Three/Ideology and the "Technological Revolution" (continued)

We haven't just seen this before; we're living it right now. I first published a public call to action about global warming in 1990 - before the onslaught of SUVs, plasma televisions, iPods, cell phones, and a hundred other technological marvels that outfitted the American "McMansions" (or "starter castles," as 6,000 square-foot homes have also been described) and triggered an explosion in energy consumption and carbon dioxide pollution. The piece was published as an editorial to celebrate the return of Earth Day as an official event after a 15-year dormant period. It laid out what was known about the environmental impact of carbon emissions at the time, particularly in methane, and essentially echoed what the scientist says in Latham's story: "There can be no doubt as to the course of events up to a certain point. Beyond that point there is no knowledge, only speculation and conjecture."

I hadn't read "The Xi Effect" yet, and wouldn't for at least another dozen years. And the really frustrating part now is that much of what was "speculation and conjecture" a decade before the third millennium began has become the "no doubt" factual data a decade after its beginning. Cars, coal, and cows—they were trouble then and have become threats now. And on that Sunday in 1990, Americans thought about recycling, and about conserving water, and about preserving forests and wetlands for wildlife; some might even have written a check and sent it off to a favorite green organization. Then Monday came, the work week began, and the planet would get its next few hours worth of awareness twelve months later. I said as much in the editorial.

As I recall, although the piece was published to a potential readership of about 300,000, I received feedback from two people. One said it was "good," and the other called it "important." Both were colleagues at the place where I taught at the time. I figured it was a professional courtesy.

Then we all went to sleep. Me, too—I bought an Explorer with four-wheel drive, and when the gas mileage on that proved too high at about 19, I traded it in for an F-150 pickup, another 4x4, that got 13. These two hogs propelled me through the decade, and it's not much of a defense to say that each of them did at least go off-road a few times on abandoned logging trails and obscure forest pathways in northern Michigan. They were exceptionally capable in deep snow, and they did well in spring mud, too. The truck, I could argue, was also necessary because I owned a small farm at the end of the decade and had a lot of "country" stuff to haul around, including a small tractor.

But all of this is just rationalizing, and more evidence of that can't-get-cars-out-of-my-system problem I mentioned earlier. The truth is, I completely contradicted my own passionate Earth Day editorial, and the only example set was how to be an utter hypocrite. If I'd had a couple of "Exxon Mobil Loves You" bumper stickers, the picture would've been complete. I suppose it's comforting to know that hundreds of millions of my American neighbors couldn't have cared less about any of it. Bill Clinton balanced the Federal budget, and the economy roared. Money came in steadily, money went out faster, houses doubled and tripled in size, car sizes did, too, and a company from Arkansas arrived to sell us totally unnecessary "consumer goods" made in China. In Seattle, a kid with blond hair had already written a theme song for it all: With the lights out, it's less dangerous/Here we are now; entertain us.

Three/Ideology and the "Technological Revolution"

This is a monumental challenge. It requires a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking. We are going to have to rethink the way we live and work.
- Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco Supermarkets (U.K.) 29

The freight train is running full speed over the cliff right now, and the issue is too important to leave any stone unturned in our search for solutions to climate change.
- Kenneth Coale, Director, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories 30

He was the fellow who had discovered this Xi effect, wasn't he? Well, then, he could probably control it, too. Man had never met a problem that man was unable to solve.
- Philip Latham, "The Xi Effect"

Klaus Lackner is a doctor of physics at Columbia University who came up with an idea in 2003 to let us keep cranking out carbon dioxide while other scientists like himself find more solutions to the warming problem. Dr. Lackner's idea was a mechanical tree, 400 feet tall and made of metal, with a chemical-coated scrubbing board that would trap carbon much like flypaper catches flies.31 More recently he worked with Global Research Technologies, an up-and-coming "green tech" company, to demonstrate an "air extraction device" that looks a bit like a giant vacuum cleaner attachment. The latest invention is an "important tool" that shows "incredible promise in the fight against climate change," according to the director of the Earth Institute.32 Surely these ideas are examples of humankind's "capacity to invent solutions to the problems we have ourselves created," as Sir Richard Branson said in announcing that he'll award $25 million to anyone who finds a way to lower the yearly carbon dioxide pollution rate by a billion tons.33 Sir Richard's confidence in human ingenuity is admirable - and it sounds eerily like the final epigraph above. 

The mechanical tree (top), the "air extraction device"

In Philip Latham's 1950 story, "The Xi Effect," two astronomers make a disturbing discovery: the universe is shrinking. At first, convinced that their mathematical equations must be wrong, they treat the phenomenon with interest, but not concern. Then colors start to drop out of the visible spectrum. The reason for this is complex and hinges on theories of electromagnetic radiation waves, but Latham is more interested in the social and political response. The public is briefly alarmed by the changes in tints, with women especially annoyed because the lack of visible red makes all of their work to hair and makeup a waste of time. But the public adapts pretty quickly and even starts to joke about the change, convinced that scientists will find a way to put everything back to normal again. Scientists, meanwhile, are censored and not allowed to tell the public that the problem is only getting worse, and the universe is shrinking a lot faster than originally thought. A few speak out and are immediately fired for doing it and causing unnecessary worry. But eventually, world governments have to concede that the Xi effect is serious.

The story's climax has 100,000 people crammed into an arena to hear the world's foremost scientist deliver a talk about their world and its quickly-diminishing light - now reduced to a few hours' worth. "If scientists knew light was going to be extinguished, then why didn't they get busy and do something about it a long time ago?" one man asks. A woman follows by asking the scientist to predict what the future will be like, and he replies: "There can be no doubt as to the course of events up to a certain point. Beyond that point there is no knowledge, only speculation and conjecture." Then the light fades even more, the moon becomes distorted and grotesque, and the crowd panics as total darkness sets in. As the story ends, thousands of people sit whimpering and clinging to each other in the pitch black of the arena - "waiting hopefully for the light that had always returned."

Latham wasn't writing an allegory for global warming. He was an astronomer (real name Robert Richardson) and textbook author. As a science fiction writer, he specialized in "hard SF," a genre that centralizes the science and builds narratives around it. The science has to be accurate, or at least plausible if the circumstances being described were to actually happen. But with "The Xi Effect," a science fiction author seems to have nailed the social science even more than the astrophysical stuff. What stands out most in this mid-20th century tale is the public apathy, government denial, and blind, uncritical faith in technology to make everything better. We haven't just seen this before; we're living it right now.


====SOURCES====

29 Michael Specter, "Big Foot." The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 2008.

30 Melanie Haiken, "Dumping Iron." Mother Jones, March/April 2008.

31 Molly Bentley, "Synthetic Trees Could Purify Air." BBC News, Feb. 21, 2003.

32 "First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved." Physorg.com, April 25, 2007.

33 Kevin Sullivan, "$25 Million Offered in Climate Challenge." Washington Post, Feb. 10, 2007.

Two/Ideology and the Right Brain (conclusion)

If we shift thinking from left brain to right brain, and from wrong to right, then ideology can shatter as thoroughly as the countless cities devastated by the automobile and the planet being destroyed by its fuel. The process of making this shift is extraordinarily simple—and excruciatingly painful. When an idea that has functioned as a Truth gets physically forced over to the creative right brain from its entrenched position in the linear and orderly left brain, there's a definite throbbing pain in the hole that's left behind.

For example, you might think by now that I hate cars. But if you do, you're wrong. I love 'em, and always have, since I was a ten-year old kid walking or riding my bike to the local library each week to read the latest issues of Hot Rod and Car Craft and Popular Mechanics. Then came a driver's license, a Mustang, Charger, Duster, and Challenger, engine and transmission swaps, body and suspension customizing, and street racing. And once that stuff gets into your blood, you can't get it out. Pictures of cars cover a wall in my garage. 1:18 and 1:64 scale models of all the classic Ford and Chrysler muscle cars are everywhere in my house and office at work. When I was 17, I let a blue Plymouth Roadrunner 383 slip out of my hands, and for the next 32 years, I vowed to replace it one day. There wasn't a week, over those three decades, that I didn't think about my lost love at least once.

The day to replace it has finally come.

And I will not be getting the car.

This is an ideological shift that physically hurts, because my heart is broken, and I've been in mourning for half a year. I deserve this car, my left brain screams. I've worked hard for it. I've been patient, and I've let all of the more important aspects of a responsible adult life come first—children, jobs, mortgages, insurance, retirement fund, maturity, boredom. Hundreds of thousands of other guys have classic cruisers in their garages, so why shouldn't I have what they have?

I'll tell you why: because when I look at the two cars in my driveway now, one built in 2001 and the other in 2007, I see two wretched machines representing unforgivably antiquated old tech. The best of the two gets a respectable 37 miles per gallon, but it's still the same basic contraption that my great-great grandfather used to get himself around town more than a century ago. His didn't have as many options, but it still had a big, heavy chunk of iron under its hood where gasoline exploded and made parts go up and down and around.

I don't play my music on 78s, I don't keep my food cold with a huge block of ice, I don't wash my clothes with lye on a ribbed board—but I transport myself from one place to another in a piece of centenarian technology that has long outlived its usefulness.

This has probably been the most challenging ideological shift I'll ever make. The positive idea of the automobile as an eternal, unquestioned Truth was finally wrenched out of its stuck position in July 2007 when I lived in Chicago and walked everywhere for 30 days. Everywhere. Always. No machine of any kind took me anywhere; my feet did it all. The new experience felt wonderful—and the two cars in my garage back home felt, with each day of walking, like oppression. They represented the fact that, beyond this wonderful self-contained city, I had no choice but to drive. The resentment grew steadily, and by the time I boarded the train to come home, the Truth about cars was not only dislodged, but radically transformed. I still love them—as I said, if you've ever been a gearhead you can't get it out of your blood—but I also recognize them as weapons for committing slow and agonizing suicide.

With that shift out of the way, all others seem featherweight in comparison. But what must it be like for someone like Bill Ford, Jr., whose quote heads this blog (and appears at the right)—someone who's not even aware that the first half of his statement is completely cancelled out by the second half? "Cars and trucks have begun to be seen by some as a social liability, primarily because of the impact on the environment," he says. And then look carefully at what follows. Mr. Ford does not say, "I want to address those concerns." What he says is very different: "I want to talk about what we have to do to address those concerns." The focus isn't on the concerns—the liability of environmental impact. And it's not on tackling the issue of a car's environmental footprint. The focus is on the best plan of action to set the people's minds at ease, so that they will love cars again, and buy them. He's thinking like a company chairman. He's stuck.

He's not alone by any means, though. After Oren Lyons, an Onondaga Iroquois faithkeeper, represented American Indians at the December 1992 United Nations opening ceremony for The Year of Indigenous Peoples, he made a lot of contacts in the business community and was asked to speak to many of them, including the 1993 gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In an interview, Lyons recalls that things began to sour after he asked one CEO where he drew the line between his public role as a corporate leader and his private role as a grandfather to an eight-year old child—i.e. where the former's business decisions were offset by the latter's concern for his grandson's future—and the CEO couldn't answer because, like Bill Ford, he was stuck. Maybe to break the uncomfortable silence, another CEO asked if Lyons could make an "Indian prophecy":

I said, I sure can. I said, how about a guaranteed prophecy? Every hear of a guaranteed prophecy? And they said, no. Want to hear one? And they said, sure. I said, you guys are going to meet next year and nothing will have changed. I guarantee it. 26

Oren Lyons

The faithkeeper recognized the importance of ideological shifting, and he saw that, for this group of people in this particular year, none was going to occur. Lyons is a proponent of Seventh Generation philosophy, wherein actions and decisions taken today have to be considered in terms of how they will affect the generation of people seven generations into the future. The principle behind that philosophy was illustrated, in allegorical terms, by Garrett Hardin in a breakthrough 1968 article published in Science, and the title of that article, "The Tragedy of the Commons," is now the name of the social and environmental dynamic that it illustrates.

In Hardin's allegory, ten cattlemen share a common pasture where each man's cow grazes. One of the men, wanting to boost his profits, considers the benefits and costs of putting another cow out to graze with the first one. The positive aspect is that he'll have another cow to sell; the negative is that the cow will use up more grazing space, but that cost will be spread across ten people. Increasing the number of cows costs the man only one-tenth of a full share of the resource, offset by one full share of profit, so it's clearly worthwhile. Each of the other cattlemen, by the same rationale, adds a cow of his own. And soon the pasture is gone since the men have effectively doubled the number of cows consuming it. 27 Dr. Carl Safina of the Blue Ocean Institute at SUNY Stony Brook has movingly invoked the Tragedy of the Commons—and although not by name, the philosophy of Seventh Generation—while addressing the issue not of overgrazing, but of overfishing. In a panel discussion on National Public Radio, Safina, like Oren Lyons, recognized the imperative to shift ideological patterns:

Since we don't have to pay the costs of these things in our time, some people feel that it's just better to go and get what you can get while you can get it.... It's a question of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. But there are a lot of people who should be in the political debate who are not in [it], and those are all of the unborn people who are about to come in the next generation and all the other generations.... They'd have something very different to say than the people who say "Well, for right now, I don't have to worry about these things that are going to happen in 50 years." ...The Tragedy of the Commons happens not only in space, it happens in time. We're putting more than our share into the future, and we're inflicting that cost on people who have nothing to say about it. It's a deep moral transgression, and it becomes an ethical issue and a religious issue that is based on what the science tells us will be happening. 28

That is what Bill Ford, Jr. should have said. That is right-brain thinking, and a breathtaking example of Right Thought. And no elementary school history teachers have any right to tell kids about "taxation without representation" unless they're also ready to join this ideological revolution.

====SOURCES====

26 Tim Knauss, "Onandaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons Speaks Out On the Environment." Syracuse Post Standard, Feb. 8, 2008.

27 Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (1968).

28 "State of the Oceans." NPR Science Friday, February 15, 2008.

< Reflection Pause / >

• Footnoting information sources is a pain. With radio, internet, TV, papers and magazines surrounding me up to 14 hours a day, facts pile up quickly, getting stored to brain space and processed there, but rarely with their sources connected. And what happens when the same story comes at you from ten directions? Does the first source of the day get the credit? Do you mention the one most deserving a bit of free advertising - as if anyone actually reads footnotes?

• My wife, who goes by the nickname "Pollyanna," is insisting that there's a sea change of optimism taking place around Barack Obama's presidential bid, and that young voters are newly excited about the political process because of it. I'm willing to cede the point, for now, but with John McCain clearly the Republican Party's boy and Hillary Clinton sliding sideways against Obama, I suspect things will get ugly - and empty - pretty quickly. Style matters more than substance, and already Obama's been attacked for being too skillful in public oration. He's got the style, but that's the substance of his opponents' criticisms. McCain is a "true hero" because he spent five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese during the American War there, but he's really old in contrast to Obama and even Clinton. And Clinton cries, which means she's either faking it or being a woman.

All of this is utter bullshit. Anyone want to talk about getting the United States to revisit its bonehead do-nothing position at the Bali global warming conference? Retracting the mandate to crank out ethanol at a maniacal pace, regardless of the environmental harm? Stopping the lunatics who've decided to build a water park in the middle of the Arizona desert?*

Oops, I said I was taking a break here. I guess the point is, maybe I'll have to revise chapter one... but probably not. And my wife will still be Pollyanna, which is a good thing, because I'm Arthur Schopenhauer and Diogenes rolled into a frowning, sneering ball of skepticism.

• Dammit, a footnote in the break!

*Chris Kahn, "Huge Water Park Planned for Arizona Desert." Associated Press, Nov. 19, 2007.

Two/Ideology and the Right Brain (part three)

With nothing left to destroy, the U.S. auto industry began to cannibalize itself. Caught without anything remotely resembling fuel efficiency, Chevy quickly threw together the Vega, and Ford followed with the Pinto. Chrysler, finding itself drowning in a sea of unsold muscle cars the size of small yachts, simply turned to the Japanese and slapped Dodge and Plymouth badges on Mitsubishi cars. Toyota and Datsun (Nissan) products trickled steadily into American garages and parking lots while aluminum Vega engine blocks melted, Pinto gas tanks exploded, GM pickup trucks burst into flames, and Chrysler slid into the bankruptcy that would require a government bailout by the end of the decade. GM found a way to protect its side-saddle fuel tanks with a steel shield, but decided not to install the shields "because it would influence, in the public's mind, a lack of security of the fuel tank. It would give them the wrong impression."18 At Ford, the accounting people ran a cost comparison and found it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits over burned customers than to change the Pinto's fuel system design.19 (Later in the decade, GM similarly chose to let its Chevy Malibu owners burn rather than invest $8.59 per vehicle in the needed fix.)20 Chevy's little Vega didn't burn, it just sort of melted—if the aluminum radiator overheated, the aluminum engine block warped, and like the Pinto, the Vega's body was so poorly and quickly designed that its panels filled with water that had no drain holes as exit points. The fenders were being eaten by rust even as the window sticker was being scraped off.

As the industry imploded, it made damn sure that it had company in its misery. Plants closed and took whole neighborhoods with them. Other industries fell, especially steel. Unemployment claims soared; the state of Michigan staggered under the financial weight. By the beginning of the next decade, the governor was forced to raise income taxes by 38% 21 to pay for the party, and auto-producing towns, especially Detroit and Flint, were decimated. "The D" lost nearly a million people by 2000, making Flint's loss of 30,000 seem something to be grateful for. Knowing that Motown was desperate, GM offered to save everyone by building a new Cadillac plant smack in the middle of "Poletown," a thriving neighborhood of more than 4,000 people. With the help of City Hall and the wonders of Eminent Domain law, GM won and the Poletown community lost. Today, the area is mostly parking lot, and the GM factory employs half the number of workers the company promised to deliver.22

Now think about the barrage of automotive images that flash past us as part of the roughly 4,000 (yes, four thousand) advertisements our eyes and brains process each day.23 Happy families in minivans; happy SUV campers in pristine wildernesses; happy speed freaks in shiny red cars slaloming around corners; happy happy happy until the car becomes one with happiness, and the internal combustion engine is inseparable from the human smile. The two ideas are stitched together so tightly and broadcast so relentlessly that it (no longer "they") becomes true. It just is. It just always has been. There has never been a time when the automobile was not our friend, our enabler for a "better life," our freedom to travel, our core identity. "You drive that?" can either inflate us with pride or deflate us with shame, depending on what that is. And even if that is a total piece of shit, it still beats riding the bus.

But all of this suturing and conflating of one idea with another is an intentional act to create—and then reinforce, promote, and defend—an ideology. The truth is far from the ideology. Cars are not our friends. Sure, it might be nice to live an hour away from work, but if the drive there takes three hours because those wonderful GM-promoted highways are now choked with cars sitting at idle, then you know, a nice high-speed train ride would be magnificent. As cars idle in traffic jams around the world, they work like little space heaters. Several million space heaters combined work like blast furnaces. But the technology of these furnaces is different; they don't heat with heat, but rather by spewing carbon in monoxide and dioxide forms, because oil contains carbon. When carbon is removed from the ground and put into the atmosphere, it changes the chemistry of the atmosphere and becomes a greenhouse gas. Oil is not our friend. Sure, it makes great stuff out of plastic, but plastic never goes away, and out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right now, is a floating continent, twice the size of Texas, that's made of bottles, bags, baskets, dolls, combs, toys, milk crates, shoes, lawn furniture, lunch boxes, garden hoses, lighters, pens, food containers, baby rattles, disposable razors, one-time cameras, fishing line—every kind of plastic item that can float into an ocean from a nation's shore or be tossed overboard by a freighter or cruise ship. This floating continent weighs several million tons and is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.24 When sea birds eat the garbage, their insides look like this:

No, I haven't drifted off point here. The point is that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so huge, so overwhelming, every scientist consulted about it admits that nothing can ever be done about it. It can never be cleaned up; no economy in the world is sufficient to pay for the labor and resources that would be needed. So the only thing we can hope for is a reduction in the amount of plastic crap ending up in the gigantic swirling gyre. No technology will come along to magically fix this problem.

And cars will continue to burn us. The carbon in their exhausts will keep heating the atmosphere, and we'll think that it's more cost effective to settle the big challenges later rather than invest in alternatives now, and the car companies will do as they've always done—which, you have to admit, has been pretty damned scary so far—and the problem will get bigger as more CO2 joins what's already in the massive swirling airborne gyre, and no technology will come along to magically fix this problem, either. The only hope is a massive and immediate reduction in what we put out there. And that's a very tough idea to wrap our brains around.

But if we shift thinking from left brain to right brain, and from wrong to right, then ideology can shatter as thoroughly as the countless cities devastated by the automobile and the planet being destroyed by its fuel.

====SOURCES====

18 Langdon & Emison, Attorneys at Law. "GM Side Saddle Pickups." Practice Areas/Fuel-Fed Fires. PDF Presentation.

19 Mark Dowie, "Pinto Madness." Mother Jones Sept./Oct. 1977.

20 Richard Alexander, "Gas Tank Fires: The $4.9 Billion Verdict Against General Motors for the Explosion of 1979 Chevrolet Malibu." Findlaw Library, Aug. 1, 1999. Findlaw.com.

21 "Michigan Governor Signs 38% Income Tax Increase." New York Times Mar. 30, 1983.

22 University of Michigan, Flint. "Overview of Land Use Patterns in Michigan." www.geneseelandnetwork.org; Jenny Nolan, "Auto Plant vs. Neighborhood: The Poletown Battle." Detroit News January 27, 2000; Gail Gibson, "A Neighborhood Torn Down." Baltimore Sun Feb. 20, 2005; Brian McKenna, "We All Live In Poletown Now." Counterpunch March 9, 2006.

23 "Fevered Pitch: What Advertising Has In Store for All of Us." Adbusters 71, May/June 2007.

24 Google returns a quarter of a million sources for this. They all confirm the phenomenon.

Two/Ideology and the Right Brain (continued)

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
If you live or if you die
God damn the pusher.

- Hoyt Axton

The list of violent crimes committed by the automobile industry is long and ugly. The civilian Hummer, a suburban war machine for wealthy paranoids and California governors; the cooler-than-a-minivan Explorer, with its magically disappearing tires and dramatic rollovers; the Pintos, Mustangs, and Chevy pickups that turned into funeral pyres for their drivers on impact, and the Police Interceptor rolling coffins that immolated cops called to those gruesome scenes11—all were ghastly affronts to refined sensibilities. But none was as brutal an attack as the one perpetrated by National City Lines, the syndicate made of Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Mack Truck, under the command of General Motors and its chairman, Alfred Sloan.12 From the 1920s through the 50s, this group "invested in" and then destroyed the streetcar, cable car, trolley car, and all other rail-based mass transit systems in cities across the United States.13 When the last steel rails had been ripped out of the streets, a "better" form of people-moving rolled in—on Firestone tires connected to a GM bus body with a Mack diesel under the hood and Standard Oil in the fuel tank.

The nation's cities, defiled and broken, cried out for justice. Justice was then served: a $5,000 fine for GM and each of its partners.14 The CEOs could be heard laughing all the way to Washington, where the Defense Department was proposing a series of interstate highways—you know, so that the military could move swiftly when called upon in an emergency. And so that former General Motors chairman Charles Wilson, who now ran the very same government agency promoting those highways, could get away just as quickly when angry mobs showed up to confront him for the villainous racketeering.

Except that no mobs showed up. President Eisenhower, freshly mesmerized by Mr. Wilson, told the American people that the highway system would keep them free and strong and mobile. The people, their hearts swelled by Dinah Shore's stirring assurance that "America is asking you to call" by driving Chevrolets across the U.S.A., obediently fell into patriotic trances and chanted, "We Like Ike."

The carnage continued. Two-lane roads that had been main thoroughfares became empty lines on landscapes, their roadside attractions forgotten after being bypassed and cut off. The towns that had dotted those two-lanes became shells or found their shapes contorting to reach the new freeway interchanges just beyond the city limits, where farms and woods were clear-cut to sprout shopping malls with acres of free parking. In major cities, downtowns emptied; in suburbs, construction boomed. And then, riding in the back of a shiny Cadillac convertible on fat Firestone tires, a clown, a king, a retired Confederate colonel, and a freckled girl with bright red pigtails rolled into every city in the nation to set up the burger joints, chicken shacks, and taco stands that would turn meat into a commodity ingested at the rate of 284 million tons annually, worldwide, by 2007.15

While this crime spree played out in the United States, passenger train service in Japan, Germany, France, and across Europe steadily became faster, roomier, quieter, and more efficient. The U.S. closed its train stations and sold off its passenger rail lines. Japan and Europe invested in high-speed trains that would eventually rival the airlines for speed and convenience.16 The U.S. invested in rockets and sent two guys to the moon. In Japan, Honda was engineering its first fuel-efficient cars for export to America, where the Big Three were busy building engines so powerful, fuel-thirsty, and gigantic that whole front ends had to be redesigned for existing product lines to contain them. (Even with the retooling, muscle cars "wanted to plow off the road front end first every time they were poured into a curve," as one automotive writer put it.17) Few owners expected these monstrous motors to last more than five years or 50,000 miles before throwing a rod or blowing a freeze plug, and then the cars were towed to the scrapyard.

Three years later, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries shut it all down with a resolute flip of a switch and a firm "No more oil for you." By this point the U.S. auto industry had long since gone completely homicidal and psychotic. With nothing left to destroy, it began to cannibalize itself.

====SOURCES====

11 Fuel Tank Hazards. Byron Bloch Auto Safety Design, Inc. www.autosafetyexpert.com/video

12 John Gartner, “The Pernicious Price of Petroleum.” Wired, December 2006; John Anderson, “Review: ‘Taken for a Ride.’” Newsday

13 Ibid.

14 John Anderson, “Review: ‘Taken for a Ride.’” Newsday.

15 Mark Bittman, “Producing Meat Taxes Energy, Environment.” New York Times, Feb. 10 2008.

16 Edward Miller, “Light Rail Is the Answer.” Marin County Coastal Post, June 2005.

17 Joe Oldham, Muscle Car Confidential. Motorbooks, 2007.

Two/Ideology and the Right Brain

Because they have refused to sign on to the energy rationing required by Kyoto, Americans and Australians will be wealthier, healthier, and therefore better able to deal with future environmental challenges, whatever their cause.

- Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy, Competitive Enterprise Institute 9


Not only has our federal government thus far failed to take action to prevent the worst consequences of unchecked global warming pollution, but it has failed fundamentally to take reasonable precautions against global warming-induced storms and drought, and the high costs that will be borne by families, businesses and ultimately, taxpayers.

- David Tuft, campaign director, Natural Resources Defense Council Climate Center 10


It starts by asking a simple question: Who was the first person to propose taking an amazingly versatile but totally non-renewable resource that never decomposes—and using it as a commodity to throw into the garbage? And what kinds of drugs was that guy on?

By definition, this genius was using his right brain, because he sure as hell wasn’t using his left, where logic lives. No, this kind of five-star idea is definitely thinking way outside the box and is deeply, profoundly creative—a sure sign of right brain origin. Let’s say you discover a miraculous natural substance that has literally thousands of uses, especially in making life-saving healthcare equipment and medical devices, and after telling me that there is a finite limit to how much of this stuff you can find, you ask me what we should do with it.

“Why, let's set it on fire and bury it in the landfill!” I reply confidently, beaming broadly and looking exactly like the blithering idiot I would be if I said that.

But someone has said it.

Several someones, in fact.

Billions of us.

That’s right, us. We have said it. Over and over and over and over again—to the point where we could no longer hear the lunacy in the words. Even as the news builds in volume, confirming that we are assuredly reaching a point where demand outpaces supply—i.e. that there are more of us than there is of it—we keep setting fire to oil and throwing it into the garbage. Sounds like insanity, but remember, this program is brought to us by the same guys who, after receiving the monster of all wake-up calls during the 1970s Arab Oil Embargo, decided that the best way to prevent massive and debilitating oil emergencies in the future would be to form a new group of products called Hummer, Escalade, & Excursion. And then sit around and quibble over which of those petrol pigs was the biggest and longest.

But most women will admit that there’s a point where biggest and longest stop being assets and start being threats to comfort and safety. The party that's getting shafted tends to have a different perspective than the one wielding the shaft. One group adds four inches to its overall wheelbase, and another group bleeds.


====SOURCES====

9 Natural Resources Defense Council, “Press Release: US Not Prepared for Peril from Global Warming.” Apr. 19, 2007.

10 Competitive Enterprise Institute, “United States and Australia Dodge Kyoto Bullet.” Feb. 14, 2005.

One/Introduction (Continued)

And we wonder why our kids can’t get fired up enough to vote. In fact, we attack and mock “today’s youth,” each election year, for their apathy and laziness. If only they could vote by texting on their damned cell phones, ha ha. If only they weren’t so busy posting misspelled and ungrammatical comments on YouTube and MySpace, hee hee. If only they weren’t filled with such utter despair by the parade of morally bankrupt weasels that march and preen in front of them in two, four, or six year cycles… oh, wait, that one’s not a joke.

But while there’s nothing to admire at the top levels of government where we’re being murdered, there is a lot going on at the very bottom, where city mayors—not just billionaires like New York’s Michael Bloomberg, but people like Wallace P. Nutting of Biddeford, Maine, and Joanne Atlas of Ringwood, New Jersey4—have taken the lead from Seattle’s Mayor, Greg Nickles, who in the winter of 2005 came to a “staggering” conclusion: (a) his city depended on rain and melted snow for its water supply; but (b) there had been virtually no snowfall all winter.5 From this compact fluorescent energy-saving lightbulb going off came the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, formed as a defiant middle finger aimed directly at the Bush II administration’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol for greenhouse emissions reduction. In fact, the USMCP was formed on the exact day that 141 other nations kicked the Kyoto agreement into action6—with Uncle Sam and his flowing white beard nowhere to be seen.

Why would the mayor of a major US city like Seattle, along with 400 of his colleagues in other cities around the nation, want to challenge George “The Decider” Bush Junior at a time when they all knew that the hyenas at Fox News could tear them apart at any moment for being unpatriotic extremists? “We as mayors have the opportunity to push the envelope and get people thinking, even when it is not politically popular,” Nickles said. “Cities hold the key.”7 But another group of troublemakers at the lower levels of leadership might disagree with that. Begun in 2003 at the instigation of New York Governer George Pataki, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative had nine states8 as full members by 2007 after their governors saw that the Bush/Cheney machine was only interested in the state of the oil industry and the state of the coal industry. It should be no surprise that eight of those states are along the eastern seaboard. Just recite the litany: higher temperatures, increasing storms and fires, rising sea levels…. If Rush Limbaugh bellows in the forest, but the forest is underwater, does he make a sound?

Right view, right intentions, right speech, right actions. Radicals seeking independence from an inattentive and unconcerned government, round two.

Mayors. Governors. What next—citizens?

Well, yes. We can all join these “little leaders” at the city and state levels of government in putting an end to the slow but steady slaughter of six billion human beings. We can prevent our own murders through only two steps of the Eightfold Path: right view and right speech. If we want to live, then there’s the basic foundation for a right view already. That leaves only one step. Note the word that Mayor Nickles chose: he said opportunity, not obligation, and not responsibility. The latter two are dark, heavy words, onerous and odious, but opportunity is a big fluffy ball of bright yellow sunshine. And what is the United States, if not the land of opportunity itself! The perfect place for a perfect word to become transformed from abstraction to realization through a shift in ideology, and through a reinvigoration of the right brain as the command center for finding the right intentions and achieving the right actions.

It starts by asking a simple question.

====SOURCES====

4 www.coolmayors.com/common/directory

5 www.coolmayors.com/common/news/reports

6 www.coolmayors.com/common/about

7 www.coolmayors.com/common/news/reports

8 www.rggi.org/about; Natural Resources Defense Council, “Press Release: Multi-State Compact to Fight Global Warming Expands Once Again.” Apr. 20, 2007.

9 Natural Resources Defense Council, “Press Release: US Not Prepared for Peril from Global Warming.” Apr. 19, 2007.

One/Introduction

We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us.... We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.

- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing: Campaign 2004"

It’s a strange and terrible thing to have to ask the United States government to please stop killing me and the rest of the world. Nothing in my public school education, and especially in the parochial school warm-up before it, could have prepared me to write those words. My country was the biggest, fastest, strongest, greatest, and most moral of any nation on God’s earth. We were the good guys, fighting to stop the Godless Commies from taking over the world via a tiny sliver of land called Vietnam, just as we’d been the good guys who saved Europe from the Nazis in World War II. Putting my hand over my heart each morning from kindergarten through eighth grade, I pledged my allegiance to that red, white, and blue symbol of everything that was right and true and good and wise. The symbol represented a nation, run by a government, made up of individual people who were giants among mere mortals, and who, more than anything, could be trusted to provide justice for all—the last three words of a pledge recited earnestly five days a week, 32 weeks a year. I provided unquestioning allegiance, and they provided justice, and I would never have to ask them to please stop killing me and six billion of my extended family members.

The journey from that level of total childhood trust to complete adult skepticism has been a long and painful process, with little shards of reality cutting away steadily at the protective bubble until I’m forced to write the most agonizing words a person can direct at his government, a group of former giants now exposed as mere mortals. But somehow they've kept their colossal status, regardless of C-average college grades and obvious allegiances to former business partners first, nation third (or sixth, or tenth) because we need them to be giants still, because if they are not giants then we have no protectors, no leaders, no wise men, no visionaries—and no hope. Our drive to go on living every day depends on continuing to keep our murderers propped up as titans.

And that makes no sense.

But really it makes perfect sense, because what keeps a group of human beings in power is the collective ideology of those over whom they’re allowed to have power. Without our agreement to think along correct, officially-sanctioned, publicly-rewarded lines, the whole facade would crumble like a skeletal Jenga tower. It’s not the military that holds a society together, nor the economy, but only the simple power of shared ideas and similar thinking. They are killing us; yes. But they are our leaders. Leaders lead; the led follow. This is how things work.

There’s a problem with the but up there in italics, of course. If only it were flipped to an and instead, the idea would be transformed. They are killing us, but they are our leaders offers semantic shelter by the word choice alone: implied is some justification—however wrong and bizarre it might be (if it were questioned, which it is not)—for the action. Surely, they know what they’re doing. Quiet now; go back to sleep.

Substituting and for but derails that train of thought and throws a brick through the distortion lens. They are killing us—and they are our leaders!

How the hell did that happen?

Words matter. Little words make enormous differences. The term “global warming” frightens people; it calls forth images of a planet getting hotter. The idea is disturbing—and it should be. If you set fire to my house, I’m going to be frightened, disturbed, alarmed, and totally freaked out. Not to mention extremely annoyed. But hey, if you want to stop by the place and just change it a little, I’d be open to giving you the benefit of the doubt and seeing how the results turn out. You might be a pretty skilled carpenter. Who knows?

And so is born a nicer term, made of words that don’t scare anyone. Times change, seasons change, people change, climate change; change is good, change is natural, change is occurring, change is progress…. Bury the words as far and deep in there as possible; make ‘em part of a gentle chant, words falling like soft rain or moving like a light breeze. Nature images are perfect since climate change is natural; hell, climate is nature. We play discs of nature’s sounds for babies to help them fall asleep. Nature is soothing.

Except for when it’s kicking our asses from here to China. Burning us. Drowning us. Blowing our houses off their foundations. Turning our coastlines to mud. And even worse, lowering our property values. Truly scary stuff. Frank Luntz, the Republican advisor and focus-group maestro who advised the Bush II government to officially change global warming to climate change, knew the huge differences that a little word choice can make, writing that “while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” For good measure, Luntz also advised changing "conservationist" to "environmentalist" to inject a "connotation of extremism."2

We can only hope that Mr. Luntz’s house will be burned, flooded, and blown into splinters with excruciating and deliberate slowness, so that he can enjoy the “more controllable and less emotional challenge” to its fullest potential. I suspect he might show some “extremist” behavior seeing his wordly existence destroyed, but out of charity we could call it “desolation.” Poor guy.

The thing is that even smart spinmeisters like Frank Luntz get tripped up in their own rhetorical techniques. Luntz, interviewed by PBS and asked why he recommended the word swap to the Bush II administration, tried to dismiss the issue by answering with his own question: “What is the difference? It is climate change. Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?”3 But really, if it’s such a small matter, then why did he recommend the change? That’s where he steps onto the glue trap of cold logic and gets caught with his rat tail sticking out.

• • • • •

The Buddhist conception of the Noble Eightfold Path contains four basic principles that we in the West no longer expect, and so no longer require, from our national leaders: Right View, Right Intentions, Right Speech, and Right Actions. Instead, we’ve settled for two sides of the same coin that we call left and right, both equally worthless because they’ve abandoned the idea of social responsibility and traded away ethical leadership for corporate sponsorship. We no longer matter to them, and so they are killing us. The only thing they see is money, their intentions are to preserve wealth for the wealthy, their speech is peppered with rhetoric poured like poison into their ears by scumpuppies like Frank Luntz, and their actions are either despicable or deplorable.

And we wonder why kids can’t get fired up enough to vote.

====SOURCES====

1 Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Air Pollution.

2 “Person Profile: Frank Luntz.” Media Transparency. www.mediatransparency.org

3 “Interview: Frank Luntz.” Frontline, PBS, Nov. 2004.