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

His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part, in the contemporary world, consuming books and encountering friends and lovers, but their dedication to art seems anachronistic, more of a piece with the romantics, surrealists, or beat poets: these are not the kind of self-branding careerists to show up as writers in residence or guests on Start the Week. As with all great vocations, many are called but few are chosen: suicide, addiction and neurosis are often their lot but, along the way, they partake of a quest which, for Bolano, is the most interesting thing humans can do.

You can read the full text at the Dublin Review of Books.

Flickr image by rocketlass

As I write, it remains to be seen whether Ireland will actually pay off the outrageous (banking) debt that has been settled upon us, courtesy of our inept, lame-duck government (itself the product of a rotten political system).

My main point in the discussion–besides pointing out that we are being penalized unfairly–was that civic reform is vital. The public space in Ireland is currently agog with initiatives, most at an early stage of gestation, testifying that a historical opportunity is upon us.

If we leave our public life unmended, darker forces, in my view, will seize the initiative. Besides emigration, political violence is another Irish “solution” to Irish problems.

You can download/listen to the radio show here:

KNPR Radio Discussion

Stay tuned for details of a new online initiative being cooked up by myself and some friends here in Westport. Flickr image by karen horton

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

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.

Definitions

• Ireland: a functional society trapped in a dysfunctional state
• Globalization: Angelus bell rings in distance while WNYC News plays in kitchen and messages from Iran stack up in office.
• Happiness: kids in bed and cricket on television. (sentimental alternate: playing cricket with kids)

Ireland

• Violent pogroms against Romanian Immigrants in Belfast are linked to Sectarianism: in a divided society, where children are educated apart and never encounter people of other creeds and ways of life, any ‘other’ can seem a threat.
• New pipeline in Mayo may be good or bad–but Shell’s record in Nigeria shows that we need to be sceptical of their intentions
• Could Archbishop Martin of Dublin be the Gorbachev of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland?

A Nicer Film Title

• Fort Apache The Hamptons

A Pop Song Anti-Climax

• Dust Around the Clock (We’re going to dust, dust, dust…)

Outputs

• Redrafting a play on the Dylan Principle: “You do what you must do and you do it well”

Inputs

• Hope Humph would be pleased: I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is back on BBC Radio 4 with guest chairs, starting with Stephen “No Better Man” Fry.
• Watching “Dancing Skeletons” (Disney, 1934) with the kids. Walt does German Expressionism: David Lynch couldn’t top it.
• Watching “Star War IV” (Lucas, 1977) with the kids. The film now seems a product of post-postwar angst. Consider the central conflict of a death-giving and bureaucratic Military-Industrial Empire versus the ragtag band of a Blonde Superman-child. In the end “Pop USA” wins the day.
• Watching Vincent Browne’s political talk show on TV3 is like watching the party scene in “The Plough and the Stars” (and, as it happens, the country is in a state of chassis).
• Chatshows on RTE since Gay Byrne retired often fail because they are “genre-driven”. The opening segments of, say, The Late Late Show or Saturday Night with Miriam will be ‘light’ come what may–while later segments will be ‘heavy’, again come what may: there is no room for spontaneous evolution of a discusion e.g a political commentator may be determined to be flippant or a pop singer may turn out to be unexpectedly articulate: good hosts adapt and let the conversation grow accordingly, but RTE’s current crop seem unable to ‘trust to the moment’.

Decline of Western Civilization, Ch. CXLVII

• At the bookshop. Assistant: “How do you spell Proust?”
• Probably the rot set in when fishmongers started calling themselves “seafood delicatessens”

At the Dinnertable

• Missus and I agreed over dinner that Herb Caen would have loved Twitter.

Proofs

• A parrot wrangler in Vegas once assured me crows were by far the smartest birds. Here is the proof.

Moral perfectionists of the Left (e.g. John Pilger, Noam Chomsky) or Right (e.g. George W. Bush, Silvio Berlosconi) are, however noble their motives, a blight on progress.

Viewed on the political spectrum, they are separated by a gulf that could not be wider. But measure their empathy for others’ positions and you will find them side-by-side, deaf to all complexity and compromise: the net result is that perfectionists make real-world negotiation and progress next to impossible.

Consider this preemptive strike against Obama by renowned reporter John Pilger in the December 11th, 2008 issue of New Statesman:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

First of all let me say that I have nothing but admiration for John Pilger’s record of reporting from the Middle East and his commitment to journalistic truth: the man clearly knows more about the on-the-ground reality of suffering than I ever will.

My problem is with the conclusions he draws. For Pilger, America can do no right, ever.

Ever, ever, ever.

Even when Americans roundly reject Absolutism as comprehensively as they did in November and take a chance on a candidate who seems to be of fine character and who clearly has a highly developed moral sense. And who is not a perfectionist.

(Beyond that, Obama has lived for long periods outside the US, has studied alongside Muslims, and witnessed the anxiety of his mother, dying while beset with worries about her health insurance coverage.)

Barack may be the product of a debased two-party system…but that is the reality we have and, once in a while, it still manages to produce leaders who can do some good for their people and their world.

How, of all people, can we tar Pilger and Bush with the same brush?

Well, Dubya is clearly a perfectionist because he could not (in the words of Bob Scheer) let Iraqis themselves pursue their own history. Bush wanted a tidy and neighbourly oil-producing state, democratic if needs be, at the heart of a shocked-and-awed Middle East. He was readily seduced by the neo-conservative delusion that Saddam’s replacement by a civilized administration would set a stirring example to the civically moribund Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

John Pilger I see as perfectionist because he simply cannot accept that we have to work with the political realities of the one Superpower we have in the world. Messy and venal though the political and foreign policy workings of the USA are, it is still the best hope we have to stand as guarantor over lasting Middle East peace (remember that it already achieved a continental peace in PostWar Europe by tacitly guaranteeing French and German security from each other’s aggression).

Remember it was a perfectionist Pied Piper, in the shape of Ralph Nader, who made possible the Bush Nightmare in the first place. But for Nader’s determination to break the two party system we would have Al Gore for President, no “war on terror”, and no invasion of Iraq.

To end, a truism: Perfection is the Enemy of the Good.

Adapted from my contributions to a comments thread over at Ready Steady Book.

Flickr image: “Puzzle” by ajgelado

At around the same time as the Monica Lewinsky Affair was dominating the news, he found himself accompanying then-Conservative Party leader William Hague and former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to a function in Manhattan.

Kissinger asked Hague if this sort of brouhaha happened in contemporary British politics.

“With Labour,” Hague replied, “The scandals tend to be about money, while with Tories it’s usually sex.”

“So,” surmised Kissinger, “Your money is safe but your wife isn’t.”

What a week–and the excitement is for good reason. At last, in Barack Obama, we have a leader who promises to be worthy of the name, who has authentic insight into hardship and struggle together with the nuanced grasp of complex issues and of history so absent in the Bush White House.

Worldwide, and throughout the United States, Red or Blue, there has been euphoria, even among those who voted against him, as the achievements of Civil Rights pioneers find some fruition in the 44th Presidency, a symbolic transformation hailed by conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike.

American flags sprouted worldwide as a suppressed love dared to speak its name for the first time since 2001.

Even Jon Stewart had to remind overseas viewers that Obama “belongs to the US” and that other countries “can’t have him”.

The United States, it is said, went from “zero to hero” in the space of a single Tuesday in November.

Zero to Hero? Woah. Hold up there, pardners.

We have to be careful here, all of us, stateside and outside, not to take the simplistic view of America and its position in the world that we were so quick to accuse President Bush of.

Under Bush or Obama there remain several undeniable facts and positions that wishful thinking will not change.

First, Obama’s America will remain the world’s only superpower.

The country carries, as an accident of history brought on by centuries of European/Asian militarism and overreach, a burden of global security on which all of us in the First World and many elsewhere daily depend.

The fuel that gets you to work or allows you to tour charming Alpine villages on vacation would be priced out of your reach if it wasn’t for American military forces guarding the shipping lanes along which supertankers faithfully carry your crude oil from the Middle East day-in, day-out.

In fact that Alpine Village might have been razed to the ground if the US had not guaranteed, by threat of arms, peace between France and Germany after 1945, a security shield which made the EU possible and for which all Europeans owe Americans a debt that should not be forgotten.

Second, America is never going to give up on Israel. Let’s hope that Obama exerts moral pressure on them to the degree that their political class allows itself to empathize with their victims in Palestine and then acts accordingly: it is a blot, a pathological blot, on Israel that a state founded by and for the victims of brutality should repress those in its own care so heartlessly.

Third, Americans are Americans. They boast citizens speaking every language known to man, but they are, by and large, not Spanish or Irish or Bolivian. There is no monarch on their coin. Their interest rates are set by their own central bankers. And, just like Spanish or Irish or Bolivians, they act, and understandably have to act, in their own self-interest: Obama has to worry about American citizens first: the plight of the Spanish, Irish or Bolivian bourgeoisie and their dependants is not his first concern.

Fourth, and lucky for us, the US is a mature nation with a clear understanding of its responsibilities. This sense of leadership was even found, albeit in clouded form, during the Bush administration: it is acknowledged for instance that Bush did more to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than any predecessor. And America’s attitude towards the UN has been patient when you consider the lamentable state of that institution (as the unlucky people of DR Congo are the latest to be discovering). I trust Obama, a true man of the world, will maintain a firm scepticism towards that body.

Iraq was a mistake and he called it early–but Obama is desined to be Commander-in-Chief of US occupying forces in the Middle East for some time to come.

Depend on Russia, an increasingly irresponsible state, to test Obama in his first term. And Obama will put Medvedev and Putin firmly in ther place when that time comes.

America, in short, is not going to turn into the world’s poodle come Inauguration Day in January. It is and will always remain an exceptional country with exceptional powers and resonsibilities. Obama, I believe, understands that. You don’t get black-and-white thinking, in any sense, from this man.

He gets it.

The question is: do we?

Image by January20th2009 on Flickr

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

Unfortunately many (blue-state) Americans and (Western) Europeans seem to take this notion as axiomatic, forgetting that in fact the United States is a remarkable and successful meritocracy, in which origins generally count less than performance.

It is true that poor people in the US suffer and that a large proportion of black people are poor. It is difficult to succeed if you are born in the underclass, far harder than it is for everyone else.

But let that reality not blind us to the emerging and meaningful fact that a black man is shortly to become leader of the country, an outcome inconceivable in any other majority-white democracy.

I have lived in three American states, two Democrat, one Republican. I have met citizens from all walks of life and of all income levels. Americans are race-conscious, yes: that is the natural legacy of American history.

But is America a racist nation?

No.

Flickr Image by emdot

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 Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.

But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.

In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.

At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.

The principle is not the issue: we are.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

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

Contrast [the response to Katrina] with the hurricanes that struck Florida last year, when federal officials pulled off a tour de force, pouring billions of dollars to help distressed residents while tractor trailers with ice, water, and other supplies waited on the state’s borders until the storm passed. As soon as it did, help was rushed to the areas hardest hit, with National Guard troops on the scene quickly, directing traffic, and keeping looters out of damaged neighborhoods. President Bush was on the scene then within 48 hours. The suspicion now will not easily be eradicated that the difference was that it was an election year

Source: M. Zuckerman: Uncalm after the storm, US News and World Report, Sept 7th, 2005