T. Boone Pickens has generated a lot of press lately, with his plan:
After watching Grist, TreeHugger, World Changing, Huffington Post, Climate Progress, and New York Times, all weigh in, it seems that the old man’s got some things right, and others not:
RIGHT ON: going crazy with wind power.
WRONG: natural gas vehicles
As with Al Gore, my main issue with Pickens‘ plan is the flagrant omission of conservation as a necessary part of the answer. It is one thing to propose some solutions. It is another to suggest an all encompassing plan, when in fact it fails to include a measure as critical as conservation efforts.
Gore and Pickens are con men, preying on the unfounded fears promoted by the mainstream media and govt.
It’s a scam wrapped in the “Save the Planet” mantra.
Too bad, because it is going to cost the average person big time – for nothing.
Google – Al Gore, Enron, Maurice Strong and Bill Clinton – that should open your eyes to the reality and depth of the scam.
Read the Green Agenda and Cloak of Green to fully understand what is going on.
Can be found on my blog or google.
Enjoy the day – the days ahead promise to be very interesting.
Still ignoring one cause of the things that threaten the human community.
Based upon what we can see now, and understand from so many discussions in La Marguerite’s Blog, would it be correct to say unequivocally that an increasing food supply for the human species is the essential factor producing the recent skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers?
Until this relationship is seen (ie, food is the independent variable and human population numbers is the dependent variable), and its implications understood and accepted, the human community cannot respond ably to the global challenges that are looming ominously on the far horizon, I believe. The family of humanity will continue its necessary but insufficient projects at “symptom mitigation” of the global threats without ever taking hold of what is actually causing our difficulties and threatening our very existence. We can identify the problem. We are it.
If the skyrocketing growth of human numbers worldwide is THE number one problem to be confronted by the human community in our time, then ideas for humanely reducing human population numbers makes good sense, I suppose.
To have continuously denied the seminal work of Thomas Malthus and to have castigated the great scientists who have extended his thinking and improved our understanding; to have adamantly demanded that the relationship between food and human population numbers be seen conversely, will be acknowledged as the greatest failure of human perception in human history. At least to me, the implications of this potentially catastrophic perceptual error (ie, human population numbers is the independent variable and food supply the dependent variable) appear to be profound and could have something to do with the existence of the culturally derived functional insanity in the thinking of the leaders of the global political economy and their manipulation of many minions in the mass media who are mainstreaming this primary misperception and other economically expedient and politically convenient mistaken impressions to people everywhere.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Steven, what you’re saying is simply not true.
Birth rates are for a large a function of underdevelopment. If we get the child death rate lower, woman want to have less children. If we give them the means for birth control, they will have less children then. This pattern is seen all over the world, we just have to get the poorest countries out of the mess they’re in.
With regard to Pickens: I wonder how he got this idea of cars on natural gas. And with whom has he consulted about this? Possibly he has some information that we lack… The alternative is that this is just a unique idea of his, and that he’s too eccentric to listen to common opinion of experts.
I wonder if we see him change direction. It would earn him credibility if he admitted a mistake.
Marguerite, I agree that both Pickens and Gore seem blind to the energy conversation side, the “Negawatts” so to speak. I think the Negawatts will be much cheaper than the “Megawatts”, at least, at some point. I don’t really fancy the idea of providing the whole world with the level of power Americans enjoy now.
conversation? *conservation*
I make that mistake often I think.
Steve and Meryn, I think your disagreement stems from differences in strategies, not objectives. As much as we would like to ‘take care’ of the overpopulation problem ASAP, seems to me that Meryn’s view is most sustainable in long run. Adam Werbach has written extensively on the topic, and along similar lines. This being said, I am all for a global family planning program. Alongside with education, and microfinancing. One should also not underestimate the religious aspect, and the need to work with major faith leaders, so that they do not undermine the work done by family panning agencies.
Meryn, love the “Negawatts” concept. Did you make it up, or has it been floating around?
Also like conservation – conversation word play. Quite powerful. I could imagine a post on, ‘The Conservation Conversation’.
Negawatts is a term coined by Amory Lovins, a high-profile energy expert.
This just up on Digg:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/28/energy_efficiency/index.html?source=rss
“America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report found that improving energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and factories could offset almost all of the projected demand for electricity in 2030 and largely negate the need for new coal-fired power plants. The cost of the efficient equipment would pay for itself in energy savings.”
They’re citing the Mckinsey report which Jeff mentioned earlier on this blog.
Pickens is promoting natural gas because his four billion dollar hedge fund is heavily invested in natural gas. His motive is good ol’ fashioned greed. Wrapping it up in the flag as he has (“We must get off foreign oil!”; “There are American solutions!”) just makes it all the more despicable.
That smiley was definitely not intended.
Meryn, see my early post on McKinsey report:
Ilex, thanks for some great digging . . . Still I will take his wind plan any time.
Marguerite, the Nega Watt stuff has been along for quite some time now.
I read a book on that matter for my master’s thesis. I think I might find you the literature review I did of the book if you want…
Keep it up…
( oh, yes, I already wrote myself on the Picken’s Plan… quite interesting 😀 )
You are ahead of me, Edouard!
Actually, rather than Negawatts, maybe we should consider a less radical, more sustainable approach, eg, Barewatts, as in bare minimum, or just what we need?
“Generating” negawatts is supposed to be an alternative to generating megawatts. Lovins wants to make clear that – assuming a certain energy-base – a new watt (e.g. from a new plant) is equivalent to an old watt that’s saved.
In a sense, CFL light bulbs are like tiny power plants, which in aggregate could replace a real one that’s burning coal.
I’m all for wind and solar, and most definitely for getting off oil. But what Pickens is suggesting is still centralization, where all the money goes to the top. If individual houses were set up for generating their own electricity via a combination of wind, solar, heat generated by hot composting (or whatever works in that particular region), we could not only break the centralization, but also turn houses into mini power plants with enough left over to power homeowners’ own electric cars. But the profit in the decentralization of energy is the same as profit in the decentralization of food– nada.
No, please Marguerite, don’t say that I am ahead of you. This is not true at all.
Let us say that my education ( or what looks like it ) brought me to read a book on the application of Nega watts in the residential sector. Nothing more.
Back to the topic itself, I agree with Meryn in stating that Negawatts are just an application of energy conservation ( or as I called it efficiency ) It can make a HUGE difference in our economies and our environment.
I found my literature review of the book Marguerite. If you want it, you just need to ask ( and the readers as well ).
Have a good time. 😀
(oh, ok. got it. Yeah, I was indeed ahead of you in reporting the existence of the Pickens Plan… my bad… didn’t get it. This is what happens when you write stuff at one am.)
Pickens’ aim is to make money, it just so happens that he believes the way to make money is through measures which also will produce less greenhouse gas emissions. This is why he’s a successful businessperson – others see emission regulations and resource depletion as a problem, he sees it as an opportunity.
At present, across most of the world, the more people consume, the more the suppliers of the consumed products will make money. So corporations, including Pickens’, have no incentive to encourage us to reduce consumption. The article quoted by Meryn also notes this fact, in reference to California. When they stopped paying the electricity companies according to how much power people used, and offered them a chunk of the savings customers made, the companies then had an incentive to help conserve energy.
That’s why the rest of the US has had electricity use rise 60% in 30 years, but California has had it stay the same – despite the rise of Silicon Valley.
Anyway, Pickens is just responding to the market’s incentives. If he sells more, he makes more money – so why should he be interested in conserving electricity? If suppliers were paid, say, by their reliability of supply, a flat rate, then they’d have an incentive to conserve, and to get the energy out there most efficiently. I don’t know if Pickens has any plans for California 😉
Seeing Kiashu’s post, I guess I’ll comment on one of my latest “spare time” projects: I’m finally getting around to reading Adam Smith’s “The Wealth Of Nations”. I’m still early in the book, so my comments are a bit premature, but I’ll mention one thing, tentatively:
The full title of the book is “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
Note that the book is NOT titled “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Health, Well-Being, and Happiness of Human Beings”.
Now, I say this (above) for a couple reasons and not for other reasons: Adam Smith was a very very bright person, and he wrote his classic in a particular time, with access to information and understanding that existed at the time (but without access to some things science understands better today), and to address certain big problems during his time. The book is great, for what it is, and my comments aren’t meant to take anything away from Adam Smith or his brilliance, of course.
But, there were also many things that were not well-understood in those days about human psychology, health, happiness (as it relates to economic factors), and so forth. And, Adam Smith’s context in those days was substantially different from at least a few issues we face today.
In my view, so far, many people who THINK the book indicates, or proves, some things that they’d LIKE it to prove are SUBSTANTIALLY mistaken. Some of the reasons are best explained by comparing the book’s actual title with what the title isn’t, as outlined above.
Yet, a good number of economists, and others, have essentially made the book into the “bible” for how modern western market-based society should be run. We hear people these days saying that (essentially) “GDP is God” and that a completely free marketplace (with no regulation whatsoever, thank you!) can solve all the world’s ills, if only left to do so, and even tuck us into bed at night with a kiss. “Trust us”, they seem to say. “Adam Smith said so”, they seem to imply.
I beg to disagree.
When I finish the book, if my thoughts are relevant to one of Marguerite’s posts (and if I’m still alive by then), I’ll share more thoughts that are directly relevant. For now, just let me say that I agree with Kiashu’s point.
Cheers.
Of course, Kyle and Jeff, I cannot not agree with you. These are all values that we need to encourage and propagate.
And, I continue to maintain, if Pickens wants to go crazy with wind power, why not? I don’t think we have the luxury of being picky at this point in the game. Anything that brings down GHG emissions without placing any other extra burden on the environment, I will take.
I just want him to give up on his other idea – natural gas powered cars –
Hey, if you want to talk about Smith, note than seven years before he wrote about wealth, he wrote about human happiness and community in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So community and humanity came first in his mind, and money second.
And really if you read all of Wealth of Nations, you find that there’s plenty of morality in there, too. It’s just that the capitalist Bible, like the Jewish, Christian and Moslem Bible, is one that its adherents like to pick and choose from… 🙂
Kiashu, yes, Smith was a moral philosopher (in part), and I agree with most of your point. Although I still haven’t read all of The Wealth of Nations (still in the early stages), my initial disagreement is not with Smith himself (who was writing fairly clearly about some specific things, in a certain time, and wasn’t pretending to do more than that, it seems), but rather with how Smith is often interpreted or assumed to have proven some broader things that he didn’t prove. In other words, many people today (it seems) justify some pretty false arguments or beliefs based on what their impression of what they think/assume Smith’s work proves.
I was talking to someone about this last night. You know that game, among children, where one child whispers something into the next child’s ear, and she whispers it to the next, and he to the next, and so on down the line? By the time the seventh child hears and repeats the story or “fact”, it’s often quite different from the story or “fact” as it was told by the first child. In some ways, that’s what seems to have gone on in some portions of the field of economics. Many people think they know what Smith’s Wealth of Nations demonstrates or proves or shows, when in reality they’ve just heard it from someone who heard it from someone else. And/or, they assume that it proves much more than it does, when you consider more modern learning and the broader dynamics of life. So, it’s not Smith that I’m concerned with: It’s the modern person who thinks that free markets can address all ills, and that growth is God, and who thinks that such views are “givens” because Smith proved them. That’s the nonsense that I’m concerned with.
Marguerite, I agree with you (although I haven’t followed his plans closely) that Pickens’s wind plans are a breath of fresh air and that that part of his approach is a good thing. Since I’m not a Pickens expert, I don’t know what drives him. But, we certainly need more people speaking out about the need to convert to renewable energy sources. When Pickens goes for wind energy, and the Rockefellers criticize ExxonMobil, and so forth, you know that the tides are beginning to shift (although there’s still alot more shifting needed).
Cheers for now.
I’ve looked over the Pickens Plan a bit and I watched Al Gore discuss it on Meet the Press with Brokaw a couple weeks ago. They are on very similar paths. Pickens may not talk about conservation or climate change, but his endeavor will have some of those same side-effects.
Natural gas has been used for years as an alternative fuel. I remember finding VW busses from from the early 70’s that ran on natural gas. It’s not a new solution. Pickens picks NG because it is cheap and readily available as a domestic product – even if it is not a renewable. NG is also much cleaner than oil.
I see it as a transition fuel possibility, but not the long term solution. It would be a quick way to get us off the foreign oil. If course, there are probably all kinds of issues getting the vehicles made and increasing production, etc. Although, NG vehicles are made by major automakers in Europe, Asia, and South America. (see wikipedia entry on CNG vehicles).
-Jason
http://www.screamtobegreen.com
“So, it’s not Smith that I’m concerned with: It’s the modern person who thinks that free markets can address all ills, and that growth is God, and who thinks that such views are “givens” because Smith proved them. That’s the nonsense that I’m concerned with.”
That’s fair enough. But I bring up the things (or theme of the things) Smith actually said because it’s an excellent argument.
If you’re talking to someone who says “X is true because Smith said so”, either the person is deliberately deceitful or they just plain don’t know what he really said. In both cases, it’s good to bring up what Smith said, in full and in context. The deceitful person will be on the back foot, forced into all sorts of contortions to justify themselves, and the ignorant person will have their mind opened.
Again, I say that any “holy book” of any faith, including the capitalist faith, is a very different beast if you pick and choose compared to taking the thing as a whole. Extremists of all kinds pick and choose; it’s a very effective debating tactic to take the thing as a whole.
“X is true because Smith said so!”
“So everything Smith said is right?”
“Yes!”
“That’s interesting, because he also said Y, which contradicts what you said earlier.”
“…!” *explosion*
Free markets could perhaps address all ills, we don’t know. “Capitalist” USA and Australia have never had a “free market” anymore than the USSR and Mao’s China ever had “true communism”. A truly free market would, for example, have free movement of labour, something which those speaking loudest about the glories of capitalism are rarely that keen on. Free movement of money between countries they love, free movement of people, not so much.
It’s best to demolish extremists with their own arguments, or failing that, with the arguments of their prophets.
Kyle, thanks for sharing your in depth knowledge of Smith’s foundation writings. You are touching on Man’s nature, and our tendency towards greed. It is no coincidence that greed is one of the sins dealt with by many, if not all organized religions.
I had a meeting yesterday with a well respected business figure from Silicon Valley. “Of course all this is going to have to take place within a growth oriented agenda; none of that buckling down bull….” The man suffers from delusional thinking, obviously. I did not confront him, as it would be a waste of time. But I did encourage him to do more in his new chosen field – solar – The man’s got lots of money, and can get a lot accomplished. As with Pickens, all that matters is the end result.
In parallel, I think it is important that people like you, Kyle and Jeff pursue your work of clarification of collective assumptions, in as many media venues as are available to you. I cannot thank you enough for all your contributions.
Thanks for your comment, Marguerite.
Kiashu, thanks also for your comment. I think that we are saying many of the same things, in different ways. I agree with most of what you said in #24, for example.
That said, aside from the general notion that Smith is often misquoted, or selectively quoted, or etc., and aside from the notion (that I also agree with) that it clearly helps alot to be familiar with what he really wrote, (actually, as part of that notion), I think there’s something “more” going on than accidental or selective misquoting or even ideological “forcing”. In other words, I’m comparing more recent science (for example, on human happiness, and on human social nature) and what Smith was actually writing about with what many people today think that he said (and also with what he actually said), to place what he said in a more accurate, and broader, context. That’s why I find his title so interesting and descriptive: Even though his title was (and is) what it was (and is), many people today seem to think or assume that it was (in essence) the other title I’ve listed in my earlier post, at least in terms of its ramifications. Those two titles I listed in my earlier post, and the two books that they would contain, are very different.
But, to go into any more detail now would be premature, as I still have to finish reading most of the book.
In any case, for the most part, I think we agree on most of your points. When I finish reading and write something up, I’d love to share it with you and get your thoughts.
Thanks again.
Cheers.