The North Coast

Pillars Social Cafe Opens

2012-01-22T19:16:00.000-06:00

The eagerly anticipated Pillars Social Cafe has at last opened up in the vast corner commercial space in the 1200 W. Pratt building, at Pratt and Sheridan, and this formerly moribund corner now has two attractive alternatives to the corporate Starbucks down the block. The glossy,stylish cafe has a full compliment of coffee house fare, including hot and cold sandwiches, salads, soups, and pastries. Prices range from $7 to $9 for most menu items, and $2 to $4 for most pastries, with a less expensive children's menu.

I've stopped in a couple of times for pastries and a Pillars Panini, and am pretty well pleased. The service is very courteous, and the place gleams with cleanliness and is very well-staffed. Opening a large restaurant in the current economic climate takes a lot of courage, but the bet looks like it might work, for every table was occupied when I stopped in this afternoon, and the place has been fairly well filled every time I've passed it on the weekend in the afternoon.

Here is hoping this great place will succeed rapidly and stay in the neighborhood for a long time.

While I Slept

2011-04-09T16:19:00.001-05:00

Many people have noticed that the Rogers Park blogging scene has grown strangely quiescent lately. This is the first time I've written a post of any length since January, and a couple of other Rogers Park bloggers seemed to have fled the scene completely, notably Craig Gernhart, who has taken his blog private. Others are posting far less often, and most strangely of all, none of us wrote much about the municipal election this February, even though this election was the most noteworthy in twenty years, giving us a new mayor and many new council members. I can't help but sense fatigue and disappointment in our local bloggers, but a few of them remain extremely involved in the community and are fully occupied with projects that will contribute greatly to the betterment of Rogers Park. At some point, people want to do more than just discuss an issue, and get their hands and hearts into actually making a difference, and that is exactly what a few prominent Rogers Park bloggers are doing.

So a number of momentous events went unremarked on by the local punditocracy, but that doesn't mean they weren't noticing, or doing anything.

For some reason, the whole issue filled me with distaste, suddenly, as my favorite candidate for Edgewater's 48th Ward, the talented, outspoken Phil Bernstein, looked to be headed to overwhelming defeat by legacy pol Harry Osterman, and most of all as my own ward, the 49th here in Rogers Park, had to choose between bad and worse. It was really all I could do to motivate myself to even vote, and had there not been a Mayor to select, I might not have. Well, and the 50th elected a promising new alderman, Debra Silverstein, and Rahm Emanuel looks more promising every day, surprising me vastly. Emanuel appears to be very focused on cutting unnecessary expenditures and restoring the city to financial viability, and is intolerant of nonsense, unlike his predecessor.

Meanwhile, life has been happening and not exactly the way I need it to, and many other interests and urgent personal matters came between me and this blog. Getting re-employed at a better job and scaring up more money have become extremely urgent matters, and a personal project, the commercial website I've been putting together, have both been claiming a large part of my time and energy. Focus and energy, or lack thereof, have been problems, but most of all, there has simply been so much to discuss, that I hardly know where to start, really.

Now that I've recovered from my disappointment over the outcome of a couple of aldermanic races, and celebrated a couple of others, such as James Cappleman's well-deserved victory in the 46th and Silverstein's in the 50th, and the election of a mayor who displays real intelligence, I can focus on my usual areas of interest, like the urgent need for preparing Chicago for a different energy regime, developing new sources of energy, and improving the quality of life in our North Coast neighborhoods and making them as attractive and comfortable as possible.

The Morgan at Loyola Station, Post Grand Opening

2011-03-22T17:46:00.001-05:00

Strange to return to blogging with this entry, but a deeply disgruntled tenant of the Morgan who read my previous post on the opening of the Morgan at Loyola Station, posted nearly two years ago on May 20, 2009, left an angry comment there today.

Here it is:

I have lived in the Morgan at Loyola Station and HATE IT! And I am not surprised either that the building is half empty. I would call this place more of a dorm than an apartment building. They over regulate everything you do. The door staff is very rude and unhelpful. The heat is included but NEVER works. Residents are noisy and obnoxious at all times of the night yet nothing is done about that. However, if you complain about anything (aka the incredibly rude door lady) they will be sure to make your stay at this building miserable - like $500 fines for things I DID NOT DO and THEY CANNOT PROVE. This place is way too expensive for the service you get here - I'm talking $1500/month for a studio. I would NOT recommend living here. Go two blocks down to Granville and there is a beautiful new apartment building with great staff and amenities. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THE MORGAN! TERRIBLE STAFF AND TERRIBLE MANAGEMENT! I WOULD GIVE IT ZERO STARS IF I COULD!

To "anonymous": prospective renters would like to know what building the "Granville" is? Could that be the new building on the northeast corner of Granville & Broadway that was formerly named the Clarovista and was originally marketed as a condominium development?

To everyone else, please comment here about your experiences with either of these buildings, or other buildings in Edgewater and Rogers Park.

Are Drug Users Smarter Than the Rest of Us? Or Are Too Many Scientists Irresponsible Publicity Hounds?

2011-01-18T23:55:00.001-06:00

A particularly vicious meme is being disseminated by ostensibly respectable publications such as Business Insider and Psychology Today, and echoed by a few misguided proponents of decriminalization of drugs, which is that users of illegal street drugs are smarter than the rest of us.

Huh?? Anybody who has ever had to interact with a habitual drug user on a daily basis will be pretty skeptical of the laughable "findings" of a study whose methodology and veracity are questionable at best; and proponents of drug law liberalization are advised to be cautious about using them as an argument against prohibition. There are many rational arguments against our War on Drugs and our savage drug laws, but there is no way that anyone can reasonably assert that drug use is good, or that it indicates more intelligence than the Gods gave a yeast culture; and anyone who makes such a claim in order to justify decriminalization of street drugs is damaging the credibility of the anti-prohibition movement, and justifying its opposition.

According to the Business Insider, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to use recreational drugs, including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin.The Insider quotes Psychology Today, a lightweight popular publication for non-professional readers, and an organization vaguely identified only as National Child Development, without supplying any links or precise identification for this organization:
"According to Psychology Today, people who use more drugs are more intelligent. "Intelligent people don't always do the right thing," they write, "only the evolutionarily novel thing."
According to a study conducted by National Child Development, "more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children." These drugs include marijuana, cocaine, heroin, alcohol and tobacco."

Not surprisingly, not too many people are buying this, least of all the people who are involved in dealing with the human destruction wrought by drug addiction and the drug trade. People who have to deal with users on a daily basis can tell you that these people display a lot of interesting traits, but intelligence isn't one of them.

In view of millions of people whose bodies and lives have been destroyed by drugs, and the millions more who have been destroyed by alcohol, it's extremely difficult to see how anyone can describe as intelligent the decision to use substances that are powerfully addictive, often cause permanent brain damage, serious illness, and death; destroy the ability to think rationally while triggering violent impulses and criminal behavior; force the user into close contact with violent criminals, put him at risk for arrest and incarceration; and don't even make him feel good.

The scientific community has sacrificed a lot of its former credibility and prestige by publicizing the findings of badly conceived and improperly conducted "studies" that have not been verified or peer-reviewed before releasing them to the uncritical and credulous public, and anti-prohibition activists won't enhance their own by referring to them to support an unpopular stance on a controversial matter of such life-and-death importance as the Drug War

Prominent Energy and Financial Analyst Nicole "Stoneleigh" Foss of the Automatic Earth to Appear in Rogers Park

2011-01-17T16:17:00.000-06:00

JANUARY 19, 2011, 7:00 PM
UNITED CHURCH OF ROGERS PARK
1545 W. MORSE AVE.
Free parking at the southwest corner of Morse & Ashland

Suggested Donation: $20 (no one will be turned away)

Many, many thanks to Christine Wellman, Pam and Lan Richart and the other great people of Transition Rogers Park, The Eco-Justice Collaborative, Midwest Permaculture, and many others for their efforts in bringing the eminent energy and financial analyst Nicole Foss to speak in Rogers Park.

Foss, who writes under the name "Stoneleigh" and who contributes to the Oil Drum and writes The Automatic Earth blog with her husband, "Ilargi", will discuss how the convergence of resource scarcity, global warming, and the failing economy is creating the "perfect storm" that could cause our fragile economies to collapse.

After the presentation, Foss will answer questions and make recommendations on how to weather the most massive shift in fundamental economic conditions in over a century.

What if Your House Was on Fire and Nobody Came: How to Collapse a Major City

2011-01-14T14:59:00.004-06:00

What if your house caught fire and the CFD did not respond?

Because, maybe, they didn't respond because nobody was at work. And they weren't at work because they didn't get their last paychecks.

Or, maybe, the city couldn't pay the fuel bill for the fire trucks and other emergency vehicles, and was out of fuel.

Most Chicagoans can't even imagine it. Most of this city's denizens can't imagine a city where the street lights are off on most streets on alternating nights because the city is having problems paying its power bill, or where the police take 15 minutes to respond to a call from a mugging victim who is sitting on the sidewalk bleeding, because there are only nine officers manning a district of 6 square miles and they were all busy dealing with the mayhem in just two blocks of the district. Or where a foot of raw sewage is allowed to stand for months on end, or where a dead body is allowed to lie on a main thoroughfare for 4 hours in July, because the city's first responders are stretched so thin that no one had time to get over to pick it up.

These are the things that I've witnessed in failing cities and that happen when a city starts to unravel financially, and everyone with resources and prospects starts to leave. The taxes escalate while services are reduced, in the usual vicious downward spiral, thus driving out more businesses and more residents. Eventually, after a few decades, all that remain are people too poor to support anything, and the corrupt politicians and street criminals who build their careers on exploiting them.

I received my first lesson in how civilization collapses on the evening that I sat at dinner on the River Queen in St. Louis, celebrating my birthday back in 1970, and we watched a building in East St. Louis burn down directly across the river from where the boat was docked, while the fire department did not respond for forty minutes after the place began to smoke and burn. The structure was a fine old warehouse that appeared to have been built sometime in the 1920s. Halfway through dinner, we noticed dark smoke pouring out of the basement windows. Then, about 15 minutes later, flames started to flicker behind first-story windows, but there was still no response from the local fire department. Another half hour passed and the immense seven-story building was fully involved by the time 2 fire trucks showed up, and no more trucks came. The firefighters, who were way too few for the job at hand, could only stand and watch the inferno as the flames leaped out of the roof, and portions of the building started to collapse. This drama was repeated many times over the next few decades, as that city spiraled into complete destitution, as anyone who had any prospects elsewhere fled the place... and the same process has played itself out in a number of American cities since: Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, St. Louis, Memphis, Rochester.... places that look, as one Brit diplomat remarked about St. Louis, like the victims of saturation bombing.

Many people will say that you can't compare a huge, wealthy international city like Chicago to these failed cities. They forget that places like Cleveland and St. Louis, or even Rochester and East St. Louis and Camden, were not always destitute backwaters with staggering violent crime rates and miles of abandoned, wrecked buildings. Before 1900, St. Louis was a wealthier city than Chicago, with a much larger GDP, and the largest rail hub in the world. Newark and E. St. Louis were prosperous manufacturing centers, and most of the appliances people bought for their houses were manufactured in Cleveland or Akron.

Chicago may still glitter with affluence, and we are suffering rather less in this deep recession than other locales. Our unemployment rate is somewhat lower than that of other major cities, and we are not seeing the widespread destitution so prevalent in other places. However, thanks to the diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to subsidies for private purposes, including for businesses that will only come here if lured by a multi-million dollar subsidy, our city has been destroyed financially and is ranked by Forbes Magazine as one of the 18 cities most likely to go bankrupt in 2011. We will almost surely have to raise taxes simply to maintain our essential services and emergency response at current reduced levels, and many necessary improvements and upgrades to essential infrastructure are proceeding very slowly or being deferred altogether as the city struggles with steep budgetary shortfalls.

In such a context, it's difficult to see how we can afford still more diversions of public money,such as the proposed 49th Ward RIF, or $200M in funding to renovate privately-owned Wrigley Field; and it's even more difficult to understand why so few of our candidates in the 2011 municipal elections are addressing the city's fiscal problems. Among aldermanic candidates, only one candidate, Phil Bernstein, candidate for Alderman in the 48th Ward, has addressed the city's financial problems, and no mayoral candidates have. Worse, the voting population seems unconcerned, with various constituencies each clamoring for its share of tax-funded "gimmes"- for tax credits for "green" energy, for funds to fix up rental apartments, for a new 850-unit luxury condo high rise development in one of the most glutted condo markets in the country, for new strip malls, for "affordable" housing, for hugely wealthy sports team owners, and for whatever else someone can stretch the definition of "public purpose" to justify.

These diversions, added to extant tax-funded boondoggles, will greatly compromise this city's ability to meet its basic needs as matters stand at the moment. The budget for 2011, remember, was only balanced by using most of the money the city was paid for the parking meter concession; and we should keep in mind that with that money, the city promised JP Morgan a given level of revenues and assumed the obligation to offset any deficiencies in meter revenues. This means that we not only have no way to balance the budget in 2012 without either steeply raising taxes, specifically property taxes, and/or making steep cuts in services.

This begs the question of just how we will cope when fuel costs double or triple from current levels, which looks like it could easily happen when we start down the slope of depletion in earnest. That could be very soon, and in fact looks to happen in 2012, when energy analysts predict that global oil production will fall 5%. Many believe that we are now on the downslope from the peaking of global production, which occurred in 2005. This augers much steeper fuel prices from 2012 forward, and I personally expect oil to establish a new floor of about $150 a barrel by that time. A major hike in fuel prices would cause the expense of such things as fuel for our emergency vehicles, and basic infrastructure repair and replacement, to skyrocket, and it's extremely likely that Chicago would not be able to pay for these things. That, of course, would mean critical and cascading failures of essential infrastructure, and basic, life-support services reduced to skeletal levels, endangering the lives and health of the city's 2.9 million residents, and those of residents in near suburbs that rely on our systems.

Book Review: Prelude by Kurt Cobb

2011-01-09T17:15:00.009-06:00

This first novel by founding member of the Association of Peak Oil (ASPO) and prominent science writer Kurt Cobb, whose commentaries on the depletion of resources appear frequently in S-Citizen magazine and is author of Resource Insights blog, was written with the stated purpose of informing the unaware public of the danger presented by the peak of global fuels. In Prelude, Cobb manages to give the reader new to the concept of Peak Oil a good survey course in the essentials of oil production, while telling an engrossing story with a likable, interesting protagonist, that will keep the reader turning the pages, and introduce the reader to the world of oil production and the reality of terminal resource decline.

Cobb has wisely avoided the temptation to write another work of "doomer porn" of struggle and death in an imagined post -peak collapse, and set his novel in the present day world. "I decided to create a narrative set firmly in contemporary society," Cobb states. " I wanted a story that would reframe the way people read the daily news and the way they interpret their everyday experience. My premise was that readers would more readily identify with a world familiar to them than one set in the distant future or transfigured by an imaginary crisis."

What he gives us instead is a fast-paced, suspenseful novel whose actions center around the career of its protagonist, the appropriately named Cassandra "Cassie" Young, an attractive and highly talented, but complacent young energy analyst who is a rapidly rising star at her firm, which very much resembles real-world Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA); and the shattering of her complacent world view and her belief in her work as she discovers both the lie of endless cheap energy, and the deep corruption of her firm.

Cassie has, like many top professionals, built a stunningly successful career in her field at a very youthful age, not only by her exceptional talent, but by never questioning her firm's gospel, which is that the world has an infinite reserve of cheap, accessible oil, and that we can rely upon the magical power of technology to solve any all problems, including the potential terminal decline of the substance that fuels it. It is when Cassie meets Victor Chernov, a brilliant and eccentric Russian musician and wealthy former oil trader, that her cozy, privileged personal world is turned upside down and she confronts the fact of the peaking and inevitable depletion of the world's most critical resource, and the destruction of her career and the life she's built upon it. Victor is a believer in the Peak Oil theory and he manages to interest Cassie enough in attend a ASPO conference, but Cassie remains skeptical until she brings Victor to the housewarming at the palatial new home of her firm's egotistical CEO, Larry Hillard, where Victor discovers, in a casual conversation with a landscape worker, that the house was paid for by a shadowy entity that turns out to be a front for one of the firm's major clients, the Kingdom of Ammar,the world's largest oil producer.

Here, Cobb illustrates the power of denial as Cassie at first dismisses the evidence of her employer's malfeasance and corruption. When she and Victor leave his party, he asks her how she thinks Hillard can legally pay for his landscaping through his company, and Cassie, as yet oblivious to the implications, replies, "he must have the best tax lawyer in Washington." But the seeds of doubt have been planted; and Cassie, troubled by the clear conflict of interest, delves deeper, enlisting Victor's assistance in breaking into her boss's email, where she discovers the firm's most closely guarded secret, the true figures for Ammar's reserves, which are far below the numbers published by the firm.

Events move quickly from here, and Cassie finds that her view of her world has changed forever. She can no longer function in her career, for that depends upon her ability to remain blind to the implications of the report that she has stolen, and even her relationship with her lover, Paul, is tested, and fails, as Paul is revealed as self-centered and cowardly. When Cassie confides to Paul that she might be in a great deal of trouble because her theft of the report has been apprehended, he shrieks," How could you do this to me!", and it is too obvious to Cassie that the consequences to her are his last consideration.

The conclusion of the novel is less than satisfying, as Cassie is forced to end her career, and accepts a massive severance check in return for her silence regarding the contents of the stolen report, and her permanent retirement from the energy industry. Thus, she can do no good with the knowledge she has gained at price of her career and risk of her very life, but her $2 Million severance check will permit her to make a separate peace,, as it were, and the novel concludes with her decision to leave her high-powered career and Washington D.C. forever to "go live in Vancouver... on some land... and grow a few tomatoes."

Many readers will be critical of Cassie's rapid transition from True Believer in the gospel of perpetual cheap energy and the magic of technology to solve any problem; to Peak Oil believer after a month's acquaintance with one man, a conference, and one damning document' and anyone who has ever worked in the financial world knows how unlikely it is that an employee who broke into the CEO's email and downloaded highly sensitive documents would be allowed to escape with so little punishment, let alone a lavish payout. In the real business world, people like Cassie are utterly, completely, totally destroyed, if they're even allowed to live, and they're fortunate if they're allowed to slink away utterly discredited and completely impoverished with no chance of recovery to a decent career ever.

Many other readers may also question Cassie's ethics in allowing herself to be "bought" and silenced, but I find her believable and sympathetic, and in her place, I would not have acted differently. Why risk everything you have, including your life, to deliver a message the world does not want to hear? Our young Cassandra rightly perceived that her message would only meet with contempt and denial from a public that has too much invested in not hearing it, and that the best use she could make of her unwanted new knowledge was to save herself... and go off to Vancouver and grow some tomatoes.

Altogether a very pleasurable, fast read and a novel I'd recommend to the non-Peak-Oil aware among your friends and relatives.

Chicago Is One of 18 Cities Most Likely to Go Bankrupt in 2011: Can We Afford More TIFS, RIFs, and Corporate Welfare?

2011-01-02T07:06:00.001-06:00

The Business Insider has compiled a list of the cities most likely to go bankrupt, and Chicago is No. 17.

The Insider points out that the budget for 2011 uses up nearly all of the revenue generated by selling a long-term lease on the city's parking meters. That money was supposed to last for decades Thus, we've balanced the budget for 2011 by destroying our finances for many decades out unless we can manage to produce a miracle, and it looks like we will have no other way to meet urgent needs, like funding our essential services, except to raise taxes to confiscatory levels, or build the casino that Daley has so long hankered for. We'll probably have to do both, for there's no guarantee that a casino could generate the revenue

However, the parlous condition of the city's finances seems to be a non-issue not only with the city's sitting aldermen, but with aspirants in the current race as well. Among the candidates for alderman in the 2011 race, only a handful, notably 48th Ward contender Phillip Bernstein, seem cognizant of the city's current desperate situation and propose realistic solutions.

Here in the 49th Ward, Joe Moore's only real opponent, Brian White, seems focused solely on devising more ways to divert tax revenues from city coffers to non-public purposes, namely the rehabilitation of 1500 rental apartments in the area via the 49th Ward RIF (Rental Improvement Fund), which will divert money generated from future property tax increases from city services to Rogers Park landlords, who will receive funds to improve their properties on the condition set aside rental units for low-income tenants. This is only one of many, many major diversions of public funds to private interest.

Will it take a major crisis, like the day the city can no longer afford the gasoline for fire trucks and police cars, to motivate our political leaders to re-order their spending priorities and take steps to reverse the outflow of public funds to non-essential private purposes?

Public Meeting: How to Protect Your Condo Association From Foreclosure Damage

2010-12-08T13:31:00.001-06:00

Many thanks to the Edgewater Community Buzz for announcing this meeting. I thought I'd pass it along, and suggest other area bloggers post it, as well.

Time: Thursday Night, December 9, at 7 PM
Place: Park Tower Condominium Association
5415 N Sheridan Road- Hospitality Room

The 147 and 151 buses stop at the door, and the Berwyn el stop is around the corner at Berwyn and Winthrop. Parking is available for a fee.

This meeting is meant to assist condo owners and managers of condo associations in protecting their buildings financially from the fallout of multiple foreclosures.

Attorneys Eliot G. Schencker and Kristofer D. Kasten of Michael C. Kim & Associates will advise condo owners on how to protect their condo associations from financial damage due to foreclosures in their buildings. The presentation will include an update on new FHA rules, and Q & A will follow.

Can We Afford the 49th Ward RIF: Financing Chicago in the Post-Peak Oil Era

2010-11-22T22:41:00.002-06:00

Mega-cities such as Chicago will confront major challenges in the Post Peak Oil era. The core problem facing our largest and most densely populated cities will be economic: we will have to meet rapidly increasing costs in day-to-day operation of our critical systems for transportation, water treatment, emergency response, sewage and waste treatment and disposal, law enforcement, and the maintenance of critical infrastructure necessary to deliver these services, in a climate of rapid and geometric increases in costs due to the draw-down of liquid fuels, production of which is projected to drop 5% a year or more from 2012 forward.

Is it wise to divert future tax revenues to subsidies for private purposes, no matter what their merits may be, when Chicago currently is struggling financially and is unprepared for the post-Peak Oil era? At this time, the city's systems and infrastructure are in need of substantial repair and upgrading, and any further diversion, present or future, of public money to private purposes could further impair our ability to maintain a safe, orderly civil environment.

TIF and RIF financing mean the diversion of future tax increases (the "increment") from general revenues to private purposes, in this case the rehabilitation and winterization of rental properties in the 49th Ward. The amount of money involved is often substantial; in the case of the proposed 49th Ward RIF, up to $54 M will be diverted from general revenues in an era of steeply increased costs of operating the city in an era of steep reduction in available energy and vastly increased operating costs.

Additionally, other wards will also demand RIFs for similar purposes, which means that the amount of future property tax revenues diverted could be multiplied by 50, since many of the the south side and west side wards are burdened with much more rental housing stock in much worse physical condition than that of the 49th Ward. This could mean that, ultimately, up to $2.5 Billion could be diverted from general revenues to the purpose of rehabilitating rental properties, over the next 25 years,in addition to other subsidies for other private purposes, to the detriment of the City's ability to fund daily operations and make necessary investment in the upgrading and expansion of critical infrastructure to keep the city minimally safe and sanitary in an era of crippling shortages and rapidly escalating cost s for nearly all services and goods.

Given that Chicago's water and sewer infrastructure is decrepit and outdated, and will need substantial repair and upgrading to continue to meet current needs, and that its public transportation system is also in poor condition and ill-equipped to handle a steep and rapid increase in ridership that could occur if the cost of auto ownership were to become too expensive for low and medium income residents due to rapid escalation in fuel costs. Considering all of the foregoing, Chicago and the surrounding Cook County suburbs are currently ill prepared for the vicissitudes of Peak Oil and the terminal decline in oil and other fossil fuel production.

While the costs of running our city in such a manner as to ensure basic safety and sanitation will rise steeply and rapidly, tax revenues could well be in free fall due to declining incomes of residents and in business activity, as declines in fuel supplies will raise the costs of all business activities in proportion. Many businesses will fail and nearly all will face major challenges, while employment opportunities will wither. Property taxes, sales taxes, and all other taxes and fees will most likely have to be increased steeply to meet daily operational expenses and perform "patch" repairs in critical transportation, water, and sewer infrastructure, and expansion and improvement of these systems will quickly become prohibitive. The capital necessary for expansion simply will not be there because of the debt overhang from the early 2000s that has absorbed all the capital that otherwise might be available to invest in replacing aged infrastructure and expanding our utilities and public transportation. Yet this investment will be necessary if the city is to maintain services at their current level for the current population of approximately 2.9 million and surrounding suburbs that rely upon our water treatment and sewer systems. Additionally, massive investment in the regional public transportation system will be necessary for the system to accommodate new riders as driving becomes prohibitively expensive for tens of thousands more local residents than currently use the system.

Chicago will therefore have to find a way to finance vastly more expensive daily operations and maintain and expand as needed the utility and transportation infrastructure needed to ensure that the city will remain safe and livable with steeply reduced energy imputs from that point forward. There is at this time no substitute for oil and other fossil fuels that will meet all energy needs,, and plans for alternative energy, such as expanded nuclear capacity, will take at least a decade and most likely two decades to be fully implemented. Expansion of our power generating capacity will also be problematic because of the shortage of capital.

In short, the city will have great difficulty in funding its daily operations and in finding the capital to invest in necessary infrastructure repairs and upgrades, with the revenues that will be available for the purpose. It will most likely be necessary to raise taxes substantially just to maintain services at their current levels and make emergency repairs on critical infrastructure. Investment in expansion and upgrades of that infrastructure to meet the needs of an expanding population of ex-suburbanites and immigrants from other cities and towns, in an economy that is shrinking in response to steeply higher fuel costs, will require massive capital outlays that will be possible only if tax revenues increase steeply.

Any further diversion of tax revenues from public purposes to private purposes, by means of a TIF, RIF, tax abatement, or any other direct or indirect public subsidy, will mean that less money is available to prepare the City of Chicago's systems and infrastructure, which are already somewhat underfunded and have critical deficiencies, and that the city could end up in a financial bind impossible to negotiate as costs increase 25% or more and it becomes impossible to operate on the revenues available. This could mean steep reduction of necessary services, such as sanitation, emergency response, and law enforcement; and cascading failures in critical systems such as water and sewage treatment, and transportation infrastructure, greatly endangering the health and lives of 2.9 million (and possibly many more) city residents; and rendering the city much less attractive as a place to do business.

Our most important task in preparing for the post-peak era is rendering our community more resilient and self-reliant in a context where government subsidies and services may be steeply reduced, or non-existent. In the future that is almost upon us, our governments will be increasingly unable to function as they have for the past century, and will be unable to provide funding and assistance for any but the basic functions of a local government, and surely will not have the means to provide subsidies to individuals for private purposes, no matter how worthy.

For these reasons, any further diversions of tax revenues, present or future, for private purposes, would mean putting our basic services at risk and would endanger the health and lives of Chicago's 2.9 Million residents, and possibly many more in Cook County that are dependent upon the same systems for essential services. As it is, large diversions of revenues from the public till to private purposes have crippled Chicago financially, and retarded the city's progress in upgrading its critical infrastructure and funding daily operations.Therefore, the proposed 49th Ward RIF, should be tabled, and no future TIF or RIF financing should be considered.

Additionally, extant TIFs and other subsidies to business entities should be reviewed and re-considered in light of their true benefits, if any, and the negative offsets to those benefits, with the aim of reducing as much as possible the drain on public finances, and building reserves for the expenditures we will need to make to keep our city and its environs livable and economically viable.

Uptown Update: 70% of Property Taxes in Wilson Yards TIF District Go to the TIF

2010-11-17T10:20:00.000-06:00

Those who believe that TIF or RIF funds are "free" money need to take a look at what is happening to taxpayers in extant TIF districts in Chicago.

Uptown Update's November 15 post displays a tax bill for a property in the Wilson Yard TIF District. As you can see, fully 71% of the amount goes to the TIF district, and away from the schools, the police department, the fire protection district, the libraries, the parks, and all the other critical services and public amenities that make Chicago a good place to live, work, and do business.

No wonder Chicago is having serious financial problems. We have over 160 extant TIF districts, with more being planned, notably the 49th Ward RIF that will cover the entire ward. Additionally, some TIFs are renewed when their 23-year term expires.

Was the Target store on Broadway worth diverting so much money from the municipal services that we need to have a safe and sanitary environment? Do the 200 or so jobs the store supplies offset the reductions in services and hikes in taxes and fees made necessary by the loss of tax revenues?

Remember, every dime allocated to a TIF comes out of city revenues. There's no such a thing as free money.

An Entitlement Program for Rogers Park Landlords: How Will the 49th Ward RIF Benefit Property Owners and Help Solve Chicago's Financial Problems

2010-11-16T13:24:00.002-06:00

Follow the link to the fact sheet for the proposed 49th Ward Rental Improvement Fund, the TIF that will cover the entire 49th Ward, and divert up to $54 Million in property taxes paid in the ward to landlords in the area to rehabilitate their properties, on the condition that they reserve a percentage of their units for low-income tenants.

Many people believe that this plan is an "improved" TIF, but the closer I look at this plan, the more difficult I find it to believe that it will benefit anyone other than owners of rental properties who are to receive the grants.

The RIF (Rental Improvement Fund), a variation on a traditional TIF created to improve rental property, is being promoted by Marilyn Pagan-Banks of North Side P.O.W.E.R. and 49th Ward candidate for Alderman, Brian White. The RIF is projected to generate up to $54 Million over its 23-year lifespan, which is to assist (i.e. subsidize) more than 1,500 rental property owners in the ward in repairing and rehabilitating their properties on the condition that they keep their rentals affordable.

According to the promoters, we need the RIF to "improve the quality of life for all Rogers Park residents by preserving the unique diversity of Rogers Park as a community of choice", to "address the current situation- that much of the housing stock in Rogers Park is aged and could be improved with rehabilitation-while creating a future source of dedicated revenue for continued housing market stabilization and improvement"; and "Protect many of the smaller landlords who may be compelled to exist the rental market or raise rents to unaffordable levels, due to the costs to make repairs."

The RIF will exist "solely to fund multifamily rental property repair and rehabilitation", and funding would be available to landlords in the form of grants, in return for which the landlord would agree to keep rents affordable, as defined in the guidelines, for ten years.

Taxpayers should have a lot of questions to ask about a plan that will take an "increment" of local property taxes amounting to as much as $54 Million over the next 23 years to subsidize some property owners to improve their properties while maintain rents at reduced levels. For starters, the grants will be offset by additional property taxes to make up for taxes being diverted away from essential city services, which means that the rents in the area will trend higher and there will be no net gain for the renters on properties that benefit from these grants.

And does Rogers Park really need more cheap housing, in an era of falling house and condo prices, and downward pressure on rentals as failed condo conversions revert to rental?

Will this TIF overlap some of the areas covered by the Loyola-Devon TIF, which still has several years to run? What effect will being in two TIF districts have on the taxes for affected properties? Will it matter?

But the most important questions are these: What gives a public agency the right to to divert public money to private property owners, whether for the benefit of renters or anyone else? And how is "continuing housing stabilization" the function of a government?

Will the RIF do more to aggravate blight than mitigate it?

Worse, could it be that the RIF will make lower-income renters worse off, not better, and that they will end up paying more rent, not less? Will the RIF be just another factor in driving up property taxes, and rents, thus not only canceling the benefits to landlords and tenants, while increasing the load on all property owners?

Most of all, how will Chicago solve its financial problems and continue to provide essential civil services such as police and fire protection, public transportation, schools, as well as desirable amenities that make the city an attractive place to live and work, and still keep taxes at levels where Chicago can compete with other cities for businesses and residents, if we continue to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in the aggregate of all the city's 160-plus TIF districts, not to mention a multitude of other massive subsidies named differently, from city coffers to private purposes?

None of our candidates for the alderman in the 49th have addressed the city's mounting financial problems, which mirror those of the state of Illinois, now one of the most financially challenged states in the country. Much less do they seem concerned with how we will be able to fund essential services, and critical infrastructure repairs and improvements in the coming era of rising fuel prices and increasing shortages, and falling tax revenues due to the continued shrinkage of our tax base and the deteriorating incomes of the population.

Two public meetings concerning the RIF have been held so far, with only a day's notice given for each, resulting in low attendance for each. The first I attended, at which Tom Tresser spoke, had only a sprinkling of attendees. It would be beneficial and only appropriate to have another meeting for the public with more publicity and advance notice, and attended by our candidates for Alderman, Joe Moore and Brian White, especially since the latter is one of its promoters; as well as Marilyn Pagan-Banks, and the members of the ZULAC zoning committee. The public is entitled to a more solidly grounded justification for yet another massive diversion of public money for private purposes.

The 2011 Chicago Games: New Northside Candidates Bring Interest to a Dull Race

2010-11-14T05:04:00.007-06:00

The Chicago 2011 election looks to be a dull election, a study in foregone conclusions.

The lineup for next year's municipal elections, with a few interesting exceptions here and there, is comprised of Legacy politicians whose major accomplishments are tax increases, budget crises, and massive subsidies for crony businesses, along with reduced services and increased fees for nearly everything. Only in a few wards, such as the 46th and 48th, do Chicago voters have a choice of interesting, talented newcomers who might be capable of reversing the insanely destructive policies and initiatives promulgated by our outgoing Mayor and the 50 spineless, brainless rubber stamps who have never opposed Daley on any important issue and who've played the major part in making Chicago an expensive and altogether unattractive city in which to locate a major business without being offered a massive taxpayer-funded subsidy... and making life miserably expensive for taxpaying residents and businesses while reducing essential services.

Maybe we are all so occupied with the struggle to get or hold onto a job and make ends meet in this dismal time that we have little energy to spare for the 2011 Chicago games, but a curious inertia seems to have settled over the city, for this election seems to be generating very little interest among the population. That is really astonishing given the incredible mismanagement of the city's finances and assets by our current lineup of clowns, and considering that this is the first time in 20 years we've had a real opportunity to elect someone other than Daley as Mayor, whose grip on power was considered so unshakable that he never once during his 20-year reign had a truly serious challenger. Same thing in several of the wards, where entrenched incumbents are stepping down after decades of running virtually unopposed, such as the 46th Ward (Uptown) and 48th Ward (Edgewater), where Helen Schiller and Mary Ann Smith are both retiring, creating opportunities for political newcomers..

There are at least 7 candidates running in the 46th, all of whom are interesting, and a number of whom have extremely detailed and specific ideas to address the ward's major issues. I will decline to comment further on the 46th Ward race as I am employed by one of the candidates, and wish to avoid a conflict of interest.

In the 48th Ward, the bland legacy pol, Harry Osterman, a long-time representative to the State House, is opposed by newcomer Phil Bernstein, who is best known for his trenchant blog, Edgewater Intelligencer, and is a feisty and original independent with over three decades of experience as a business owner and public servant who has directed major public works projects, and who offers a detailed vision for Edgwater, including specific plans for reviving Edgewater's moribund Broadway and Granville retail strips and most of all, solving Chicago's increasingly serious financial problems. His opponant Osterman is a nice enough guy in his colorless way, I suppose, but there's more to being an effective leader than being a "nice guy" and Osterman has, after all, been a part of the state government that has made Illinois one or the most financially troubled states in the union. Bernstein, by contrast, not only has very detailed plans for the ward and the city that include viable ideas for reducing expenses and balancing Chicago's out-of-control budget, but has taken real risk in publicizing his positions, his vision, and his plans in great detail at his candidate's website, which most candidates avoid doing, preferring to mouth the usual vague palaver about "creating jobs" and "improving service" and "creating coalitions". It's easy to come through on promises that are nothing but vague, general statements that promise nothing in particular. You aren't expected to deliver what you never promised, but when you say that you absolutely will, say, donate 30% of your salary to local charities, reduce property taxes, and mitigate the city's budgetary problems, you had better deliver. Bernstein pledges to do all of this, and we can only hope that 48th Ward residents are sufficiently motivated by the recent spate of violent crime, the deteriorated condition of Edgewater's retail districts, and escalating taxes, to put their Iphones aside for a few minutes this February, and go out in the cold to vote to give this talented and spirited outsider a chance.

Here in the 49th, Joe Moore, the 20-year incumbent, has no credible opposition at all. It was not until a couple of weeks ago that I encountered anyone circulating petitions for any candidate at all, though I heard loose talk about a number of others, including Blane Roberts, Joyce Shanahan, Louis Herrera-Baker, Ben Meyer, and Brian White. I signed Brian White's petition, holding my nose, just so there would be somebody on the ballot besides the incumbent. I have not encountered anyone circulating petitions for anyone else since, even though I walk the streets a lot, and use public transportation.

Somehow, none of these people seem like they're likely to offer spirited opposition. Sorry, kids, but your Facebook page doesn't make it as a campaign site, and neither does a one or two page amateur website with a couple of pictures of you and your charming family, but only vague statements about "service" and no specifics about your experience or qualifications, and most of all no vision or specific, detailed plans as to how you will implement your plans.

Well, Shanahan, and recently, Herrera-Baker have dropped out of the race, and Shane Roberts and Ben Meyer are invisible, so Joe Moore's only real opponent at this point is Brian White of the Lakeside CDC. White sole agenda seems to be securing a TIF to cover the entire 49th Ward, designed to subsidize landlords to reserve apartments for low-income renters, and is patently a device for conveying property taxes to certain Rogers Park landlords. Does Rogers Park need more low-income rental housing? Does diverting our tax revenues from essential services and desirable public amenities to favored apartment owners for the purpose of securing housing for low-income tenants, benefit most of the ward's middle-class population? Since White and Moore are both supporting this TIF, and seem to have similar agendas altogether, White's candidacy seems rather pointless.

If anyone is opposing O'Connor in the 40th (Edgwater-Rogers Park-West Rogers Park, or Bernie Stone in the 50th (West Rogers Park), I haven't heard about it. If you've heard anything interesting, fill me in. These two wards are experiencing problems with spreading blight and crime, and their somnolent incumbents need to be replaced with energetic people who have visions for their wards as vibrant urban neighborhoods with well-maintained rental housing, clean streets, and lively, well-kept retail districts.

$58 Million TIF Planned for Entire 49th Ward- Meeting at Loyola Park Field House Saturday Oct 30

2010-10-29T15:36:00.000-05:00

A TIF that will cover the entire 49th Ward is in the works, that will funnel $58 Million to connected cronies. This means increased property taxes and reduced services for 49th Ward residents.

Is Chicago broke enough from the quilt of TIF districts covering this city? How much more can we take?

There will be a meeting at the Loyola Park Field House tomorrow, Saturday October 30, at 3 PM.

Click on the title link above to go to the petition to ban TIFs in Cook County.

Midas Plague

2010-09-15T16:02:00.008-05:00

Those of us who are fanatical Science Fiction readers might remember one of Frederik Pohl's more famous stories from the early 50s, during which period Americans experienced for the first time truly incredible affluence- remember the saying "you can't starve in America"? The Midas Plague projects a society so affluent and so awash in consumer goods of every description that you are forced by government edict to consume as much as possible, and your socio-economic status is measured by your relative freedom from forced consumption; as you ascend the ladder you are required to consume less, not more.

Pohl doesn't show the flip side of the story, which is a society broke and resource-depleted and burdened with towering debt to make and pay for this crap, to the point where many people are walking away from houses and apartments stuffed with decent, usable belongings simply because they can no longer pay the cost of housing them all and carrying them around. This is where our wealth and a major chunk of irreplaceable natural resources have gone, and we won't be able to reconstitute it into food, money in the bank, or the fossil fuels that made this incredible superfluity possible.I think about this story a lot when I contemplate the devolution of the country into a massive coast-to-coast resale store, as people buried under mountains of unwanted possessions and the debt they accumulated acquiring them, try to unload all the outdated clothing fads, obsolete electronics, multiple sets of china and stemware and turkey fryers and chocolate fountains and smoothie makers and yoga mats and kiddie pools and bric-a-brac and spare tires and multiple sets of tools and hobby kits and old kitchen cabinets and lawn furniture and whatever else they have stuffed into houses and garages and storage lockers, to buy food and pay rent.

It evokes revulsion, this seemingly uncontrollable urge to acquire and accumulate past any consideration of need or even visible benefit or pleasure that so many Americans seem to have, especially when it's financed by equity-stripping your house and running up credit card bills equal to four times your income. The phenomenon has become so prevalent in rich Western societies that it has triggered a reaction formation known as Minimalism, the paring of possessions to the most basic essentials and an aesthetic of utter simplicity.

In our condemnation of the "materialism" and "consumerism" we think we perceive in the compulsive shoppers and packrats of this country, we forget that the incredible abundance of Western countries in the past 100 years is anomalous in human history, and that for the 10,000 years preceding this period, it was all most humans could do to keep a few pieces of shabby clothing on their backs and acquire the rudimentary necessities of daily life. For most of the world, it still is. That's why status and achievement have usually been measured by how much and what kind of possessions a person acquires. Our urge to accumulate evolved in response to extreme and chronic scarcity that lasted until we learned how to harness the power of fossil fuels, and it is essential to our survival under normal conditions... and the conditions of extreme abundance under which we of the Western world have lived in the past century and half are not normal.

That's just the problem with so many of our basic "instincts". The behaviors we evolved in the long ages of hardscrabble existence that enabled us to thrive and build a base on which to build our civilizations have been rendered obsolete by civilization and are mostly more a threat to our existence than an aid. We once needed to reproduce endlessly because most children in pre-modern times didn't survive past the age of five, but in our present context, a large family is only so many more mouths to feed, and a major drain on the finances and energy of the parents. We once needed to hunt and fight endlessly just to maintain a hold on our territories and stave off predators both human and animal, but now our dominator urge could lead to wars that end up extinguishing the species. And until quite recently, most people needed to amass stores of food and other goods to survive through the long periods of shortages, the crop failures, and the scarcity of almost everything, in periods where nearly everything was made laboriously by hand and you had to settle for what was available to you in your own back yard because of the difficulty of travel and shipping.

We might still need the traits that seem so inimical to survival now, but which will could mean the difference between living and dying in a world of resource scarcity and vicious contests over the scraps of industrial civilization. The acquisitive urge is basically constructive, but we need to learn to channel it constructively, toward accumulation of things that are genuinely useful (like a large savings account, for example) and possibly will be essential as the affluence of the last century fades and the consumerist ethos with it. Unfortunately, we're still wed to that ethos, and haven't gotten past the idea that the best way to achieve prosperity is to buy and fill our houses with "luxuries" of no utility and little lasting pleasure that trick us into believing ourselves wealthy while the bills stack up, our bank accounts are empty, and we are more dependent than ever on fragile systems for delivery of essentials that could fail quickly and catastrophically. Our economists still believe that the best way to repair our economy is to stimulate spending, and borrowing to spend, on the things that are not only making our houses uninhabitable but are depleting the resources we can never replace and will badly need just to live in basic comfort, at the expense of the savings and investment in the ndustries and systems we will need to provide basic technological amenities and comforts in a future of permanent resource scarcity.

So, when we're tempted to buy another toy or another overpriced trendy garment, or trade up to a bigger apartment to accommodate the swelling horde of consumer "stuff" we've maxed our cards to buy, we should take a look at our possessions and bank accounts, and ask ourselves the following questions: Would this money I'm spending on this item be better spent paying down a bill? Do I even really want this nonessential frill? Could I get this item for free or next-to-free off Craigsllist or Ebay? Do I have the stuff I really need, like a six-month supply of non perishable food and personal supplies for everyone in this house, and necessary emergency equipment like an electric generator and ample warm clothing and bedding on hand? Would it be better to pay off my mortgage than leverage myself into a bigger house I wouldn't need if I didn't have so much useless junk sitting around? Do I have enough money in my savings account? Is my retirement adequately funded? Would I be better off just getting rid of about half the stuff I have and stop spending money storing it and hauling it from one dwelling to another?

Our core urges and drives aren't corrupt or obsolete, just misdirected because we have not yet learned to deal with the incredible affluence of the modern era in our privileged country, nor do we yet grasp how fleeting this abundance may be. We will have to learn once more how to live with less, and make our resources serve our real needs instead of being diverted into useless consumption and the manufacture of billions of items that will spend the next few thousand years in landfills, the resources that were squandered making them lost to us forever. We'll have to relearn to make truly beautiful, durable things that can be passed down through four generations instead of stuff that breaks or obsolesces in two years. In short, we'll have to revert to the frugality that most people had to practice in the past just to live, while learning to conserve rather than waste.

We Will Kill for Oil

2010-08-17T18:59:00.004-05:00

Honesty is so distasteful.

We'd so much rather see WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER, even if this sweet homily seems sort of hollow when affixed to the back end of something that weighs 6,000 pounds and gets 12MPG. Do these people think that there is no connection whatsoever between the 20% of our oil we import from various hot spots in the Middle East and Africa, and our 65-year-involvement and multiple wars there?

Was there ever any other reason for our cozy relationship with major human rights violator Saudi Arabia? Or for our presence in Iraq, which is expected to displace Saudi Arabia as the largest producer and exporter of oil over the next decade? Or Afghanistan, of great strategic importance in accessing and securing the estimated $12 Trillion in oil reserves projected to reside in the Caspian Sea.

And how many people here want to reckon with the consequences of a sudden, drastic reduction in available oil supplies? So far, there is no indication that our local leaders even consider the possibility, let alone how it would cascade through our systems to produce critical shortages and major system failures. Chicago has no emergency plans in place, and instead of making the improvements necessary to our critical transportation and utility infrastructure necessary to keep the city intact and functioning with decent levels of safety and sanitation in the event of a prolonged emergency, are searching for more paths by which to divert tax revenues from essential public needs to the back pockets of corporate cronies while starving our increasingly decrepit and inadequate public transportation. To date, I have not once heard the term "peak oil" pass the lips of Obama , who prefers to talk about "reducing our dependence on foreign oil", as though there were any other kind, especially since it has become glaringly evident that offshore drilling is not likely to offset the fading production of the super giants, and neither are the tar sands of Calgary,which require staggering quantities of fresh water and natural gas to work, which means that the oil from the sands is not only partially subsidized by Canadian taxpayers and would have a negative EROEI without that subsidy, but comes at the expense of natural gas supplies, which are subject to rapid and irreversible depletion just as oil is.

Iraq and Afghanistan were Bush's Wars, then became Obama's Wars, but they're really our wars, and they probably will not end until every last drop of oil has been extracted from every last well, or at least until the cost of extraction is a barrel in for a barrel out. That time may come sooner than we think as it is. Obama's promise to end these conflicts, so quickly reneged on, is being flung in his face by foes and former supporters alike and will no doubt be used as a major wedge in the 2012 election by the next pandering con artist who runs on promises to accomplish the impossible, but anyone who believes that we'll withdraw from these conflicts anytime soon is probably someone who believes in perpetually self-renewing abiotic oil, or that we can run our economy on wind turbines, used restaurant grease and corn liquor.

It is probably useless to consider that our resource wars are only hastening resource depletion, or that all combatants will eventually lose, for the oil will deplete remorselessly no matter who controls it. But in the meantime, we probably have no choice but to soldier on, since we are still in stone denial concerning our extreme dependence on petroleum and are in no way prepared to make the adjustments and arrangements that would enable us to withdraw from the Middle East and lose access to the bounty of Iraq, or the Caspian sea. Nor is the rest of the western world, which relies upon the U.S. to do the dirty work of securing the oil supplies for other western nations, and any political aspirant who suggests that we confront the inevitability of resource depletion and consider these wars already lost, and learn to live with much less energy, is committing career suicide.

So what it all means is that we will continue to kill and be killed for the oil in the Middle East, and Africa, too, just as we have for decades now, because the alternative, a rapid withdrawal with the possible sudden loss of 20% of our usual supply, would mean incredible chaos and violence, and random death on a mass scale,within our borders, as the systems we rely on to deliver electricity and clean municpal water and vaccines and medication and cheap, abundant food, all start to wobble and fail for lack of the necessary energy imputs to run them. It's an alternative that I'm personally not willing to accept if there is any way around it, and I'm sure you aren't, either, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for our leadership and general public to embrace the only alternative to "the war that will not end in our lifetimes", as Cheney put it, which is to downscale and rearrange our systems and our lives to enable us provide for ourselves at a decent level of modern comfort and amenity in the absence of copious quantities of oil.

Over The Cliff

2010-08-08T20:50:00.002-05:00

While American policy makers pass energy bills designed to pander to various lobbies and to allocate the largest subsidies to the "alternatives" to oil that are least likely to be suitable replacements and provide us with even basic amenities in the energy-short future, a number of geologists and energy analysts are eying the rapidly dropping rates of new gas discoveries, and the steeply falling drill rig count with growing alarm.

Natural gas is now considered to be the most likely substitute for oil, in spite of the fact that it, too, is a fossil fuel that is almost always found in proximity to oil, and is also subject to depletion. Gas prices are at deep lows and consumption has dropped in recent years, and policy makers and the public alike are pacified by the assurance that we have enough natural gas in North America to last 100 years at current rates of consumption.

Energy writer Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights, among a number of other prominent prognosticators, believes that natural gas supplies are headed "over the cliff", that the drop could be rapid and precipitous, and its onset could take place in less than three years. In a recent article at SCitizen, he outlines the convergence of circumstances now in place that could cause seemingly plentiful North American natural gas supplies to plummet precipitously in the near future. These include not only the unexpectedly rapid rate of depletion in recently drilled wells, but the shutting in of existing drills due to extremely low current gas prices.

As I've pointed out in previous posts, a 100-year supply will become a twenty-year supply very quickly were consumption to increase by just 5% a year. That's something we need to be very concerned about, because at this juncture, our leaders, driven by the fossil fuel lobby and in deep denial concerning our ability to continue business as usual as that has been done sine WW2, are hell-bent on converting our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks to natural gas. The conversion of our gigantic fleet of petro-burners to natural gas would cause consumption to ramp up very steeply over the next decade, and drive this extremely valuable fuel into steep depletion, with dire implications for our ability to meet other critical needs, such as for food and heat.

Not only is natural gas used to heat most of the homes in the U.S. and is the most efficient and economical way to do that so far, our population of 305 million (and growing) people are extremely dependent upon mechanized agriculture for food, and natural gas is absolutely essential for manufacturing the nitrogen based fertilizers that made the "green revolution" possible.. Obviously, rapidly declining gas production could mean widespread food shortages, or even famines, in this country that has never experienced such a thing, and would also make many other essentials, such as ample home heat, unaffordable for a sizable fraction of our population. That the result would be unbelievable suffering accompanied by a steep increase in disease and hunger and rapidly falling lifespans, ought to be obvious, but our leaders don't seem overly concerned with the implications for our non-rich population, which is about 95% of us.

Rapid depletion of existing wells could easily cause crippling shortages and steep increases in prices in the next few years even if we don't increase our consumption. Therefore, it would be sheer insanity to double the demand for this fuel by adding the load of our entire transportation system, if indeed we could even begin to convert our fleet of gasoline burners, or put into place the delivery system needed to make the fuel widely available.

The promotion of natural gas as the silver bullet that will save our energy-intensive way of life is just the next stage of denial. Our business and government leaders now recognize that peak oil is a fact, and we are understandably frantically casting about for a "solution" that will permit business as usual to continue, forgetting that all resources have a depletion curve. This is why our political leadership and business elite not only will not be of any help in dealing with the vicissitudes of life in a rapidly contracting economy and increasing scarcity of necessites, but will actually be major obstacles to successfully managing the massage shift in our economy and its physical underpinnings now underway.

Eliminating Housing Subsidies Will Improve the Economy

2010-07-27T09:58:00.002-05:00

Excellent article at Irvine Housing Blog

Eliminating housing subsidies may cause house prices to drop, says Irvine Renter, but it will free up capital for more productive uses.

How many "more productive uses" can you think of for the $3.4 Trillion that we've committed to mortgage assistance, tax credits for new buyers, backstopping the GSEs like FMAC and FNMA against their hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on bad mortgages, and other assistance and subsidies for the sinking housing market? How much do FHA loans with their average 20% delinquency and default rates cost the taxpayers? How much do we lose to the mortgage interest deduction?

And how many poor people are living any better with Section 8 subsidies than they would be without this welfare program for slumlords?

$3. 4 Trillion would repair every dangerously deficient dam and bridge in this country. It could rebuild St. Louis' collapsing sewers, and rebuild Chicago's lakefront and rail system.

It could rebuild the aging water treatment infrastructure in all the older cities.

We could build a completely electrified rapid-rail (not High Speed) to every city and town in this country with a population of more than 5,000.

It could be put against our towering public debt load, most of all.

We might once again have productive industries making the things we badly need, to the benefit of every socio-economic group in this society, while housing costs would drop steeply. Poor people could find more "first-rung-on-the-ladder" jobs, and our middle classes could have more opportunities for advancement and more job niches utilizing a greater variety of skill sets and talents, while the rich would have more profitable investment opportunities where their capital would be utilized building new industries providing the technologies and systems we will need to maintain our technological amenity while transitioning to a low-energy regime.

Skewed Priorities

2010-07-26T23:55:00.004-05:00

SEND MONEY!!!

That's the overriding message from the northwest corner of Iowa, where the Lake Dehli Dam breached and drained the recreational lake behind it this weekend. There was no loss of life and no one was seriously injured, thankfully, but the resulting deluge pretty well gutted the value of the area to the vacationers who own the 900 or so homes that fronted the lake... which was all most of the folks there could think about.

Nobody, not one person, said, Thank God there were no fatalities or injuries, which is the first thought you have when something like this happens. There didn't seem to be a lot of sympathy or concern for the people downriver whose businesses and permanent homes were wrecked by the torrent, and a local official said in passing that his town would of course apply for funds for cleanup, which is going to be a big job. But that seemed to be a peripheral concern to most of the people interviewed.

What most people talked about first and the most was how they hoped the Feds would step in with the money to rebuild the dam, because otherwise their vacation homes- mostly second homes worth from $50,000 to $500,000- will be almost worthless without the lake it created.

Like the rest of the taxpayers in this country have nothing better to do with $200 million or so than to rebuild a small dam solely to restore a recreational lake, to rectify the economic losses of a handful of second-home owners.

Our pols and economists are sending the public a lot of mixed messages mixed with hope fastened to very doubtful metrics, but the message we most need to be trumpeted from the rooftops is already printed on our increasingly decrepit and dangerous infrastructure, our $13 Trillion in public and private debt, our gutted manufacturing sector, and our failing war efforts in the part of the world on which we depend for most of our liquid fuels; is that the party is over. We can't even afford to repair the things whose catastrophic failure would cause thousands of deaths; at this time there are over 3500 large dams and 8000 bridges classified as dangerously deficient, and whose catastrophic failure would easily kill thousands of people, that we are dragging our feet on because we already spent the $16 Billion required for minimal remediation on things like highways to nowhere and mega-sports arenas, supporting the government-financed mortgage market, paying subsidies to farm owners to not grow food, and paying people to buy new cars and build ever more houses that nobody can afford to buy, among many other wasteful expenditures too numerous to list here.

We have extended ourselves financially into the next century, well beyond our childrens' probable lifetimes, since the post WW2 era in order to finance things that not only are too big and too complex to maintain as we start down the other side of the fuel supply curve, but continue to squander massive amounts of our remaining wealth, or rather, our remaining borrowing power, on things that cannot be considered public purpose and are flatly extravagances that we never really could afford and that are now crowding out urgent public needs that we don't have much time to meet before energy costs place them beyond our reach forever.

The figure in the foregoing paragraph does not include private debt, which maybe doesn't mean anything anyway since so much of the public debt was incurred in backstopping the financial institutions against the losses they incurred from this private debt. Municipal shortfalls and state deficits are also not included, nor are future pension and entitlement program obligations.

Suffice it to say that recreational lakes in Iowa and 850-unit luxury condo towers in Chicago's laughably glutted north lake front condo market, among thousands of other costly private indulgences that come at public expense, are costly frills that benefit few, and that neither the country at large nor this city can accommodate any longer without making steep sacrifices in the things we need to live decently and safely. But the American middle classes, steeped in delusion and fantasy, and possessed of a swollen sense of entitlement, are the people least apt to get the message broadcast by the ever-increasing numbers of boil-water days, extended power outages, critical infrastructure failures, and the general decrepit and brittle condition of the country's systems, which is that we're at the end of our ability to pretend that we're still a wealthy country with unlimited resources and the competence to manage either our physical resources or finances so that we'll be able to keep the lights on and the trains running when energy supplies become critical.

Loyola-Morgan Retail District: Gains and Losses

2010-07-17T22:44:00.001-05:00

We can't fail to be impressed by the recent transformation of the formerly forlorn stretch of Sheridan between Devon and Albion. The strip of disused buildings and vacant lots has blossomed into a lively and attractive retail district with the addition of the Morgan at Loyola Station rental apartment building, a good-looking and appropriately scaled mid-rise building with small ground-floor retail shops; and a pocket that used to be ugly and a little forbidding is now cozy and inviting. This pocket of Rogers Park is now the most successful and attractive retail district in the neighborhood, and it is helped a lot by the proximity of two major grocery stores and other retail in Edgewater a few blocks south.

Yet, as you travel south on Sheridan into Broadway and consider the moribund two-block stretch of Broadway just south of Sheridan, and spotty Devon Ave, you're reminded of how much easier it is to destroy a neighborhood than it is to build it, and how important is appropriate development, for Broadway Blvd is an essay in the destruction wrought by ugly, auto-oriented, anti-urban development; a wilderness of strip mall slums and drive-through food outlets and self-storage facilities. Actually, the street contains a number of interesting small businesses, including a couple of antique stores and a wonderful day spa as well as several interesting small restaurants, but they're a little lost among the seas of parking, fast food outlets and other auto-oriented garbage. Just a couple of blocks south, Broadway between Granville and Sheridan is still a cold, lackluster corridor of drive-through food outlets and parking lots, and Devon is pocked with disused parking lots fronting the street and vacant storefronts. But attractive, interesting, lively urban neighborhoods don't develop in a day, and it will take quite a few more years and an improved economic climate for this area to develop fully, and to reverse 75 years of atrocious urban planning and deterioration.

And that's just as well. Maybe we need to move a little more slowly, and build more carefully, with every building built with care and love. We Americans tend to go way too fast at way too big a scale, with no consideration for unintended consequences and no regard for feedback along the way that is signaling that things aren't working out according to plan. And now that nobody has the money to go forward with big plans except for Loyola University, the people involved in developing this area need to take a breather and consider the progress made so far.

Some of things we hope they think about before they do too much more demolition include the block of Sheridan just north of the Loyola el station. This block still contains a couple of really interesting buildings and a number of businesses that have been in the neighborhood for many decades, like Carmen's Restaurant and Affordable Optical. However, in the past fifteen years, this block has lost a lot of its charm and cohesion, having been decimated by fires that destroyed a couple of charming old buildings, and Loyola University's demolition of a decrepit but lovely two story building and corner building. The University has rights of eminent domain in this area, which is part of the Sheridan/Devon TIF district, and the buildings that remain are in increasingly decrepit conditions, and according to one commercial tenant, are renting their commercial spaces out on a month-to-month basis, while Beck's Bookstore vacated its old building and moved to a space in the Morgan apartment building.

This would all seem to indicate that the university has plans for this block that very likely don't include the restoration of the remaining buildings on this block, including the incredible little beauty pictured below, which contains Affordable Optical and Carmen's. Chicago is fairly stuffed with buildings covered with wonderful embellishment, but I've never seen anything quite like the decorative terracotta ornamentation on this quirky little charmer, and the destruction of this building would be a tragic loss to the neighborhood. Buildings like this are what lend a neighborhood charm and character, and another bland new building, no matter how luxurious and loaded with amenities, would not replace a structure like this.

From here forward, the developers here need to take small, careful steps. There's no crying need for more retail space at just this point in time, given the number of empty spaces available in the area already and the extremely unfavorable business climate. Therefore, the developers might want to consider "infill" buildings for this block, small one-to-three story buildings with commercial space on the ground and perhaps second floor, and apartments above, and more important, some attention to architecture and decorative detail. The recent renovation of a row of one-story storefronts in the 1100 block of Granville in Edgewater is encouraging. These ugly, run-down spaces were recently re-fronted with attractively styled facades capped off by the attractive deco corner store, shown below.

These stylish renovations, and recently constructed mixed-use buildings allover town, while not architectural masterpieces, are major improvements on the hideous, utilitarian,suburban-style commercial development that blighted so much of the city during the 30-year period of urban destruction following WW2. Let's hope we can do even better with whatever gets built in the 6500 block of Sheridan, where the builders will be starting from scratch. Not every building, or even most buildings, has to be a masterpiece, or terribly "original", just reasonably attractive and well-designed, and perhaps possess some charming decorative details. We might still have a long way to travel before we build with the same spirit and love of beauty that inspired the magnificent buildings of the early twentieth century, but we've at least turned the corner and left the dreadful post-war period behind us.

Whatever gets done, let's hope it gets done slowly. And most of all, lets work to preserve the beauty and charm our neighborhoods still possess after 65 years of maliciously anti-urban modernist destruction.

They Just Don't Get It

2010-06-28T00:25:00.004-05:00

Our ruling elites and their mainstream media shills never really have cared what was good for the population, or even what we want or believe, but they used to listen to us well enough to at least feed back the lies we most wanted to hear. However, in their response to the financial debacle, they've shown that not only do they not give a damn what we think, but that they have no idea what it is we really do want or believe or expect.

Never have they read us so wrong as in the government response to the financial debacle and the cures proposed. Now, after committing over a trillion dollars to goosing the house market in an attempt to rewrite the laws of supply and demand by floating more bad loans that will result in more defaults, and pouring hundreds of billions into FHA and the GSEs such as FNMA and FMAC, a few people up there perceive the threat to what remains of our credit system, and realize that the bleeding has to be stopped. Lawmakers have proposed not only tightening the lending rules and underwriting standards for loans purchased by the GSEs, but punishing people who strategically default by locking them out of the government-backed loan market for 7 years, during what time they would not be able to qualify for a loan backed by a government agency. That means they would not be able to get financed for a house, period, because 95% of all home loans written these days are either purchased by Fannie, Freddie, or Ginnie, or are written by the FHA, which has combined delinquency and default rates for its 2007 and 2008 vintage mortgages of over 20%.

Yet there remains the fear that Fannie's punitive new policy might not make it with the public. Writes David Streitfeld in the New York Times, "Fannie Mae ’s decision to begin punishing people who walk away from their unpaid mortgages could prove difficult to sell to the public and might be impossible to execute, housing and lending experts said Thursday."

Uh, just what sector of the "public" would be unhappy with policies that punish people who walk away from mortgages that they can pay for? Most of us out here feel that the only foreclosure victims who rate sympathy are those who are unemployed or whose businesses have gone down the tubes in this dismal economy, yet these are the very people who are ineligible for assistance and get the least help, and we're furious at the lawmakers who are continuing to subsidize more home building and more bad borrowing under the auspices of the FHA and government-backed GSEs while cutting off the lifelines of millions of unemployed who will be left stranded with no income whatsoever at the end of this week.

A "strategic defaulter' is a borrower who has the ability to pay but is defaulting only because his house is worth less than what he paid for it. These people tend to be much more affluent than the average foreclosure casualty and they are defaulting as part of a larger financial plan. They usually have absolutely no remorse, and plan to buy within a few years when they feel that prices have reached levels justified by rents on comparable housing. And so far, there has been nothing to prevent them from buying within a couple of years of foreclosure if they have something for a down payment, even though mortgages are considerably more difficult to get than they were a few years ago.

If there's any group of defaulting homeowners the public has no sympathy for, it's these well-heeled borrowers who can pay their mortgages but are walking away because they just don't want to pay. After all, not only do renters, who derive no benefit at all from efforts to support housing prices and help buried homeowners, make up 40% of the general public, but most homeowners are not delinquent on their mortgages and tend not to sympathize with people who deliberately default. The only part of the "public" that will be unhappy are scamming borrowers, and the housing and lending hustlers, who were the only people who benefited from the Great Rampage of the 00s, and who have shoveled billions into lobbying for the HOPE NOW and other mortgage assistance programs, as well as ever more subsidies for housing "affordability" programs.

Strategic default is now becoming a fad among affluent homeowners whose expensive homes have dropped catastrophically in value, and threatens to topple what remains of our credit system.Tighter lending policies and steep penalties for defaulting borrowers who have the capacity to pay their loans are way overdue. The Republicans additionally have introduced a measure to the FHA financing bill that would forbid strategic defaulters from getting a loan from FHA. This is a completely justifiable measure and is only one of many reforms necessary to prevent another massive credit bubble from forming as this one deflates.

However, there's one question that has to be on everyone's lips, which is, how will we punish major corporations who default on mortgages worth tens of millions, for the same reason- that the properties involved have dropped steeply in value since purchase? These entities have set a example for the rest of the population, and there's nothing that angers people so much as the vicious double standard that exempts major corporations, especially financial concerns, from major wrongdoing while punishing hapless individuals lacking wealth and influence. Will J P Morgan's strategic default on a portfolio of commercial properties in San Francisco impair their ability to obtain credit down the road? Will corporate defaulters incur penalties proportionate to those imposed on individual homeowners?

We'll believe that our rulers are truly committed to reform when the financial concerns who benefited the most are subjected to the same penalties for irresponsibility and malfeasance as the rest of us.

Rogers Park Men CAN Cook!

2010-06-27T04:10:00.001-05:00

Yes, Rogers Park guys can cook! Above, Michael Harrington and Eva McCann present the Grand Prize to winner Michael Cain at the fundraiser for the Willye B. White Park's summer day camp program.

The gods gave us a perfect, sunny, cloudless day for the event, the food was great, and many neighbors were in attendance.

We're eagerly anticipating the next event! Thanks to Michael Harrington, Toni Duncan, Sister Cecilia Fandel, Eva McCann, and all the other organizers and volunteers who made it happen.

Shameless

2010-06-10T00:06:00.001-05:00

Pictured above is a condominium at 6212 N North Winthrop I wrote about back in 2008, and it looks like the property has only gone downhill since. This building is a newly-constructed condo with 8 units originally offered at $550,000-$600,000 each, and which has gone through many ownerships. See current snapshot of ownership, above.

This is the worst-looking property for many blocks on N. Winthrop in Edgewater, a street that has undergone a 180-degree transformation over the past 15 years. Many years ago, Winthrop and Kenmore together formed the notorious Winthrop Corridor of drugs, crime, and blight, but since that time, these two streets have become beautiful, placid, tree-lined streets with well-groomed, beautiful houses and buildings in a wide variety of architectural styles.

In this block are many charming old corridor buildings and a number of "four-plus-one" buildings, all offering cheap rentals, yet these places are beautifully landscaped and well-maintained. 6212, on the other hand,, is gleaming new construction with large, new high-rent apartments, yet it looks seedier every time I walk past it. The weeds are nearly a foot high in the pocket front lawn and on the parkway, where there is also a hole about a foot across and a foot deep, covered only by a barricade lying on its side. There is trash everywhere- on the little lawn, the walk, the parkway, and stuffed, along with piles of last fall's fallen leaves, between the pickets of the wrought-iron perimeter fence.

I was strolling down Winthrop late this afternoon, and was freshly shocked at the appearance of the place. In the course of snapping pictures to document the wretched appearance of the property, I was intercepted by a white male who appeared to be about in his forties, who double-parked his SUV in front of the place, jumped out, and demanded to know what I was doing.

"Are you the owner of this place?" I asked, indicating the building with my hand.

"Yes! I'm the owner!" he exclaimed, puffing his chest out and staring me intently in his "aggressive display" stance.

"Do you realize you have the trashiest-looking property on the street? This property looks horrible, " I said, "what with trash allover it and weeds a foot high. Look at all these cheap little corridor buildings that look so lovely and have such beautiful flowers and plantings, and your place looks like a slum. You're blighting the street."

I suppose he realized that he could not stop me from taking photos. "A good day to you, madam! Have a good day!" he barked.

The guy was utterly shameless.

This guy clearly isn't troubled by the neighbors' opinions. We seem to have a larger number of such owners since the Great Housing Rampage and the ensuing glut of newly constructed and converted condos. Either the owners are not paying for the place and are de facto squatters, and aren't going to lift a finger to maintain the place while they wait for their NODs to arrive in the mail (or for the Sheriff to arrive with the movers), or they are slumlords who picked these places up in foreclosure and just want to sit on them till they can flip them. They don't care how their places look or who they rent them to. Twenty years of dramatic neighborhood improvement in Edgewater and Rogers Park is in danger of being reversed by these predatory new owners.

Shame is usually a good method of enforcing local standards of property maintenance on slob owners, but you can't shame the arrogantly shameless. Some owners just have to be coerced, and it's no violation of their property rights to compel conformity with community expectations. Every owner in the area is negatively affected by the neglect and visible deterioration of property in the area. This property is in the 49th Ward, whose alderman is Joe Moore, and a few dozen calls and letters to Moore from irate neighbors disturbed by the litter and weeds might be helpful.

Republicans Block Bill To Raise Oil Spill Liability Cap

2010-06-04T20:46:00.000-05:00

Law Enforcement Against the War On Drugs

2010-06-04T06:08:00.000-05:00

Chicago's Shadow Governments

2010-05-22T10:14:00.003-05:00

Most of us are hardly aware of our local Chamber of Commerce or Community Council, or any of the other business development and community advocacy organizations, and when they do intrude on our awareness, we wonder just what do they do, exactly, to justify a business allocating a few hundred scarce dollars to membership dues,and valuable time to attending meetings and events.

Well, for starters, they take taxpayer's money in order to lobby for more taxpayers' money to fund massive projects that may or may not be advantageous for their communities and are often opposed by the bulk of the citizens. These organizations are considered "delegate" organizations by the City of Chicago, and are eligible for funding by the City, as are other non-profit organizations that exist for "community" purposes. At this time, there are well over 100 such organizations, and many neighborhoods have two or three, for oftentimes, another organization will be founded by those opposing the plans and policies of the original group, and they exert an unseemly degree of control over local affairs, including major public works and community developments. Rogers Park's infamous DevCorp North, now known as the Rogers Park Business Alliance, is notorious for its involvement in and partial ownership of the disastrous Gateway Mall, which was funded by the Howard/Pauline TIF, and the Edgewater Intelligencer has detailed the role of the Edgewater Community Council in advocating for the outer drive extension and landfill, in spite of overwhelming and vehement opposition to this project by the bulk of Edgewater, Rogers Park, and Evanston voters. Additionally, the organization is promoting the construction of a large wind farm at Edgewater Beach, a massively expensive and unsightly "greenwash" boondoggle to be financed by the taxpayers, as part of their Edgewater Environmental Sustainability Plan.

They also possess power over member and non-member businesses and development alike in their respective communities, and often do not hesitate to exert themselves to obstruct and harass businesses whose owners are not in their club, and have a tendency to reserve control of their organizations to a handful of powerful members.

Worse, these organizations have a voice in decisions affecting the entire city, such as the Outer Drive extension and park landfill, that was not granted them by the citizens of this city, and is often inimical to their interests and bank accounts. I don't remember electing any of the members of the ECC nor did I deputize them to speak for me on the matter of the Outer Drive extension.I did not vote to support them and other community organizations with my taxes, nor did I vote to support their positions on other issues, such as labor laws, zoning, the proper business mix for an area, and who shall be allowed to do business in the area and who should not.

Yet the City of Chicago has granted these organizations not only a significant chunk of our tax revenues when these groups are considered together, but a considerable degree of power over their respective communities, and a significant voice in major local affairs. It is not encouraging that the U.S. Supreme Court has voted to accord corporations the status of "person", thus granting corporate organizations additional power without the accountability of a live, human person.

Should a 503(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization be permitted to lobby for legislation favorable to their members, or for anything at all? Should an organization with defined, limited membership, existing for the benefit of that membership, be permitted to rule the entire community and foist unwanted public works projects on it, and decide which businesses will live or die?

This is not meant to disparage the many fine community organizations and Chambers of Commerce that play a major role in improving their communities and building solid, desirable businesses in them. These organizations are often very beneficial.They often beautify the community by voluntary efforts, with plantings, banners, and other small enhancements, and they often are of real assistance to businesses starting up in their area. Some even provide valuable assistance to individual members in the form of business and legal advice, and access to financing. However, no matter how positive a role in the community a particular organization may play, it exists to serve its own members or a small constituency, and it should be supported strictly by voluntary contributions.

Most of all, these organizations should not be able to wield power not granted them by the citizenry, nor claim to represent us in matters that affect the entire community. They should not be permitted to hound a harmless little business out of existence, and they should not be able to use taxpayers' funds to lobby for legislation and projects that involve the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues and the disruption of tens of thousands of lives. The members of the ECC and other community organizations are surely entitled to their personal views and are entitled to voice them, but not with our money, nor should they be given authority in these matters not granted them by the voters.

State of Illinois Funds Coal Mining: $1.6M Grant to International Coal Group, Inc.

2010-05-13T20:28:00.002-05:00

in fiscal year 2009, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity gave International Coal Group, Inc. (ICG, Inc.) of Williamsville, IL $1,664,250 for grant number 09-483006. According to the DCEO’s Grant Tracker website, grant number 09-483006 was part of the Coal Competitiveness Program, which “encourages communities and businesses to improve the coal extraction, transportation and utilization systems within Illinois.” This specific grant was for the construction of a new production portal.

Meanwhile, the resolution to repeal the moratorium on further nuclear development has gone to the state assembly.

Why are we subsidizing coal production while obstructing nuclear, the most efficient and powerful means of energy production on earth?

Could it be that coal is a safer and cleaner form of energy? No, because coal has killed more people both directly, as a result of mine disasters, and indirectly, by pollution-induced illness, than any other form of energy, while the 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. have not killed a single civilian in the entire history of the industry in this country.

Could it be, instead, because the coal lobby is one of the most powerful in IL, and because we still have a substantial number of people employed in high-wage, though deadly, jobs as coal miners?

It's time to ask why we are promoting and subsidizing the dirtiest and most lethal form of power generation while obstructing a set of technologies that could extend the fuel cycle for a thousand years by means of more elegant and efficient nuclear technologies, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. And it is really time to question the wisdom of so-called "renewable" technologies that are diffuse and grid-destabilizing without the backup of fossil fuels like coal. How clean and renewable can the "renewables" really be if they're only reliable with the "backup" of coal and gas, two forms of energy proven dirty, destructive, dangerous, and subject to depletion in the next couple of decades.

Against Nature: Can Our Freedoms Survive Peak Oil?

2010-05-05T14:17:00.002-05:00

Many observers in the Peak Oil community are baffled and disgusted by the angry denial of our dire fuel situation and its implications for our future, not only among the general public, but among our well-educated upper-middle class, including many prominent political leaders and intellectuals. The truculence of the general public is usually attributed to stupidity, ignorance, and "selfishness", and the unwillingness to make sacrifices to serve the "common good"; and the consensus among the aware is that we will have to become a more authoritarian and regimented society, perhaps even impose military law, in order to maintain civil order and assure the equitable distribution of remaining resources. "This country needs a good father," one commentator wrote, and commented approvingly on the regimentation and authoritarianism prevalent in the early 30s, remarking that we might have to impose these conditions again to make it through the hardship and upheaval of the massive shift that is upon us. Rationing is already under discussion, and various additional controls and government-imposed rules regulating use and distribution of resources, are also being discussed, some more seriously that others- and every single one, from the CAFE standards that the auto industry has resisted tooth and claw since their inception 30 years ago, to the government-mandated phase-out of incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFL bulbs and LEDs, is bitterly resented by the bulk of the citizenry, who feel the weight of over-reaching authority in every part of their lives.

That the authoritarianism of the environmentalist and peak oil believers, and their open contempt not only for common 'merikuns' and their wasteful ways,but for the concept of rights and freedom, might be exactly what triggers denial on the part of so many people who ought to know better, doesn't seem to occur to the environmentalist pundits and policy makers.

It also doesn't enter the heads of the authoritarians that the trends of the past 60 years that have made this country the most wasteful consumer of resources in the world, notably the build out of suburbia, and the corresponding total dependence on autos and trucks by our population, owe not so much to "market forces" or to the democratization of auto and suburban home ownership, as to government policies created by people who thought they knew better than we do what is good for us.

And what our leaders thought was good for us in those days was government-subsidized home ownership, taxation policies that incentivized the formation of large families, and lavish incentives for auto ownership, notably "free" highways to enable car ownership and facilitate the mass movement of the middle-income population out of the old cities to houses purchased with VA and FHA 3% down loans in new auto suburbs. Meanwhile, civic leaders across the country frantically cast about for ways to revitalize their rapidly emptying cities, and eagerly embraced the vision of urban planners and architects who wanted to demolish the unsightly slums around urban cores and warehouse the poor in high rise housing projects.

In short, it was our authoritarian welfare state that gave us the world's most wasteful and unsustainable built landscape next to Dubai, and is now shoveling the last of our wealth into sustaining and expanding it. This massive misinvestment is questioned by only a handful of our citizens, for our population was inducted by the corporatist nanny state into the passivity, consumerist ethos, and sense of entitlement that have made this country into a quagmire of towering debt and built an economy distorted by multiple layers of government subsidies and programs that reinforce the practices we need to discontinue, and disguise their true costs.

Therefore, we beg the question of just what a super-authoritarian, hyper-regimented Big Daddy regime can do for us that will produce any other outcome than further misallocation of resources in massively expensive boondoggles like the misbegotten high speed rail plan, multibillion dollar gifts to failing, obsolete industries like production home building in the far suburbs and our failing, obsolete domestic auto industry, and most of all, further intrusion into our private lives and restrictions on our personal and economic activities? Will erasing what few freedoms we have left to us and moving entire populations around like chessboard pieces according to the wisdom of a bunch of bureaucrats assure us of an orderly and peaceful transition to a lower energy regime and mollify the tens of millions of people whose expectations and hopes will be crushed but who will be expected to acquiesce to arbitrary authority in the most personal matters, with little or no explanation except for the usual crap about the "common good"?

Will the same government whose leaders have consistently lied to us for 50 years regarding the costs of the high-entropy economy its policies created and who, while knowing full well what the likely outcome would be, recklessly drove the creation of the worst financial debacle the world has ever seen, be able to lead us to any other end than the complete collapse of every system we depend upon for water, food, transportation, and every other necessity of life? And will these leaders be able to offer any other solution to the predicament of a country of 305 million people left with no resources, no means to make a living, and no way to procure food and housing and heat, but a military dictatorship with the complete cancellation of all our rights, vastly amplified state violence, and the death by mass slaughter or starvation of a substantial chunk of our population?

The coming difficult times of shortages, falling living standards, and failing systems will require all the fortitude, flexibility,skills and virtues individual citizens possess, in order to rebuild our communities into places that can sustain and shelter us and our civilized values. And the cornerstone civilized value is individual freedom, which is inseparable from personal responsibility.

Without the liberties, unprecedented in history, that we have secured at such a cost, we're headed straight back to the filth, brutality, and class tyrannies of the past, complete with the entire population enslaved in a neo-feudal society with draconian restrictions enforced by a brutal military.

And responsibility is the virtue that we have to painfully relearn, and in a large hurry, from the bottom of our society with its vast population of welfare entitlement junkies, prolific breeders, and criminal elements emboldened by our irrational justice system, through our middle classes with their passivity, complacence, sense of entitlement, and refusal to reckon costs and make necessary trade-offs, up to our financial elites that have been granted a license to steal trillions of dollars from the taxpayers, and have permitted to use their power to dictate legislation and policies that favor them, to turn this country into a low-wage cesspool, asset-strip the population by fraud and malfeasance, and sell our country to a nation ruled by a thug government ideologically opposed to the freedoms we have enjoyed and abused here.

After all, there is nothing "natural" about guaranteed personal liberty for every citizen regardless of class, color, ethnicity, or sex. The concepts of liberty and unalienable rights are the products of a highly evolved and literate civilization, which is also unnatural, a civilization with a high level of knowledge and technology, and with a broad and reasonably well-educated commonalty dedicated to preserving as much of it as possible, beginning with the philosophy that justified it and made it possible, that of freedom and rights and personal dignity. Without the will to preserve that, and the knowledge of its importance, we'll lose those values and everything that they made possible, including, most likely, our lives.

Be Afraid

2010-05-02T22:58:00.001-05:00

The world won't end in 2012, but life as we know it just might. For those who didn't get the point embedded in the other chart I published a few posts back, here, from the Energy Information (U.S. Dept of Energy) is a more graphic depiction of the depletion of oil supplies, which are projected to "drop off the cliff" in 2012 after plateauing for a couple of years at current levels.

If oil in now at about $85 a barrel, where will it go when we experience a 5% to 7% drawdown in production? Chevron and other oil producers aren't spending approximately $120 a barrel on risky deep-sea drills because they think they will lose money on it, people.

And how many years will it take to deplete remaining reserves at this rate of depletion?

Given the hardship and economic turmoil described in this chart, we needn't expect such considerations as the human death toll and environmental consequences of offshore drills and the production of oil from "unconventional" sources (tar sands, deep sea drills) will weigh against the far greater toll should our complex systems that keep our grocery shelves stocked, treat our municipal water supplies, and supply the vast quantities of electrical power we need to live in comfort and have access to comfortable, sanitary living conditions, advanced medical car,and rapid emergency response, never mind the cornucopia of consumer goodies we all feel entitled to.

We are not prepared, nowhere near. We do not have decent public transportation, either for local or long distance travel. We will never be able to build all the nuclear power plants we need once the costs skyrockets due to escalating fuel costs. We do not have the rapid and high speed rail we will need to replace our planes. We do not have the wherewithal either jointly or severally to replace our soon-to-be-unlivable sprawl-burbs with well-insulated housing in dense, walkable towns and cities. We do not have the sustainable agriculture developed that we will need when it becomes prohibitive to use the chemical fertilizers manufactured with oil and gas. Most of us have no savings, let alone a 6 month supply of food. And thanks to the debt debacle of the past decade, we have no capital with which to build the systems we will need to retain our comforts, nor the industries that can supply us with the goods we will need in a different world than the one we live in now.

Maybe the religionists have a point- praying is what you do when you have nothing else left, and it seems appropriate now.

However, we could try to do just a few little things that might help. Since nobody, including all the leftist "greens", seems unduly disturbed by the recent deaths caused by the production of fossil fuels, could we try not to get all hysterical at the mere thought of building another nuclear plant near Chicago, or foam at the mouth because a train loaded with spent nuclear fuel might pass through town sometime. If we can tolerate a mine disaster that kills 29 minors, or a drill rig explosion that claims 11 men and spews oil allover the Gulf, could we front the theoretical hazards involved in a form of electricity generation that has not killed a single civilian in the U.S. or Western Europe in its forty-year history?

Chicago is in the Top Twenty Cities for Foreclosures and REOs: No Shortage of Affordable Housing

2010-05-02T20:57:00.002-05:00

Illinois is one of the top ten "scam" states for mortgage fraud and Chicago is among the top twenty cities as ranked by percentage of home sales that are "distressed" sales. Distress sales comprise more than 30% of all home sales in the Chicago area at this time. Click on chart below to blow it up.

So it looks like the rollback in house prices is not over. Rogers Park and other far north neighborhoods are extremely hard hit by foreclosures, in direct proportion to the rash of condo conversions. According to the 2008 report compiled by Lakeside Community Development in 2008, over 3, 600 Rogers Park rentals were converted to condominiums.

Many of these units, which are frankly less than luxurious, are being offered at prices below $50,000, even though financing is not available on many of them and many others are uninhabitable, or are in buildings that are vacant and in boards. Many will be purchased by investors for cash below the prices offered, and fitted for rental. Others will be sold to buyers looking for a bargain-priced dwelling they can afford to invest money and love in without living on Raman Noodles for the next five years. On the city's poverty-stricken south side, the carnage is still more widespread, with many hundreds of beautiful 6 and 8 flats standing empty and in boards, and available to cash buyers for as little as $5000 a unit?

So why are we spending as much a $400,000 a unit for publicly funded "affordable" housing? I have personally counted over 40 units on the multilist in zip codes 60640, 60660, 60659, 60626, and 60645 that are available for less than $40,000 and could easily be made habitable and comfortable for another $20,000. Moreover, I discovered that behind every unit listed lurks a "shadow inventory" or "market overhang" of about 20 units that don't appear on the multilist but sit empty and in default. I personally can't put my finger on the precise number of vacant units, but my rough calculations tell me that we have at least 300 units that are "shadow inventory" between these five areas.

And why are we subsidizing more bad mortgages through FHA mortgage guarantees? Clearly, home ownership is not for everyone, especially in a period of falling incomes and unstable employment, and the government's efforts to re-inflate the housing bubble have so far not prevented prices from falling but have produced another bumper crop of bad mortgages: FHA is now the major subprime lender and recent-vintage FHA mortgages have a combined delinquency and "serious delinquent" or loans-in-default rate of nearly 20%, a really good indication that we're headed for another monster bailout in a couple of years. Bill Zeilinski of Mortgaged Future writes;

Once again, thousands of borrowers are getting loans they do not stand a chance of repaying. Only now, unlike in the subprime meltdown, Congress would have to bail out the lenders if the FHA cannot make good on guarantees from its existing reserves.

Given the continued high rate of default, high unemployment rates and dropping incomes, and huge inventory of unsold housing, does it make sense to force the taxpayers to back yet another wave of soon-to-default mortgages made to unqualified buyers at prices they can't afford?

And given the massive glut of unsold inventory, much of which is available for less that $40,000 a unit and could be made habitable and comfortable for less than $25,000 a unit, does it make sense to drive honest low-to-middle income homeowners, who bought their places honestly, out of their homes by confiscatory property taxes in order to divert tax money to construct more luxury condos in a glutted market and subsidized "affordable" rentals that cost $400,000 or more a unit to build?

This is really not about the "rich" folks vs. the "poor" folks, or even the taxpayers vs everyone who wants a gift at their expense. What this is really about is the massive misallocation of resources and money that will be very scarce in the near future, as fossil fuel resources continue down the other side of the slope. The money diverted to wasteful projects designed to sustain the unsustainable, in this case an inflated housing market and tax-funded boondoggles designed to enrich politician's cronies, is money taken away from the systems and industries we will desperately need to maintain our cities at a reasonable level of amenity and comfort, let alone safety and sanitation, and to have an economy that enable the creation of new industries and jobs. It isn't just our money or our houses at stake here,it's our lives.

The Best Urban Neighborhoods For Post-Peak Living

2010-05-02T17:50:00.001-05:00

There is endless discussion in Peak Oil and Survivalist circles regarding the optimal living arrangement for an era in which transportation will be difficult, expensive, and perhaps widely unavailable, and in which all the necessities of life- food, fuel, potable water, medicine, and common consumer goods, will be outrageously expensive, and their availability subject to supply chain disruptions and commodity scarcity.

Many Peak Oil prognosticators are extremely pessimistic about the prospects for extremely large cities such as NYC and Chicago, where denizens tend either to live in the suburbs with their thousands of square miles of auto-dependent sprawl, or in super-dense city neighborhoods with their thickets of super-large, energy-guzzling high rise buildings, and many people predict that the most successful settlements will be the small towns and smaller cities, principally those that have been battered the most by the cheap fuel extravaganza of the past 65 years, that saw our cities decimated as their populations bought automobiles and moved to distant suburbs. I expect that as the desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas fail, their populations will flee eastward and repopulate and rebuild these cities along lines that better comport with shrinking resources.

We here in Chicago can expect a massive influx of suburban refugees as the outer suburbs on the fringe of Cook County, as well as the collar counties, become non-negotiable for their middle and lower-middle class denizens Most of our lower middle classes (figure incomes of $25,000 to $65,000) live in the outer suburbs and exurbs, lured by the cheap houses and decent schools, and they will not be able to afford the 50 mile-each-direction commutes and multiple car ownership necessary to live in these places when gasoline prices start to rise even incrementally above current levels. In fact, they can't afford it now, thus the immense personal household debt levels that have become commonplace in this country in the past thirty years, and which render our population much less resilient and flexible in the face of the discontinuities we will face in the near future. These people will be hit first and the hardest as liquid fuels and all the goods and services dependent upon a ready and copious supply of them-in short, absolutely everything- become much more expensive, and this is already happening, as homes in the outer suburbs are losing value much faster than those in the cozy inner suburbs with their easy access to public transit and the city. Meanwhile, their better-off middle and upper-middle income brethren will be squeezed by much higher costs for everything, too, and they will be looking for convenience and freedom from the rising expense of the high-energy lifestyles of the recent past. However, many of the less affluent will cling to their homes because they cannot afford to take the heavy losses they will incur as these dwellings lose their utility and value. Most likely, more affluent middle class homeowners will be the first to recognize the inevitability of the suburban unraveling, and these people are the ones who are now making the choice to settle in the city in order to escape heavy transportation expenses and be close to work and within walking distance of retail and entertainment.

So we here in Chicago will very likely be dealing with floods of new arrivals, while we will be having problems of our own. We can be thankful that we have many people running our systems, such as our water treatment facilities and our electrical power, who have better brains than either our politicians or the Peak Oil prognosticators, and these people are aware of the challenges of maintaining essential services as basic maintenance and replacement become prohibitively expensive, which will happen as we descend the slope. Our major challenges will be to arrange things so that we can accommodate many more residents in comfort and offer access to public transit and retail, and to make sure that our public money is spent renewing our aged water and sewer infrastructure as quickly as possible, before high fuel prices drive the cost of construction and replacement out of our reach. This means that we need to immediately re-order our priorities, and stop the diversion of money towards unnecessary projects and allocate it to necessary repair and replace. Many neighborhoods that were badly beaten up in the cheap fuel years will experience rapid revivals, while others that have been extremely successful, such as our downtown areas with their dense concentrations of mega-high rise condo and apartment towers, will become extremely difficult to manage.

Therefore, I offer my personal, non-scientific assessment of a sampling of Chicago neighborhoods that I believe are the most advantageous locations for post-peak living:

1. Rogers Park/West Ridge/West Rogers Park- I don't name this neighborhood just because I happen to live in it and love it. Rogers Park has almost everything you need to live a low-energy lifestyle. For one thing, we have easy access to Lake Michigan,one of the world's largest sources of fresh water.That is is really handy should we experience problems with our water treatment facilities. Residents might want to equip themselves with home water treatment kits in order to take advantage of this priceless resource. Additionally, Rogers Park is within easy reach of 24-hour public transit, abundant retail for necessities, and most of all has an abundance of back yards, courtyards, parkways, parks, and vacant lots on which food could be grown should it become necessary. The housing is mostly 3-7 story multifamily buildings of 18-60 units, the new urban ideal, which provides support for local retail and public transit, while the area is not overburdened with high rise buildings. On the negative side, the area is burdened with elevated crime rates and a sizable pocket of deep poverty. However, the neighborhood's poorer denizens might be more amenable to the difficult adjustments and deprivations entailed in energy scarcity than their more affluent neighbors, and more willing participants in community agricultural projects.

2. Jefferson Park/Sauganash Park, ranging from well-paid blue collar to extremely affluant- this quiet safe- area in the northwest corner of the city is ideal for families who desire a single family home, yet also contains a full array of housing types, from 2-flats to large 3 and 4 story buildings. There is reliable public transit that runs 24 hours a day (Blue Line el and a couple of bus lines), and abundant retail. Transportation is difficult for many pockets of single family homes, but this is offset by an abundance of great homes at reasonable prices, and a high level of public safety.

3. Lincoln Square/Ravenswood/Albany Park- medium-to-high density, easy access to retail and public transit, many different types of housing from cheap apartments to large, beautiful single family homes. Access to the Chicago River. High level of public safety

3. Old Irving Park- an area of fine, large old homes on large lots big enough to farm,with access to the Blue Line, and short distance to retail.

4. Belmont-Cragin- high density area with access to public transit and dense retail. Medium to high density with many cheap apartments and small, inexpensive homes.

5. Wicker Park/Bucktown/Logan Square- Medium density area close to urban core with 24 hour transit nearby and dense retail.

As we can see from the sampling above, Chicago by and large is, by virtue of the way it is built, designed for much lower energy use than current levels and it and other Midwestern cities will have many instrinsic advantages in the post peak era. This city, like most older Northern cities that were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries and its original arrangements- clusters of high density housing and industry close to the city core- were those necessary for a pre-technological society. It was located on a major water body for access to water transportation and fresh water supplies, in an area of the country that contains the world's finest farmland and gets generous rainfall. It is well above sea level (about 500 feet), and enjoys close proximity to other Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic cities. However, many neighborhoods will be severely challenged, mainly because they are built to be reliant upon copious quantities of extremely cheap energy. I'm thinking mostly of the inner city neighborhoods that are densely packed with thickets of mega-scrapers of 30 stories or more. These buildings have much higher internal energy loads per square foot because of their reliance on elevators, water pumps, and need for large numbers of personnel to keep the buildings running properly. These neigbhorhoods include:

1. Downtown/Near North/Streeterville/South Loop- Thankfully, these neighborhoods are mostly inhabited by high-income people with large amounts of disposable money. They're going to need a lot of money to keep their super-high buildings functioning properly, for this area contains more really large (40 stories or more) high rise condo and apartment towers than any other in the city. These neighborhoods are advantageously located in the midst of dense retail and have access to better pubic transportation than any other part of the city. However, there is no possibility of growing edibles there. Worse, a massive percentage of its denizens are "yuppies" who rely for their high incomes on the very types of jobs- advertising, FIRE, law- that will see drastic attrition in a shrinking economy, and these middle income people will not have the wherewithal to meet rapidly rising energy costs in massive buildings into which most of them are shoehorned. While the True Rich, those who have ample fortunes and live in the best buildings in that area, will most likely be able to cope with escalating costs, many people in this area will lose their incomes just as their buildings become outrageously expensive to operate, and the end result is likely to be many empty and half-empty high rise rentals falling into decrepitude, and vastly compromised public safety and comfort.

2. Lincoln Park/Lakeview- These neighborhoods are a lot like downtown, with way too many really large residential buildings. Offsets are excellent transportation and a lot of retail. But their support base, like that of downtown neighborhoods, is due to erode rapidly as the economy shifts to lower energy consumption and occupations that were dependent upon a high-consumption economy disappear. This is another area with no possibilities for local food production beyond a few tomato plants on balconies.

3. Uptown- This area has an immense concentration of low-income housing, including CHA high rises and "flophouse" single room occupancy hotels, along with more non-profits serving challenged populations than almost any other neighborhood on the north side. While the alderman, Helen Schiller might be more amenable to projects that enhance the area's sustainability (i.e. fish farms), her progressive stance is more than offset by her willingness to tolerate disorderly populations and criminal activity. The large Asian population is a plus, for these people are often recent immigrants who live much more frugally than most Americans and are more likely to be involved in running local sustainable business. For example, the large garden at the corner of Kenmore and Ainslie is owned by a private individual who supplies many local restaurants with produce grown there. So this area is a very mixed bag.

4. Edgewater- I love Edgewater and it is probably my favorite North Coast neighborhood all around. However, this neighborhood has a number of liabilities when viewed in terms of sustainability. Most of these liabilities line Sheridan Road and are at least 25 stories high, and inhabited mostly by moderate-to-middle income people, including many extremely elderly folk, who could find the cost of keeping these buildings with their prodigious energy demands functional ratcheting out of reach as fuel costs escalate. On the plus side, the neighborhood has easy beach access, excellent 24 hour public transportation, and prolific retail featuring the necessities of life. Additionally, local zoning authorities have established a height limit of 7 stories for new buildings. Edgewater high rise dwellers need to think about how they will run their elevators in times of power outages and hyper-expensive electricity, and whether the proposed windfarm off Edgewater Beach will be capable of carrying their energy-intensive buildings in the possible absence of reliable baseline power generation.

I've only discussed some of the north side neighborhoods. The south side of the city, which contains half the population of the north side but twice the land area, presents a whole different array of problems and possibilities. While the area is beset with widespread poverty and joblessness, it is also the site of many promising experiments with local agriculture and boasts a number of large community agricultural stations and community gardens.

Natural Gas Supplies Overstated

2010-04-21T17:11:00.005-05:00

The Energy Information Agency, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department, stated that it has been overstating natural gas supplies and is preparing to make substantial revisions in the methodology it uses to calculate supplies of natural gas.

EIA spokesman Gary Long stated that the revision in the methodology used to compile the 914 report, which reports monthly gas production data, will result in "significant downward revisions" in production numbers.

The common belief is that while oil may peak, that we have a nearly-infinite supply of gas and that "peak gas" is not even a remote possibility, thus the current emphasis on converting our auto and truck fleet to gas, which is also essential as a backup for solar and wind power without which these unreliable and intermittent forms of power generation simply won't work. Nolan Hart at Zomba writes:

"We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way"

The italics are mine. We have one hundred years of natural gas at current consumption rates. Now, if we ramp up consumption just 2% a year, then how much do we have? How about a 5% increase, which is very likely? We can roughly figure that a 5% yearly increase in consumption will mean we will use over 50% more per year in 10 years, which obviously means that a 100-year supply will shrink to 20 year supply in about that many years. Now, how much will our consumption increase if we switch to gas for electrical power generation, and if, in ten years, at least half our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks runs on gas?

Considering our heavy dependence on gas as a feedstock for heavy industry, electrical power generation, and most of all, for the chemical fertilizers for the factory farming so despised by the environmentalists, but whose productivity is the only thing standing between our population of 305 million people and major famines, is it provident and sensible to enable the population in the notion that all we have to do is convert our vehicles to gas power, and we'll be able to continue on as we have since WW2?

At this time, natural gas is being touted as the panacea for the energy crisis, and there is a powerful political impetus to increase our gas consumption drastically, especially for generating electricity and powering our fleet of vehicles. It seems easier and more economical to many policy makers to build gas-fired plants to replace polluting coal plants, than nuclear, which are more expensive and employ relatively novel,difficult-to-understand technologies that a significant percentage of the population fear and misunderstand.

And anything is easier than telling our car-crazy population that the Automobile Age is as good as over, and that most of us are going to have to re-arrange our lives rather drastically.

Our lives depend on the ability of our leaders to clear a path through the hype generated by the advocates for various energy source. Most of all, they, and we, need to be able to envision a future in which all our fuel sources could be in decline, including uranium; and devise approaches designed to conserve these fuels and use them as efficiently as possible, while developing technologies that utilize more plentiful fuels whose cycle can be extended for centuries, such as thorium, one of the most plentiful elements on the planet.

'Nuff Said

2010-04-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

Global oil production from all sources, current and projected. Notice the three peaks in 2005, 2006, and 2009. Production projected to decline by 2.2 million barrels a day from 2009. Source: Energy Information Agency. http://www.eia.doe.gov/

The Natural Order

2010-04-09T02:31:00.001-05:00

Somebody named Eric posted this concise summary of socialism over at Classical Values awhile back, who posted it for someone named M. Simon:

The natural order of things is for the rich to steal from the poor. Any other order is unnatural. So how do you maintain an unnatural system where the poor have a chance?

The only way is that no one steals from any one else. Once you allow stealing into the system the rich get their usual extra advantage. Which is why our founders stated that the system they designed can only be maintained by a moral people. And the morality was not about who was having sex with whom but the morality relating to property.

Socialism is a system for stealing from the rich in the hopes of advantaging the poor. But once you allow theft into the system it reverts to the natural order where the poor have no chance. Which is why socialism always fails.

So the trouble with socialists is that they mean well but have no understanding. Which is why I am no longer a socialist.
==
And note: when you take into account the incentives for production socialism comes out even worse. If you can't keep a very large portion of what you earn the incentives for production decline and we are all worse off. The rich and the poor alike. Of course for the rich it makes less difference.
The moral of the story is that socialism leads to feudalism (anther name for a system where warlords rule) and the people are then reduced to serfs. And serfs are held in place by force. And force came into the system through government as a way for the poor to steal from the rich.
It may be why F. A. Hayek called his book on socialism The Road to Serfdom.

This surely the way modern American socialism is working out, as an increasingly impoverished population is brutally taxed at the local, state, and federal level to pay for the endless array of corporate welfare programs foisted on us by our political leaders and their cronies who are the beneficiaries, and justified as "economic development" or "help for struggling homeowners", or "decent housing for the poor", or "economic rescue" , with a few small benefits tossed to select members of the peasantry to conceal the fact that the chief beneficiaries are the powerful and connected.

We are now ruled, not by laws that protect the right of all individuals to own their lives and the fruits of their labors, but by pressure groups, whose ability to influence policy and legislation is directly related to their wealth and political contributions.

And while the wealthier members of the population may contribute most of the federal tax revenues, the break that poorer taxpayers receive on their federal income taxes, which are progressive, are more than offset at the local level by viciously regressive property taxes, and sales taxes, which affect poorer taxpayers disproportionately

Stone Walls of Denial

2010-04-07T20:04:00.005-05:00

Blame the speculators.

Since oil reached the $70/barrel mark and continued north while gasoline approached $3/gallon, the public wailing has begun, and hundreds of websites lobbying for congressional action to limit speculation have sprung up, demanding action to limit the price of oil.

The Democrats ,who are suffering badly in the polls as a result of their heroic attempts to rewrite the law of supply and demand as it applies to overpriced housing and overextended borrowers, will almost surely take the bait and embark on another adventure in misconceived economic engineering, and pass laws to limit commodities speculation, specifically speculation in oil futures. If there's anything Obama and his fellow Dems don't need just before the 2010 elections, it's four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, so look for a lot of frantic posturing and blatant pandering, in the form of legislation aimed at commodities speculation.

And if the commodities speculation is "regulated", expect spot shortages and long lines at the stations, because the law of supply and demand never rests. Speculators do not control prices, they merely respond to situations as they set up. If indeed there is an ample supply of a commodity and prices really are inflated artificially, the "bubble" will burst, for you can make just as much money shorting as you can on the long side of the trade. Why are the speculators not shorting oil? Could there be a fundamental reason for the steady rise in liquid fuel prices, such as the decline of almost every major oil field in the world, coupled with rising demand from developing nations?

The fact is that we have likely reached the absolute peak of global production, and have probably crossed it; and are now on the "bumpy plateau" , the period in which oil production is flat-lining before the descent down the other side of the slope. This period is bound to be defined by increasing volatility in prices as upward-arcing prices due to declining supplies and increasing global demand,which will quash economic activity, producing demand destruction, which results in temporarily lower prices, until the economy starts to recover, and then the cycle will repeat.

This is very, very bad news, and there is really no way to mediate the situation except to reduce our demand, and drastically. That's the "free market" solution to rising energy prices and declining production: just use less. Much less. And make whatever adjustments in your life you have to make to do that. That might mean moving closer to work, swapping your house for an apartment, moving back to the city or near a rail stop, taking the bus or train to work, or even having only one television set on at a time. It will mean, most likely, consuming less of absolutely everything. Most of all, it will mean radically reordering our built environment to enable far lower energy use, and that will take money and time we no longer have. We've wasted our time and money doing the opposite of what we need to do to mitigate the situation and make life with a fair degree of technical amenity possible as supplies dwindle, thanks to 65 years of disastrous public policy designed to promote sprawl development, auto dependency,destruction of our cities and waste of resources in the name of 'growth'.This country has simply built into its structures and systems an inflexible demand for copious amounts of cheap fuel, so much that with the best efforts at conservation in the world, most people in the U.S. simply cannot make a living or procure the necessities of life- heat, food,water, clothing- without consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels.

While Americans have wallowed in complacency and a sense of entitlement, China has for years past been busily locking in future oil production to fuel the rise of its middle class and their aspirations to the American suburban lifestyle. India, also, has a burgeoning middle class, and these two developing super-powers have been hard at work building power generation facilities, and inking contracts for future supplies of oil and other essential minerals.

And far from leveling with the citizenry regarding our prospects for continuing the Post WW2 lifestyle with its waste and excessive dependence on motors, the current administration has erected more walls of denial, and added a couple of trillion dollars to our mountain of public debt to pretend that we can continue as we have for the past 60 years. Instead of deregulating the railroads, eliminating subsidies to private airlines, and curtailing highway construction, we are devising new subsidies for auto and air transportation, suburban subdivision building, and consumer debt, while starving the systems and industries we will need as fuel supplies become ever more constrained. Enabling the citizens in their ignorance and denial by capping oil prices will not help us in making the necessary adjustments and sacrifices we will all have to make to survive the massive economic shift taking place. Manipulating the market by regulation in order to pander to the public's desire to continue obsolete lifestyles and wasteful consumption may help you win the mid-term elections, but it will only incentivize the very behaviors we need to curtail to make a successful adjustment to new necessities.

Will Reducing the Cost of Solar Panels Make Solar Competitive With Fossil and Nuclear Power Generation?

2010-04-04T15:15:00.010-05:00

Plastics could slash the cost of solar panels dramatically, says Dr. Yueh-Lin Loo, an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Loo and her team have developed a new technique for producing electricity-conducting plastics that could replace the extremely rare and costly Indium Tin Oxide that is currently used in solar panels, to conduct electricity.

"Conductive polymers [plastics] have been around for a long time, but processing them to make something useful degraded their ability to conduct electricity," said Yueh-Lin Loo, an associate professor of chemical engineering, who led the Princeton team. "We have figured out how to avoid this trade-off. We can shape the plastics into a useful form while maintaining high conductivity."

There is no question that this development could make solar power much more viable and economical, and the best benefit of all is that it could make production of solar panels possible without the use of a rare and expensive material But will it make it competitive with the highly concentrated energy available only from fossil fuels and nuclear?

That's doubtful, because the improvement in conductivity and efficiency, even by a major increment, will not solve the major problem with solar, which is its dependence on diffuse and intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is not only unreliable in itself, but the major limitation is in the transmission of power generated from a large number of small sources that generate intermittently.Stoneleigh, a major contributor to The Oil Drum and The Automatic Earth, describes the difficulty and vastly multiplied complexity of transmitting power generated in small amounts by large numbers of widely dispersed generators in her post on The Automatic Earth, Renewable Energy: Not in Your Lifetime:

As the power system was designed under a central station model to carry power in one direction only, with high voltage transmission and low voltage distribution, the modifications that would be required to enable two-way traffic, especially at the distribution level, are very substantial. Comprehensive monitoring and two-way communication would be required down to the distribution level, with central control (dispatchability, or at least the power to disconnect) of large numbers of very small generators.

The level of complexity would be vastly higher than the existing system, where there are relatively few generators to control in order to balance supply and demand in real time, and maintain system parameters such a frequency and voltage within acceptable limits.

The image above conveys by analogy the essence of power system frequency control - the easiest parameter to visualize. Frequency must be maintained at a set level by balancing supply and demand over the entire AC system. There are 4 such systems in North America - the east, the west, Texas and Quebec - and each functions as a single giant machine. The trucks in the image are generators and the boulder they tow up the uneven hill represents variable load. The trucks must pull the boulder at an even speed despite the bumps.

For a more accurate representation, one would actually need additional trucks, some moving at the same speed waiting to pick up a line if one should be dropped (spinning reserve) and others parked by the side of the hill (standing reserve). Some of the trucks would have to be able to start the boulder moving again from a standing start if it should stop for any reason (black-start).

We are looking at a world where there would be many more trucks, but each would be much smaller, and some of them would only pull if the wind was blowing or the sun was shining. The difficulty of the task will increase exponentially, and frequency management is only one parameter that must be controlled.

The mismatch between renewable resource potential, load and grid capacity is considerable. Resource potential is often found in areas far from load, where the grid capacity is extremely limited. Developing this potential and attempting to transmit the resulting power with existing infrastructure to where it can be used would involve very high losses. Many rural areas are served by low voltage single phase lines, and the maximum generation size that can be connected under those circumstances is approximately 100kW.

Even where three-phase lines exist, so that larger generators can be connected, carrying the power at low voltage is particularly inefficient, as low voltage means high current, and losses are proportional to the square of the current. Building high-voltage transmission lines to serve relatively small amounts of renewable energy would be an exceptionally expensive and difficult proposition, especially in a capital constrained future.

Renewable energy generation far from load could amount to little more than a money generating scheme, as a premium rate will be paid from the public purse for the time being, but little of the power might reach anywhere it could actually be used.

Difficulties occur when generation proposed would amount to more than 50% of the minimum load on the feeder. At this threshold, special anti-islanding measures are required that add considerable cost to the grid connection. In North America, we have large geographical areas served by a network of long stringy feeders with very low load. Adding much of anything to this system will be very challenging.

"Complexity", of course, means much more money and a complete overhaul and massive expansion of our electrical grid, far beyond what would be needed to supply three or four times as much power from conventional large power plants in order to power our transportation by electricity. It would mean, given our current population distribution, at least 8 times the grid capacity we now possess, not the three or four times current capacity that will be necessary to power all our transportation by electricity. Just meeting the needs of a comprehensive rail system is beyond the current capacity of our frayed grid.

The same limitations would apply to wind generation, another diffuse and intermittent source of energy. What this all means is that solar and wind, even were the costs of the components reduced substantially, will still be extremely expensive and unreliable means of generation, and will still rely upon fossil fuels for backup. They will vastly complicate the transmission requirements and in doing so, cause the costs to ramp up steeply.

And they ultimately rest on a fossil fuel platform, as James Howard Kunstler has pointed out, not only for backup, but for the ingredients in the manufacture and transportation of their components, as does the the nuclear power industry... and fossil fuels of all types- oil, coal, and gas- are depleting, and if we expect to retain any of the benefits of technology going forward, we are going to have to make the most efficient use of our remaining fossil fuel resources possible. In doing so, we will be up against frantic global competition for remaining reserves, escalating costs, and "receding horizons", for as the cost of fossil fuels escalate, so will the cost of building more power generation and upgrading the grid. It will take all the ingenuity of all of our best minds in combination with stringent conservation and the utmost economy in the management and deployment of our resources, to retain a minimal level of comfort and technological amenity in the decades ahead.

In such a context, should we pursue the least efficient forms of energy, those with the lowest EROEI, while spurning the most powerful and concentrated forms, namely nuclear, which is the most concentrated, powerful form of energy available? Can we afford to pursue wind and solar, while turning our backs on the most powerful technology ever devised, that could extend the fuel cycle for millinia while providing ample, cheap electricity for every community in the country? For, for every incremental improvement in "renewable", diffuse, intermittent forms of energy, there is a greater breakthrough in nuclear. We now have available to us many new and proven nuclear technologies that are not only extremely safe and leave almost no "waste", but which will reduce the costs of electricity to below that of coal and gas, two materials prone to rapid depletion.

Unfortunately, the decision as to which form of power generation we will commit investment rests in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, not the "market", and several hundred million American lives depend upon those decisions. Let's hope our leaders choose wisely.

Oil Reserves "Exaggerated by One Third"

2010-03-26T01:33:00.000-05:00

A number of years back, prominent energy analyst Matthew R. Simmons, in his Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, stated that Saudi Aramco and other oil producers routinely overstated their reserves, and this claim is now being seconded by Saudi Aramco itself, which recently admitted that the famous Gwaihir field, the world's largest oil field, is showing distinct signs of exhaustion and that its production might peak as early as 2015.

Other voices are now chiming in. Scientists and researchers from Oxford University in UK state that global oil reserves are overstated by a third by producers, Saudi Aramco prominent among them, in order to bolster investment and market share. Additionally, a paper published recently by these researchers states, such authorities as the ever-optimistic International Energy Agency (IEA) and Energy Information Administration (EIA), and political leaders who rely on these agencies for policy guidance, have taken these overly optimistic estimates at face value even though they have been unofficially recognized as exaggerated among oil insiders for many years.

The Oxford researchers also point out that "unconventional" sources of oil such as the Canadian tar sands and deep-water offshore fields are also included in reserve estimates. While these sources certainly count as reserves, they are extremely expensive to exploit and oil prices must rise substantially to justify their production. These difficult-to-access sources of oil most likely will become our principle sources in a few years, as the "elephant" fields in the Middle East, Mexico, Russia, and South America pass their peak production. Production from Mexico's formerly massive Cantarell is collapsing , and Mexico, which has been a major supplier of oil to the fuel-guzzling U.S. will soon cease to export oil.

Here in the United States, the world's most energy-dependent nation, we are airily complacent and inert in the face of declining global oil supplies and rapidly increasing global competition for the remains, while other hungrier and less complacent industrial economies, notably cash-rich China, are not taking their futures for granted and are aggressively locking up future supplies of dwindling natural resources. American political leaders are coming late to recognition of the direness of the fossil fuel situation, and even as they unwillingly, and almost in passing, acknowledge that supplies might be a problem in some distant future, that we have plenty of time and in any case can switch to natural gas, another resource subject to peaking and inevitable decline as we ramp up consumption.

We will probably need $4 a gallon gasoline and deeper economic hardship as a result, to shake us awake and motivate us to do what we desperately need to do, which is develop new means of energy production and most of all change the way we live, consume, and inhabit the land. By then, it will be too late to mitigate the effects of a sudden and drastic contraction in available fuel supplies.

Illinois Senate Votes to Lift Nuclear Moratorium

2010-03-25T18:37:00.001-05:00

In a rare fit of rationality, the Illinois Senate has voted to rescind the 23-year-old moratorium on the development of nuclear power in this state. See title link.

One wonders what came over them. Maybe there's a new virus going around. If so, I hope it becomes a pandemic. But maybe they were just Scared Straight by the recession and the relentless upward creep of liquid fuel prices. Maybe it's realizing that Illinois, the crucible of civil nuclear power and once a manufacturing powerhouse, is quickly fading to second-tier status (or worse) economically as our manufacturing has moved away, first to southern states and then offshore.

And perhaps our pols are at last becoming Peak Oil-aware, and realize that natural gas will soon follow oil to peak production, then to inevitable decline and eventual depletion. At last Peak Oil is beginning to get media attention, and our leaders are beginning to recognize that the decline of fossil fuels is a much larger threat to our civilization than Global Weirding. This is not to trivialize the challenges presented by rapid climate change, but to say that the decline of concentrated energy is a much larger threat.

The Obama administration also seems to recognize the towering threat to our ability to support ourselves and provide the basic decencies with either fossil fuels or the "renewable", diffuse forms of energy such as wind and solar, and that reliance upon them will make us much poorer and that there's no way that we can run any fraction of our systems with them. Gradually, by increments, the administration seems to be moving away from its former commitment to wind and solar, possibly recognizing that there is no way that the incredibly concentrated energy available only from nuclear can ever be matched, either in cost or reliability, by the diffuse energy available to solar and wind farms.

Now we can hope for the regulatory reform necessary to permit the development and deployment of newer, cleaner, safer, and vastly cheaper nuclear technologies, such as the Molten Salt Reactor and Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

Cricket Connection Problems

2010-03-21T22:04:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person suddenly experiencing difficulties with my Cricket 3G broadband, or are other Cricket customers also experiencing trouble in connecting, time outs, and extremely slow page-loading with their Cricket wireless broadband?

I became a Cricket customer in August of 2009, and subscribed to the cellular phone and wireless 3G broadband "bundle" in order to free myself from land connections altogether. For the first five months, the broadband connection was absolutely flawless- it connected almost instantly and loaded pages quickly. Downloading and uploading files of all types was extremely easy and rapid.

However, in the past month or so, I've experienced almost daily difficulty in getting connected, staying connected, and accessing web pages. Time outs have become extremely frequent.

If you are a Cricket user, how has your experience been? Please chime in with any comments and remarks you have.

Federal Loan Guarantees for Inefficient Energy

2010-03-21T11:21:00.015-05:00

Federal loan guarantees may be doing more to harm the development of efficient alternative energy than aid it, by funding inefficient and/or obsolete forms of power generation.

At first blush, the $8 Billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power development sound like good news for the nuclear power industry, now experiencing a shaky revival after 30 years of pariah status. However, the nuclear plants now being planned are Generation III light-water reactors, mostly AP-1000s. While these plants are a vast improvement on older plants built in the industry's infancy, they still will employ a nuclear technology based on uranium, and that are tremendously costly and time-consuming to build, requiring massive structures that must be constructed on-site from the ground up, requiring hundreds of different, expensive skill sets. Most of all, they employ a technology that is being rendered obsolete by the development of many other nuclear technologies, which are intrinsically much safer and generate far less waste, or almost none at all, and can be built at a much lower cost relative to the amount of power generated while extending the fuel cycle for many decades or even centuries. However, too many people have a massive stake in the current obsolete nuclear industry, from building contractors and organized labor, to equipment manufacturers, all of whom will realize handsome profits from the construction of plants costing $8 billion and up to build, and they are working hand-in-glove with the principal nuclear regulatory authority, the sclerotic NRC, to retard the development and deployment of the many new and vastly more advanced, efficient, and safe nuclear technologies. In the absence of regulatory reform, it will be for nimble, flexible, hungry countries like India, that are not hamstrung by existing technologies and their lobbyists, to develop the most modern and efficient techniques such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, while the United States continues to commit massive portions of its rapidly shrinking wealth to obsolete 20th century industries like automobiles, suburban house-building, and light-water reactors.

At least these nuclear plants will produce the quantities of reliable, on-demand electricity our economy requires,and they will do it with minimal carbon emissions, which is rather more than can be said for the wind and solar pipe dreams being given loan guarantees. $1.37 B in loan guarantees have been granted for the construction of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, to be built in California, and which will generate 392 Megawatts of electricity. The plant will not be able to stand alone, but will require a gas-powered assist in the mornings and during overcast weather.

As Charles Barton at Nuclear Green points out: "If you factor out the gas assist, you get actual low CO2 emission solar thermal power out of this thing for a mere $15,0000 per available kW, which is only THREE TIMES what it would cost to put in a nuke plant, if you assumed that Lester Brown is correct when he cites the Areva plant in Finland as the true "tombstone" poster plant that will kill the nuclear renaissance because it costs $5000 per available kW after the cost overruns are included It would take about 11.7 of these Brightsource "392 MW" nameplate 123 MW actually available on average projects to equal the output of the far too expensive for Lester Brown to consider using Areva Finland nuke. Lester touts solar thermal, so, let's see, for a mere $16 billion or so, you could cover 75 square miles of places the Sierra Club, et al, say they don't want to see covered and use generating stations like these instead.

Given that solar and wind are in themselves not only the costliest forms of power generation but are intermittent and unreliable, and therefore dependent upon gas and coal backups, it's difficult to consider them truly renewable, and they would certainly raise the cost of electricity out of the reach of many poor consumers. The requirement for a fossil fuel backup effectively cancels out any environmental benefit to be derived from solar and wind, especially in consideration of the steep environmental costs of gas drilling, which releases more radiation into the environment than uranium mining and nuclear fission, and coal mining, the environmental devastation of which is well-documented. Moreover, the materials used to manufacture the components of these systems, and their massive land requirements, give them an ecological footprint equal at least, and probably exceeding vastly, that of a large nuclear plant capable of supplying a major city with large amounts of reliable, on-demand power necessary to run our civilization.

The Department of Energy and the various government loan programs are not working to assure us of reliable, cheap energy going forward nearly so much as they are obstructing the development of future energy sources in favor of entrenched constituencies, namely the current fossil fuel and old-style nuclear power industries, and the environmentalist lobby, while disguising the true costs of the programs involved. Regulatory reform, with the goal of streamlining the licensing process for proven technologies and less obstruction for newer, more efficient technologies, in combination with more mass production of designs and components, would reduce costs substantially and make it possible to get plants online more quickly.

Is $80 A Barrel the New Floor For Oil?

2010-03-16T20:57:00.004-05:00

Anybody who is still in denial regarding the reality of Peak Oil need only consider the type of drilling being done now. Never has so much money been committed to such high-risk drills in places so difficult to access and requiring so much new and expensive technology, for such relatively trifling yields, as with the deepwater drills being done by Chevron and Petrobas.

Newsweek writer Matthew Philips, in his article last week, Journey to the Center of the Earth, called this deepwater field, which could contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for ten years, "perhaps our best shot at energy independence." If so, we are destined for considerable economic hardship and material deprivation going forward, because the cost per barrel of drilling alone is nearly 50% more than the current price of oil, about $80 a barrel.

Chevron's offshore drilling platform, the Tahiti, is located about 190 miles from the shore in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where the drill must plunge through 7,000 ft of water, then through a thick layer of much and a salt bed beneath it that is over a mile deep, and then through several miles of crust to reach a paybed estimated to contain 85 billion barrels of sweet crude. That's a real giant, a stunning find relative to the relatively piddling yields projected for other deep sea drills, which are expected to yield 15 billion barrels at best, or the Bakken formation, which is considered to be good for 3.5 billion barrels at the most.

But it will not be cheap oil, and we can put to rest any dreams we may have of seeing $30 a barrel oil ever again.The project is expected to cost about $100 Million, which means that if it yields the 85 billion barrels thought to reside there, the cost per barrel will be $117.64. And that assumes that all 85 billion can be recovered, and that nothing major goes wrong with the project to cause massive cost overruns, which are pretty optimistic assumptions.

Why would Chevron do a drill that costs at least $117 a barrel when oil is currently trading around $80? Now we know why oil companies have been a little recalcitrant about obeying the command to "Drill, baby, drill!" and you have to figure that there must be a very powerful incentive to induce the people who front the money and risk to do the drilling to embark on such a massively risky project. Chevron is, after all, a business, and we can safely assume that it isn't doing this to take a $37 a barrel loss. The oil producers can only be extending themselves to this extent in the belief that near-future oil prices will support these projects and give them a decent return on this massive investment, and they must have a reasonable basis for believing that the supply/demand balance will work in their favor.

There is less dispute everyday over whether Peak Oil is a reality, and the major argument now is not if but when, and the estimated years of arrival are closer together. Kenneth Deffeyes believes that 2005 was the year that global production peaked, and points out that production has never exceeded that year's level. Other analysts say 2008, and most ominously of all, Sadad as Husseini of Saudi Aramco predicts that its Gwaihir field, the largest in the world, will reach peak production in 2015.

Just as the early Peak Oil prognosticators warned, demand is increasing while each new discovery is smaller and harder to exploit, and we're now arriving at the interstice between increasing demand and declining supplies, and arguments about exactly what year the peak will occur or has occurred are really beside the point. We will be paying more for less, not only oil, but everything that is somehow dependent upon it. And that means just about everything.

Looks like we are in for a long economic convalescence.

McCain Wouldn't Have Done Any Better: McCain-Dorgan Will Expand FDA Power

2010-02-28T08:35:00.001-06:00

While the Republicans co-opt the inchoate Tea Party movement for their own purposes and pretty much defeat whatever good purpose the movement had, prominent Republicans are working alongside their Democratic rivals to increase the size and power of our government and assist its corporate overlords in making life more expensive and difficult for our citizens, and further constricting their liberties while funneling what remains of their wealth into corporate coffers.

Anybody who thinks that Obama's rival, Sen. John McCain(R) of Arizona, or any other Republican, would have done any better than Obama in protecting us from further encroachments on our freedoms or back pockets, need only consider some of the dangerous legislation now being introduced, notably the McCain-Dorgan Act, introduced last month, which will vastly expand the power of the FDA to regulate vitamins and other over-the-counter supplements.

The pharmeucetical industry and medical profession are using every legal tool at their disposal to prevent people from controlling their own health care, and have lobbied for years for more regulation of supplements, often advocating making them available by prescription only. The justification for this new bill is the existance of small amounts of "performance-enhancing" substances in some over-the-counter supplements, causing some sports figures who used these products while innocent of their contents, to be in violation of the NFL's anti-doping policy. Why the use of such supplements by sports players to give themselves a competitive edge is considered to be a matter of public concern is difficult to understand - why can't this remain a matter between the players and the NFL?

More regulation of supplements will mean much greater costs to manufacturers and higher prices for consumers. Worse, the bill is one more step along the road to total control over every substance we put in our bodies by government authorities. As it is, the ongoing war on drugs has triggered more restrictive regulation of pain-killers, with harsh punishments for physicians found in violation of draconian restrictions on the use of addictive or narcotic pain relievers, resulting in greater misery for people suffering great physical pain who cannot now obtain pain relief in the dosages necessary for real relief.

Obama has taken a tentative first step toward expanding personal liberties and ending the destructive, no-win war on drugs by ending federal raids on suppliers of medical marijuana where permitted by state law. Let's hope he takes the next step and vetos this destructive bill.

The Death of the Space Program: Are We Squaring With Reality or Are We Volunteering to Die as an Advanced Society?

2010-02-14T14:24:00.006-06:00

I'm sure that most of the people who share my views regarding our country's financial condition and energy outlook won't concur with me, but when the death of our space program was announced, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss at what seems like the final capstone on forty years of national decline, during which this country has lost its lead in almost every branch of technology, and has become an impoverished debt addict and de facto colony of China.

The news that President Obama has canceled the funding for Constellation program was no doubt applauded by many people as a victory for common sense and fiscal restraint, and seems not to have registered at all among most of our citizens. In many quarters, the space program is regarded as a costly,wasteful, ecologically unjustifiable boondogle of little immediate utility and doubtful future benefit that consumes gargantuan quantities of fossil fuels and siphons massive amounts of tax revenue from projects of more immediate utility, such as our vast military apparatus and the ongoing efforts to re-inflate the housing and credit bubbles so that our top banksters can justify their multimillion dollar bonuses and the rest of us resume flipping houses and generating loan fees.

To many other people, notably the doomsayers of the Peak Oil community, it was only inevitable that this Promethean endeavor, with its massive energy and financial requirements, would be the first of our advanced technologies to be triaged on the descent from the absolute peak of our energy production, wealth, and technological advancement- a long, steep, wrenching path down hill that, many predict, will end with the death of any technology more advanced than wood-powered steam engines and water-driven mills. Damien Perrotin, of The View From Brittany, states in his post, Farewell to the Moon: "This pattern is likely to repeat itself as the decline in net energy available to our society makes keeping an advanced technology more and more difficult. There won't be any technological cliff, no abrupt return to the Middle-Age. Technologies will just lose momentum as the resources needed to advance them become scarcer and scarcer."

We will be reaching that point very soon, and there is considerable evidence that we might already have reached it. Yet what is more obvious is that the United States has passed its own peak of scientific achievement and advancement , and has lost its former lead in almost every field that matters, just as it has destroyed its manufacturing base and relinquished its economic lead to China and India in the process. More ominously, we have sat idly by as China moves aggressively to lock in its claims on a massive portion of the world's future oil production. At the same time, we have deliberately retarded development of nuclear power, an industry this nation pioneered and once led, and are stalled at the starting gate in the development of more advanced nuclear technologies, such as the molten salt and liquid fluoride thorium reactors, that could provide us with abundant clean energy for many generations going forward, while other nations, notably India, are not waiting for our blessings and are aggressively developing them.

Now, we are relinquishing to other major powers the chance, slender though it may be for anyone, of achieving a human landing on Mars, and developing the rich mineral resources that reside there and on Triton, a moon of Saturn thought to possess vast hydrocarbon reserves. These extraterrestrial mineral resources may well be the only way we will be able to fuel our technology in the coming century. The window of opportunity for developing the technology necessary to send humans to Mars and there build a small settlement from which to conduct extraction operations is narrow, being the brief interval between the present time, and the hour in which we reach the point on the downslope of fossil fuel production at which liquid fuels become so expensive and scarce that any effort that doesn't pertain directly to production of bare life necessities will be off the table. That window is closing very quickly. Moreover, as the grieving Charles Krauthammer points out in Closing the New Frontier, the Ares booster and Orion capsule are essential basic steppingstones along the arduous path that leads to a successful landing of humans on the red planet, and without those stepping stones, our hopes of ever attaining this are crushed. How will we ever make it to Mars and succeed in building a mining settlement if we can't even get to the moon, or into low orbit?

An alert reader might note a certain logical inconsistency in my position here, given my frequently-stated opposition to large-scale, multi-decade government programs that rely on the taxing authority we've granted the federal government, and whose effects cascade and amplify down through generations and produce unforseen consequences that we never bargained for, and that divert money away from private development and enterprise, which tends to be more sustainable and appropriate, to massively overscaled projects that not only cannot justify themselves economically, but destroy the fine-grained economic networks that support large-scaled private enterprises. The space exploration program would seem to be that, and on steroids- a vast undertaking that oftentimes seems more about national vanity and the daydreams of science fiction writers than about anything that we need to continue as an advanced nation, and that to many is absolutely unjustifiable in a period in which we are increasingly challenged in staying housed, fed, and warm. Obama himself, in announcing the decision to eliminate $3 billion for the Constellation project from the 2011 budget, framed it as a victory for free enterprise, stating that the private sector is welcome to pick up where NASA is leaving off.

That would be all well if even we still had a significant private sector. Would it be that our most successful and adventurous entrepreneurs, people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates, could organize a concern that might be capable of running even a rudimentary space program.But we no longer have a strong, confident, independent private sector that is capable of raising the gigantic amounts of capital required for such an undertaking. Most of all, though, we no longer have the business and political climate in which it is feasible to make plans that take up to a half-century or more to develop and implement, and in which investors feel secure enough to venture massive sums of money in highly speculative enterprises with massive capital requirements and multi-decade paybacks.

What we do have is a tower of unrepayable debt created by the financialization of our economy, and the most uncertain business climate in two hundred years. The uncertainty created by capricious changes in regulation and taxation, and the mounting costs of servicing government debt, have elevated the risk involved in long-term enterprises requiring massive capital outlays to levels unacceptable to most investors, and the result is that capital has fled heavy industry in this country, and gone into enterprises with a short payback period and immediate results-hence the decline of manufacturing and the flood of money into casino-type financial instruments where the payback is more rapid and the risk is perceived as being more manageable. The result of this process, of course, is the complete destruction of our heavy industry and the perversion of our financial markets, which were created to facilitate industry and commerce, into casinos that have enriched only a relative handful of players who belong to the financial cartel, while impoverishing the country and destroying our ability to finance the productive enterprises that could rebuild our economy.

As a result, the only entity with the wherewithal to support really large and speculative enterprises is the federal government, with its unlimited taxing authority. This would not have been the case a century ago, when people like Vanderbilt and Carnegie built the giant industries that made America not only the richest country in the world, but the most advanced and the one in which the incredible benefits spread to the greatest number of people, elevating our common citizenry from dirt-floor rural poverty to the most comfortable mass living conditions in the world, and offering them opportunities for advancement in a variety of fields that did not exist just 30 years before, just as it created the richest and most successful entrepreneurial class ever to exist at that time.

The result is if any major speculative venture is going to happen, it will be the government or nobody to finance it, and the process of determining just what will receive how much money, or any at all, will be driven not be consideration of the costs and benefits, or long-term needs, but by a purely political considerations, most of all by lobbyists and pressure groups. And as it happens, the most influential pressure group is the financial cartel, who as a group are not much concerned for the ongoing well-being and access to the decencies of life for the 98% of the population that doesn't get paid $40 million dollar bonuses for destroying our financial system. The Wall Street bonus babies won't be the ones suffering as our technology withers and our population spirals down into the poverty, filth, and degradation that was the lot of the majority prior to the industrial revolution, and is still the rule for most of the world's population, but will find a way to profit from our destruction, if only because they'll be able to recruit armies of poorly-paid household servants for a pittance.

Most of all, though, it will mean the end of our aspirations as a people. The greatest gift of the great thinkers and doers of past centuries was what they aspired to, and their passionate belief in the ability of humans to fulfill those dreams. A person might fall considerably short of his goals, but he surely won't exceed them, not even by accident. As Theodore Sturgeon once remarked, if you aim for 100, you might get that or you might get 50, but if you aim for 0, that is exactly what you will get. Now is the time to ask ourselves just what we aspire to- to greater knowledge and whatever advancement is possible to us, or to the life that was lived in the days of hand plows, childbirth on the kitchen table, and streets slimed with horse-droppings. There's no question of which manner of life is more easily attianable, and the human-haters are applauding every step backwards to it we take. Which will we choose?

Gas Explosion Kills 5 at Power Plant Site: Is Natural Gas the Best Bet for Safe, Clean Power Generation and Transportation Fuel?

2010-02-07T23:57:00.000-06:00

Strange how little public reaction there has been to the catastrophic natural gas explosion at a Connecticut gas-fired power plant this weekend, which killed at least five people and completely destroyed the plant, which was under construction. The explosion occurred while workers were clearing out a gas pipeline, and could be felt several miles away.

If a comparable disaster, with like loss of human life, had occurred at one of this country's 104 nuclear power plants, there would by now be multi-page articles published all over the globe on the presumed monstrous hazards of nuclear power, and thousands of activists and NIMBYs would be mounting demonstrations at plants and at state capitals across the country to demand that all the nukes be shut down and decommissioned immediately. The event would provide fodder for several years worth of anti-nuclear campaigns. There would be congressional hearings and state legislatures would be busy at work hatching legislation to stop further nuclear development. As it is, a minor fire or mechanical problem necessitating a temporary shutdown at a nuclear plant is enough to generate considerable yowling on the part of anti-nuke activists..

And if such an event as that in Connecticut occured at a commercial nuclear event in this country, there would be no chance of getting a new nuclear plant licensed in the U.S. within our lifetimes. As it is, the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant over thirty years ago, in which no one was killed and no injuries were ever proved, cast a pall on the nuclear industry in this country that has set this country back several decades in the development of nuclear. That event, and the explosion at the Soviet-built Chernobyl plant, are brought up at every public discussion regarding the expansion of nuclear power and the development of newer, safer, and cleaner nuclear technologies. These technologies are being aggressively developed by poor, developing, overpopulated nations who have not enjoyed our past abundance of cheap energy and so are not so complacent as we are regarding their ability to power their economies in the future.

Natural gas has been used for so long and is so commonplace in this country that most people, including environmentalists who now strangely favor natural gas as a fuel for autos and trucks, are blind to the health and safety hazards of this volatile, dangerous fuel, and the massive environmental costs of producing it and consuming it. Most people here in Chicago take in stride the numerous gas explosions that have occured in this areas over the past couple of decades, even though they have leveled houses and mult-family buildings and killed a large number of people.

Because of its extremely low density and volatility, natural gas is even more dangerous to transport than gasoline, which is something to consider before we push for the widespread adoption of gas-fueled vehicles on the premise that their fuel burn is "cleaner" than gasoline or deisel. One expert remarked that he would not want his daughter sitting atop a gas fuel tank. Gas extraction and production are major environmental hazards affecting all areas of the country, including the Great Lakes region. According to the Energy Justice Network:

"Natural gas is a fossil fuel that is often promoted as "cleaner" than coal, but which has its own serious environmental hazards. Natural gas extraction threatens ecosystems from northern Alaska and Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, including drilling on farms, public lands, forests and parks, in the Rocky Mountains and other coal-field communities, off of U.S. coastal waters and possibly even under the Great Lakes. Deep drilling technologies such as "hydraulic fracturing" or "fracking" have recently opened areas of the U.S. to drilling, leaving a legacy of groundwater pollution. Hydraulic fracturing is the process of injecting water, salt, and a cocktail of hazardous chemicals deep underground to break open rock formations from which natural gas is extracted. Hydraulic fracking techniques threaten communities facing drilling operations and downstream communities, including communities near "frac" wastewater treatment plants. This wastewater can contain radioactive materials, high levels of salt that affects aquatic life, and carcinogenic elements and compounds such as arsenic and benzene. [1, 2]

Pipelines and compressor stations add to the harms, crossing all sorts of ecosystems. Even water bodies like Lake Erie and the Long Island Sound have faced proposals to bury pipelines in underwater trenches that involve stirring up toxic sentiment accumulated on lake/sound floors."

Natural gas is a major indoor polluter, as well as a major fire and explosion hazard. Those who are concerned with air quality in their homes, or who suffer from asthma and other respitory ailments or who have babies or young children, urgently need to consider disposing of their gas cooking ranges and getting an electric stove. According to Agnes Malouf and David Wimberly, in The Health Hazards of Natural Gas:

     "Thinking of cooking with gas? Think again.With natural gas rolling ashore in Nova Scotia, it is tempting to believe industry and government promises that if only we could plug into this rich new local resource we could see our fuel bills drop and free up money in the budget for the nicer things in life.

     But would we still feel the same way if we were to learn that, in trying to save those hard-earned dollars, we were undermining our health by polluting the air we breathe in our very homes? It may be discouraging to hear, but now is the time to listen to what the experts have to say before we make what may be the wrong decision for us and for our families.

     Living with natural gas can be a health hazard both for people who are healthy and for those who are already ill. It is especially risky for people who have weakened immune systems, including those who are asthmatic, allergic, or chemically sensitive. Gas appliances create a constant low level exposure to gas which can cause or increase illnesses. Natural gas is a sensitizer, which means that exposure can lead to intolerance and adverse reactions both to
it and other substances in our environment."

In view of the multitude of safety, health, and environmental hazards attendent on the consumption, production, and extraction of natural gas, environmental activists and interested citizens might do well to be skeptical not only of the claims of those who are promoting the use of gas for power generation and in preference to nuclear, but the claims of solar and wind power advocates, who go to pains to downplay the dependence of these "renewable" and "clean" forms of energy upon fossil fuel backups. Promoters of wind and solar admit that these forms of power generation are too intermittent and unreliable to stand on their own without being backed by coal, gas, or nuclear.

Will Making Everyone Poor Help the Poor?

2010-02-01T23:44:00.003-06:00

More and more of us every day are losing the War on Poverty.

You might have heard of the $5000-range tax bills confronting the less-than-affluent owners of $40,000 shanties in neighborhoods like Englewood and Garfield Park, while Streeterville condos costing $1M or more pay no more than $5000 or $6000, or maybe $8000 at the most in property taxes. You have to wonder why there has been no outcry from the poor and near-poor homeowners who are being robbed of their last little bit of wealth, and who don't have the resources at their disposal to combat this assault.

The suburbs aren't any better. Last week, I was talking to one of our firm's clients, a nice Hoffman Estates man who occasionally makes a tiny stock trade in penny stocks he researches himself, as a hobby. He and his wife are solid in their jobs, have savings, and have had no problems making the payments on their $240K house. But they recently received their new tax bill for $8,500, which is more than double their previous bill, which itself had represented a massive increase over that of a year before. The house might now sell for $180K, which in itself is not a problem for my friend, for he bought it to keep and live in, not to "make money". But the new tax bill will mean an additional $400 a month in payments, which will force this man and his family of four out of their home, especially since his wife was recently laid off her job. My customer is protesting through the usual channels, even though he is so blindsided by this that he can barely cope. The reason for the draconian hike is that the Village is in a bad financial bind due to large mistakes in the allocation of revenues over the past few years, and many of their bets went badly. We can only ask how the village will cure its situation if my friend and about 1000 of his neighbors are forced to walk away from their houses for inability to pay these utterly unanticipated bills, and the city is forced to take possession of their houses, that are often worth less than the mortgages outstanding. There comes a point when people just cannot pay anymore, and the upward-trending line of expenses and taxes is now crossing the downsloping line of personal incomes and employment.

Against this backdrop, the taxpayers of Chicago are being forced to spend $447,000 per unit for "affordable" housing at Wilson Yards, to house 150 very select tenants. Given that there are hundreds of condos all over Uptown, Edgewater, and Rogers Park, many in "move-in" condition, languishing on the market for months on end at price points far lower than this, and many more hiding in the "shadow" inventory, whole developments nearly emptied and unsold, but not showing on the listings, you'd really think that our leaders could mate need with need, and purchase a couple of hundred of these orphaned units to offer as "affordable" housing. While many of these units have suffered from neglect and abuse and surely need substantial work in order to be habitable, an expenditure of $30k-$50K per unit to replace broken plumbing and missing fixtures is pretty small potatoes relative to the cost of the Wilson Yards project. Desperate sellers and foreclosing lenders would benefit, and the neighbors would be no worse off with a "low income" tenant than they are saddled with yet another "low income" housing development in the area, or with the liability for unpaid utilities and assements for neighboring units in their condo buildings that are in default or foreclosure, and are deteriorating into slums through sheer neglect as pipes break in unheated units, and departing foreclosure "victims" strip fixtures and inflict other damage on their units.

It's a good bet that the poor homeowners of Englewood and the middle-class dropouts of the suburbs won't be able to score an "affordable" apartment at Wilson Yards. They will just have to move in with relatives, or maybe find a box under a freeway somewhere. Somebody has to pay for projects like that, and these are the people who are doing the paying. Nobody has ever done a precise calculation on how many people have to sell their houses for inability to pay rapidly escalating taxes, for every "affordable" apartment built at the taxpayers expense.

Will taxing our poor and middle class homeowners into homelessness help house the poor? Why are we dispossessing our working poor of what few assets they possess, such as their little homes they struggled to buy, in order to build "affordable" housing, and destroying the struggling remains of our middle classes to subsidize evermore redundant Big Box retail in the name of "economic development"? The tax revenues lost to TIF districts, tax abatements, and other corporate "gimmes" must be offset by raising property taxes to confiscatory levels, and on the national level, the few trillion dollars committed to TARP, TARF, HAMP, and the rest of the alphabet soup of housing and financial bailout programs, as well as the immense subsidies committed to keeping housing prices levitated beyond affordability to a population whose incomes are falling, is taken from the taxpayers at large, and from other desperate needs. Someone out there remarked that the money committed to housing and financial bailouts as of the end of 2008 would pay for electrified rail service to every city and town with more that 5,000 inhabitants in the country. Aside from the sheer cost to the public treasury and the increasing danger of a treasury default, as the deficit swells and the tax revenues drop because of reduced incomes and business activity, there is the unbelievably twisted thinking of a president who believes that the best way to provide "affordable" housing is to spend our tax money to prop up housing prices at levels that are still above affordability.

In any case, you have to pretty naive and deluded to believe that our local and federal governments have any solutions to the economic problems we're dealing with, or any help for any of us out here. So let's stop asking these people to come up with "solutions". Our authorities are the problem, not the solution. Any "solutions" will be of our own devising, with our own money and effort; and the more of our resources our parasitical and theiving authorites skim from us, the less we'll have to help us deal with the problems our authorities have created and that they're inflicting on us.

Using Foreclosure Law to Save Your Home

2010-01-30T09:07:00.002-06:00

Now, before I get started, let me make some things clear. I am not, and have never been, in favor of programs designed to save buried home borrowers from the consequences of their folly nor do I support any of the array of "housing affordability" programs designed to line the pockets of all the players in the housing industry while keeping house prices levitated beyond affordability for legitimate buyers. Far be it from me to lend my support to anything that would re-inflate the housing bubble or reward buyers and lenders alike for extremely bad behavior.

However, I fully support the use of foreclosure law and securities regulations as they exist to help yourself financially and hold onto your house, and your credit rating. After all, business entities don't hesitate to use every tool in the box to legally escape debts they don't want to pay, as Morgan Stanley's decision to just "walk away" from five large commercial properties in San Francisco proves. It's humorous that Morgan Stanley refuses to refer to this as a "default"- "we're not defaulting, we're giving the properties back to the bank," said one Morgan spokesman. If it's not immoral for Morgan Stanley to "give back" their underwater properties to the bank, is it immoral for home borrowers to "strategically default" on a loan that way exceeds the value of the house?

I can't think of a better way to punish irresponsible lenders, and the bottom-feeding scum "servicing" companies who have recently bought all these crud mortgages for ten cents on the dollar, or maybe twenty cents, hoping to make a quick killing off of this mountain of misery by applying strong-armed collection techniques to extract payment, then for borrowers to make use of the laws as they exist to hand it to the greedy scum who make their living off the debt creation racket.

Troubled homeowners whose mortgages date from 2003 forward might be able to use existing foreclosure laws in order to keep their homes, says Ken "The Postman" Kappel, author of Use Foreclosure Law! Save Your Home.

In a related article, Is Obama Captured-The New... New.. Mortgage Scam, Kappel states that most loan modifications are not working and have a 58% re-default rate, as they usually result in higher payments and increased loan amounts.Worse, when you get your loan modified, you mostly lose all rights you may have to remediation if your original loan was fraudulent or otherwise in violation of applicable laws and regulations.

Kappel goes on to state that, according to Forensic Loan Auditors, over 80% of mortgages written since 2003 contain predatory lending and securities law violations which the borrower could use to have the loan rendered void altogether, but that home borrowers are giving up their rights under the applicable foreclosure and securities laws when they have their loans modified.

If you are a buried borrower, it might be worth your while to explore your possibilities under existing laws to see if your rights were violated and you were indeed defrauded as that is defined under the law, and what remedies might be available to you. I make no personal guarantee that you will be able to salvage your situation, but it's worth exploring. It is especially important to carefully consider whether a mortgage modification will really serve you, even if you are able to obtain one.

Whatever you do, tread very carefully and obtain really competent legal help, before you decide to default, or get a loan mod, or take other action, for you might be able to use existing laws to save your credit rating at least, even if you end up giving up the house after all. Good luck.

Death By Auto Dependency

2010-01-18T19:37:00.002-06:00

Most people would chalk up the death by exposure of Mrs. Martil Jovanes, 80, of Minooka, IL, as just "one of those things", a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, under the wrong conditions, not to be helped. The hand of God, some might say.

The circumstances surrounding her death are sketchy. Her address is not provided, and no survivor offered a statement.It is known only that she was returning from a dialysis treatment, and that she had left her car stalled on the railroad tracks, and had walked away from it, presumably in search of help, for it was ascertained that the auto had burned before being struck by a train, and Mrs. Jovanes was found collapsed about a quarter mile away. A post-mortem examination determined that she'd succumbed to hypothermia, or exposure to the cold.

Readers in the Joliet-Minooka area posted a few comments online, and most posters were critical of local law enforcement for not responding to a report of a fire at the rail crossing. But no one remarking on the tragedy questioned the living arrangements that require an octogenarian resident of a small town to drive many miles on desolate roads in the bitter cold to fulfill a course-of-life errand, such as a necessary medical procedure or trip to the supermarket.

Because that is how most of us live these days, at least those of us who live beyond the most densely -populated precincts of the handful of American cities fortunate enough to have adequate public transportation. In all other places, including most of our larger cities, the transit is infrequent, unreliable, and either doesn't run where you need it to, or when you need it to. You might be able to get to work, but nowhere else, least of all the nearest supermarket that might be 10 miles away. You might be able to get to work, but not back home because the service stops at an early hour.

60 years ago, at the end of WW2, this tragedy might not have happened. At that time, our towns and cities were oriented to their central business districts, and in a town like Minooka, like most other small towns, businesses and residential development would have clustered around the rail stops.An elder most likely would have lived on a street not far from either the retail district nor relatives, friends, and neighbors, and if she needed help, she would have quickly gotten it. She would most likely have had relatives nearby, or at least neighbors she knew well, and the goods and services she needed would have been available within a few blocks of her residence.

However, the post-WW2 era with its frantic suburban development and super-highway building was no kinder to towns like Minooka, or for that matter, small cities like Joliet and Springfield, than it was to our larger cities, and these days, instead of cozy, stable residential neighborhoods close to a prosperous business district, what you see at the rail stops on the Amtrak lines these days are deserted retail buildings, and dirty, decrepitating residential areas made of formerly fine houses let to fall into ruin, while the town's newer neighborhoods are built like suburbs, far from the retail district and accessible only by automobiles. Like the residents of the outer suburbs of large cities - and Minooka is now considered to be an outer suburb of Chicago- the remaining residents of most small towns must drive many miles to shop for groceries, go to school, visit the dentist, or see a new film.

Worse, just as our auto dependence has caused the populations of our towns and cities, and the businesses and institutions that serve them, to disperse to low-density neighborhoods oriented to expressways rather than to local businesses and rail stops, it has also dispersed families and friends and, in rural places like Minooka, even neighbors far and wide enough that an elder might feel that she's imposing a real burden on her neighbors and loved ones by asking for a ride to the doctor on one of the coldest days of the year.

Thanks to our almost universal auto dependence, a lone elder living in a place like Minooka has the worst of both worlds, really- you have the anonymity and lack of neighborly relations of a large, bustling city without the amenity and convenience, such as a bus that stops at your door and runs 24/7, while at the same time you have the poverty of services and retail of a very small town that has been left behind by suburbanization and big box dominance, without the intimacy, neighborliness, and long-time neighborly associations and physical closeness to your relatives, that were once the saving graces of small-town life.

Well, oil has once more crossed back into $80/barrel territory, and a larger percentage of our increasingly impoverished population everday, especially those dwelling in distant auto suburbs and rural outlands, are finding themselves stranded by the side of the road, figuratively as well as literally, as the costs of car ownership collide with the escalating costs of everything else, to make their lives much more uncomfortable and perhaps downright dangerous, thanks to our heavy dependence on a dwindling resource and our refusal to consider how we could arrange our lives so that a person could at least live and perform the ordinary errands without driving a car.

Nuclear Energy and Radiation Exposure:Depleted Cranium Blog on Reducing Exposure to Radiation

2010-01-12T21:24:00.002-06:00

For those opponents of nuclear energy who believe that any exposure to any amount of radiation is life-threatening and that our authorities should pull every stop to reduce exposure to the minimum possible, check out the suggestions for accomplishing zero radioactive exposure over at Depleted Cranium.

Coal-fired power plants, nuclear medicine, naturally occuring radon, and commonplace building materials including concrete, masonry, and granite, all generate more radiation than any nuclear power plant. Shall we eliminate these potent sources of radiation in our pursuit of zero radiation in our environment? What will we sacrifice not only economically, but in the way of health, comfort, and the basic decencies of life to eliminate low-level radiation, as well as other potential chemical hazards?

Community Meeting: Proposed New Restaurant and Bar at 1412 W. Morse

2010-01-07T22:23:00.001-06:00

Wednesday, January 13, at 7:00 PM
United Church, third floor
1545 W. Morse (Morse & Ashland Aves.)
Chicago, IL 60626

The office of the 49th Ward Alderman, Joe Moore, will conduct a community meeting on a proposal to open a restaurant and bar at the new condo building at 1412 W. Morse. According to an email announcement from the alderman's office,the owner of the building , Alex Samrdzija, will be the proprietor of the proposed new business, which he says will be similar to Xippo, a restaurant and bar that Mr. Samrdzija owns in Lincoln Square at 3759 N Damen.

A zoning change, from the current B3.3, to C1.3, will be required and a special use permit will also be required for 7 additional off-site parking spaces.

Save the Uranium 233

2010-01-03T06:31:00.002-06:00

Kirk Sorensen of Energy from Thorium has graciously granted me permission to post in its entirety his series of posts concerning the Department of Energy's planned destruction of its stockpile of Uranium 233, a material that is not only essential to the functioning of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, but is extremely valuable in nuclear medicine. The DOE plans to destroy the U-233 starting in 2012 as part of a comprehensive plan to reduce the amount of weapons-grade material. This is specious, for U-233 can only be used in nuclear weapons after undergoing an enrichment process vastly more complex than that for isotopes that are vastly more plentiful.

Please write to your elected representatives and urge them to take action to prevent the destruction of this valuable material.

From the EFT blog:

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Save the Uranium-233!

The Department of Energy has been engaged in a terrible effort to destroy--permanently--what might be the most precious substance on Earth: Uranium-233.

Why is uranium-233 so precious? Because in a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, U-233 represents essentially unlimited energy. How can that be so? Because in a LFTR, U-233 "catalyses" the consumption of thorium, which is natural and abundant. Every kilogram of U-233 represents roughly a megawatt of power in a LFTR--forever.

This might sound like some kind of "perpetual motion" machine, but it's very much grounded in nuclear reality. U-233 is what thorium turns into when exposed to neutrons. U-233 is fissile, thorium is not. But thorium can capture the neutrons from fissioned U-233 and then replace the U-233 consumed.

So a LFTR, started on U-233, will burn through its original "start charge" fairly quickly, but will continue to form new U-233 at the same rate it's consumed. So after 1, 10, or 100 years, the same amount of U-233 is there as was there when the reactor got started.

That's how U-233 "catalyses" unlimited energy production from thorium.

Here's some images describing the inventory of U-233 that the DOE currently has at Oak Ridge National Lab.

One kilo of U-233 in a LFTR for a year: one megawatt*year (8,760,000 kilowatt*hours)

One kilo of U-233 in a LFTR for 10 years: ten megawatt*years (87,600,000 kilowatt*hours)

One kilo of U-233 in a LFTR for 100 years: 100 megawatt*years (876,000,000 kilowatt*hours)

The longer you use U-233, the more it's worth. Let's say electricity sells for a nickel per kW*hr.

One kilo, one year: half a million dollars.

One kilo, ten years: 5 million dollars.

One kilo, one hundred years: 50 million dollars.

Anyone else know of something worth $50M per kg?

But the DOE is determined to destroy this precious resource (and we have about 1000 kg of U-233) by mixing it with U-238 and making it worthless for future use. What's worse, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make this precious resource into waste!

Why are we sabotaging our future by destroying U-233?

Call your congressman (especially if you live in Tennessee) and beg them to intervene!

Further discussion on the thorium-forum on this topic.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Why Should We Save the Uranium-233?

I have appealed many times on this blog to our public leaders to save the precious resource that is uranium-233. I have explained in an earlier blog post why the uranium-233, if used in a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) represents "unlimited" energy, because it can "catalyze" the consumption of abundant natural thorium and the inventory of U-233 remains even at the end of the reactor lifetime.

But why save this particular 1000 kg of U-233? If we're going to start hundreds of LFTRs, there isn't enough U-233 to start all of them, and we'll have to use other sources of fissile material. So why worry about this batch of U-233?

Reason #1: Destroying the U-233 is a waste of money.
The Department of Energy is estimating that the cost of "downblending" U-233 with depleted uranium (predominantly U-238) followed by "disposal" at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico will cost approximately $380 million dollars. This is the estimate as of December 2006, and it came from an article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that is no longer available, but the text can be viewed on the thorium-forum. $380 million is a LOT of money, money that's being used to destroy U-233 rather than develop the LFTR technology that turns it into unlimited energy.

Reason #2: LFTR runs better when it is started with U-233 than any other fissile fuel.
The LiF-BeF2 dissolves uranium better than plutonium, and if you start LFTR on U-233 you start it the way that it will be running in the long run. It takes a lot of neutron absorptions for U-233 to turn into something other than uranium. You have absorb one (U-234), two (U-235), three (U-236), and finally four (U-237, decaying to Np-237) neutrons before you form your first transuranic nuclide. By contrast, if you were to start LFTR on highly-enriched uranium (which would be a very attractive way to dispose of HEU that was produced for nuclear weapons) you only have to absorb two neutrons to get to Np-237. Plus, HEU has a certain amount of U-238 in it, and U-238 is only one neutron absorption away from forming a transuranic isotope (Pu-239). Obviously starting on plutonium, you've already put a lot of transuranics in the reactor to begin with.

This may sound a bit confusing, so I've made an image to try to graphically depict what happens in the reactor when you start on different fuels. U-233 fissions more favorably, its products have more opportunities to fission, and it has further to go before it forms a transuranic.

Reason #3: U-233 allows us to prove "thorium burning" in a prototype reactor.
One of the basic underlying assumptions of the LFTR is that we can "burn" thorium, in other words, we produce enough U-233 to replace that consumed. By starting a prototype reactor on U-233, we can actually show this in a real-world case early on, rather than trying to extrapolate backwards from a HEU or plutonium startup. It is going to be important to demonstrate that LFTR can really burn thorium, and a U-233 start is the only conclusive way to demonstrate this.

Reason #4: The aged U-233 contains valuable decay products that could save lives.
The U-233 in the DOE's inventory has had 30+ years to decay. That means that some special isotopes like actinium-225 and bismuth-213 have had time to form in the stored U-233. These actinides, which can ONLY be formed through U-233 decay (not fission) have shown that they could be very promising isotopes for certain types of radiotherapies that could save thousands of lives every year. Even the Inspector General of the DOE has appealed to save the U-233 to save lives.

To summarize, saving the U-233 saves money, lets us demonstrate LFTR's ability to burn thorium, and could save lives. Please appeal to your congressional leadership to save this precious resource.

Posted by Kirk Sorensen on 8/12/2009

Good Riddance: The Wild 2000s in Review

2010-01-01T21:43:00.004-06:00

Well, we can kiss off the first decade of the Third Millenium. Never have so many people been so damned glad to wrap up a decade, and at no time in the history of written civilization have so many people spent so much money and racked up so much debt with so little to show for it, and never have we had a period in which just about every asset lost so much values.

The decade saw a major terrorist attack on an American city that killed over 3,000 people. We entered two losing wars that will probably not end in our lifetimes and that are less likely every day to achieve their objectives. We elected two spectacularly inept presidents in turn who have each colluded with the country's financial kingpins to strip the population of not only the wealth it possessed but that of the next three generations going forward, by offloading the trillions of dollars of unrepayable private debt generated by the most egregious financial fraud ever perpetrated onto the backs of the public. Our incomes declined while our cost of living rose nearly 35%, and we managed to promulgate the biggest financial fraud ever perpetrated on Planet Earth, whose creation involved racking up the largest load of private and public debt relative to a nation's GDP in the history of civilization. The disparity in incomes has never been wider, and we have at last managed to sell ourselves lock, stock, and barrel to a country run by a thug government dominated by an ideology we are officially opposed to.

It's hard to say what comes next, and while I've made some accurate calls here and there, I wouldn't presume to forecast the coming decade. I can only say that we're not exactly off to a promising start. One octegenarian commentator, at the High Plains Reader, reflected on the comparisons between his first decade of life during the Depression of the 30s, and his 8th decade, and mordantly remarks that we're headed for worse times now and that "I doubt even the grapes will grow in 2010." It is not encouraging that our leadership continues to toss trillions of dollars at the housing industry to make housing more expensive for people whose incomes are dropping, and billions at the obsolete American auto industry, thus siphoning off the capital that is badly needed to rebuild our frayed electrical grid, let alone the power plants and railroads we will need, or to develop promising new technologies that could mitigate our slide down the slope of fossil fuel depletion and perhaps improve our lives while offering careers with a future, and the potential for economic growth from something other than swapping fraudulent financial products and selling overpriced houses. Or building redundant highways and purveying goods made by semi-slave labor in communist countries.

Our hope lies in the willingness of our middle classes to accept that new externalities have drastically changed the game forever, and their creativity and adaptability in crafting appropriate and rational responses to new and vastly more difficult conditions. Traditionally, the middle classes have been our most dynamic and adaptable populations, and are generally the first to embrace necessary changes and are usually in the vanguard of innovation. The middle, and often, the better-off working classes have given us our entrepreneurs, inventors, scholars, philosophers, and artists, but our middle classes have been financially weakened and greatly demoralized by the losses they have taken in the past 10 years, not to mention the past 30.

On the plus side, our population has become, at least for the time being, more frugal and cautious, and the population in general seems to accept that the high-flying lifestyles of the past couple of decades are out of reach, probably forever, and that they never were underpinned by reality. We are at least still able to eat regularly and the grocery stores are amply supplied. The power flows through the lines and goods are in the stores and the city is repairing the streets, and the trains and buses are running.

Let's just hope that we've seen the worst that thirty years of dying productivity, increasing financial fraud, and reckless spending and debt creation can do, at least for the time being. Most of us have an ugly inkling in the gut that the future has worse things in store for us, and we can only hope we can meet them with courage and the willingness to let go of what no longer serves us, and with the same spirit that inspired the achievements of the past century that have given us so much.

The Hidden Reserves of Gull Island and Other Cornucopian Legends

2010-01-01T10:41:00.005-06:00

Stressful times have a way of infusing new life into old superstitions and legends, and sure enough, now that oil prices are making a choppy path back to triple digits and existing elephant fields are showing symptoms of exhaustion, the conspiracy theorists are reviving rumors of vast, untapped supplies of oil, "enough to last two hundred years", or is "bigger than Saudi Arabia".

The two most enduring legends are Gull Island and the Bakken Formation.These two fields were discovered decades ago, and any hopes that these fields could approach the production of Gwaihir or Cantarell have been dashed many times over. The vast reserves simply are not there, but the myth dies hard. A Google search brought up hundreds of articles on each field, and in the case of Gull Island, the conspiracy hacks claim that the U.S. government has conspired to cap these wells and keep secret their existence in order to drive up oil prices. There are many plausible explanations for the shutting in of productive wells by the producer, and it's not difficult to imagine that a producer might wish to put a floor under oil prices, since a temporary glut can drive prices to points below profitability, but it is difficult to imagine a vast government conspiracy to raise oil prices in view of the fact that oil production is heavily subsidized in the U.S. with a vast variety of tax favors and incentives, in order to keep prices artificially low, and current prices are still low enough to render offshore drills and extraction from the Calgary sands prohibitively expensive and risky. Wells are shut in when the energy required to work them exceeds the energy that can be extracted from them, that simple, which is why the tar sands projects have been shut in and the offshore drills are not being done- the cheap, easy sweet crude is mostly gone, and what remains is the stuff that is difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. This means that price of oil must be at a certain level to justify the development of these sources, and when it isn't, they will go untapped.

Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)

According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. Perhaps it's a matter of public perception; to most people out here, 164M sounds like a lot of oil, and 5 billion is staggering, for most people do not realize that the U.S. rips through 7 billion barrels a year. Nor do they realize that while we once found much greater quantities of oil than the world used, that now the finds are very small relative to global demand, which is growing while new discoveries are smaller and smaller. A recent white paper authored by Dr. Robert Hirsch, Giant Oil Field Decline Rates and Their Influence on World Production, makes it clear that the world's giant fields are in decline and that the decline rate vastly outpaces the rate of new discoveries.

The Bakken Formation, a gigantic formation that is nearly 200,000 square miles in size, was first discovered in 1951 and then abandoned for decades as impossible to work because the petroleum is encased in layers of impermeable dolomite,and is a truly tantalizing find. The formation stretches across three states and provinces, and some geologists speculated that as much as 400 billion barrels of oil might reside in the layers of impermeable shale and dolomite. However, it turns out that, based on current production, that the most the formation can be expected to yield, given current levels of knowledge and technology, is about 4.1 billion barrels. While that is a pretty respectable number, it won't come near meeting our ongoing demand, let alone that of rapidly developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia with their huge populations of a billion people or more and rapidly devoping industrial economies.

The cornucopian tales of vast, unlimited resources and conspiracies to price them out of reach to the needy population are matched by the myths of "green" Perpetual Motion machines spun by the fantasists of the Green movement, and the current liberal political regime has bought into them hook, line, and sinker. Environmentalists Amory Lovins and Al Gore, who are the most prominent propagators of the alt-energy myths, have attained almost God-like status among the Green contingent, as well as considerable influence within the Obama administration. The plot line of green fantasies of the unlimited energy that could be realized from solar, wind, and geothermal power is similar to that of the fossil fuel cornucopians. We could, they say, run our cities and transportation entirely on wind, solar, and geothermal were it not for government coddling of the fossil fuel industries and deliberate obstruction of alternative technologies. "Whole cities are run on wind power!" exclaim the fantasists, and they point to such "cities" as tiny Rock Port, Missouri, pop.1300, as examples of the superiority of "renewable" energy. The little hamlet near the Nebraska border has achieved energy independence by means of four wind turbines that cost $90 Million and that generate 5 megawatts a power per day. A closer look reveals that not only is this expensive power -it translates to a minimum .20 cents per kilowatt hour under the best circumstances, but that the system must be tied to the nation-wide grid for backup power when the wind is not blowing. In other words, like solar power, it is reliant upon fossil fuel backups to assure reliable, uninterrupted power generation, thus blasting away fantasies of energy independence from "renewables". Additionally, the Rock Port project is one node of a much larger project in the area, which meant that the turbines cost much less than they would as a "stand alone" project, and the town was, under its previous arrangement, paying a substantial premium for power transmitted from distant places, known as a "wheeling charge", for the line loss involved in transmitting electricity over vast distances, which elevated its power costs significantly. In other words, Rock Port is a special situation, a tiny community in a remote location that has benefited from a convergence of unusual circumstances: the high cost of importing power from remote sources, the loss of other alternatives such as the hydro that used to supply the town, and proximity to a large wind farm and the existence of ideal weather for wind generation, along with a tiny population and copious federal subsidies. Such a combination of factors doesn't set up often, and even so, the town is ultimately reliant upon fossil fuel for its power given the intermittant nature of wind power and the difficulty of storing it.

But no matter how often and convincingly these myths are debunked, they retain their life and their power over a frightened population traumatized by the loss of the industries that made this country, for a time, the wealthiest and most productive nation ever to exist; blindsided by the vicious reversal and revealed fraud of the "growth" economy that seemed invincible just a few years ago, and now confronted with steep, irreversible financial losses and, worse, the permanent loss of our high level of comfort and the terminal depletion of the resources that have made it possible. Right now, we are in denial, which is the first stage of the grieving process, and that denial is manifest in the cornucopian fantasies of government coverups of giant oil finds and suppression of alternative energy sources that could, people believe, make it possible to continue our current obscenely wasteful consumption of resources. Such denial is utterly human and completely understandable.

But it won't help us in the task of reorganizing our economy and communities in keeping with reduced energy imputs and the contraction and eventual loss of industries reliant upon cheap, plentiful lifestyles. We will soon progress to the second stage of the grieving process, which is anger, and millions of people consumed with pain and rage will target the usual scapegoats, which would include our political leaders, who will pay a steep price for pandering to the wish-based fantasies of a population steeped in denial.

However, the steepest price of all will be paid by the 290 million or so "ordinary people", whose failure to reconcile their desires with emerging conditions will set them on a collision course with unpalatable realities, and who will thus be driven into corners defined by no-win choices and who will not have the alternatives available to our financial and political elites.Most of us will not be able to fly off to pristine little communities buried in remote spots, or accumulate vast stockpiles of provisions and ammo in gated compounds guarded by private armies.

And at that point, the "bargaining" stage of the process, we will not be the ones setting the terms of the deal. The hard facts of resource scarcity in combination with a population utterly unprepared to cope with life on terms vastly different than those of the past 70 years will set the terms, and we will have to cope however we can, minus the skills and mentality that could make the difference between life with a certain minimal level of tech amenity in solid communities in an honest, productive economy; and the chaos, scarcity, and rampant violence of a society rapidly devolving into savagery and civil breakdown as its fantasy-driven denizens wander witlessly from place to place in search of illusionary prosperity and safety, and of leaders who will tell them exactly what they want so badly to believe, which is that we can flout the laws of nature and continue to consume vastly more than we produce, whether energy or the goods the energy makes possible.

Shrinking Horizons and the Devolution of American Rail Transit

2009-12-27T19:00:00.005-06:00

As I usually do at Christmas, I took the Amtrak Lincoln train to St. Louis to visit my family. I usually enjoy the ride even when the train is substantially delayed, for even though Amtrak service and amenities are very basic, they compare favorably with air travel in comfort and decency. After my last plane trip to St. Louis in 2005, a red-eye out of Midway, where I was subjected to vicious incivility usually experienced only at an open-seating rock concert, I decided I'd had enough of the savagery of modern air travel and reverted to travelling by Amtrak.

Amtrak service, while not luxurious by any standard, is still extremly comfortable relative to air travel, offering ample leg room, wide, deep seats,the opportunity to get up and walk around, and the freedom to enjoy my electronic devices at will along with an outlet at the seat to plug them into without fear that they'll somehow derange the landing gear or radar. Additionally, the atmosphere is relaxed and the personnel are genial and courteous. The only downside, really, is that it is just too slow, taking 5.5 hours minimum to travel between Chicago and St. Louis, and long delays of 30 minutes or more are distressingly frequent. Everytime I ride, I consider that there were once about a dozen interurban trains traveling between these two cities, and that in the 1920s, speeds of 100MPH were ordinary for passengers trains in the U.S., whose passenger rail system was the envy of the world. Nevertheless, I usually enjoy the trip, and settle into my seat with my music collection, headphones, and a book for the ride.

But the arrival in St. Louis is a distinct downer, and I get just a little depressed as the train rolls into its pocket at the new station downtown. Often, I ride to the charming old commuter station in Kirkwood, which is so close to my mother's house that in fine weather I can walk there, but the layover between St. Louis and the last leg to the Kirkwood Station has been lengthened to two hours, and I can think of better uses for that much time than milling around at the ugly new station, staring at the dismal scenery surrounding it and wondering why we let our cities, and our country, be reduced to this.

Nothing illustrates the devolution of rail transit in the United States like the contrast between the magnificent old Union Station at Market and 18th Streets in St. Louis (pictured at top), and St. Louis' new Gateway Multimodal Transportation Station, a bizarrely configured series of small, boxy segments jammed underneath a tangle of highway overpasses on 15th Street.

While old Union Station, built in the 1890s when St. Louis was the largest rail hub in the world, sits proudly on Market Street opposite beautiful Aloe Plaza with its incredible Carl Milles fountain, affording the rail travelers of the past an imposing view of the city, and grand welcome; the new station, with its two platforms and four pockets for passenger trains, is hidden away in a desolate pocket in downtown's neglected backyard. As you exit the station, the sight that greets you is not a lovely park with sweeping views of the city's skyline, but a dank, dark parking lot under the tangle of highway ramps and support pylons, the USPS parking lot across the street, and a jumble of weed-choked vacant lots and decrepit buildings, from where you can get a glimpse of Union Station's clock tower to the north and west, and your first thought is: why was $31 Million spent on this ugly jumble of buildings that will surely be inadequate to the needs of revived rail in the future, while the magnificent old building on Market Street sits underutilized, as a floundering shopping mall?

Where was the vision here? While rail travelers visiting the city are dumped into this ugly pocket in the city's service alley, Union Station's beautiful mall, which underwent a second renovation in 2007, is languishing, and continuing to lose traffic and retail tenants. The area surrounding the station is thinly populated, and poorly anchored by St. Louis' moribund downtown business district. Basing Amtrack service at Union Station would not only revive the lovely old structure as a rail station that could accomodate vastly expanded passenger rail in the future, but would present the city in its best light to visitors and would feed traffic to the hotel and shopping mall, while providing an impetus to further residential and commercial development in the immediate area.

This sad place is not only indicative of our lack of commitment to rebuilding our transportation system in keeping with the reality of dwindling fuel supplies, but most of all, illustrates the shrinking of our vision of the future and our acquiescence to increasing failure and dysfunction.

The Hyperion and LFTR: Charles Barton at Nuclear Green Discusses Small, Factory Built Nuclear Reactors

2009-11-19T07:15:00.000-06:00

Charles Barton at Nuclear Green discusses the advantages and costs of small, factory-built, sealed nuclear reactors. These plants, such as the Hyperion slated to be installed in Galena, Alaska, which uses conventional nuclear fuel but with a technology vastly different from that of conventional large light-water reactors; and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a technology that India is aggressively developing and whose fuel, thorium, is much more plentiful than uranium and utilizes a much safer, cleaner technology that results in steeply reduced levels of "waste".

There's No Such A Thing as Nuclear Waste

2009-11-11T20:26:00.000-06:00

One of the larger concerns surrounding nuclear power is the management of the byproducts of fission, popularly known as "waste". As matters stand at the moment, the Yucca Mountain repository is on hold, and further development of nuclear power could be curtailed until a "solution" is found.

Only in a society accustomed to plentiful resources would these materials be considered "waste". France and other chronically resource-short nations recycle fuel, and only a relative abundance of fissionable uranium here in the U.S. makes it possible for us to take such a cavalier attitude toward the 56,000 tons of material residing in containment pools at reactor sites all over the country. Aside from the considerable amount of uranium left behind that can be recycled into fresh nuclear fuel, fission byproducts contain dozens of isotopes that are valuable in many other applications, and include some of the "rare minerals" that we now depend upon China for and that are indispensable in the manufacture of electronic devices, as well as in many other industrial processes.

Kirk Sorensen at Energy From Thorium writes of the large variety of isotopes produced by fission, and the characteristics and uses for these materials, some of which are rare minerals of the sort that China is now restricting access to. This chart, from the blog, describes them:

As China restricts its exports of these minerals and as the demand for nuclear fuel increases steeply, we will desperately need the fission leftovers and the materials they contain. 30 conventional Generation III reactors are currently in the planning stages here in the U.S., and dozens more are being planned around the world. At current rates of consumption, our estimated supplies of fissionable uranium are sufficient to supply us for only 100 years, which means, of course, that if consumption ramps up steeply, it could become extremely scarce and expensive within a couple of decades. If we want to have regular, cheap, on-demand electricity decades from now, we will have to make use of every material that can provide it, including the most controversial element, plutonium, certain isotopes of which can be blended with uranium to fuel reactors.

The Unites States is not only fallen far behind the curve technologically, but has a stunning disregard for proper resource management, mainly because we have not experienced genuine scarcity of necessities and essential resources within the lifetimes of most people alive now, and essential resources are still very cheap here relative to their prices other nations. At this time, it is still cheaper to mine uranium than it is to recycle spent fuel, but this state won't last forever, and could end very quickly and just might in another decade or less, as rapidly developing nations containing a billion or more people command more and more of the world's remaining resources, especially fissionable minerals, as well as oil and coal.

The Role of Government Intervention in the Financial Collapse

2009-11-08T09:28:00.000-06:00

In his Wall Stree Journal article, Three Decades of Subsidized Risk, Charles Gasparino discusses the indispensible role our government played in the creation of the tower of unrepayable debt whose unvelling caused the financial collapse of September 2008.

Those of us who remember the asset bubbles, and resulting financial disasters, of the 80s and 90s also remember the government bailouts of first the S&Ls and then of a major hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. Our perception was that an immense moral hazard had been created thereby. Simply put, our government made it clear at that time that it would never fail to backstop any risk with taxpayers funds, no matter what the amount, and when all meaningful controls were removed with the repeal of Glass-Steagal, it was only a matter of time before the combination of extremely easy money borrowed at ridiculously low interest from the government, in combination with implied government guarantees of bailouts and the removal of all reasonable controls to blow up the biggest bubble of debt ever to exist.

However, the government role in creating debt and inflating asset values began long before. The Roosevelt administration's "solution" for rapidly-deflating asset values in the aftermath of the 1929 and 1933 crashes was to create a network of government agencies whose purpose was to guarantee home loans that otherwise would be unworkable, by the creation of the FHA and the GSEs such as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. Before the creation of these agencies, and in the decades prior to the Great Depression, down payments of 50% were often required, and no more than a third of the homes in the U.S. were mortgaged.

Since the 1930s, government-backed home lending, the mortgage-interest tax deduction, and numerous other federally and locally subsidized incentives for home ownership have generated enormous over-investment in housing, just as other massive federal programs have provided massive incentives for the development of suburban sprawl and universal auto ownership, and ultimately the emptying of our cities into suburbs, and the depopulation of the fertile, moist Midwestern states in favor of desert states that would never support their current swollen populations were it not for massive imputs of tax funds drawn from older, established cities in conjunction with federal agencies with almost unlimited power to allocate those funds into the pharoanic infrastructure projects we will be most unlikely to be able to maintain in the capital-and-energy deprived years before us.

A rollback and eventual termination of government-sponsored lending and housing "affordability" programs , and most of all a steep reduction in the government's role in directing our economy, would likely result not only in a sounder financial system, with lending based on the borrower's ability to pay, but would also give us more truly affordable houses. Without these incentives and guarantees, it is likely that housing prices would fall much further and that it might once again be rewarding to be a landlord.

Why We Need the Liquid Thorium Reactor

2009-11-02T00:27:00.007-06:00

The Daily Kos once published a great post, Why We Need the Liquid Thorium Reactor, which supplies an easily-understood explanation for a complex technology that is becoming extremely important in the nuclear industry. It's recommended reading for those who don't have the patience to wade through the more technical nuclear blogs I link to on my blogroll.

For those who want to explore the subject in more depth, Charles Barton at Nuclear Green , and Kirk Sorensen and Charles Barton together at Energy From Thorium discuss the LFTR technology as well as other newer nuclear technologies and "renewable" technologies, in great detail on these two blogs, which are considered by other scientists and technicians to be among the richest sources of energy information on the web.

The United States, now a technological laggard, is planning only Generation III light water reactors, which, while being vast improvements on older nuclear technologies in terms of safety, efficiency, and cost, are still tremendously expensive and inflexible. Current industry players here in the United States tend to be dismissive of the thorium technologies, as I discovered when I attended a "dog and pony" show for a uranium mining stock recently and, when I inquired of its CEO if there were plans to mine thorium, he was downright defensive (it seemed to me) and said that the thorium technology would never be developed and had no potential. I could see from his reaction that I'd hit a nerve, for thorium is vastly more plentiful than uranium 235 and would probably render his struggling little uranium mining operation superfluous. Meanwhile, other countries are not waiting for the United States to put its stamp of approval on the most promising energy technology since the first controlled nuclear chain reaction here in Chicago nearly 70 years ago, but are forging ahead and aggressively developing thorium nuclear power, with us or without us. India has been unable to trade in conventional nuclear fuel because of its exclusion from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and therefore has a much greater incentive to develop new technologies that do not require it, and is aggressively developing thorium technology to exploit its indigenous reserves of thorium. Not surprisingly, India has become the front-runner in the development of the LFTR and intends to supply 25% of its electricity by this technology by 2050.

The LFTR technology makes for an intrinsically much safer, cleaner and cheaper reactor that extends the fuel cycle almost into infinity, is much more "scalable" in that the units are smaller, for power plants that can consist of one small reactor for a small town, or clustered together as need dictates. The units are built at the factory and transported sealed by truck and rail to the site, and there can be either buried for greater security or, as some technicians suggest, installed in decommissioned coal-fired plants.

The United States, like other formerly successful countries, is pouring the last of its wealth and resources into the rearguard effort to sustain old, obsolete, and unsustainable industries while spurning developments that could considerably offset the depletion of fossil fuel supplies, supply much cleaner energy and far greater quantities of it, and replace our dying old industries as the drivers of economic growth, with new, growing industries supplying the goods, services, jobs, and wealth we will need in the future. Our regulatory agencies and our ossified utilities with their protected monopolies are years behind the curve in knowledge and development of new technologies.

Instead of shoveling evermore money and effort at shoring up the dying auto and suburban-house-building industries, we need to remove the obstructions to new technologies and new industries, and most of all rediscover the sense of purpose and forward motion that made this country, 100 years ago, the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen and gave us the prosperity and unparalleled comfort and amenity that we now seem to think are God-given entitlements. The revival of the nuclear power industry and the development of new nuclear technologies could be the start of the development of a new industrial economy that is sustainable for many decades into the future and could make it possible for our swelling population to make a living and enjoy a reasonable level of comfort and amenity in a time of dwindling resources and heated competition for remaining supplies of liquid fuels.

The Peril of the Savior State

2009-10-31T19:22:00.002-05:00

In demanding that our rulers provide for all our material needs and rescue us from the consequences of our own folly and the normal risks of existence, we are paving the way for a totalitarian regime that strips us of the last of our rights and enslaves us to the ruling oligarchy. Charles Hugh Smith at Of Two Minds warns of the dangers to our basic civil rights and constitutional freedoms in his latest post, When the Savior State Becomes the Enemy of the People.

Smith reminds us that we can't have it both ways. If we desire to retain the liberties guaranteed us by our constitution, then we have to be willing to pay our own way, take our our risks, and accept the results of our actions and judgments.

He says,"In granting the state the power to become a Savior State, you also grant it the power to be a repressive regime or corrupt kleptocracy which openly serves an Elite and is accessible only via bribes/ political donations."

Where would you say we are now on the Nanny State Enslavement Scale? Are we now a "corrupt kleptocracy" where the citizens exist to serve a dominant oligarchy empowered to strip them of their remaining wealth by means of government force? And at what point will the "corrupt kleptocracy" become a "repressive regime"? A convincing argument could be advanced that that is exactly what we are now and have been for quite a while.

If so, we became so with the enthusiastic co-operation of our citizens, who traded away their rights for the illusion of security and perpetual plenty regardless of the means used to maintain the facade, or the price paid for it. People who want the benefits of a Nanny State should consider if they're willing to front the price- the invasion of our privacy by maintaining health records (the national health plan), the suspension of our constitutional rights for a specious security (the USAPATRIOT Act), the seizure of our property for the sake of the "public good" or "economic development" by eminent domain, or hundreds of other abuses and outright violations of our constitutional rights that have become commonplace and acceptable.

How the Chicago Showdown Failed

2009-10-28T21:24:00.007-05:00

As was expected, the Chicago Showdown, the massive protest against the efforts of the financial industry to lobby against reform of the financial system, drew many thousands of protesters from across the country to engage in three days of protests against the government support of the greed and larceny of the banking industry.

It was a pretty good protest, as they go, what with the requisite marches and chanting and prayer vigils and some really great costumes, though somehow it failed to evoke enough guilt among the attendees to ruin their enjoyment of a Roaring-20s-themed party, the irony of which was not lost on anyone but the party-goers themselves. Obviously, no one at the American Bankers Association convention gave much consideration to that first great American debt debacle that ended with a decade-long depression, or at least not enough to see any parallels between the multiple speculative bubbles of the 1920s, in land and financial instruments alike, that parallel the vastly more intricate, layered, and global scams of the 2000s.

But the message of the protest was lost, for it was too obvious that many of the protesters suffered from the same disease as the financial fraudsters, which was the idea that somehow the universe owes them "gimmes" and guarantees against losses and respite from the consequences of bad judgment, thoughtless risk-taking, and yes, greed. But the protesters seemed oblivious to the parallels between the greed and deliberate insanity of the financial maniacs who raked in the obscene profits from the ten-year rampage, and their own greed, gullibility, and willful blindness.

The bulk of the protesters were demanding, not an end to the entire structure of socialistic housing "affordability" programs and alphabet soup of federal agencies and GSAs that enabled the greed stampede, but only that they, too, be "rescued" from the consequences of their greed, delusional thinking, and bad judgement, as Senator Durbin and the protesters demanded that the $23 Billion in bonuses being given out to Goldman Sacks executives instead be donated to help people stay in homes in foreclosure. Nobody suggested that those bonuses instead be remitted back to the treasury and to the taxpayers at large, who paid them.

Granted, many people there were genuine victims- people who lived and operated honestly and borrowed prudently within their means, only to be done out of jobs and then homes by the vicious reversal of the fake good times produced by the spate of debt-driven "growth". However, for every person who is losing his home to business reversals or job losses, there are four or five who are in foreclosure because they bought much more house than they ever had reason to think they could afford with loans that they knew, or should have known, were suspect, or who withdrew all the equity in their houses to buy cars and boob jobs and other extravagances,and are no more deserving of gifts from the public till than the financial managers attending the convention were to their bailouts and mega-bonuses.

As in most con games, most of the victims here were absolutely complicit in their destruction, and are not entitled to be "rescued" from foreclosure and loss of homes they never honestly owned to begin with. But most of all, we have all, from the low-income buyers borrowing to buy middle-bracket homes on subprime pay-option loans clear up to the Goldman Sachs bonus babies who are enabled by our government in skimming the taxpayers for decades to come to pay this year's bonus, contributed to the mentality that produced the casino economy of the past 20 years, a mentality made up in equal parts of greed, magical thinking, and a boundless sense of entitlement to unearned rewards.

Let's Reduce the Number of Chicago Aldermen: Help Circulate the Petition

2009-10-27T22:11:00.004-05:00

The great people at Second City Cop blog have started a movement to reduce the number of Chicago aldermen to 25, one for each police area. A petition has been started, and you can print up copies here and go to work gathering signatures.

Remember, in order to be valid, all signatures must be those of City of Chicago residents who are registered voters, and you must, after getting signatures, attest to their validity by getting your own signature, as a petition circulator, notarized.

WE NEED 121,660 VALID SIGNATURES BY NOVEMBER 14, 2009!

If we can just get one 1000 people gathering 125 signatures each, we can get this on the ballot. Gather 200 just for good measure, in case of overlap or invalid names. Ask if the signer is a registered voter and resident of Chicago, always

Stay tuned to SCC for a collection point for the petitions.

If Los Angeles, a city larger than Chicago and at least as difficult to run, can get by with 15 aldermen, why do we need 50? Estimates of cost savings range from $10 million to $50 million. My own guess is closer to $50 million, if you include the costs of wasted time and corruption. Time to make this $100K-plus-per-annum job into a full-time job.

The Nuclear Energy Option:A Nuclear Power Primer

2009-10-23T21:29:00.001-05:00

The Nuclear Energy Option (Dr. Bernard L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh) an online book summarizing current nuclear power technologies and their costs, benefits, and hazards, is a short summary of the history of civilian nuclear power development, current nuclear technologies and their costs, comparisons of costs and benefits of nuclear with other forms of power generation, the management of nuclear waste, and the regulatory framework and politics of nuclear power generation.

The short booklet is, while not exactly "light" reading, a well-written and easy-to-comprehend summary that translates technical jargon and lucidly explains complex technologies for the non-technical reader. It's essential reading for policymakers and interested citizens.

Obama Endorses Nuclear Energy

2009-10-22T18:14:00.000-05:00

President Obama is learning.

According to a Reuters report, the president, at a public meeting in New Orleans, said that he would like to see increased production of electrical power in the United States and that he recognizes that nuclear energy could play a key role in reducing greenhouse gases

"There's no reason why technologically we can't employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way," Obama said.

It appears that Obama is beginning to sort out the arguments against nuclear, and listening to top scientists and engineers instead of lawyers such as Amory Lovins. It might be beginning to dawn on the "greens" that such "soft" technologies as wind and solar will not only not be able to supply more than a third of our current power needs under the best circumstances, and that the denizens of France, which 80% dependent upon nuclear, are not exactly glowing in the dark.

Now that Obama has endorsed nuclear, perhaps Illinois leaders will wise up and repeal the state's foolish moratorium on nuclear development, and give Illinois a fighting chance to regain lost economic ground and compete with other states in economic development.

Showdown in Chicago October 25-27

2009-10-20T23:30:00.001-05:00

Some people are asking "Where's the outrage?" at the wholesale plundering of the American population by the banking cartel and the U.S. Treasury, to support the banking cartel.

We can show our outrage at the protest this weekend downtown, concurrent with the annual meeting of the American Banker's Association, October 25-27.

So far, the financial bailout has cost us over $3 Trillion dollars, and our leaders are concocting new schemes to strip the American public of the last of its wealth, by offering more E-Z FHA money and an $8000 tax credit to gullible buyers ,for yet another bailout in a couple more years. We have about 7 million foreclosures before us yet, not counting recent FHA borrowers who are already delinquent- all to maintain housing prices and assure profits for loan originators and home builders. The taxpayers are theoretically on the hook for up to $24 Trillion, though $12T is a likelier number. Each $8000 tax credit is costing the taxpayers $40,000- true government efficiency here.

The results are more Americans impoverished since the Great Depression, 10% U3 unemployment across the nation, and fabulous profits for the banks.

Below is the Showdown Chicago Schedule of Events:

Get hyped for the Showdown...
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Schedule of Events

Note: all times are approximate and subject to change

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2009

If you wish to join us on Sunday, please fill out a Sunday Registration Form. Attendance for Monday or Tuesday does not require registration.

3:30pm – Welcome & Conference Orientation

4:30pm – Put People First: Showdown in Chicago
Hundreds of everyday Americans come together to launch the Showdown in Chicago. A peoples’ Commission will hear testimony and evidence from everyday Americans, well known public figures, and elected officials on how Wall Street banks created the foreclosure crisis and sent the economy into a tailspin. Commission findings will be shared with the Obama Administration, Members of Congress, and the Angelides Commission.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2009

11:30am – American Bankers Association convention, 301 East North Water Street.
Big banks are spending billions to prevent reforms that would protect taxpayers from their future abuses. Nearly a thousand Americans will take our message directly to the American Bankers Association at their annual convention.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009

MARCH TO THE BANKER'S CONVENTION

10:00am - Prayer vigil on Wacker, east of Michigan Avenue
10:30am - March: starting at Stetson and Wacker
11:00am - Rally at the Sheraton Hotel (301 East North Water Street, Chicago)

No registration required for the Tuesday march. For more information, visit www.stopbankgreed.org or contact rozwadowskik@seiu1.org

The Price of the New Housing Mini-Bubble: The FHA Will Need to be Bailed Out

2009-10-17T10:58:00.004-05:00

Since I work at a stock brokerage firm, I get to listen to Kudlow and Cramer crowing about the "recovery" of the housing market, and how housing prices have "bottomed", which surely means that we're on back on track to house price Nirvanah... that is, from a current homeowner's viewpoint. Aspiring buyers might view the situation differently.

I have a lot of thoughts when I hear Kudlow & Cramer. Mainly, I think about how many ordinary 'merikuns, mostly male, regard their show as the font of all economic wisdom and how they get paid 7-digit salaries to mouth this crap and don't even have to register as Investment Advisors or Broker/Dealers. So if you lost your ass and are in foreclosure as result of following their idiotic rantings over the past 8 years, you have no redress. I, on the other hand, have to exercise a little care about the advice I dispense for pay because I have securities registrations to protect and can't afford the legal fees to defend myself in the event of a complaint.

What was before hidden from view and justified as a process of the "free market" is now out in plain view, which is that the current flurry of house purchasing is a result of blatant government manipulation, and it will probably produce the same results as the multiple government manipulations that gave us the mega-rampage of the 2000s.

At least the Democrats have some baseline level of honesty regarding the role of the government in creating debt bubbles and driving house prices to unsustainably high levels, whereas the Republicans who ruled in the past decade unblushingly referred to the Fed manipulation of interest rates, the subsidies provided borrowers and lenders through the FHA and the GSAs (FNMA, GNMA, Freddie Mac, et al), and the bailouts that financiers knew they could always count on, as the "free market". The Dems very openly state that they are trying to elevate housing prices by means of heavily subsidized FHA loans on very easy terms, while talking out the other side of their mouths about making housing "affordable".

The lower illustration is one of the signs we've been seeing on parkways all over Edgewater and Rogers Park. I called the number on the sign, and was told that you come in with a FICO of 680 or better and $500 cash, and receive your $8000 tax credit to use as your down payment at the closing. Given the required down payment of 3.5%, and current underwriting rules that permit a housing expense ration of 40%, a borrower with an income of $60,000 a year can pay up to $260,000 for a place with a $500 down payment out of his own pocket.

Click on the upper image in order to enlarge it so it can be easily read. What it is, exactly, is the underwriting summary for a recently-issued FHA loan, with the borrower's personal information blacked out. It is not a loan for a new house purchase, but is an ADJUSTABLE LOAN for an EQUITY EXTRACTION of $133, 292 from a home appraised at $193,750. The LTV ratio for this equity extraction (or Home Equity Loan) is over 67%. The Housing Expense Ratio is 41% of the borrower's gross income. The borrower's total expense ratio is 53%. The stated purpose of the loan is CASH OUT REFINANCE.

How long do you think the borrower will be able to service this loan? Do you think that he will make it past the first reset? Or will the loan recast as the house continues to drop in value? Do you think someone with an income of $60,000 can afford a $260,000 home? Do you think that perhaps many of these loans will become problems early on and that delinquency and default rates on the recent generation of FHA loans will equal those on all the subprime, Alt-A, adjustable, interest-only, and pick-a-pay loans that got us into this mess to begin with?

If you are a renter waiting for an opportunity to buy a reasonable place at a sensible price with a loan you can really afford, do you resent your taxes being used to subsidize more bad loans for more marginal borrowers, just to create another tower of unrepayable debt that the taxpayers will once more have to make good on in a couple of years?

Do you think that the housing "gains" based on this kind of borrowing are sustainable, or do you think that the recent surge in home sales and slight bump in prices is a government-manufactured Bull Trap and that we are poised for another steep leg down in prices, as well as the further degradation of our currency and another tax-funded bailout?Do you think that the FHA can survive a combined delinquency and default rate of 24%?

This time, the Dems will not be able to blame the previous administration for the next wave of defaults or the next round of bailouts. Obama and his advisors own the situation now, and not only haven't done anything to reverse the disastrous fiscal policies of the past 10 years but are reinforcing them and building new stories on top of the tottering tower of loans that will never be repaid. And nobody's questioning team Obama on how you can strive to raise housing prices while making housing more affordable, but that is what the tax-credit-subsidized loans are all about.

Daley Offers No Alternative to CTA Fare Hikes

2009-10-13T22:02:00.000-05:00

Mayor Daley says that the proposed CTA fare hikes and service cuts are "very ugly", but offers no alternative or solution to the the agency's budget problems.

Strange- Da Mare had the funds ($86 Million) to buy the Michael Reese hospital property to be redeveloped as the Olympic Village, but can't find the funds for one of the city's most essential services?

Daley has always considered the CTA to be something of a "frill", and now that the Olympic Games are off the table, he has no interest in repairing or expanding Chicago's once-excellent service, thus condemning our city to second-tier status in the future. There has even been talk of cutting Owl service, which would put at least another 50,000 cars on the streets and put Chicago on the same steep downhill path as other formerly great Midwestern cities such as St. Louis and Detroit, both of whom deteriorated rapidly after all-night transit was eliminated. In St. Louis, the last "owl" ran in 1965, and what had been a gentle glide downhill became a cliff dive into depopulation, disinvestment, and poverty.

Daley was originally opposed to free rides for seniors, but now has nothing to say about this absurdity, and there is no discussion of raising the city's funding contribution to the agency to reflect inflation since the early 80s. Now that we won't need to spend $500 Million or more on costs related to the Games, could we direct some of the TIF slush funds towards our essential services? Our transit, our police department, our schools, and our essential sewer and water infrastructure are in tatters. We need to be replacing 80-year-old water mains, we need to put more police on the street, and we badly need improved transit and to get those improvements in place before the next round of gasoline price hikes, which are coming very soon, and which may come sooner than anyone was figuring if oil ceases to be denominated in the dollar.

While Chicago's transit and that of other large cities is starving, it's competition, auto transit, is more lavishly funded than ever, and at the expense of our largest cities and their needs. Over 60% of the road-building stimulus money being doled out by the Feds is being allocated to the most lightly populated areas of the country to build unnecessary highways. Why are these funds being so allocated? 65% of this country's population lives in the 100 largest urban areas, and 75% of the country's economic activity takes place in them, yet our tax money is being allocated for mega-highways through semi-desert wastes with the lowest population densities in the country. This has been the funding pattern for the past 60 years, to the great destruction of Chicago and other cities.

Chicago is one of the country's largest net taxpayers, behind only NYC and Los Angeles, yet ranks near-to-last in federal givebacks. In other words, we are being taxed to fund mega-highways and heroic water diversion projects in the middle of the Big Nowhere, the better to lure millions of denizens out of livable Midwestern cities to mega-cities in the middle of the high desert that are bound to fail catastrophically as water problems deepen and as the massive water infrastructure becomes impossible to maintian in a fuel-short future- while our services deteriorate and our city, which is one of the world's greatest metropolises, is decimated to pay for all of that. And electing a Chicago machine politician as our president has not helped us get our share.

It's time to get our share of the tens of billions of dollars, or at least get benefits that equal the taxes we send to Washington on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Same thing goes for the State of Illinois- why is the state's largest city treated like a poor, unwanted cousin in Springfield? We need to demand the end of free senior fares and demand that our state and city governments give us something of value in return for our taxes- and adequately fund and manage conscientiously this essential service.

Celebrating North Coast Artists During Chicago Artists' Month: Andy De La Rosa of Rogers Park

2009-10-10T20:50:00.001-05:00

October is Chicago Artist's Month, and our city has a lot to celebrate, with a huge community of visual artists in all media. Our North Coast neighborhoods- Rogers Park, Edgewater, West Ridge, Uptown, and Lakeview, contain great artists working in every sort of media imaginable. I'll be featuring local artists and designers, and so will other local websites, so if you are working in the visual arts or know of a local artist whose work you like and think should be featured, let me know at lauralouzader@yahoo.com.

People who like to hang at Ennui Cafe at the corner of Lunt and Sheridan may remember the numerous beautiful and colorful sculptures that used to embellish the corner on both sides of Lunt, as well as the courtyard of the apartment building containing the Cafe. You will be glad to know that their creator, Andy De La Rosa, is alive, well, and making art in Rogers Park still, now on Glenwood Ave. just south of Morse Ave, where he can be seen working in the yard among his latest fantastic creations, pictured here.

Andy is a very quiet, soft-spoken young man and I did not discover much about his history, but what does that matter? Like all art, these sculptures speak for themselves, no explanation necessary.

What Hath the Loyola TIF Wrought: The Blighting of Sheridan Road by Loyola University

2009-10-10T02:09:00.019-05:00

Your Devon-Loyola TIF dollars at work at 6610-28 N. Sheridan Road- still a blighted eyesore three years later, pictured at the left.

The recent destruction of the two charming old commercial buildings at 6572-90 by Loyola University was an unpleasant reminder, to me, of the monstrous misallocation of taxpayer money that is the Loyola-Devon TIF, a $50 million taxpayer-funded windfall for the university that is paying for the renovation of four buildings on the campus and gives Loyola University control over 270 parcels of land lining Sheridan Road from Devon Avenue to Farwell, and along Devon Ave. from Sheridan to Clark. I

Why didn't the university buy and demolish the blight-pit pictured above instead? We would love to see this reeking slum kicked down and replaced with a garden.

It's rather difficult, at first blush, to discern a connection between the economic leverage the TIF granted the university, and the demolition of these buildings. These buildings have been Loyola's property for years, after all. But it's difficult not to think that the economic power and spare funds granted the university by the TIF were a big factor in the university's decision to demolish the properties instead of renovating them. Worse, the loss of these buildings augers very ill for the beautiful, colorful little building that remains, for the TIF grants Loyola control over the entire block, and given modern developers' preference for over-scaled mega-buildings in preference to small ones, it is likely that the university has plans for this block that don't include quirky little buildings.- plans it couldn't contemplate were it not for its access to tens of millions of dollars in public money. If there are plans afoot for a large building down the road, then this building will fall, too, and cost us a beautiful, irreplaceable building and two fine old local businesses.

There was a public meeting concerning the demolition, which was by this time a done deal, and the the university promised to install a garden, which promise they are now talking about reneging on. There was no legal ground to stop the demolition, for these two buildings, while lovely, were not "significant", and the university pointed out that rehabilitating them would cost $500K while demolishing them would cost only $100K. So last week, down they came, and what was once a solid wall of charming, densely decorative old buildings is a gap-toothed block of gravel and dirt lots. The only remaining buildings are the el station building with Harris Bank and McDonald's, Beck's Books, and the incredibly decorative and charming building containing two great local businesses, Affordable Optical and Carmen's. This little building has an incredibly colorful terra cotta facade and it is difficult to imagine that anything built beside it in the future will come near equalling it in beauty and charm.

Thus the charm and character of a neighborhood is lost, and the economic power granted the university by the TIF is used not to improve the area and foster local economic growth, but to blight the neighborhood. Developer Daniel McAffrey's The Morgan at Loyola Station, the beautiful new rental apartment building that went up on Sheridan just south of the Loyola el is a major plus for the area, but it's not a sufficient offset to the destruction the university is wrecking elsewhere along the street. It could also be argued that McAffrey could have developed this building without the TIF, though the funds could sweeten the near-term losses this property is no doubt suffering in the current soft rental market. The rehabilitation of the old Village Theatre-with $200K public money- as the new 400 Theatre is another plus, even though it's not particularly well-done, but it is offset by the blighted 4-plus-1 at 6628 N. Sheridan, whose rehabilitation is being funded by funds from the TIF, and at this point is, three years later, a decrepit eyesore. The construction is proceeding so slowly as to be invisible, and the building appears to be partially inhabited and is advertising apartments as being available for rent. The parkway in front of the building is a weedy patch strewn with litter. 1200 W. Pratt, the very last building in the strip of land controlled by the TIF, was a decrepit slum purchased at an absurdly inflated price and rehabbed slowly into overpriced condominiums by Lohan Realty, and is now a market rate rental. The ground floor retail spaces are still under renovation, and the broad plaza in front of the building, which could easily be renovated into a beatiful focal spot for this street corner, is still a patch of cracked old concrete. While nobody was gladder to see this mangy slum vacated and renovated than I was, except for perhaps my landlord, it's difficult to see how the TIF funding made any difference in the fate of this building.

In summary, the Loyala TIF district has produced very little in the way of economic development relative to the allocation of public money,and has done more to destroy the tax base than add to it; all in all, the only winner is Loyola, which has managed to get the taxpayers to pay for the reno of four large campus buildings with money that is badly needed for municipal services such as police protection and infrastructure repair. Such development as has taken place, like the Morgan, arguably would have taken place without it and might even have taken place sooner were it not for the university's control over the strip. The eyesore at 6610-28 was better kept and occupied before "rehabilitation" began. The corner of Devon and Sheridan is still occupied by a former fast food outlet, which has now been rented to yet another fast food outlet. The Weinstein Funeral Home is now vacant, and the property with its four parking lots fronting (and defacing)Devon Ave., are for sale, with no plans in place for the development of these blighted parcels.

In arguing for the Devon-Loyola TIF, aldermen Moore (49th Ward) and O'Connor (40th Ward), argued that the university is a good neighbor that Rogers Park should be grateful for and that we should extend ourselves to keep the university here by tossing this well-endowed institution $46 million to improve tax-exempt property, which is not an appropriate use of funds under a program specifically designed to expand the tax base. However, their argument is pretty specious in view of the fact that Loyola has been here since 1878, through all the years of Rogers Park's early development and its later deterioration. What was the university doing, exactly, to combat the blight that spread rapidly through Edgewater and Rogers Park in the 70s and 80s? In any case, it's doubtful that Loyola would trash investments it has made on its campus here over the past 100 years simply for lack of a windfall it is not morally or legally entitled to, nor would it be at a loss to fund these projects without the TIF money.

This would be a good time not only to challenge the Devon-Loyola TIF, but the city's other TIF districts that have notably failed in their stated purpose and moreover have fostered ugly, inappropriate development that often fails economically, at massive cost to the public in both money and degradation of the civic envirnonment. The Berwyn-Broadway TIF gave us the strip mall slum at that corner with its incredibly ugly buildings and vast expanses of black asphalt, thus further degrading the blight-pocked Broadway streetscape. The Ashland-Diversey TIF destroyed dozens of charming old apartment buildings that could have been renovated into desirable housing and replaced them with another strip mall of overscaled suburban-styled Big Box retailers. The Broadway-Lawrence TIF is paying for the renovation of two exquisite old Uptown commercial buildings, but the major retailer, Border's Books, which was the beneficiary of local subsidies, will be vacating its space on Broadway as soon as it sublets its space, and will leave a huge vacant space that is unsuitable for a small local business and will probably sit vacant for many years.

But to to challenge these TIFs and to prevent other TIF districts from being formed, we need to not only make use of every law that would enable us overturn existing TIFs, but we need most to attack at the root, which is the 1952 legislation passed by Illinois that enables the formation of thse districts. We need also to demand legislation that protects property owners from eminent domain proceedings.

The Audacity of Nope: Chicagoans Protest the Olympic Bid

2009-09-29T20:18:00.005-05:00

No Games Chicago led this evening's protest against the Olympic 2016 bid this evening in front of City Hall on LaSalle St. About 200 people turned out to say NO to the Olympic boondoggle. It was a cheerful, orderly crowd that included people of every sort, and the police monitoring the event were grinning broadly at us all.

I saw a number of familiar faces among the other protesters, including our own Lorraine Swanson of Lake Effect News, among the many media reps in attendance.

All our big guns are over in Copenhagen right now, and they must look just a little desperate to the IOC people, what with Barack and Richie and Michelle and Oprah in tow, while other contenders are represented merely by their heads-of-state- sort of like some pathetic social climber from the wrong side of town who has a wedding with 10 bridesmaids or something and gets a HELOC loan to buy a $40,000 dress and invites the mayor and the whole city council to her shindig. What with the country completely bankrupt on every level and fighting no-win wars on two fronts, you'd think Obama would have more pressing concerns, and GOP leaders are seizing on his junket on behalf of Chicago's bid as evidence of his lack of seriousness.

Let's hope they all make royal asses of themselves over there. Rio has come up fast and is now the front-runner. Brazil has guaranteed $14.4 Billion to cover expenses and losses, which is more than the other three contenders put together, and there is no significant opposition there.

This is no time to rest easy, though. Email President Obama and let him know that if he wants to throw some pork to his home town, that we have many more urgent needs than an over-hyped egofest for da Mare that will cost the public at least $4 billion and cause major disruption and displacement.

Environmentalists Protest Desert Solar Plant

2009-09-28T04:22:00.005-05:00

There's just no pleasing some folks.

Certain environmentalists, whose cause is being championed by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-California) are seeking to block the construction of a large solar power plant in the Mohave desert because of its potential environmental impact.

"It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," said David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy.

It's difficult to think of any means of electrical generation that has less environmental impact than solar, even wind, and the only thing either wind or solar have going against them is that they are outrageously costly, inefficient means of generating small amounts of unreliable electricity; and that there isn't enough land in the United States to fit the solar panels it would take to generate the power that the denizens of California guzzle in any given month.

However, everything bears a cost, and there is simply no way to generate large amounts of electricity without some environmental impact. There is also no way for a population of 39 million people to conduct any other activity pursuant to maintaining their lives without environmental impact, and even were all the denizens of California (and the U.S.) to relinquish modern life in favor of a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle, there would be far-reaching environmental consequences. We can easily imagine the desertification of the entire state of CA as its denizens cut down every growing thing more than a foot tall for firewood for cooking and heat.

The exasperated Gov. Schwarzenegger asked "if we can't put a solar plant in the Mojave, where in the hell can we put it?"

The moral of the story is, of course, that that there is no way to eliminate environmental impact except to maybe lie down and die. Will any of the deep ecologists volunteer to do this? Strange how the human-hating Gaia-worshippers who gloatingly contemplate the die-off of 90% of the species as resource depletion collapses us socially and economically will not volunteer their own lives by way of reducing the human impact on the planet.

People like Feinstein and the people at the Wildlands Conservancy have cost the environmental movement whatever credibility it ever had, yet never has human life been so at risk from environmental degradation and its multiple threats to the basic necessities of human life, such as our water and food supply. The only way to overcome the overwhelming hostility of the public to the concerns of the movement is to make concern for the human being the movement's central focus, for that is really what this is all about- to provide a liveable cradle for human life and to assure that our children and their descendents will have the wherewithal to live lives with a tolerable level of comfort and technological amenity. The point is not to avoid all environmental costs, but to manage and minimalize impacts as much as possible and to manage our resources so that we can continue to live comfortably and with basic technological amenity. For that, we need the cleanest and most efficient means of power generation we can devise, not the means we will be stuck with if we foreclose every means of large-scale electrical generation on the grounds that it may someohow, sometime, have some sort of negative impact.

The 49th Ward Green Corps Forum:From the Holler to the Hood

2009-09-26T11:13:00.003-05:00

Where: Loyola University LakeShore Campus
Life Sciences Building, Room 142
1050 W. Sheridan Road, Sheridan & Winthrop, Chicago, IL
When: Monday night, September 28, 2009, at 7 PM

An e-mail blast from our Alderman, Joe Moore, announced a very important event this coming Monday night.

The 49th Ward Green Corps and the Rogers Park-based Eco-Justice Collaborative are sponsoring a forum on the devastation produced by coal mining and production to discuss so-called "clean" coal and the permanent destruction of the Appalachian landscape.

Loelei Scarbro from the Coal River Valley in Appalachia, an activist and community organizer with the Coal River Mountain watch, will be on hand to discuss the destruction wrought on this part of the world by mountain-top removal on the landscape.

Commonwealth Edison is considering closing two aging coal-fired plants here in Chicago, but Illinois is unfortunately spurning future nuclear development in favor of "clean" coal development. A 600 MgW "clean" coal plant is currently planned in Southern Illinois, while the moratorium on nuclear development remains in place. We in Illinois need urgently to consider whither our current energy policies are leading us, and whether coal is an acceptable alternative in light of the environmental destruction it causes, and most of all its human toll, whether measured by deaths in coal mines, illness and death caused by coal pollution, or the loss of the landscape that has supported a community of human beings for generations, Appalachia.

What Are Our Lives Worth: $1.4 Trillion More for Housing Rescue vs. $8 Billion for Dam Rehabilitation

2009-09-25T07:01:00.013-05:00

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a true Third World nation is flagrant disregard for human life,which is usually manifest in a society's spending priorities. In failing societies with rapidly increasing populations and shrinking wealth, what remains of the nation's financial resources are increasingly diverted by political corruption and statist initiatives designed to sustain the unsustainable at unlimited cost to the taxpayers, for the benefit of select constituencies, which in the case of the United States are the Wall Street financial cabal, the homebuilders, and homeowners buried in homes that continue to lose value.

The financial black hole opened by the collapse of our housing and credit markets keeps growing and threatens to suck every dollar of tax revenue we hope to realize for years to come into it with no offsetting benefit to taxpayers (least of those who rent and aspire to buy homes), and most of all at the cost of every other necessity, notably our emergency preparedness and our rapidly decrepitating Pharaonic infrastructure, to which a pittance, relatively speaking, has been allocated to affect urgently needed repairs on critically deficient roads, bridges, and dams. While nearly $1.4 Trillion of taxpayer guarantees have been extended to the housing market over the next few years, Congress is still debating whether to commit $8 Billion to repairs to dangerously deficient large dams whose failure could cost thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars in economic losses. The Wired Magazine article I linked speaks only of non-federally owned dams that have been "orphaned" by owners who've gone out of business. There is no discussion of the 600-foot or taller mega-dams owned by the Bureau of Reclamation, whose spokespeople glibly assure the public that most federally owned dams are in safe operating condition, despite what is known about a couple of its largest structures, notably the fragile 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam that nearly breached in 1983 and has been "shit-rigged" ever since, while the movement to decommission and remove the dangerous structure was quietly tabled by its owner, the Bureau of Reclamation, for unstated reasons.

Is the Glen Canyon really any safer than it was in 2007, when it was named one of the two most dangerous dams in the country, or is it just that there is no money available for the massive task of removing it?

Fixing the 1,800 large American dams that represent the biggest threat to human lives will "cost billions, but can we afford this in addition to roads, bridges, and other projects?" asks one recent article on CNN Money.

How could we even ask if we can "afford" $8 Billion to fix "worst-case" dams with their immense watersheds containing millions of people exposed to major flood hazards, in a context where we are committing trillions to propping up property values, modifying mortgages, and enticing new homebuyers into a falling market, creating yet another future wave of defaults in the process? The money spent on Cash for Clunkers could have paid for the repairs on a couple of the larger and more endangered dams, or for a number of critically deficient bridges. Can we afford not to make these repairs?

"Where food is dear, life is cheap", someone once remarked a couple of centuries ago, and the depletion of our resources and in tandem with an expanding population,falling incomes, and increasing internal divisions and conflicts, has dire implications for our future political and social climate. We seem to be well along the path so many other societies have traveled as they ratchet down the slope of declining productivity and increasing impoverishment, as we become more and more apathetic and callous in the face of rising crime, violence, and poverty.

The Oil Industry at 150: A Celebration or a Funeral?

2009-09-20T18:54:00.014-05:00

You have to wonder if Alex Epstein on the blog Voices for Reason, grasped the irony of the title of his recent post, Oil at 150: An Unhappy Birthday. The blog is operated by The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, which is headed by her designated spokesman and intellectual heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff.

This article was a follow up piece to his previous post, Oil at 150:Celebrating Oil's Birthday, a short piece lauding the first drill in Pennsylvania 150 years ago and the ensuing discovery of the incredible power and versatility of the liquid that literally built the modern world and to which we owe every essential of modern life.

In his follow-up post, Mr. Epstein lamented that there had hardly been any comment on the occasion at all from either our opinion makers or oil industry leaders themselves.

That might possibly be because for the oil industry and for everyone who aspires to a lifestyle better than that of a 19th Century subsistence farmer, this is a time of grief, not joy, for the landmark Epstein commemorates will more likely be the industry's tombstone, and no one knows it better than oil industry insiders themselves.The most prominent Peak Oil spokesmen are, after all, alumnae of the oil industry; Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes are retired petroleum geologists who spent their professional lives in the employ of major oil producers, Matthew Simmons is a prominent investment banker and oil analyst, and former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, who remarked on disparity between growing demand for oil and the ever smaller and less frequent discoveries of unexploited reserves, is the former Chairman and CEO of Halliburton. Each of these men, along with dozens of fellow executives and scientists in the energy industries, has expressed their conviction that we have arrived, or will soon arrive at, the peak of global oil production and the inevitable steep decline in available oil supplies.

And none of them, nor anyone else, can say for sure what will replace oil, but there is among them and other students of Peak Oil, the disquieting thought that there will be no replacement for it. And neither the cornucopians nor the "green"' promoters of renewable energy care to dwell on the thought.

I like Alex Epstein and many of the other intellectuals whose writings appear at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and intend no disrespect for them or the Objectivist philosophy that they articulate and that I share, when I say that their extremely linear logic regarding the necessity of oil fails to factor in a number of important points, like the possibility that we will likely have to do with a steeply reduced supply of it. Another contributor, Dr. Keith Lockitch, author of The True Meaning of Earth Hour, criticizes the movement to reduce carbon emissions because a steep reduction in emissions would mean a steep reduction in our lifestyles. His reasoning is likewise rigidly linear to the point of simple-mindedness: it says, our comfort and advanced technologies depend upon the ability to consume large amounts of fossil fuels, therefore we must have fossil fuels, and since we demand them they must therefore be available. Well, what happens when they no longer are available, or supplies are steeply reduced from current levels? Will our demand for them in and of itself produce them once every oil field on the planet is in steep depletion along with most gas wells and coal mines?

This is not Objectevist thinking, this is not rationality. This is wish-based thinking that refuses to recognize a distressing reality.

Unfortunately, Dr. Lockitch, Mr. Epstein and other writers at the Center have fallen into the Cornucopian trap that has ensnared most "conservatives", a variety of wish-based thinking that believes that just because our civilization badly needs dense, energy-intensive fuels in order to drive our advanced technology and supply the comforts and amenities that are the difference between a long, healthy life with opportunity, choice, and incredible luxury; and a life that's nasty, brutish, and short, that those fuels will always be there and that the market will provide them simply because we want them, need them, and demand them.

The "conservative" cornucopians are as in denial regarding the hard limits we are confronting as the "liberal" environmentalists and "greens" in their approaches to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and other essential resources, and just as irrational, and neither mode of thinking will help us negotiate the tectonic economic and social shifts that are sweeping the globe, and sweeping away our favored way of life and the assumptions we have based our thinking and planning on.

If ever we needed rational philosophy, this is the hour, but the latter-day spokesmen of the philosophy that supplies the epistemology that supports it and defends it are frantically evading it and denying the conclusions to which it would lead them.Evasion, denial, and emotion-based thinking are the hallmarks of irrationality and subjectivity, which are not only cardinal sins in Objectivist philosophy, but will lead us to the same place that they always have, and will defeat our efforts to retain our civilization and develop the techniques and organization we will need to cope in a resource-constrained world.

Couldn't Happen to Nicer People: ACORN Loses its Federal Funding

2009-09-17T18:22:00.004-05:00

Both Congress and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to strip the community activist group, ACORN, of its federal funding amidst allegations that the group counseled its clients on how to commit tax fraud and other crimes. Last week 11 ACORN workers in Florida were charged with submitting fraudulent voter registration papers, and most disturbing of all, ACORN workers are alleged to have aided in human traffic, including the recruiting of underage girls into prostitution.

Many of us here in the 49th Ward of Chicago remember the role this unsavory group played in the hotly contested city election of 2007. ACORN activists worked to help re-elect the incumbent alderman, Joe Moore, and distributed "attack" fliers that slandered and vilified his opponent's supporters, including myself.

It's rather a shame, really. ACORN started out in the 70s as a grass-roots activist group whose mission was to help lower utility rates and provide affordable housing for the poor. Since that time, the group has degenerated into a blatantly political action group that advocates for favored candidates and engages in questionable and perhaps illegal practices on behalf of people who distinctly aren't poor or disadvantaged.

Feds Promote Irresponsible Lending

2009-09-16T00:44:00.012-05:00

Signs like the one pictured have been sprouting on parkways all over Rogers Park and Edgewater. Looks like we're setting up for another wave of foreclosures after the one just in front of us plays itself out.

If recent FHA loan generations and current FHA delinquencies and defaults can be seen as indications of where the housing market is headed, we can expect another costly home-loan bailout in a couple of more years, in addition to our current soaring default rate and the tottering $3.5 trillion tower of shaky commercial debt. Delinquency rates for recently-generated FHA loans are at 14%.

2nd Quarter Notices of Defaults were the highest ever recorded, and these were for loans that actually defaulted 6 to 9 months before the NODs were issued. Lenders have so large a backlog of delinquencies that many borrowers are in default a year or more before any action is taken against them.

The $8000 tax credit is just about to end, coinciding with the end of the selling season, and we will then see how durable the recent hike in housing sales really is. But it looks from here like the taxpayers will be paying for this recent uptick two ways, first with the $8000 taxpayer subsidy for new home buyers, and then again when these subsidized-down-pay loans start to default. Given that about 80% of all home loans being written now are FHA-guaranteed, that could mean another record-setting wave of defaults and foreclosures.

The Feds always were the most irresponsible lenders of all, inasmuch as the wave of bad lending was made possible by the alphabet soup of government agencies- HUD, GNMA,FNMA, FHA-that either backed or bought the mindboggling array of "creative" loans that got us into our current financial predicament. Now the FHA is THE irresponsible lender, and just about the only functioning home lender.

Sacrificing the Future to the Past

2009-09-13T19:47:00.005-05:00

Readers might have noticed that I've become an unapologetic shill for the nuclear power industry, and have added a number of nuclear advocacy blogs to my blog roll and even posted the Nuclear Advocacy graphic.

My passionate support for nuclear power proceeds from my belief that it is the only way we will be able to provide adequately for the energy needs of our swollen population in the amounts needed to retain the basic benefits of modern technology, let alone real luxury, in the face of terminal fossil fuel depletion, the unacceptable costs and environmental hazards of biomass and ethanol, the need for steep carbon reduction, and the hard limitations on the efficiency and reliability of such "renewable" forms of energy as wind, solar, and geothermal.

One of the best of the nuke blogs, Atomic Insights, recently published a chilling article concerning the ambitious plans of this country's de facto owner, China, to develop the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the world, in addition to its Promethean dam-building plans and ambitious coal solar power projects, such as the 25-square-mile, 2-gigawatt plant that First Solar is engaged to build there. While not all of these ventures are going to yield the hoped-for returns, China's dedication to exploiting every opportunity to develop its energy production and industrial base while aggressively pursuing control of the world's remaining resources, is indicative of its leadership's determination to remain competitive.

China is also buying futures on as much of the world's future oil production as it can, and more ominously, has drastically restricted "rare earth" elements that are necessary for high tech applications such as lithium ion batteries and numerous other high tech components. China and India are both rapidly developing new nuclear technologies, most importantly those involving smaller reactors with much safer designs that use fuels other than uranium.

In the meantime, the United States under Obama has completely curtailed nuclear development and is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in our corrupt financial system, as well as in attempts to manipulate housing prices upward and in propping up our obselete, failing automobile industry.

In short, China is stimulating its economy by investing its prodigious cash pile into the projects it will need to power its future, while the United States is racking up more unrepayable debt to sustain the unsustainable with the insanely destructive "cash for clunkers" program, $8000 tax credits for first-time home buyers, and insanely easy 3.5% down payment FHA loans, which already have a 14% delinquency rate. In other words, we've invested an untold amount of money in the next wave of defaulting loans and guaranteed another massive, costly bailout effort in a couple more years.

China, India, and other Third World countries are investing the industries and technologies of the future, while we are investing in the dead past.

China and India and other Asian nations are determined to remain as competitive and productive as possible, while we are turning our backs on every opportunity and misallocating our remaining wealth to efforts to resuscitate dying, obsolete, and even pernicious industries (like the housing-inflation and mortgage-fraud machine), and to starting another credit rampage, by extending more loose credit and paying people to buy cars and houses. In the same spirit, we are pouring our road stimulus funds into the very places where the population is sparsest and that generate the least economic activity, and into Bread and Circuses of various sorts.

The United States has lost its lead in almost every field of endeavor that matters. We are now quickly losing our lead in heavy electrical equipment, and lastly, we are beginning to slip in scientific research.

Most of all, we've lost the ability to re-invent ourselves. We're still very heavily invested emotionally in this country's glittering post-WW2 period, and have never grasped that not only was the prosperity of that era founded on an anomalous confluence of circumstances most unlikely to be repeated ever again, but was unsustainable from the outset.

This is the difference between societies that flounder after a few centuries, or even decades, while other cultures endure for thousands of years. Compare cities like NYC and Boston, who embraced high tech as their old smokestack industries withered, to cities like Cincinnati and Detroit, who continued to cling to the old early-20th century industrial model and as it withered away anyway, turned to government bailouts, corruption, and low-wage service industries instead of making the effort to rebuild their battered economies on a different template.

At this point, our book looks written. It looks like we're determined to squander every opportunity to build the industries we will need as we go through the biggest economic shift of the past 150 years, and are destined to become a deteriorated, fourth-world backwater with collapsed cities, ever-increasing crime, violence, filth, brutality, and disorder along with vaulting poverty rates with all the misery we associate with undeveloped countries This doesn't have to happen, but the window of opportunity is closing quickly. Let's hope our current leadership can find the mental clarity and political will to steer us onto a different path than the rut of steep decline we've settled into now.