Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

Today the Justice Department has initiated a criminal investigation against BP, but one has to wonder whether this isn’t more of a defensive operation than an offensive plan  of action. Is this legal investigation really based on something that can be criminally prosecuted, or is this, as BP contends, an industrial “accident?” Meanwhile, the gushing of oil into the Gulf could go on all summer. BP’s  intention was to cap the current well and move the drilling rig so that new sites could be drilled, some of which were intended to begin far deeper than the current problematic drilling site. I just watched the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS and noticed that a reporter went to a shoreline region in Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred. While the surface looked as if it was clean, the reporter dug down into the rocky shoreline and came up with oil-drenched rocks that smelled like “roofing tar.” Once it comes, it never goes away unless perhaps you think more in terms of geological time.

RFM

While the Obama administration does not have the same  “drill baby  drill” attitude of its predecessor, there are no environmentalists within the administration, at least none with the passion of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Stewartl Udall; historically, it seems that spending time in the wondrous U.S. West was essential training experience to acquire a protective attitude about the environment–the physical wonders that your eyes report to you.  The “I want to save this for my children and grand children syndrome,” is a mind state which you could acquire while seeing for the first time places like the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, or any of the other places that are included in our fabulous national park system. Those searing experiences, faced with our inherent tendency to exploit and destroy the natural environment or privatize it,  has historically served as the stimulus for environmentalism and site preservation. But, that was then and this is now. Today, whether it’s an oil spill or the threat of global climate change, we need a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable plan that can begin to sort out the   “species interconnectedness;” this will require more knowledge of biology and environmental preservation, an emphasis which does not resonate well with the short-term problem solving that seemingly exists in the culture of the Obama cabinet meetings and our need for more oil resources. But, the biology we need to be studying can no longer be seen with the naked eye, for it is microscopic in size, yet fundamentally huge in its impact–it’s the ecosystem of our oceans and the threats that exist from oil spills, over fishing and salinity changes that might impair the fundamental biodiversity of the water and impact on the bottom of the food chain where life support is critical and the point at which it all begins.

So, how do you gain knowledge of species interconnectedness by watching birds drenched in oil and being treated with detergents? You don’t! Unless we are watching the event in the company of environmental and marine biologists and toxicologists. Yet, even these experts have limited knowledge of what the long-term impact of an oil spill will do to all the species in the ecosystem. Like global climate change, it’s too incomprehensible to imagine and, unlike global climate change, we don’t have computer models to help us figure out the real dangers of an oil spill of this magnitude. The historical reaction applies here: we can only shrug our shoulders and assume that eventually, all will be back to normal, that the ocean can and will deal with this problem, fixing it in ways that we don’t yet understand. After all, there is an equilibrium to nature, even when faced with increasing global temperatures or a slippery oily interface. We may not like the new steady-state, and it may be far less compatible with our expectations from the oceans of the world, but a new equilibrium point will be established and so far, we have shown ourselves to be completely impotent to facilitate one outcome over another. Ocean ecology is perhaps evolving in something less than a geological time scale. Something short enough that we will be able to gauge some of the impact of the Gulf oil spill, but we will be unable to do anything about it. By the time we recognize what happened, and a validate that a new balance point has been established, we will not be able to return to the old one, no matter how much we miss it, or what we do to restore it. New counter forces will be in place to preserve the new point of equilibrium and oppose any efforts we make to restore an older point of balance.

Krill are tiny crustaceans found in all oceans. They feed on phytoplankton and serve as one of the essential elements at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow we expect that these essential organisms will be unaffected and that no large mammals will start washing up on shore because of starvation. Should that ever begin to happen, the human population would of course already be stressed, yet probably  knowledgeable about the unfavorable imbalances within our oceans and its implications for planetary balance. What do we really know about the influence of oil on the ecology of a region? Did we lose species in the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the one in Santa Barbara? In the case of the Exxon Valdez, the salmon and herring fishing industry in the region collapsed. Slowly the salmon came back, but the herring never returned. One mayor in the region committed suicide, apparently related to his despair over the oil spill and its impact on the local economy. Have we done enough studies to understand the changes in the ecosystem that invariably happen with a major oil spill? Each major spill is probably very unique, given the variance in species and habitat of the surrounding region and relative size of the ocean volume involved.  We know that for each spill, the lives of commercial fishermen will be permanently changed and their chances of getting a fair compensation for their lost livelihood is about zero, as it will take many years to resolve the impending issues and suits within our heavily biased court system, one that rewards and protects big business and allows lower income recipients of the calamity to serve as mere cannon fodder. According to some studies, significant oil residue remains in Prince Williams Sound where the Exxon Valdez spilled oil onto 1200 miles of beach, killing thousands of animals. In some areas, oil was three feet thick. Current estimates are that it will take decades more or even centuries more for the oil to fully dissipate from the region: Litigation against Exxon continues.

If you’re wondering about long-term damage liability, to compensate for lost jobs and continued clean up operations, here is what happened on that issue with Exxon (From Democracy Now): “In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.” You can see how favorably the courts treat these jury-determined settlement costs. For Exxon, it’s just a few days of profits and they have more lawyers to throw at these issues than almost anyone else on the planet, unless it’s our own government that operates by bringing criminal charges.

This country is badly in need of re-implementing the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and staffing the organization with field and marine biologists who can participate in efforts to understand oil spills and the devastation they generate on species and their interconnectedness. I have commented on this acute need in a previous posting. We only see the damage at the top, on the shores, in the form of dead and oily birds, turtles and a few mammals. We don’t have the capacity to see the impact on the ecosystem beneath or the effects of the new menace–the large subsurface oil plumes riding at mid-level depths in the ocean; the oil companies would like to keep it that way. For them too much knowledge is a bad thing. They would like us to remember that the oil platforms they put down become havens for fish to collect in the service of sport fisherman. Isn’t that a good enough benefit?

The lack of a strong, passionate environmental presence sitting at the Obama cabinet meetings has made it difficult for our urban president to find his voice on the Gulf oil spill. Someone needs to drive home the environmental disaster to Obama in such a way that an urbanite, who seems to have learned nothing about species interdependency and the potentially disastrous magnitude of the BP spill, can quickly get up to speed talking about phytoplankton, krill and other members of the Zooplankton group. He very badly needs to go out on a boat with a group of marine biologists and toxicologists, who can explain to him the dimensions of the problem and how seeing a bunch of oily birds, while visibly shocking, coupled to the regular summary of the spill on CNN (mostly consumed by showing the undersea footage of the oil leak bulging out if the drill rupture), is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the local fishing economy and the long-term health of the Gulf ecosystem. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a lawyer by training, doesn’t quite have the sophistication or experience to recruit the kind of scientific expertise and visibility required to assure the public that some level of scientific accumen is being applied to this disaster. In keeping with the corporate motif of the new world order, science and scientists don’t speak for BP, except through the corporate elites of the company, who know virtually nothing about biology; their objective is solely the public relations message and BP’s liability. Yet, biology is what this spill is all about and it is where the effort must be focused with education, research and a good dose of corporate honesty. School children in the region could be enlisted in the research effort to gather samples, make measurements, much like school children in Minnesota discovered and studied three-legged frogs. How refreshing it would be to see and hear the BP CEO tell us that BP has no idea what the long-term damage of this spill will do to the environment, but that they will begin to fund significant grants for the region to be studied as the long-term laboratory environment they helped to create.  At least that would be a starting point from which we could launch some serious research. Yet, we have to admit that the problem cannot be researched in the sense that no long-term projections can be made because we do not understand, nor do we have models for comprehending the impact we are witnessing from this spill. The new oil plumes beneath the surface represent a form of oil we have not encountered before and we don’t even know the cause. But, they potentially represent vast dead zones due to the lack of oxygen that has been reported near these sites.

Hurricane season is nearly underway and each day we experience continued oil gushing from the well, we run the risk of a single hurricane serving like an ocean Hobart machine, circulating and mixing the oil and water until it reaches the loop current and begins marching up the Atlantic coast. The city of Fort Lauderdale, a major oil import region, has begun discussions on the impact of Gulf oil that might find its way moving into the Atlantic coast, an event that could devastate the tourist economy of the region, to say nothing of the damage already done to the seafood industry that serves Florida and much of the country.

But, back to Alaska. If a spill should occur anything close to what we are seeing in the Gulf, once drilling in the Beaufort and and Chukchi seas begins, it will be impossible to devote anything significant to the cleanup operation, at least not for many months. Even Shell executives have agreed that “there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice.” The government has acknowledged that a major spill in the Arctic waters of the area could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up. How about impossible? However, they concluded that a large oil leak was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis. Well that was then (December, 2009) and this is now. The permit for drilling in the Arctic sea has been suspended, but that suspension could be lifted soon enough to see drilling this summer. Should a spill occur in these cold waters, the nearest Coast Guard facility is a 1,000 miles away, the nearest cleanup vessels and equipment are too few and at least 100 miles away, and the nearest airport where major supplies could be transported is Seattle, a few thousand miles away.

The Alaska waters where drilling permits have been issued, are vastly colder than the Gulf and any oil spill will take far longer to dissipate, no matter what the mechanism, be it biochemical breakdown or micelle formation and dispersal. For another, during the winter, weather patterns often include 65 mile per hour winds at temperatures in the -40 degree range, making rescue operations for any troubled rig virtually impossible. In the summer, the area serves as a huge breeding center for multiple species of birds that migrate from six different continents, including all of the other 49 states. Huge herds of caribou congregate on the Arctic coastal plane and Beluga whales have their calving season in these waters. To become more familiar with the region, check out Subhankar Banerjee‘s interview on TomDispatch.

Several years ago, GW Bush wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Fortunately, environmental organizations defeated this idea. But that took place when every environmental organization, everyone interested in sane ecological management, knew they had a hostile President to deal with and opposition to his leadership on almost every front was widespread and passionate. Today, in the current climate, with a Democratic President, the environmental movement has been much more subdued and has become more passive about the ocean drilling plans of Shell Oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, particularly since Obama announced permits for that drilling operation a few weeks before the BP Gulf oil spill. Perhaps the Gulf oil spill will serve to re-invigorate the environmental opposition to drilling and help the country move rapidly to a state of reduced oil dependency. It is not clear to anyone that the drilling demands of the international oil giants is really necessary. You might want to read Michael Klare on this important topic. So far however, Obama has shown himself to be just as much of an oil man as we had with GW Bush. The Minerals Management Service, the government oversight function for the oil companies has for years been deeply corrupted. The recent shake-up in the government oversight structure may improve this relationship, but Obama has a lot of repair work to do if these oil companies are ever going to conform to the needs of our society, rather than their own needs of high profits and reckless drilling practices, with little financial risk to their bottom line. Maybe this will be his wake-up call for the environment and Big Oil.

RFM

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

When Obama announced the release of new sites along the U.S. coastline that will be opened for oil exploration, it seemed like another slap against his own supporters, those environmentalists who are opposed to any new drilling. Obama’s point was that establishing additional sources of domestic oil will further reduce our dependence on foreign oil, a problem now recognized within the military as Middle East oil and our policies in the region continue to place a bright red bulls-eye on the homeland soil of America. The environmentalists believe that we should accelerate the development of alternative, renewable energy resources and that we have been too timid and reluctant to invest in these innovative energy alternatives, precisely because the giant oil companies control our energy policies.  While it is true that our high energy demands are still met largely by oil, gas and coal-burning power plants, Obama’s decision on new oil exploration had less to do with the Middle East and a lot more to do with China.

Author Michael Klare, writing in TomDispatch (whose most recent book is “Rising Powers Shrinking Planet“)  has pointed out that during the last two years of the recession, America’s oil demand dropped by 9%, from 20.7 million barrels per day in 2007 to 18.8 million in 2009. In contrast, China’s oil consumption has gown in this same period, from 7.6 to 8.5 million barrels per day. And while projections for oil demand in the U.S. continue to be flat during the rest of 2010 and well into 2011, China’s will continue to grow during the Great Recession. The advantage that China has over the U.S. in securing  new oil fields is that the government of China is willing to provide financial backing for new developments that, in the near future, will make China one of the giant competitors to Western oil interests. Of course you could argue, as I believe we should, that our extensive, worldwide  military deployment is rationalized in part to protect Western oil supplies, and if you added those costs to the price we pay for oil, it wouldn’t seem like such a cheap form of  energy. But, as opposed to our oil companies which are subsidized in many ways by our government,  Chinese oil companies are state-owned and in tough times, that’s probably an advantage, as it serves and controls a national energy imperative and can thus look much further down the road than an American oil company that thinks in terms of five years or less.  As the accompanying graph shows, our domestic production for oil reached the “peak oil” condition in the early 1970s and most accounts dismiss the possibility that we could ever be self-sufficient in oil again. So what solution do we really have for solving the oil shortages that may lie in our future? Well, we have to import more, right?

Two developments are of relevance for any attempts we have planned for expanding our future oil imports, though they hardly summarize the entire picture of the competition we are facing for oil with Chinese oil expansionism: whereas you might have expected our military intervention in Iraq to give us an edge for developing Iraq’s huge oil reserves, in October 2009, the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) led a consortium, including BP, to develop the Rumaila oil field in Iraq, keeping in mind that Iraq has perhaps the third largest oil reserves on the planet. If that developmental arrangement goes well, China could become the dominant player for access to the lions share of Iraq’s oil reserves. You might ask what went wrong with the neocons invasion plans, since oil was supposed to be such a big part of the motivation for going to war?

The second development that has taken place has been the new emerging relationship between Saudi Arabia and China. Until 9/11, the interdependence between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. has always been that of a  comfortable love affair, in which the Saudis were the major supplier of U.S. Middle East oil. But 9/11 changed that, since we learned that most of the terrorists who attacked the U.S. were from Saudi Arabia and we have been critical of the manner in which they fund radical Islamic schools or Madrassahs, fed by the primary Islamic religion of the country–Wahhabism. For the Saudis, a shift in customer preferences towards China has become a comfortable two-way street, acceptable to both parties. Saudi Arabia recently announced that it sold more oil to China last year than to the United States, as if to announce the end of the long period of oil romance. “We believe this is a long-term transition,” said Khalid A. al-Falih, president and chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant. “Demographic and economic trends are making it clear — the writing is on the wall. China is the growth market for petroleum” (From Micahel Klare’s article in TomDispatch).

China has been acquiring foreign energy assets in Angola, Iran, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. It is not just oil assets, but also metal mining operations for iron, copper and other resources essential for expansion of manufacturing.  So far, the collective Western Oil companies have more oil resources than those of the Chinese. But China has deep pockets and they have clearly decided to strike out for increased oil access at a time when the demands from the West are in a state of abeyance. China’s big stimulus package helped the country bounce back from the Great Recession and they are now aggressively seeking to insure an oil rich future for their expansion of manufacturing and national wealth.

Once our own recession is in the rear view mirror, perhaps after several years, and we wake up to take another look at the world around us, we will see that China has become the new epicenter of increased oil demand and the great rising customer for oil expansionism well into the future. That is one reason why Obama announced his intentions to expand domestic oil production in the United States, even though it is primarily for political purposes rather than a transition in oil policies.  Although the magnitude of the oil that might result from expansion through the new oil leases is unknown, at best, projections are that we might gain 5 to 10 years of additional oil at our current level of consumption. So, Obama’s commitment to energy independence and the rising influence of China in gaining access to oil resources which are in competition with the needs of the United States, places us on a collision course with China for one of the most critical resources we need to make our economy work. The second reason for Obama’s willingness to open more sites for oil exploration has to do with cooperation he is hoping to get from Republican Senators for his new energy policy, one that will include a cap and trade arrangement to begin the long slow retreat from the size of our current carbon footprint. Somehow, Obama needs to find a policy solution such that the country will see the trivial nature of the tea baggers, whose ideology is currently an obstacle for serious policy momentum on global climate change and resource conservation. However, oil conservation in the future will surely be spelled D-U-E  T-O   C-H-I-N-A! And, maybe that’s the kind of threatening stimulus that will spring us into action, just as long as our choice to resolve the conflict is not a military one. But, as the saying goes, if you have a set of tools, you are probably going to use them for any problem that seems soluble by the toolbox in your hand. The eight years of the Bush administration accomplished one major change in the perception of America among other countries: for the oil-rich, oil suppliers of the world, they view China as having eclipsed the U.S. for oil futures, and it’s better to deal with someone climbing up the ladder than someone going down.
RFM

On the front section of Times Science, an article by Tara Parker-Pope, describes “What you need to know in the first year” in which she points out that for starters 32 million, presently uninsured Americans, will eventually be covered under this law, such that 94% of legal residents not covered by Medicare will get insurance, up from what has been estimated at 83%. While only a gain of 11%, there are lots of people that will have to be brought in under this new plan. The extended coverage will not kick in until 2014. This bill cannot help but have an enormous social impact on our country, as we have been the harbingers of nothing less that a disastrous healthcare system–a true nightmare for far too many of our citizens. Shouldn’t that issue be part of our national security?  Some of the most important changes for individuals will kick in this June, while others will be delayed until the end of this year. Look for the nuts and bolts of these changes to be elaborated by the Health and Human Services at a website devoted to healthcare, but the Parker-Pope Q&A section handles some specific issues. In June of this year, denial of coverage by pre-existing conditions should be eliminated. If you currently lack insurance, there will be several different options, depending on your age, financial status and the duration during which you have not been insured.
The Times has gotten pretty slick at providing multimedia graphics to explain and help clarify the issue and with a healthcare bill that has more than 2000 pages, everyone will need a period of accommodation before the impact of the bill can be truly appreciated. If you go to the Times Science Website and click on the Multimedia section in the middle column, it will take you to a brief summary of the options available if you are currently  insured or uninsured. The site also explains what you can expect to pay in taxes, given your income level, when the plan is fully implemented.
One of the horror stories during the build-up to the healthcare legislation was that of a woman who had a previous Cesarean section for child delivery; she was subsequently told that C-section was a prior condition and that she couldn’t be insured unless she was “sterilized.” When she went public with her story, the use of the word “sterilized” served as a key motivating factor for rallying against the gender inequity rules of health insurance companies and some of you may be surprised about the extent of gender prejudice in our healthcare system. Denise Grady describes how the new healthcare bill will “lower the cost of being a woman.” Here, here!
I remember attending a meeting in Boston about a decade ago when I was invited to tell the sad story of the University of Minnesota Medical School under the banner of “How Not to Reform a Medical School, held under the auspices of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors). It was there that I listened to a physician in the Boston area describe an interaction with one of  his patients who had a headache and insisted on having an MRI exam. The physician suggested that she should have some other procedures done first and the patient retorted that he (the doctor) knew that she needed an MRI, but he wouldn’t give her what she needed because he worked for the insurance company and the money for the procedure would come out of his pocket.  It was at that moment that the physician realized his profession had been drafted into the wrong side of the healthcare war: the doctor, who sounded like a well-intentioned, selfless physician was now viewed by at least one of his patients as a corporate shill.

Historically, physicians made it hard on themselves by aligning their position on healthcare largely through the policies of the AMA, who repeatedly fought against the attempts to bring a unified system of healthcare to American citizens. Physicians tend to be Republican, whereas you would have thought intuitively, they should all be Democrats and believe in public policies that make us, all of us, healthier with better access to doctors.  Of course, there are some good, radical physicians who have helped push the issue of a single payer plan and we must be grateful for their voice, just as we should  be grateful to the California Nurses Association for pushing the same agenda. Perhaps someday we will get there–health insurance without health insurance companies. But we have to get through the current bill first before launching the better healthcare system that remains within our sights. The trouble is, we have a history of finding a fix, and no matter how imperfect, sticking with it until the mud flaps come off.

There continues to be something of a sham within medical schools, which have “ethics” programs that you might think should consider our present system of healthcare to fall within their purview. But most “ethics” programs at medical schools deserve to be expressed in quotes because they were really put their to deal with issues like “animal rights activism,” “organ transplant” and  “organ donor” issues and “death and dying” procedures. Only recently have I heard a few ethics members speak out against our disastrous healthcare system and even then it seemed like they were coming late to the healthcare party. So, almost any description of change in our healthcare system would be incomplete without comments on whether this new bill can help heal the badly fractured relationship between a doctor and his/her patient. In that regard, physician Pauline Chen describes an experience she went through with an uninsured patient and how she herself hopes that the new healthcare bill will offer at least the possibility of repairing what has become “a crippled, even broken, relationship between patients and doctors.” I would say to Dr. Chen, don’t hold your breath. As long as we have insurance companies dictating the treatments and drugs that will be given to a patient under their insurance plan and as long as a profit margin must be squeezed out of patient service denial, the doctor will still appear to be the insurance company shill who is denying service and appearing to do so while enhancing his own profit margin. At one time, doctors were in a position of control over the course that a unified healthcare plan might take. But they turned down the opportunity to be the master and instead became the slave of the healthcare industry. Now they are lightly regarded as a source of unbiased expertise on the healthcare debate. Nurses are a much better source of information. After all, they have been underpaid from the get-go.

Yet, we all have hope. Many of us have good physicians, whose passion for medicine is admirably high. My doctor for example donated an extensive period of his time to go to Haiti and treat patients and organizations such as “Doctors Without Borders,” continue to inspire hope that medicine and humanity are really one and the same. But such a unified concept cannot exist when corporate forces are in the way and the money-mad CEO is making the decisions. Many physicians have found their journey hopeless. I have noted in the past,  that for many months, AMWAY, the sales company, had a converted MD as their “employee of the month.” A more decent healthcare delivery system might  slow the rate of such defections, but we must recognize that part of the gigantic profit levels of the for-profit insurance companies, come off the backs of doctors, some of whom labor with huge debts and modest incomes.

Finally, in the same section of the Times, Abigail Zuber, MD reviews a book written by Lionel Shriver entitled “So Much for That.” It’s a story about a middle-class family, whose bread-winner comes down with the dreaded malignant mesothelioma–the asbestos-related cancer of the lining of the lungs. The symptoms of the cancer are generally very subtle, so by the time the diagnosis can be made, treatment is almost entirely palliative. Ms. Shriver details how the treatment causes other symptoms and during the course of therapy, retirement dreams are shattered and financial resources are drained. Shep, the husband-father with the disease is forced to keep working despite his decaying health, to keep his insurance active. Other health-related entanglements in the story reveal what a disastrous health care system we have imposed on our citizens, all for the sake of corporate profit and the unfettered free market system whose chief objective is to create disastrous levels of poverty that society then has to worry about. How about a Superfund from corporate profits to compensate for the widespread poverty the system has created?

RFM

RFM

This bill sailed through the house, but got blocked in the Senate where all good things come to an end. But the clever tactic of including it in the reconciliation process (part of the savings from the new student loan bill will help pay for the new healthcare insurance bill) dropped it into the can-do box under the radar screen.

Student loans began with the Federal Family Education Loan Program, created in 1965. Under Clinton, the Department of Education began its own direct loan program and most schools would sign up for one vs the other (bank vs Fed), not both. At that time, the Federal Government would set the rates and terms. Once at 20% of all student loans, as our economy went south, the percentage of direct Federal loans has grown, now at about 35% and soon to be 100% of all new student loans. Banks can still give loans, but they will not be secured by the Federal Government and will presumably be prohibitive in cost–so be wary!

Loan repayment schedules have been improved. The new bill will limit payments to 10 percent of discretionary income and forgive balances after 20 years. But these changes only apply to loans taken out by new borrowers on or after July 1, 2014. They are not retroactive.

Public-service workers on the income-based repayment plan can have their remaining balances forgiven after 10 years. That’s the same as the old law.

Now the major challenge in front of us, is to make a new economy that provides jobs for college graduates and doesn’t reduce them to competing for the same jobs that high school graduates get in line for. So far there is too much of that going around, especially for an “advanced” “civilized” “modern” society. That is the mother of all assignments for the weekend. How to build a better economy. Here is my first suggestion: any business that is going to be sold by its owners or downsized by a Private Equity firm, is given first opportunity for purchase to the employees, who with government help to secure loans, can assume ownership and try to run the business as a profitable enterprise. Remember that one problem we have is what I call the “Microsoft Problem.” That is too many corporations trying to emulate Microsoft’s unseemly profit margins and as a result, workers pay has stagnated and they did not financially gain as their company productivity went up: savings from that source went into CEO pay and company profit margins to elevate the value of the stock. The golden parachute appeared and the gold watch went in the toilet.   Worker ownership should be less concerned about profits and more concerned about jobs and products. And, we know where the creativity for the place is typically found–yes in the workers. Remember the high financiers of today’s corporate world, understand a leveraged buyout, but don’t know how to make things. Making things is the key to an industrialized society with equitable wealth distribution. Everybody has a skill. We need to get all those Chrisitan militia people back to work as well. They are getting a little scary out in the hinterland.

RFM

After the Massachusetts election, it looked like the Democrats might fold their tent, but even in that state,  the polls showed, on the eve of Brown’s election, that the voters  favored the public option. More savvy politicians realized that the Massachusetts disaster for the Democrats was created because Congress was doing too little, not too much. If there was a revolt, it was against the Democrats for being too soft with their legislation, too poky in getting things done and giving away too much to corporate interests and Republican opposition. Obama was not getting high marks either, as he seemed to be aloof from the debate and one could only wonder if he truly had a passion for one outcome over another. No one knew if he really stood for something.  Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, was advising that perhaps they had aimed too high and should lower their sights a bit and  simplify the bill.

But the dynamic for the legislation began to change once talk of a Senate reconciliation process surfaced and, more importantly perhaps, when Obama held his health care summit on February 25th. For me, that was the day that the lion stepped out of his den. It was the game changer.  If you missed it, you can see the whole thing on C-Span, though you probably need to be some kind of wonk lover to sit through the entire day’s event (yes, I stayed home and caught most of it). You will learn something about the bill and you will see how inept the Republican response was and inescapably conclude that their mission was to destroy, not replace (for example does anyone believe that our entire healthcare nightmare will disappear if we impose tort reform?)  It was that one-day summit, very inadequately covered by the press (who completely missed conveying Obama’s grasp of the strategy and the details of the bill and his mastery of the debate), in which Obama embarrassed the Republicans who tried to stand up to him, as he skillfully co-opted any seemingly meritorious suggestions they had (like tort reform, and medicare fraud, which were advanced by some Republicans as the entire reason for runaway healthcare costs; Senator Dick Durbin promptly refuted the idea on tort reform, though it seemed to surface again, because Republicans don’t have any new ideas (tort costs represent less than 1% of the healthcare budget). Republicans were caught flat-footed because they cannot think on their feet, since their ideology and dialogue come from consulting firms, with the talking points for healthcare agreed upon before any healthcare bill was proposed last year. The Republicans will now have to check in for a rhetoric and narrative overhaul at their nearest consulting station. This should be a banner year for consulting firms who cater to the needs of the Republican Party. As a result of the summit meeting, Republican opposition to the bill was much harder to justify, having been smashed during the long meeting, and it also meant that Republicans might have a much harder time explaining their opposition to the bill when confronted by their constituents in the voting booths this fall, especially when the opposing candidate can talk about removing some of the fear out of healthcare risks.   Obama brought out his passion and frustration with Republicans all on the same day. As a policy wonk, he outmaneuvered and flummoxed the Republican opposition. At the end of the summit, it was clear (at least to me) that a bill was going to pass and did so about a month later. It was also clear that day, that Obama had changed everybody’s score card.

After the summit meeting,  focus quickly switched to the House, which passed the historic bill, while the Senate anticlimactically passed the reconciliation bill  a few days later. In retrospect, it all took place with the snap of Obama’s fingers. One can only hope that Obama himself has learned that when he leads, many follow and perhaps he has learned that he’s been too conservative and cautious about having “bipartisan” agreements. Such agreements only weaken the legislation, needlessly prolong the debate and fall into the hands of the Republican opposition, whose objective is to delay, obstruct and kill the Obama Presidency. Many Republicans thought that they had a good chance of killing the healthcare bill as of just a few weeks ago, but now at least one Senator who voted against the bill (Charles Grassley) is claiming he was one of its sponsors. Like the Healthcare bill of March 23, 2010, the Social Security Act was signed by Franklin Roosevelt on August 14, 1935. Although Howard Dean reported that Social Security was passed without Republican Support, more detailed analysis indicates that some Republicans did vote for Social Security (there weren’t too many around then). The two threats against Social Security were mounted by Newt Gingrich with his contract with America and GW Bush with his privatization plan, both of which failed. It appears that of the great momentous social programs enacted into law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Car Act of 2010 is the only one which passed without a single Republican vote.

In many ways the healthcare summit was Obama’s first day as President in the sun. He lived up to expectations and, though hardly a progressive, he stared down the Republican opposition and made them seem like policy wimps–they seemed to complain about the size of the bill because they didn’t want to read it and apparently most of them didn’t. Not a single Republican brought up any issue of substance, outside of the often incorrect talking points they have been using for the past year and all complained about cost, while at the same time being forced to acknowledge that the standard for evaluating the expense of the program was the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which cited net savings for the plan– it’s their organization. Of equal importance is the fact that within the new healthcare bill, a “Comparative Effectiveness Research” group has been established as a non-profit study group to analyze comparisons for therapy and diagnosis with an eye towards beneficial outcomes. For example, right now there are two different treatments available for the wet form of Age-Related Macular Degeneration, each of which seems to offer equivalent, beneficial outcomes, but for very different costs to the patient.  This group will be responsible for determining the most cost-effective approach based on outcomes. If the two drugs give equivalent outcomes, then strong recommendation will favor the less expensive procedure. This objective strategy offers great reform possibilities, especially as we are beginning to see a whole new host of therapies becoming available and it will take sound judgment to decide which among them is best and most cost-effective. This is a force we have never had before in medicine. It will hopefully lead us into a new era in health care cost controls. We are finally entering the dawn of “molecular medicine.” By the way, the Republicans are complaining about the cuts in Medicare, but that will only happen to those on the “Medicare Advantage” plan, which is the privatized form of Medicare, whose costs are at least 14% higher (many experts have suggested the increase in costs by Medicare Advantage have been much higher than 14%)  than traditional Medicare, with no evidence for improved outcomes. That’s the only part of Medicare that will be scaled back, but of course it’s the one that lots of Republicans prefer.

If you are interested in watching a summary of the new healthcare bill, I suggest you view Judy Feder’s excellent presentation on C-Span or go to the Kaiser Family Foundation site which has numerous explanatory sections describing features of the healthcare bill and an excellent pdf available that summarizes the main changes.

For me personally, the healthcare bill was a major disappointment. I have always felt that we must have a nationalized form of  health insurance that is separated from our jobs. That will enhance our personal security about healthcare and eliminate the employer costs which make our manufactured good more expensive and less competitive abroad. The single payer plan was not given any play because of the high level of  corporate money in politics. Before we can truly address the kinds of reforms we need to right our listing ship, we will need campaign finance reform, which right now is facing problems with the Supreme Court, the balance of which has turned to a Civil War era “state’s rights” mentality.

But, despite my disappointment with the healthcare bill, it does fix many things that were not just wrong, but perfectly odious; our healthcare system had become a sinister corporate operation. Some of that will change immediately. I am in hopes that the insurance exchange system, when put into place, will eventually give individuals better insurance options, though it’s unlikely to compete with the more perfect, single payer system that was never seriously under consideration. Nevertheless, perhaps it could serve as the Trojan Horse for eventually bringing in a national healthcare system or “Medicare for All.”

Now the Democrats can run this fall by talking about the ~44,000 lives their bill will save each year when fully implemented and they can hold their heads a little higher by talking about the first major progressive legislation to come along in more than forty years! What I hope we have witnessed is more than the passage of a single piece of legislation, no matter how historic. I hope and believe we have seen the emergence of a new party climate, one in which Democrats of many different stripes can formulate sensible legislation, present it coherently to the public and, with Obama as a President (who hopefully has discovered the power of his leadership), learn to focus more clearly on the next important task that must be immediately addressed–that of building a new economy. Perhaps we have seen the birth of a new source of national energy for the kind of change that got Obama elected in the first place. We have not seen anything like this healthcare bill in Washington for many decades. Maybe we are learning that government can work. One thing is certain: the Republicans were rightfully scared out of their wits about this bill, because they understand from historic behavior that legislation which brings benefits and a sense of social justice are prized by the public and become part of the national mantra of our expectations. It worked all during the New Deal and we can make it work more effectively again by drawing on our successes, buttressed by the fact that the young millennial generation behind us is one of the most liberal-minded and pragmatic generations in our history. We are witnessing the cultural wars beginning to come to an end, even though tea baggers may keep the issues alive for many years. How utterly boring were they and how much did they degrade the fabric of our country? These wars of abortion, gay rights, the drug war and “zero tolerance”  may not be over immediately, but the odds for a better outcome have been dramatically improved. The groups that support these button issues are diminishing in size and influence. So the best thing about the healthcare was perhaps, just maybe the Democrats got their groove back.

My enthusiasm for the future of this country has been stirred by the events of the last two years in which forces that serve the common public good seem to be emerging from a long Rip Van Winkle sleep under a tree that started to rot. And my enthusiasm has surged further by the behavior of our government since the healthcare summit less than two months ago. Yet, there have been highs and lows over the past year and one might have hoped for better outcomes in almost every endeavor we have witnessed on the political landscape. But fear of Republicans is waning and we should all try to accelerate the growth of the absurd tea baggers, who, together with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have placed the Republican Party on a calm sea without rudder or compass. Hopefully, they will finally see the ice flows. What these people represent is nothing less than the re-awakening of Jim Crow, without the realization of what he has historically represented or who in fact he really was. Glenn Beck might try to look him up in the phone book. In the meantime, sweet dreams America–you have to wake up tomorrow with a new vision. That’s the pace of modern life, especially when you also have the future health of the planet to worry about.

RFM