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

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.

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.

Irish blogger Damien Mulley has helpfully pulled some of the evidence produced by victims into a slideshow: this, mind you, is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Catholic Church in Ireland

View more OpenOffice presentations from damienmulley.

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

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

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

Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.

Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.

It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).

On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.

Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.

So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton

The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]

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)

Fin likes to read coffee-table picture books about the railroad in the 19th century…

Fin likes to sit in the space between the wall and the bed…

Fin likes to stare longer than decorum permits…

Fin likes to be and knows he is alone because he is “different”…

Fin likes to rasp through the skin of cucumbers…

Fin likes to get all the way down by my feet…

Fin likes to be poked with a stick…

Fin likes to get the job done when he is on hot pursuit of the criminals…

If only André Breton had lived to use the Internet.

Image: ‘Found 16mm’ by N°1 on flickr

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 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?

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.

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

(Similarly, the defense posture of the post-war Superpowers was symmetrical, to the point of producing Mutually Assured Destruction, an acronym to savour).

Although our current struggle against Islamo-fascism is assymetrical, Pat Robertson’s ungentle suggestion that the President of Venezuela be assasinated produced another likeness worth noting. One of the few words in Arabic that Westerners know is fatwa: an opinion or injunction promulgated by a religious authority. We first heard the term when the Ayatollah Khomeni attempted to murder a peaceful man, Salman Rushdie, whose only crime was storytelling. Subsequent clerical directives have spiritually underwritten murder the world over, from New York to Bali. And now comes the moral test for us that McCarthyism once posed and which, until decency re-emerged, we failed: an influential religious authority in our own society has issued a call for murder.

In effect, the McCarthys and the Robertsons suggest to our opponents that we are, essentially, their equal in amorality. And, in forfeiting principle, they comfort the Enemy, who relishes moral weakness more than any other.

Such a proposition therefore must be roundly refuted, especially by leaders in those communities (mostly Republicans) to whom Robertson, a tele-evanglist, appeals.

There must be no equivocation: we may kill, but we don’t murder.

Backstory: Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez

Posted: August 22nd, 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.