Re: Energy and politics.

[Rob Schaap <carob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scary post, Gene!

And a hard winter in Europe and North America may compress much of the story
into very little time, eh?  I imagine richer Californians are on to roof
solar cells in a big way.  Is there a plan in California by which a
households' excess power is directed back into the grid, btw?  I'd imagine
this'd hardly threaten an excess production problem, so even a
megabroker-controlled utility wouldn't mind paying wholesale rates for those
bits of potential embarrassment-avoidance.

As for the rest of your scenario, I really can't imagine Californians
letting coal power back.  Red is all but dead, but green is still big there.
 Non-compliance with Kyoto can easily be dressed up as a proud recovery of
national sovereignty on the part of a much put-upon Uncle Sam (I dare say it
already is).  And as for global warming, I imagine that'll kill
Bangladeshis, Malvinans and Tongans first.  So no problem there.  Then the
West European economies will lose the Guinea current and their economies
will ice up.  Mebbe even some short-term advantage there for US producers.
But, yeah, whilst America might ride the first physical assaults the more
comfortably, its time will come.  As everyone else'll be well-fucked by
then, whatever they might choose to do then won't matter much.

Maybe I spend too much time on Crash-L (I do tend to see climate in this
weather everyone's having), but I can't help but feel what went on at the
Hague last month, coupled with the unprecedented primacy of 'shareholder
value' and the ascendancy of that Sahara Club posterboy, well, it all looks
like there's absolutely nothing in our institutions and dispositions capable
of responding to any of this (oil-dependence, aquifer-depletion,
soil-degradation and fisheries-disembowelment all included).  Nope.  If
anything positive is gonna transpire - and if there be time for it to
transpire, well, it'll have to take the form of some kinda overwhelming
extra-institutional groundswell.

And it ain't like anyone's in any position to spot a point-of-no-return,
either.  That point will declare itself, I fear, in the denouement itself.
As Steven Wright reminds us, experience is something you get just after you
needed it.

He also says a fool and his money are soon partying, so I'm off for some
Vat69 and a blast of Junior Wells (it'll have to be a CD sadly; no turntable
in the shed) ... snatch it back and hold it ... somebody gotta help us, coz
we can't help ourselves ...

Sigh.

Gargling and puffing amongst the Huntsman spiders (and a stunning hawkmoth
caterpillar  - dauntingly horned at the front, fat and sleekly green all the
four centimetres to the false eyes glaring at me from atop a modest
fundament whence might issue the very tribute of which the 'Bureau of
Transport and Communications Economics Report on Diffusion of
Communications, Entertainment and Information Services' beneath it is so
deserving),
Rob.

>    Let me conclude by saying that I think this is heralding a major
>political earthquake.  But I have no sense of what the place will look
>like after the first few shock waves.