the duchy of hetkettle trophish

— scott ritter, exploring his personal experience in the land between the diabolical and the naïve

ps. and there’s a walk-on for the crown prince, at the end.

pps. so. eisenhower.

“Our public relations problem almost defies solution,” Eisenhower complained more than once. The problem was indeed insoluble. He spent eight years trying to persuade the world that he wanted to reduce nuclear weapons, while every day he built more of them, planned how to use them, and resisted efforts for disarmament.… it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would “push [his] whole stack of chips into the pot” and “hit ‘em … with everything in the bucket”; who would “shoot your enemy before he shoots you”; who believed that the U.S. could “pick itself up from the floor” and win a nuclear war, even though “everybody is going crazy,” as long as “only” 25 or 30 American cities got “shellacked” and nobody got too “hysterical.”

i guess the russians were right to hurry.

ppps. in the latest left business observer, doug henwood seems to think naomi klein’s “disaster capitalism” idea ignores the richly criminal history of the ownership class, and asks

is this really all we can do? tinker while the weather’s fair, and get ready to duck and cover on a moment’s notice? in the US we did better back in the nineteenth century, when pinkertons were shooting strikers.

lately i’m thinking more along the lines of “suicide capitalism”.…

pppps. “but it’s not!”

none of them were about sex. i checked.

ps. i suppose it’s possible there are no unanswered questions about that subject. but if we are talking about the scientific method, about the gathering of data and testing and retesting of assumptions, and the attempt to reach… a… yeah see i’m having trouble reconciling “conclusion” here with the idea of “please don’t stop.” it merits ongoing study, right?

if you’re thinking your share of the pie will remain fat for your lifetime, forget it.

other people’re smarter than you, with smaller shares. if you don’t use your bigger energy budget for their benefit they’ll kick your ass. where ya gonna hide? your exhaust trail is visible over the horizon.

ps. oh, shock.

In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from power stations by 80–90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated, the individual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. The government has launched a competition for companies to build the first demonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by 2014.

Unfortunately, despite Hutton’s repeated assurances, this has nothing to do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS experiment has even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take “at least 15 years” to assess. It will take many more years for the technology to be retrofitted to existing power stations, by which time it’s all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

it’s not their fault, though. at that scale, all they know is how to start wars.

For the companies which will bid to bury the gas, one technique is more attractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil fields. The gas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its viscosity and pushing it into the production wells. It’s called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The oil the companies sell offsets some of the costs of carbon storage.

A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the environmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the scheme BP proposed (but abandoned last year) for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off the coast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and extracted 40 million barrels of oil. Taking into account only the four major fuel products, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh the savings by between seven and fifteen times.

ok, i must have some quote around here about how capitalism will arrive at environmentalism by its own decision process. i wonder if this is what my uncle meant about the crime of using fresh water for EOR. did he have another substance in mind? i thought we were finding (un)common ground — but it was a short phone call.

pps. ok, wait. i know that current energy systems are actually an effort to avert war (via)…

“Foster economic ties,” he says, “and the reason for warfare, which is usually resources, will probably dissipate.”

…and that the availability of energy is a key to realizing dreams…

“My little dream,” he confesses, is that all nations give equal decision-making power to two entities, “a House of Men and a House of Women.”

…and nightmares, too, can’t forget, but still, before castigating the corrupt fuckers for their more underhanded obsequy, there’s something to be said for keeping very rich, greedy, and misinformed people from taking steps.

ppps. when and if it is impractical to jail them.

big fat pink conveyor belt sensitive to many pressures.

Scientists now estimate that the Columbia River system once gained about 400 million pounds of nutrients from each year’s salmon runs, before the dams broke the cycle. … Samples of salmonberry bushes growing streamside reveal as much as 18 percent of their nutrients are ocean-derived, making it one of the more aptly named plants around.

why did they leave? where did they go? will they return? let us hope so.

ps. cuz if they don’t, we fucked up!

pps. meanwhile, i didn’t think they would, because of us being diurnal and dynamic demand and maybe even swapping batteries—

Oblige all chains of filling stations to supply leasable electric car batteries. This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt. A crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore windfarms. Timescale: fully operational by 2011.

—which BTW i annotated and played with — and because charging stuff at night is a good match for the wind farming biz — well, anyway, it turns out like i thought and maybe you thought,

Plug-in Hybrids Might not Need New Power Plants

ppps. another approach: building up to it.

The first time I publicly gave this talk it was at a technology conference for the programmer / hacker community. The temptation was to say that “Earth’s climate is humanity’s operating system” and that “what temperature we choose determines what functional calls we have, how stable the platform is, and what chances there are that we crash the OS and have to reboot”. That mightn’t be the best metaphor for general audiences, but the point of bringing it up here is we need to find the metaphors for every audience. Everyone needs to develop an intuition for what this means to us all.

what metaphor is right for you? i like sex.

My personal interpretation of the information laid out here is that this is the biggest engineering challenge ever faced by mankind. That barely implies that it is also the biggest social, economic and political challenge in history! I personally would conclude that you should support a concerted effort to meet this challenge in every way possible whilst also learning to live your personal life in healthier and happier ways.

^_^   <— healthy happy face

This is after all about our collective choice, not the choice of any single player in the game. The coal companies get their vote, the environmentalists get their vote, middle Americans get their vote, Indian peasants get their vote. It’s everyone’s climate. That’s what we have to realize. It’s everyone’s climate. It’s everyone’s choice.

pppps. swim swim swim swim swim *jump*

ppppps. today’s info-helpings on generation and distribution come in two sizes: more and much more.

building up to it part two