EclecticLip

Newsweek ran a story awhile back on how “big oil’s gone green for real”.  (Though the correct phrase would be “big oil’s gone greenwashing for real”.)

A sample looks-good-at-first-glance sentence is the following:

In fact, while companies like BP and Shell are cutting back on commercial projects in wind and solar, Big Oil is taking a closer look at how they might be used to increase efficiency internally, or to free up increasingly profitable fossil fuels, like natural gas, for commercial sale.

If going green means cutting back on alternative energy programs, George W Bush should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.    Increasing efficiency is something any good business does, so that’s not a real mark of improvement.  And the stated reason for pursuing natural gas is money-green, not sustainability-green.
As it turns out, this is a case of advertiser-funded media gone awry.  From ClimateProgress:

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker…

…journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.

“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek”…

To mark this occasion, and in light of the current goings-on at Copenhagen, I put together a “Big Oil Hierarchy of Denial”, along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Five Stages of Grief.  Sort of a guidebook to the different stages that Exxon & co have gone through, over the years.  Enjoy!

Note: the list is to be read from the bottom up. 

For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)

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Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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I attended the Peter Senge lecture at the Vancouver Board of Trade yesterday. He’s the MIT lecturer who wrote “The Fifth Discipline” years ago, about learning organizations. His latest is “The Necessary Revolution”, about corporate efforts to develop true, legitimate, authentic sustainability. He made some very interesting comments, detailed below the fold:

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A New Scientist article from a few years back suggests that vampire legends were how our ancestors tried to explain rabies. Interesting to think of vampire stories as educational tools. 

Nowadays, of course, kids learn about rabies through Old Yeller, that “sick doggy snuff film”, to quote Phoebe from Friends.

[Rabies/vampires] is then analogous to [Williams Syndrome/elves].  The latter is a genetic disorder which causes elfin features and a love of music, clearly the inspiration for elves in various fairy tales.

This article in the Times is about James Lovelock.  Like many articles about the author of the Gaia hypothesis — which posits that the earth and life on it form a self-equilibriating system — it notes his pessimism for the future of humanity.  Heck, that’s evident even in the article’s title:

“It’s too late for planet earth, says James Lovelock.”

The article also notes Lovelock’s derision for renewable energy — he prefers nuclear (despite its myriad challenges including cost, lead time, uranium depletion, and that whole management-of-waste thing — tho thorium reactors might hold promise… many years from now).  Indeed, Lovelock evidently thinks renewable energy is an elaborate scam made possible by subsidies!  This neatly parallels my thoughts on nuclear energy. 

In this, Lovelock reminds me of Einstein.  As we all know, Einstein also contributed epochal insights to the scientific community.  Few realize though, that Albert was on the wrong side of the debate about quantum mechanics: he spent his later years in a futile attempt to disprove it.  As innumerable experiments have shown, Einstein was wrong.

This is in fact the subject of Einstein’s famously mangled quote “God does not play dice with the universe”, which started off as “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice“.

Einstein could not accept the premise that at the microscopic, quantum level, reality exists as a field of probabilities, until interactions collapse all possible outcomes into one.  (See Schrodinger’s cat for a PETA-unfriendly example.)

It seems to me Lovelock is in the same position - he made a titanic contribution to science.  But as with Einstein, he’s been unable to keep up with the latest developments, and so is making an inferior argument (that is, nuclear over renewables).  As one of the article’s interviewees notes, Lovelock is:

“very knowledgeable about how Earth systems work, and he is right about the need to integrate science. But he does not apply the same intellectual rigour to his judgments about energy”

Denis Rancourt has been in the news a fair bit lately.  He’s even been made the editorials, being the subject of a scathing New York Times op-ed.

On the surface, it seems the U of Ottawa physics professor wanted to shake up the teaching methods by announcing at the start of a recent term, that everyone would get A+’s.  Peering more deeply, he seems fiercely determined to rouse students into activism against oppression — a positive thing, surely — but at the expense of teaching what he has been contracted to do.

He even called out Noam Chomsky (!) as a “non-activist intellectual” who “serves to deepen the pathological pacificism of neutralized mainstream movements“.  Mind you, Noam Chomsky never converted a linguistics course into “Introduction to Activism” as Professor Rancourt has apparently done.

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I linked to a FlowingData post on WalMart’s growth across the US, earlier.
They’ve now got a similar graph showing the growth of Target - which, as it turns out, started up in the same year.

From what it seems, this is a business analogue of convergent evolution.

In biological cases, different species may develop similar traits, especially if they’re targeting the same ecological niche.  In this business case, Target and WalMart both started off aiming to be low-cost department-store vendors; aiming for this economic niche, they seem to have independently come up with very similar formulas for successful suburban “big box” retailing.

Curiously, while Target’s main colour is red (and WalMart is blue), Target is reputed to generally support Democrats (”blue states”) while WalMart generally supports Republicans (”red states’).

This is different from what happened with the trio of McDonald’s - Wendy’s - Burger King, which is a business analogue of horizontal gene transfer.

HGT is a process whereby one organism takes genes from another.  This doesn’t seem to happen between “higher” life forms (like us) but is apparently fairly common among “lower” life forms. When bacteria develop drug resistance, it could be that some bacteria were drug-resistant to begin with, and that only those bacteria survived to reproduce.  But since bacteria swap genes near-indiscriminately with each other, bacteria-species-A might have acquired the gene for drug-resistance from bacteria-species-B!

Indeed, HGT is the biggest challenge to the Darwinian idea of a tree of life; Darwin assumed genetic variation is only caused by transmission from parents to offspring.  The “family-values” version of evolution, if you will.

HGT implies that genetic variation — at least among the single-celled creatures who started us off — could also come by transmission between any two organisms which got close enough to do the microbial equivalent of French kissing.  This superimposes an “orgy” layer atop the “family-values” model above.

In the fast food example above, the founders of Wendy’s and Burger King both heard of McDonald’s success, and went to California to study the business.  They then returned to their stomping grounds (Wendy’s - Ohio; Burger King - Florida) and started up their own versions.  This is a business analogue to HGT, because the Wendy’s and Burger King corporations didn’t independently come up with the business model, they copied it from McDonald’s.

The Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is melting.

The good news: it won’t raise sea levels because it’s sea ice.

The bad news: it’s even further evidence that global warming is getting worse, even faster than the worst-case IPCC forecasts.

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This article from Bytesizebio points out that our bodies are only one-tenth human: in our bodies, human cells are outnumbered by the cells of harmless or symbiotic microorganisms, about 10 to 1. Wikipedia concurs. 

What it means to be human, when 90% of our body isn’t?  (To be clear, human cells take up a larger volume than our passenger microbes, as the latter are smaller.)  And that other nine-tenths can literally shape our lives; as the article explains, the bugs in your gut can make you fat!

Most interestingly, Part 2 of the article divulges that while identical twins share the same human DNA (their physical differences apparently being due to variations in gene expression) their gut flora populations are as unrelated as those of randomly-picked strangers. In other words, while identical twins may share essentially the same human cells… they’re as different as any pair of people, when it comes to the other 90% of their body!

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