Peak Oil proponents hold that we have used around 50% of extractable oil and thus face a dwindling, increasingly expensive supply. (One proviso: OPEC do not reveal their reserve estimates but, as every driver knows, prices have been rising over recent years, indicating demand outstripping supply).

Cut out oil overnight and our social and commercial fabric would quickly collapse: supermarkets would be empty in a matter of days for example. But this will be a slower crisis and, if we are to overcome it, we need to act now.

One grassroots initiative that has taken off in recent years, particuarly in English-speaking countries, is called Transition Towns. You can learn more in an article I wrote for the Smarter Cities website recently:

Keegan – All Together Now: Transition Towns Rise in the US

Thanks to Paul McRandle, John-Paul Flintoff, Annie McCleary, Ben Brangwyn, and Trathen Heckman for their help. Flickr image by Roger Smith

Why then, one might ask, does society lay siege on imagination? For that is how things stand today.

To begin with, falsely believing abductions and child murders to be everyday dangers, we have put in a host of needless restrictions on children’s lives, preventing them as a result from experiencing much nature (or life indeed) beyond the bite-sized chunks dolloped out to them on screen or in museums.

We allow advertisers (even on RTE, to our shame) to exploit children by making them feel self-conscious for not having Object X or looking like Celebrity Y.

You can read the full text of this article I wrote for the Mayo News, by clicking the link below:

Keegan – The (Almost) Lost World [Mayo News]

Flickr image by …Tim

Enter the Colorado River–which kisses the southern edge of the Silver State and keeps Las Vegas alive.

Of course, long ago, when the southwestern states divvied up river resources, little did they imagine that a city of 2 million high-maintenance souls would emerge in the pitiless Desert cauldron of the Las Vegas Valley.

But emerge that city did, replete with mod cons and then some. And then along came Global Warming in the shape of an ongoing drought.

Add to that trenchant opposition to water extraction from rural counties…and you end up with the present situation: a regional water system under severe stress, as evidenced by the dramatic “bath ring” in Lake Mead pictured above.

You can read an article I just wrote for the NRDC’s Smarter Cities website on this topic, as well as listen to a portion of an interview I conducted with Pat Mulroy, the Las Vegan charged with meeting the city’s water needs, by clicking the link below:

Keegan – Ring of Dust (NRDC Smarter Cities)

Thanks to Pat Mulroy, Dr Robert Fielden, Robert Glennon, and Paul McRandle for their help on this article. Flick image by loop_oh.

The Brown Envelope

This story came second in the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Contest. I hope you like it.

flickr image by Conor Pendergrast

This dates from just over half a century ago and the time to consider the poem’s meaning has surely come.

Happily our generation comes out of this interrogation rather well, as the English language, whatever the platform, is livelier and more playful than ever. But I leave it to you to decide–after all, the piece is addressed…

        To Posterity

        When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
        And reading and even speaking have been replaced
        By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
        Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
        They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
        And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
        Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

        -Louis MacNeice (1957)

From Selected Poems

Flickr Image by ‘Quick, like a mule’ (CC Licensed)

1: Never buy a book by a celebrity
2: Never buy a book that is a numbered part of a series
3: Never buy a book that is tied-in to a movie or TV product
4: Let your kids buy (or borrow) whatever they want.

No celebrities, no series, no cameras: remember these rules of thumb and you will have yourself a powerful tool to help you when next you are standing in the bookstore, facing the 90% garbage that most booksellers offer our children. (Is any other group of consumers treated so badly?)

With these rules, you can quickly gather a pile of quality books to choose from: books that got onto that bookshelf largely on their own merits.

An objection could be made that most kids’ classics, The Jungle Book, say, or the Harry Potter novels, all had movies made of them. But, caveat emptor: the books under these names in stores today are often a shabby mixture of movie screenshots and insipid ‘retellings’. And look out for ‘abridged versions’: more grown-up stupidity dressed up as concern for children, the poor dears. The best place to find the original classics is in the library or by reference to the publisher: Puffin Books is one imprint I trust for editorial commonsense.

Rule #4 is vital of course: if they are doing the choosing, children should always be allowed to choose what they like, without any comment from parents.

Rules are made to be broken so, for instance, I would make an exception to #2 for the likes of Tintin and to #4 for material that is patently unsuitable and likely to disturb e.g. adult horror stories.

flickr image by mwoodard

I am writing to you to express my deep concern as an Irish citizen about the establishment of NAMA and, in particular, the unorthodox methods being used to establish the value of properties concerned.

Perhaps all concerned are acting in good faith–but there is a great danger that the present and future treasure of our country, of our children and our grandchildren, will be squandered: all in a vain attempt to mitigate the losses of a reckless element.

The thinking of course is that those losses, when realized, represent a systemic risk. That may be so. But the creation of NAMA, like so many responses in this crisis, is ill-conceived and burdensome.

• For one thing, why are stakeholders in our banks not absorbing the losses first?
• For another, why are values being determined as though they will not fall further?
• And, to stop only at three points where a dozen could be made: how immune is NAMA to the “stroke-pulling” that seems endemic to our public life?

I would appreciate you redoubling your efforts to stop NAMA; if you are in support of it, I beg you to reconsider.

In Dublin however I came across one exception. At the departure gate there was a large lightbox hung on the wall, bearing the following quote from Lady Gregory, taken from one of her reworkings of Celtic legend:

“It is sweet to people to be telling a lie, but it is bitter in the end.”

Flickr Image by Svenwerk

Does the hapless response of the Bush Administration to the financial crisis–the inability to grasp the scale of the problem, the sheer lack of preparedness and of ready resources to deal with contingencies–remind you of something?

Hurricane Katrina, perhaps? Or post-invasion Iraq?

In each case the government’s response has been essentially the same: a failure to grasp the scale of the disaster together with a dearth of contingency plans.

In the case of Iraq, the CIA’s major concern was ensuring enough US flags were in hand for the welcoming crowds to welcome their “liberators”.

When it came to Katrina, FEMA chief Mike Browne was showered with congratulations from President Bush while an American city was drowning.

Now, with the US investment banking system not only in trouble but actually destroyed, a victim of Wall Street greed condoned by government laissez-faire, we find the authorities flummoxed at the markets’ unwillingness to act on their assurances.

Contingency planning is something we expect of governments. It is one of their primary functions: to plan for the worst. Governments, not private firms, invest in defenses against chemical or nuclear attack or take steps to avert the consequences of climate change.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party discovered, through Ronald Reagan’s success, that attacking, belittling, and demoralising government had the perverse effect of ensuring power: from 1980, the GOP have been adepts of this strategy.

Small government is good, particularly for free-market economies: this truth was at the kernel of the “Reagan Revolution”.

But the public sector should not be shrunk to the extent that it cannot come to the rescue when needed. Nor should public funding be misdirected or cut to the point that there is no Plan B when the best-of-all-possible-outcomes fails to materialize.

For proof you no longer have to ask the people of Baghdad or New Orleans.

Flickr Image by Christian et Cie

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

What I like about their plan (linked below) is the implicit distinction between “rich” and “poor” dollars, i.e. the acknowledgment that one’s ten-thousandth dollar has a different meaning, and hence value, from one’s ten-millionth dollar.

However, I think we should go further: continued progressivity to tax saturation. In other words: a universal salary cap.

Why? Because there is nothing, beyond single-handedly curing premature death, that any human being can do that merits earning on the current level of our billionaire class.

We’ve become so used to the endless pursuit of personal wealth that nobody thinks it odd anymore but, as any Martian will tell you, no mortal, American or otherwise, has any true need (or actual want, indeed) of their twenty-seventh million dollar wad.

Therefore I propose that the tax rate kicks in at the level suggested by Kotlikoff and Goodman ($46,000 for families) and thencefrom progresses at an evenly growing tax rate until, at $4.6 million, say, the rate terminates, necessarily, at 100%.

Granted, there will be a challenge to society (for one, how to re-allocate the money without bloating government) and the makers of fine shower curtains and umbrella stands might notice a dip in sales–but we would, on the up-side of my plan, be spared the obscene and ultimately damaging kink of our current system: wealth obesity.

Reference: John C. Goodman: A Kinder, Gentler Flat Tax Forbes, September 29th, 2005

Some highlights:

I propose a rule: if you aren’t sure whether you really live in plenty, you do.

…

From our cornucopias…pour houses that keep out the weather, clean water to bathe in daily, medicines to prolong life, clothes no-one wore before us — and then stuff, oh a torrent of stuff of unimaginable profusion and variety, stuff to tempt us, stuff to entertain us, stuff to decorate ourselves with, stuff to transport us from place to place, stuff to store other stuff in.

…

We are still running as hard as we can, with apparently undiminished urgency, and our desires still feel to us as if they are thwarted and fulfilled in the proportions you’d expect from a resistant universe.

…

[If] we all did decide, one at a time or all together, on some mark that represented adequate plenty, and stopped buying at it, our plenty wouldn’t glide calmly to a halt. It would collapse, because the system depends on striving, and whatever no longer strives to rise in our system doesn’t just stop rising, it immediately and inexorably sinks.

That’s why in our age of plenty everyone who can is still working frantically hard

Full Transcript: BBC Radio 3 – Twenty Minutes: Plenty: The Land of Cockaigne

Image: povertycodes, by thane via flickr.

It was not…just [in] eastern Europe [that Communism collapsed] but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world.

Source: Kettle: Germany and France are struggling with a new world, The Guardian, May 24th, 2005

I sometimes think that much of the public life of [Ireland] since 1963 has been an attempt to fill the hole in our self-image that Kennedy’s visit [to Ireland] had exposed. We were supposed to be a deeply spiritual people, concerned with God, the land and the nation. The ecstasy evoked by the appearance among us of the first citizen of the great republic of the West revealed to us how utterly bedazzled we were by all the things we were not meant to want: his cool, sexy, glamour, his impregnable aura of wealth and his ability to embody the fridges and TVs, the porches and pools that our American cousins conjured up in those family photographs. We were embarrassed by our sudden, naked impulse to worship the golden calf

Source: Fintan O’Toole What We Think of America Granta #77, March 28th, 2002

After Beverley Hills I am taken to speak to the Las Vegas Literary Society. There are more society ladies, and the event there is even grander. I sit opposite the wife of the last Governor of Nevada. She has two guests to entertain that week, the other one being Mr Gorbachev. The night before, whispers one of the other ladies, they took him to a Russian Restaurant. I nod: the Russian Restaurant is in my hotel and I have noticed it. You couldn’t fail to notice it: it has outside it a large statue of Lenin and they have chopped the head off it. Then they have covered it with artificial bird droppings. It is a gesture of quite unbelievable triumphalism. I reflect on the fact that they took Mr Gorbachev to dinner there. Even by the standards of Las Vegas that defies belief.

After lunch and the signing of books, I jump into the powerful car of one of the society ladies and am taken off to the Liberace Museum. There is much to be seen there, and in a very curious way it is rather touching. The human spirit, I have decided, moves in mysterious ways.

Source: Alexander McCall-Smith: A flea in your ear can be a very pleasant thing, The Scotsman, April 12th 2004