Archive for Energy

Water, Energy, Money, Blood

April 23, 2012 Economics, Energy, Politics, Values, Wealth No comments

Bless me my conscience; it has been seven months since my last post. In that time, we have witnessed the Republican presidential primary process deliver Mitt Romney—as clear an example of the top 1% as you can get.

We need to think about his success and the success of the 1% in general in a different way than Romney would like, or can even get his mind around. In the conservative worldview, which most of us accept without question, Romney is a winner. He played the game of wealth creation well, and is exactly what we all want to be like: rich (not stiff and awkward). Who doesn’t want to be rich?

In this prevailing worldview the accumulation of vast wealth is what all individuals seek. Along the way jobs will be created, investments will be made, and society will benefit. And this is true to a degree. But jobs are only a once-in-while by-product of wealth accumulation; many times the loss of jobs creates wealth for owners.

The unbounded creation of wealth for the top 1% is also sequestering resources that the rest of us need to be healthy. Imagine if one rich farmer had hundreds or thousands of times more water than the other farmers and there was a drought. This farmer sold the water, but if you couldn’t pay, oh well. I hope you don’t starve.

One person controlling all the precious water is a big problem. What would happen? Would the other farmers attack the rich farmer? Would they be justified in doing so? Would the government back the majority of desperate people and send troops to free the water, or be bought off by the rich farmer and send troops to keep the thirsty, starving mob at bay?

In this metaphor, water equals money. But both actually equal energy. No water, no energy for the growth of a crop. No money, no energy for the growth of the economy. By playing the game of individual wealth creation, which we all do, the winner’s jackpot is now detrimental to everyone else. The irrigation system of the economy is dry, not because there isn’t enough money, but because the flow is being restricted and tightly controlled. Money is flowing not to dehydrated everyday people but into the endless reservoirs of the 1%.

Never mind that people are dying or becoming homeless because they can’t pay their medical bills. In the system we’ve bought into Romney wins and we all lose. It’s perfectly fair that he get as much as he can. Concern for the losers is not part of the equation. But since money is the energy needed for growth, look for higher costs in blood when that energy is not forthcoming.

The 99

October 8, 2011 Economics, Emotional Energy, Energy, Media, Politics, Republicans, Values, Wealth No comments

I am very hopeful that the folks occupying Wall Street and the Build the American Dream movement are getting some traction. George Carlin had it right. It would be great if he were still around during these crazy political times.  In the clip, he gives us the reason why the other 99% are starting to make noise: it’s the behavior of “the owners” and those who work to keep them in power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q&feature=player_embedded

But the owners are only doing what we define as success in this society. As long as success is about amassing a personal fortune and controlling everything to protect and increase that fortune and not about the explicit contribution that was made to the greater good–reducing poverty, subjugation, war and the destruction of the environment–we will continue to worship and want to be like the rich.

Now the right wing in this country will say that by following your dream and becoming wealthy your are helping everyone. You are bringing value to the world and creating jobs. And this is not untrue.  But it is only one side of the coin. Like electrical regulators that control the flow of electricity so that power stays within a narrow bandwidth that is usable by all, the human energy and power that flows to and is stored by the wealthy needs to be regulated. Because when too much of the economic energy that drives society is tied up in too few hands a different sort of energy builds.

The stored energy of anger and frustration is finally being targeted at the real source of our increasing economic hardship, the disproportionate amount of economic energy currently being sequestered for the exclusive use of the top 1% .

The current flow of energy is unstable. Hopefully the new energy being generated by the other 99 will result in a more equitable distribution of power.

Thanks to my Facebook friends for finding the clip.

Love is Wise

December 29, 2010 Consciousness, Economics, Emotional Energy, Politics, Values No comments

From a friend’s Facebook post, I saw a video of Bertrand Russell giving advice to people who might see the tape in 1000 years. His quote was “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” What a great thing to live by—something that should be taught as the basis of all moral teaching. The Golden Rule is a corollary to this statement.

One might also conclude: “love is positive, hatred is negative,” or “love is positive emotional energy, hatred is negative emotional energy.” This is in line with a metaphor I’ve been thinking about lately that I think is very powerful as a guide to human activity: humans are emotional energy batteries. We store the emotional energy we receive and generate that emotional energy back to the world.

So if kids receive a lot of negative emotional energy in their formative years they transmit this negativity back as dysfunctional adults. If kids receive a lot of positive emotional energy they also tend to reflect that back as successful adults. Of course, there may be a genetic component that helps determine whether people are generators of positive or negative emotional energy. But regardless of a person’s innate orientation, negativity begets negativity and positivity begets positivity.

That’s why wars seldom solve things, particularly when the negative energy of violence does not have a clear target. WWII presented a clear evil with a mad dictator directing a well-defined, military entity. In the kind of wars we’re fighting now, the negative energy of violence is much more likely to create stored negative energy in a population than to curb future violence.

At some level our civilian and military leaders understand this, which is why there is an emphasis on building schools and stabile, secure areas in Afghanistan where people can live their lives without the negative energy of fear and violence. But our bombs often create more negative energy than can be overcome by other positive acts. And our fundamentalist enemies are big time negative energy generators.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives has a better solution.

“The NSP wants advanced industrial countries of the world to use their resources to eliminate once and for all global and domestic, poverty, homelessness, and hunger; provide quality education and health care for all; and repair the global environment. As an initial commitment, we want the U.S. to donate at least 1-2% of its Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty years, in the form of a Global Marshall Plan (GMP).”

The link is here: http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/gmp_one. This would certainly be following a wise policy as defined by Bertrand Russell.

Driven by Fear

August 18, 2010 Consciousness, Energy, Politics, Uncategorized, Values No comments

In a previous blog, I talked about positive and negative freedom—how progressives are more apt to promote the freedom to and conservatives seem more oriented toward freedom from. For example, the freedom to get married for gays and the freedom from government intrusion for business owners.

But perhaps a stronger way to show the difference between conservative and progressive ideology is to think about positive and negative emotional energy. Negative emotional energy is fear, hate, insecurity, greed, exclusion and a rigid set of beliefs. Positive emotional energy is hope, love, sharing, community, inclusion, and open-minded critical thinking. As one who is solidly in the latter camp, it seems pretty obvious which ideology is positive and which is negative.

Conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers all seem to be driven by fear: fear of immigrants, fear of government, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of their tax money being given to the poor who didn’t work for it. They have a totally erroneous belief that the world consists of isolated individuals, some who are deserving—themselves and the wealthy—and some who are not—anyone not like them or poor. They don’t realize no human being is an island and that we’re all connected.

As pointed out in an excellent Alternet.org article (link below), de Tocqueville observed about the distinctive American mentality more than 150 years ago, “Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.” [from http://tinyurl.com/29r2x3r]

Human progress is marked by successive expansions of the community of man, such as the abolition of slavery, the expansion of civil and womens’ rights, and an understanding that we all share one planet. Conservatives are desperately resisting this expansion of consciousness. They seem determined to hang on to views that are not consistent with progress, views motivated by the negative emotional energy of fear.

This site is about promoting an understanding that beneath each individual’s beliefs is a human who needs as much positive, supportive, and respectful emotional energy as possible. May hope, critical thinking and community, triumph over fear, rigidity, and greed. One can be optimistic because that is the general trend of historical progress. But we are entering a time of hardship, and fear is an unfortunate, negative, but natural human response. It will take more than hope for continued human progress and a more global species consciousness to evolve.

Dynamic Equilibrium vs. More More More

July 26, 2010 Economics, Energy, Politics, Values No comments

In high school I learned that living systems, if they are healthy, achieve a state of dynamic equilibrium. That is they are in balance. There are a lot of processes going on but they act on each other to stay in balance. A simple example is any local ecosystem prior to man’s arrival. There may be too much rain or too many of one kind of species for a while, but the overall ecosystem comes back into balance over time. Without humans, the whole earth would be in a kind of dynamic equilibrium.

Clearly humans have thrown the natural balance of the planet out of whack. We’re using a huge amount of energy and creating a huge amount of waste product. Without a change, the energy required to keep human progress going will run out. More people chasing a better life will need more and more energy—more coal, more oil, more water, more food. More energy for more machines and more energy for more humans.

More energy use means more waste by product—carbon dioxide, methane, toxic chemicals, trash. And this waste is what’s threatening to throw the planet into a new state of dynamic equilibrium that will be extremely detrimental to humans and other life on the planet. Balance will be restored but at the cost of many lives and much hardship. But you probably know this already. The question is can we change?

To change the way we act requires a change in beliefs and values. Right now most people on the planet are operating with a core set of beliefs that is not aligned with our best interests or the true nature of the universe. We believe that the pursuit of happiness equals the pursuit of stuff, of wealth. We think the more stuff we have the happier we’ll be. Our economic systems are set up to encourage this, to promote “wealth creation.”

But it turns out, according to Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathetic Civilization, that “once people have achieved a minimum level of well-being that allows them to adequately survive and prosper, additional accumulations of wealth do not increase their happiness but, rather make them less happy…” [p 497].

The idea that we must accumulate all that we can, that life is a competition, is ingrained in all of us. “I’ve earned this stuff, it’s mine, and the government doesn’t have any right to take it and share it with others who didn’t work for it.” That’s the way the prevailing value system shakes out if you’re a “conservative.” But unless we refocus on creating a dynamic planetary equilibrium for all, rather than wealth creation for a few, we face disaster for all.

The End Is Near

July 2, 2010 Economics, Energy, Evolution, Politics, Values No comments

If you’re awake and paying attention you may have noticed that things aren’t going so well right now. The oil spill in the gulf is a harbinger of more difficult challenges ahead as we have to go to greater depths, literally and figuratively, to find the oil that powers our world. That’s because the end of easy cheap oil is here. That’s bad news for the economic reality of the life we’ve become accustomed to. Because to work properly, the dynamics of our current economy depend on constant growth fueled by cheap oil. So the end of life as we know it is near. And the change that is bearing down on us is not pretty.

Of course it’s not like the economic system we have has been working all that well anyway. The middle class is going backward and the millennials are really going backward in terms of prosperity. The world economy had to stop growing sometime. Constant growth—in the stock market, in home prices, in ever more affordable energy—has never been possible. But it’s only now, when it’s ending that we realize we shouldn’t have expected an ever-rising arrow of economic well-being.

The idea that most of our kids will have a better life than we did has already ended. With cheap energy ending, global warming coming and a world economic system increasingly unable to sustain itself at the current level, life as we’ve come to know it is definitely ending.

The question is how bad will it be when it ends? You see, many great civilizations, such as Rome and the Egyptians, collapsed not because of conquerors, but primarily because they grew too large for the energy resources available. Their agricultural land went fallow and in the case of Rome at least, the dark ages ensued. (This is laid out in the great 2009 book The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin.) Right before the industrial revolution Europe was entering an energy crisis because the wood they used for virtually all housing and energy was almost gone. Fortunately rail and mining technology arrived just in time for a transition to coal without a real nasty economic collapse.

Will we be so fortunate? Or will we only transition to new forms of cleaner, sustainable energy after life as we know it ends? Right now the power lies in the hands of those who control the oil and the industries that rely on it. Unless we all rise up and recognize it’s already ending and work together to make a transition many of the humans on this planet are definitely going feel extreme stress. I don’t want civilization as I’ve known it to end. But unless we radically change course, the end truly is near. It’s too bad that many in power have let self-interest be a blanket they pull up over their heads to keep from having to acknowledge how near the end is.