person the therapist feels confident they can work with.

Initial Consultation

Of course, you can't fully judge whether a therapist is a good fit without talking to them. While it is possible to schedule an appointment blind, it is not recommended unless you feel confident that they are the therapist for you (ie if you are already familiar with their work via books or a blog). Ideally, a consultation would happen over phone or video, but sometimes it is just easier to talk via email. It is important to note, though, that if you and the therapist have difficulty scheduling time for a phone call, you are likely to also have difficulty scheduling sessions.

In the initial consultation, you will both be learning about each other. Your therapist will be listening to your description of your symptoms and needs to assess whether they feel they can take you on as a client, and you will be noticing their responses to decide whether you trust this person enough to make an appointment. Notice how comfortable they are or aren't to talk to, and how the experience of the consultation feels. Do you feel heard? Judged? Understood? Ignored?

This is also the time to make sure they actually fit your needs, practical and otherwise. Online information may be dated, your schedules may not mesh, and they may have only taken a class or two in a technique that you need an expert in. If you have questions about fees, this is also the time to ask about that; many therapists have sliding scale fees and can make accommodations for those paying out of pocket, though a lot of these therapists won't advertise this unless there is an expressed need for cheaper therapy, so it's good to ask. Try and settle on a fee before you schedule an appointment, so you aren't shocked by the numbers once you're charged. Once you're talking to them, you should also find out what the easiest way to reach them is in case you need to contact them before the session. It is good to know how to get in touch with them if you have trouble finding their office or are running late.

Clients often forget key information during initial phone consultations. Remember to mention your name and age, as well as what you're coming into therapy for. Including a general sense of your weekly schedule and any concerns about insurance or ability to pay can also be very helpful. Depending on how much time you have for a consultation, you may not have time to get to culture and experience in therapy, but these should be brought up either in the consultation or within the first couple of sessions. Culture includes elements of identity, such as sexuality, languages spoken, military background, etc. Depending on your concerns, these may be more important to bring up in consultation (ie if you need an LGBT friendly therapist or if you prefer a therapist who can speak your mothertongue). Similarly, previous therapy experience, diagnoses, and psychiatric meds taken can give your therapist important information about what your concerns are and what does or doesn't work. Some of this stuff may be covered in the intake (also called biopsychosocial), but it's important to discuss it in session nonetheless.

by squidious, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: Will & Deni Mcintyre/Getty Images/Science Source via

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Grooming Beaches to Death

As Gavin Andrus takes a seat at the helm of a green John Deere tractor, it’s still dark out at the Santa Monica Pier. The stationary Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the city sky, and unseen waves crash against the pilings and lap against the sandy shore. The rhythmic onslaught brings with it the flotsam and jetsam of modern society: plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts, straws. Some of this refuse may have been expelled from the city storm drains. Some of it may have been cast off by thoughtless beachgoers the day before. And some of it may have been borne on the currents, washing in from Mexico or Japan or who knows where.

For the next five hours or so, Andrus’s job is to clean up as much of it as possible before the crowds arrive. He has the south side of the pier. Two other tractors will take care of the north. “Grandma needs a new facelift every day,” he tells me when I hop in the cab with him a little after sunrise. Behind him, the rake attached to the tractor kicks up a kaleidoscope of colored plastic and broken glass, churning in a vortex of liquified sand.

Andrus is a California boy in his mid-50s with the kind of bemused how-could-I-get-so-lucky-to-spend-my-whole-life-on-the-beach attitude that makes people living in colder climes curse. “I’m not the kind of person to sit behind a desk,” he says, gazing at the breaking waves from inside his glass-walled cab as he tunes in to the morning radio. Lest you think his job sounds a little too copacetic, consider that the sealed cab is necessary to protect him from the fine particles stirred up outside. Breathing those in day in and day out can cause silicosis, the lung disease known as potter’s rot or gravedigger’s disease. How about beach-groomer’s lung? Andrus doesn’t want that. “It’s terrifying,” he says.

The other great occupational hazard Andrus faces is running over a person at this wee hour. Off to his left, near a lifeguard station, a homeless man is cocooned in a sleeping bag—far from the only one he’ll see this morning. “Obstacles,” Andrus says. When it’s still dark and foggy, people can come out of nowhere drunk or tired or just not paying attention. “You’ve really got to be on your game down here.”

With each pass of his section of the 5.6-kilometer-long beach, he makes a loop away from the shoreline and flicks a lever, depositing garbage—a single, sad sandal on this pass—in a growing windrow, the speed bump of debris he leaves behind for a specialized vehicle to vacuum up and filter. “Everything shows up in a windrow,” he says. “You name it. From condoms to toys to money. Occasionally, jewelry.”

He jokes about painting baby diapers on the front of the tractor, like a Second World War fighter pilot memorializing the enemies he’s shot down. He would soon run out of canvas though—gathering a dozen or more nappies on a summer day is not unrealistic. Sticking out of the vents on his dashboard are two rubber killer whales retrieved from a windrow. Not that he’s a scavenger. Andrus just notices things sometimes. He circles around to make another pass along the beach as the morning’s first yoga class convenes for sun salutations.

Santa Monica State Beach, considered by some as the birthplace of beach volleyball, ranks among the busiest in California. As many as 50,000 people flock to this stretch of coastline on a typical summer day, and, at its widest, the beach could potentially accommodate more than 30 volleyball courts. Visiting a freshly raked urban beach like this, few people realize that it can amass over 10,000 kilograms of trash during a busy summer week. After the Memorial Day holiday in May 2015, cleaning crews gathered 39,862 kilograms. That’s the equivalent of 800 North Pacific giant octopuses. If Andrus and his coworkers failed to show up for a month, the beach would start looking like a dump.

While the US $3.3-million the city spends each year maintaining its beaches is undoubtedly good for keeping the tourist dollars rolling in and protecting some of the local marine life, there are some unfortunate side effects to all this cleanliness. Out of sight means out of mind, and when a city sweeps its pollution away, urbanites lose their biggest and best indicator of how much trash is in our oceans and befouling remote shores they rarely visit. “If they don’t see it, they don’t think it’s a problem,” says Heike Lotze, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has studied the perception of marine threats around the world. And grooming itself has some unintended environmental consequences. When sweepers flatten the contours of the beach and strip the shoreline of the wrack—the rotting mess of kelp and seagrass that washes up—they turn a living beach into a sterile sandbox. When the beach hoppers and kelp flies vanish, so too do the shorebirds, including plovers and killdeer. (...)

While keeping our oceans and beaches clean of garbage is undeniably good for the environment, figuring out the best way to achieve that is complicated. Over 150 kilometers of Southern California beaches are regularly groomed, sometimes twice a day, and biologists and conservationists have begun to see the downside to tidiness.

You could call it the beach hygiene hypothesis. Just as humans may develop allergies from growing up germ-free, beaches are suffering from being too clean. Swept flat each day, the beach can become a biological desert, devoid of the rare plant and animal species that make the coastlines so special. Over two tonnes of decaying kelp get deposited on a kilometer of beach each day, a valuable resource for wildlife that is robbed by city cleanup crews on a daily basis.

Jenifer Dugan, a biologist with the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that beach hoppers, 14-legged “garbage” cleaners that thrive on wrack, have been disappearing from the coastline. “What habitat is disturbed as much as those beaches in Santa Monica?” she asks. “No agricultural practice disturbs the fields twice a day.”

On ungroomed beaches and other areas with little human impact, beach hoppers’ population can reach 100,000 individuals for every meter of beach. And on each meter of beach, they’ll devour 20 kilograms of wrack each month. “The kelp gets vaporized!” says Dugan, who has watched it happen. But when the beach hoppers, isopods, and other invertebrates that subsist on the wrack disappear, shorebirds also go hungry. That’s why barren beaches in California lose birds like killdeer and the endangered western snowy plover. Grooming can also destroy the eggs of the grunion, an unusual fish that lays its eggs in the sand at high tide.

What this research is telling us is that we need to accept that healthy beaches can sometimes be a little messy. Sure, most people going to the beach just want a clean place to lay out their towel, but they may not even realize what they’re missing. “There’s a whole ecosystem that would survive here without beach grooming,” says Karina Johnston, the director of watershed programs at the Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to protect the Santa Monica Bay.

On a cloudy May morning, she’s come out to one particular stretch of beach to show me what an ungroomed beach looks like in an urban environment, and the answer is, in part, flowers. Hundreds of canary-yellow flowers—the blooms of beach evening primrose—dot the rippling contours of the low dunes here. It’s the site of a pilot rewilding project that Johnston has been shepherding for the past two years.

In December 2016, the Bay Foundation, in partnership with the City of Santa Monica, erected a wooden sand fence on this section of the beach—a little larger than a stadium-sized soccer field—to keep the groomers out and encourage the formation of dune hummocks. Next, the organization seeded the sand with native plants, including primrose and sand verbena. These plants had been largely extirpated from the Los Angeles region until this project began. Remarkably, within four months of planting those seeds and putting up the fences, Los Angeles County also got its first western snowy plover nest in more than 70 years.

by Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Kyle Grillot