The Way the Future Blogs

Oil slick around Mississippi Barrier Islands (NASA E0-1 Satellite photo).

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn’t particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn’t quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do it, and so he wasn’t able to do anywhere near as much of the writing as I had expected — to the detriment of the book.

But there were several parts of the book that were all mine and had always been intended to be so. One of those was the section that demonstrated that many of the problems associated with pollution and environmental damage were simply a matter of bad bookkeeping.

For example. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped some 1.3 million pounds of extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), waste products from the manufacture of electronic devices in two of its factories, into the upper reaches of the Hudson River. GE did this because, although safe disposal of the PCBs was quite possible, it would have added significantly to the manufacturing cost of the devices. Dumping the PCBs in the river cost General Electric little more than the charge for trucking them to the river’s edge.

This is not to say that there were no costs involved in the dumping. There were many costs, and some of them were quite high. The pollution of the river made its fish inedible, causing the cash loss of a commercial fishing industry. The restrictions on even sport fishing meant that fewer vacationers spent their summers there, to the loss of tourism. The health of people living nearby was compromised, at an incalculable cost. Real estate prices dropped as the area lost some of its attractiveness. Put them all together and there were real costs amounting to millions of dollars for the dumping. All those costs, though, were what accountants call “externals.”

That means that they were costs that General Electric didn’t have to pay, because the bills went directly to the rest of the world..

Proper accounting procedures, on the other hand, would have immediately tacked them onto the manufacturing costs — thus making it better business to dispose responsibly of the pollutants.

And thus, if it were common practice to make enterprises pay for their externals, many of the problems relating to industrial pollution would simply disappear. (It is true, however, that the courts finally ordered GE to pay for a partial cleanup of the river. That didn’t heal all the damage done, but at least it was something, and it showed a dawning awareness that externals should not be neglected indefinitely.)

 
It is not only manufacturers that foist their external costs off on the public. The extractive industries, among others, are at least equally blameworthy if not more so. In the oil and coal industries we have only to look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what external costs British Petroleum has imposed on the nearby population. (It is true that President Obama is forcing them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, but it is impossible to make some of the losses whole. Even BP doesn’t have that much money.)

And, of course, the Gulf oil spill is only one, if so far the most severe, among many such disasters. Some of us will recall the Exxon Valdez back in 1989, but in fact there has been at least one major spill — “major” meaning at least tens of thousands, and all too often tens of millions, gallons of oil spilled — somewhere in the world almost every year.

Major oil spills in waterways, last five years, as supplied by Infoplease:

• 2010: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico
• 2010: Tanker Eagle Otome, Port Arthur, TX
• 2009: MV Pacific Adventurer, Queensland, Australia
• 2008: Barge, Mississippi River, New Orleans, LA
• 2007: Tanker Hebei Spirit, off coast of South Korea
• 2006: Calcasieu River LA, waste oil spill
• 2006: Israeli navy bombing Jieh coast power station
• 2006: Tanker sinks in deep water, still there leaking oil, Guimaras, Philippines
• 2005: 7 million gallons oil spilled during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA

(Before that, the list is very long.)

All the same, it’s obvious that the costs of an oil well blowing out dwarf other oil spills. BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill — so far — is estimated at over 160 million gallons. The only other spill that came even close was the Ixtoc. of 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. That one spilled 140 million gallons over the three months before it got stopped — by drilling a relief well next to it And there too the party responsible for the disaster was an oil company, Mexico’s Pemex.

So much for oil. What about coal?

The coal companies are, if anything, perhaps a little more rapacious than the oil companies. In the United States, their main unmet external costs are floods, landsides, the conversion of beautiful mountain areas into open-pit mines … and dead miners.

And how do these giant companies get away with it?

The answer is simple: money. The officials you and I vote for to protect our interests are sometimes all too willing, for money, to sell their votes to the very people we most need protection against.. It’s not really a matter of party, either. The Republicans are traditionally a little more friendly to big business than the Democrats, yes. But there are some eight Democratic Senators who are known, for obvious reasons, as the Coal Democrats. And at least one commentator does not believe that in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico there is a single legislative or judicial candidate of either party who has not received substantial money from Big Oil.

That’s the main other contribution I tried to make in Our Angry Earth. We individuals do not have anywhere enough muscle to deal with thee giant corporations. Only government can protect us from their worst excesses.

And what is the key to controlling government?

It’s called politics. If those among us who would like to see less corruption and misconduct among elected officials would get even a little bit involved there would be wonderful changes.

What do you have to do to get a little bit involved?

You give up Dancing with the Stars for one evening and go to the next League of Woman Voters-sponsored candidates’ debate scheduled in your neighborhood. (They’re listed in your local paper. If you can’t find one, call up the League yourself and ask them what they’ve got.

When you see a candidate you’d like to vote for, introduce yourself and ask if he needs a volunteer to stuff envelopes or the like now and then. Then, if later on, you decide you don’t like it, or don’t like the candidate, you can always just walk away. It’s a free country, after all.

And the more you do of that sort of thing, the more you help to keep it that way.

Those among us who don’t want to be active in politics because it’s a dirty game just help to make it dirtier.

    Richard Shelby

Richard Shelby was first elected to the Senate as a Democrat,. Then, in the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans won back control of the Senate and Shelby changed his party affiliation to Republican, where it has been ever since.

Senator Shelby boasts that he is a watchful guardian of our country’s defense concerns who can be trusted with the care of them. Recently, however, he was mad at the federal government for some unannounced reason — gossip says it was because he had been denied two porkbarrel “set-asides” in a new bill — so he placed a “blanket hold” on all confirmations of new presidential appointments to federal office. This meant that, for about 70 functions of government, nothing could be done, since no one could be confirmed to do them.

This stopped progress on such defense-related activities as procuring new tanker planes for the Air Force and creating a big new intelligence facility. Because of the outcry that arose concerning this action Shelby quickly rescinded most, but not all, of the holds.

(We should bear in mind, though, that Senator Shelby isn’t the only clown here. There is no law, presidential directive or other enablement which gave Senator Shelby the single-handed power to “hold” back action on presidential appointments. It’s just a custom of the Senate’s. It’s quite likely that if any single Senator had spoken up to oppose it, it would have disappeared.)

All the same, by his act in capriciously and singlehandedly putting a stop to 70 of the functions of the U.S. government with one single blow, Senator Shelby has shown himself to be clown enough to have earned his listing as Senate Clown No. 1.

Vocabulary question: When your weird Uncle Mortimer left you all that money, the tax people who work for your other uncle — for Uncle Sam, that is — took part of it back. What is the name of the tax that gave them the right to do that?

Answer: It’s called an “inheritance tax.” If you said “estate tax” you would also be right. However, if you said “death tax,” you would not only be wrong but you would have fallen (I learned from reading the 21 May issue of the New York Times Magazine) for one of the sneaky tricks of a man named Frank Luntz who works for the Republican Party (and other right-wing bodies). What does Luntz do for them? He thinks up emotionally loaded names for things that they want people to have an emotional reaction to.

Take for instance President Obama’s health-care program. That’s a perfectly descriptive name for a specific plan, but it’s not how Luntz wants you to think of it. He prefers that you call it “a Washington takeover.”

That’s not one of his most ingenious creations, because it’s based on an outright lie: there’s no “takeover” in the President’s plan. The consumer keeps all his freedom of choice. He simply has more options to choose from.

But actually Luntz can get people to change how they feel — and vote — without even having to lie. Do the oil companies to want to make voters feel more kindly about despoiling an environment? Don’t call it “drilling for oil” any more. Call it just “energy exploration.”

If you want to see how this relabeling works in action, just turn on the Fox news channel for a while, or listen to a panel of Republican senators discussing world events.

As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.

In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.

Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.

(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)

Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2008

Like a lot of other people, I voted for you, although you weren’t my first choice. Actually you were my third. But as the campaign progressed I began to see how revolutionarily hopeful your candidacy was, and how wrong I had been ever to prefer anyone else.

The first thing was your brilliant style of fund-raising. American candidates normally put the arm on the biggest and richest bankrolls they can for the fattest checks, with the result that every candidate achieving election does so owing a large debt to individual persons and institutions, including such powerful entities as the National Rifle Association and (forgive me, dear wife the college professor) the teachers’ unions. All of which take care to see those debts get handsomely repaid in the currency of government favors.

But, President Obama, you didn’t do that. You raised your campaign funds primarily from individuals and in relatively small amounts. So you owe a debt too, but in so universal and diffused form that it can best be described as a debt to the American people in general.

Which is actually what every elected official is sworn to honor anyway, by the terms of his inaugural oath. So at one blow you have weakened one of the two great wickednesses in American politics, the favoritism given the rich and powerful.

Of course that is only one of the sins that besmirch our democracy. What about that other one, the power of the single-issue voter? Why, you’ve done something about that, too.

You said you wanted to be the president of all Americans, not just the ones who voted for you. That’s a pretty sentiment. It has been adopted — at least rhetorically — by just about every elected official in America since the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam, and if there is one of them that ever has put that principle into practice once elected, his name escapes me.

But look what you did, President Obama. The pastor of your church made some repellently unpatriotic remarks about the American treatment of African Americans. Others you have chosen to honor were gays or gay-bashers, liberals or conservatives, and a storm of disapproval rose against each one of them.

I am not privy to your thoughts, President Obama, but I think I see what you are doing. You are putting into practice that famous, and famously neglected, Golden Rule, “You and I disagree on some issues, but let’s work together on the others anyway, so we can jointly keep making the world a better place.” So there you have struck heavy — I hope mortal — blows against two of the most crippling evils in American polity. Don’t stop.

 

Even after I had come to the conclusion that you would make the best president of all the people in the field, I had some lingering doubts. You were, after all, visibly a person of color. Was it possible that the American voter could elect an African American to the highest office in the nation?

About that I kept my fingers crossed. Indeed, I think you might well have been defeated at the polls, except for two wholly unexpected factors. One was the surprisingly feckless campaign waged by John McCain (along with the appallingly snide one of his vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin). The other was the catastrophic self-immolation of the world’s financial structures. It is these things that put you so triumphantly over the top, and if I were a religious man, I would thank God for these healing scourges.

So carry on, President Barack Hussein Obama. There is a huge job ahead of you. I don’t know how you are going to heal the festering sores of recession and corruption that are all around us — but I know you will try your very good best. And whatever tiny bit I can do to help, I pledge to undertake.