First, can someone tell me why philosophy isn’t taught in high school?  Is there some reason we think we need to shelter kids from life’s great questions until they’re older? I never taught the subject formally, though I tutored quite a few undergraduates while I was in graduate school, which often caused me to wonder how I would construct my own “101” course if I happened to be in that position, and at what age group I would present it.

What happened when mankind evolved to the point, about 10,000 years ago, that we had a solid grasp on basic agricultural principles, and so no longer needed to roam, hunting for and gathering food in a nonstop life-and-death struggle? What happened when we started to look up into the heavens — and the questions started to flow: Who made all this stuff? Why are we here? What happens when we die?

I’d certainly get the kids into questions like that – “speculative philosophy” as it’s called.  But I wouldn’t do so at the expense of “moral philosophy,” whose questions are different, though no easier: What is the nature of our responsibilities to others? What does it mean to say I have a “right” to do or have something? A “duty?” And from what do these rights and duties come? The bible? Our conscience? The mores of our group?

I bring this up because the debate about energy really unfolds along these lines. It boils down to this:

If we really don’t have a duty to anyone but ourselves, we can serve the world’s energy needs very well with fossil fuels. Yes, we’re running out of oil, but not right this minute. Yes, fossil fuels more generally are ruining our health and our environment, but they’re by far the cheapest way to power our civilization at this point in time. People who scoff at the idea of a duty to others say, “Look, we can generate baseload electricity with coal at about three cents a kilowatt-hour.   If that creates a problem, that’s too damn bad. Until someone can beat three cents, we’ll burn coal. ”

Yes, there is no doubt that we can do that. But don’t all people have certain rights — and others among us certain duties — that make this a more interesting question?

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Here’s a wonderful video presentation of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ the clever reminder that problems in the world are nothing new, and really nothing to get too concerned over. I infer that this philosophy must be quite dear to him, as he expresses it in many of his songs, e.g., The Angry Young Man:

There’s always a place for the angry young man

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand

He’s never been able to learn from mistakes

So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks

His honor is pure, and his courage as well

He’s fair and he’s true, and he’s boring as hell

And he’ll go to his grave as an angry old man.

….

I do believe I’ve passed the age

Of consciousness and righteous rage

I’ve found that just surviving was a noble fight

I once believed in causes too

I had my pointless point of view

But life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

While this is brilliant stuff, and extremely musical, it’s sickeningly wrong-headed.  I know I’m decidedly unhip, but remember Margaret Mead? She left us with:  “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” And how about Edmund Burke?  He reminded us: “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” Ideas like these may not sell records, but there’s a lot of truth there.

In 2009 and 2010, the oil companies took $500 million, a considerable fortune, yet a tiny sliver of the profits they had retained, and invested it into lobbying Congress against climate change legislation. I don’t use the word “evil” lightly, but it’s more than appropriate here. And labeling this behavior as evil — and trying to do something about it — is not a “pointless point of view.”

I can appreciate the hedonistic viewpoint, and the rock stars who take their riches and party, well, like rock stars.  But I submit that there are other ideals worth pursuing as well.

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Frequent commenter “Shivrat” writes:

Great that solar investment is increasing so rapidly, and agreed that many challenges lie ahead, but would you say that a paradigm shift to renewables is inevitable in the long term? After all, something like 80% of oil is produced in 6 countries, and 90% of natural gas reserves lie in 3 countries, right? Given that global energy demand is set to increase by 50% in the next few decades, wouldn’t market forces seem to make it futile for anyone to resist (fossil fuels’) decline in the long term?

This is an excellent question – one that surprisingly few people ask. The basic answer is the short-term focus of most people and entities.

I happened to ask a friend who runs a very successful hedge fund why the stock price of the oil companies doesn’t take into consideration their ultimate demise. I pointed out that a company like Chevron, for instance, has a huge market cap based on an extremely specific skill set (oil exploration, production and distribution) and will not be able to diversify into clean energy – or anything else — to any appreciable degree. He laughed out loud! “Craig,” he grinned, “the attention of the stock market is measured in minutes, hours, days and weeks, not decades. What will happen in 2030 has no relevance here at all.”

Individual people are really no different, which is why we’re having such a problem focusing on global climate change. In fact, there are a number of different psychological issues that conspire against rationality here:

1) We have a huge “discount rate,” devaluing future pain against our immediate pleasure. Like drug addicts and teenagers, many of us behave as though the future doesn’t really exist.

2) We wrongly assume that the future will be pretty similar to the past, which, in this case, is dead wrong.

3) We have a limited capacity for disaster. When the nightly news brings us tales of woe from all over the globe, we eventually go numb.

4) Extremely aggressive, professional, and super well-funded public relations campaigns (like the ones being waged by the big oil companies) are extremely effective. Note the ever-increasing number of Americans who believe global climate change is a hoax, even though this concept flies in the teeth of more than 97% of climate scientists.

That’s my viewpoint, for what it’s worth.  Thanks again for the excellent question.

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It’s the birthday of John Philip Sousa, the “March King,” born in 1854. Best known for his patriotic music, the U.S. Marine Corps Hymn “Semper Fidelis,” and of course “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Sousa loved a rousing live performance, and generally reviled the phonograph, as he believed that it would result in people’s singing less. In fact, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Sousa performed at Willowgrove Park, a wonderful old amusement park that meant a great deal to me as a boy growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs.  (Now, of course, it’s a shopping mall.) 

I often wonder what the great patriots of history would say about what and whom we’ve become. Of course, I tend to look at the question through the lens of energy. Thus I ponder what Sousa might think about our de facto energy policy, blithely borrowing an incremental billion dollars a day and sending it offshore to buy another ten million or so barrels of oil, empowering our sworn enemies, and ruining our environment.

If Sousa had trouble with the phonograph, I can’t imagine he’d look on this self-destructive energy policy too kindly.

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Sorry to sound like a broken record, but a huge part of our problem is simple ‘resistance to change’.  The main reason why Palin and Perry may be even more resistant is they represent states with super-abundant fossil fuel resources, is that they do not want change or questions which rock their profit boats. After all, it’s those resource and production profits which allow Texas and Alaska to have no state income tax. Lots of taxes collected on conventional energy, at many levels.

To a large extent, the Republican political debates include politicians from pretty diverse states, both the haves and have-nots. Massachusetts (Romney-land) is an importer of its energy so it can be expected to have a different prevailing view from reps from energy-exporting states like Texas and Alaska. Super-crowded, high population-density states like Massachusetts are also completely different territories, politically, from sparcely populated states like Texas and Alaska where land seems still very abundant and resources are almost free for as many takers as desire.

Indeed, look at our blue-red political maps nowdays. Is it odd that the more rural, less population-dense, more food-producing, less cities-dominated regions are leaning one way while the more urban, more population-dense, less food-producing areas seem leaning the opposite ways?

… Texas and Alaska won’t like this. Nor will Kentucky or West Virginia or Ohio which produce a lot of coal.

…. So we can expect a “some states vs others” conflict for the foreseeable future.

To be sure. I go back to what we all learned as children about the formation of the United States and the debate over the powers of the states vs. the federal government, in which the voices of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, and the others will forever be remembered. And of course, this wasn’t put to rest by the Founding Fathers; it heated up for almost a full century, came to a head in the Civil War, and has festered in various strange and terrible ways ever since.

Though I can sympathize with the states rights advocates at the time, given the tyranny from which they had narrowly escaped and their rightful concerns about a strong central government, I think it’s obvious that we’d have a more productive, less bureaucratic and more just country if those people had simply lost the argument to Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalists at the time.  We are most certainly not a better nation because we have 50 sets of criminal and civil statutes, 50 individual different political and economic agendas, competing against one another for federal dollars in Washington, etc.

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I try not to comment on political issues that have no direct bearing on clean energy, or sustainability more generally.  Having said that, I have indeed taken up the mantle of MoveToAmend.org, in its fight to overturn corporations’ recently granted rights to spend as much as they wish to influence our elections.  The tragic US Supreme Court decision granting this right, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, is, in my mind, the single most important, and, in this case, disastrous opinion  to come from the High Court in more than 150 years (Dred Scott, 1857).

The relevance of this today  is Mitt Romney’s bold admission at the Iowa State Fair that, in his estimation, “corporations are people,” a statement that lies at the very heart of the controversy.

At least Romney had the decency to tell us where he stood.  As the MoveToAmend people put it, “He’s taking a lot of flak for it, but we want to thank Mitt for being honest about his true loyalties in a time when so many politicians are trying to hide the truth. Americans deserve to know where candidates stand on the illegitimate doctrine of Corporate Personhood.”

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In his farewell address in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us:

“You and I, and our government must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”

I was only six years old at the time, quite unaware of the insight that Ike had bestowed upon us. Of course, he wasn’t the first. 150 years earlier, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.”

I bring this up to call your attention to Jeremy Grantham’s quarterly newsletter, in which he writes about the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism as it applies to forming the underpinning of our society.  He notes:

Capitalism, despite its magnificent virtues in the short term – above all, its ability to adjust to changing conditions – has several weaknesses that affect this issue.

o It cannot deal with the tragedy of the commons, e.g., overfishing, collective soil erosion, and air contamination.

o The finiteness of natural resources is simply ignored, and pricing is based entirely on short-term supply and demand.

o More generally, because of the use of very high discount rates, modern capitalism attributes no material cost to damage that occurs far into the future. Our grandchildren and the problems they will face because of a warming planet with increasing weather instability and, particularly, with resource shortages, have, to the standard capitalist approach, no material present value.

It is clear that there is a time and place for an enlightened government to step in and regulate market activity such that it does not jeopardize our future.

Enlightened government. Does anybody know where I can get some of that?

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In a recent post I suggested that renewable energy throws a new set of variables into an already complex energy market: intermittencies, transmission issues, suitability for certain kinds of storage, etc.  At the end, I asked: Are we intellectually capable — and honest enough — to make all this happen?

In preparing for a talk I’m giving at a conference later this month, I started to think about that.  We?  Who’s “we”?  The citizens of Earth? Am I implying that the seven billion inhabitants of Earth have some collective voice in the matter?

In truth, most of the decisions that this world makes on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis with respect to energy policy fall largely into the hands of a very few billionaires, whose fortunes were made in the energy monopolies, and, though those fortunes seem bound to ebb in the future, will certainly not go down without a considerable fight. 

It’s clear that our civilization will, in fact, get to renewable energy – purely because it must.  Fossil fuels, starting with oil, will prove too costly in the long run.  Supply and demand alone will ensure that the energy stored here over the last hundred million years (and consumed without a thought over the last century) will soon become unacceptably expensive. 

But what will happen as we struggle along this supply and demand curve?  Will this become, as most of our scientists say, a tough time for a growing population of people and the biosphere that supports it?  

It’s clear that there’s more at stake here than the fortunes of a few billionaires.  May we make the right decisions.  Oops — there I go again..  Who’s “we”?

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As I’ve mentioned, I always look forward to Jeremy Grantham’s quarterly newsletter. I admire his fluid and conversational writing style, his common sense, and his viewpoint that, while making lots of money is nice, we should at least consider the idea that we all share a greater responsibility to one another.  His piece “Everything You Need To Know About Global Warming In Five Minutes“  is one of only a few documents that I hail as a “must read.” 

I hope you’ll take a few minutes and go through this quarter’s report, linked above. If I could sum it up in a sentence, I would say: the party’s over.

The pure, unavoidable mathematics of the world demonstrates clearly that we cannot continue to ignore our consumption of resources and think that our civilization will continue without consequence. There are policy elements – especially vis-à-vis energy – that we need to have in place. But this is news that we don’t want to hear, and thus our leaders feel they need to avoid.  Yet the result of inaction will be dire.

The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that we’re talking about the viewpoints of an unapologetic capitalist. If you were reading this from a left-leaning tree-hugger, you may write it off as liberal blathering. But here’s a guy who manages $107 billion on a minute-to-minute basis.  I have to think that counts for something. 

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