Hell, as  explained by a Chemistry student:

The following is an actual question given on a University  of Arizona chemistry midterm, and an actual answer turned in by a student.

The answer by one student was so ‘profound’ that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well :

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely.. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct….. leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.

What grade would you have given?

RFM

Fig 1. A description of this figure is found at the bottom of this posting

Recently I was reading about the Oregon coast and discovered that, since 2002, the region has experienced sudden periods during the summer months in which the shallow ocean water dramatically loses oxygen levels below those required to sustain normal marine life. The first occurrence of this event took place between Newport and Florence along the Oregon coast, and included Yachats, the small town where we stayed. Though I did not personally see any evidence of fish or invertebrate kills, these surges of hypoxic coastal ocean water take place further out in the shallow ocean water beyond the shores and are evident at depths up to about 50 meters or so: because of the intense wave action, tidal pools probably get effective oxygenation through wave aeration; its an excellent mechanism for mixing water and air and the Pacific ocean seems very adept at creating intense wave activity. I have always appreciated how much better the Pacific ocean is at generating large, strong waves when compared to its Atlantic cousin.

When hypoxic events occur, many fish are able to swim out of oxygen depleted regions into more sustainable water, whereas the slower invertebrates are stuck, and in the case of the Oregon coast, thousands of invertebrates have been dying every summer when the ocean becomes intolerably hypoxic. You can view a Quick Time video clip of a fish/invertebrate kill photographed underwater along the Oregon coast here: it amounts to a massive kill.

Marine biologists tell us that normal ocean surface water contains 5 to 8 ml of oxygen per liter of ocean. But during these anoxic spells in Oregon, the measured oxygen level was as low as 1.4 ml/l, too low for most fish and invertebrate survival. Many regions of the world have hypoxic ocean waters, some of which have been created by eutrophication, or fertilizer runoff from intense agriculture, which produces blooms of plankton that reduce the oxygen content of the water. But the scientists who initially investigated the Oregon coast hypoxia knew that it was unlikely to be caused by eutrophication, simply because farming along the Oregon coast didn’t seem sufficient to generate significant fertilizer runoff.  Initially, marine biologists thought that they were viewing a once-in-a-lifetime event, but anoxic waters along the coast of Oregon are now an annual event and have been detected each summer since the first large scale fish and invertebrate kills of 2002. From as early as mid-April to mid-October, hypoxic water has been the rule, though fluctuations in the intensity of oxygen depletion give variance to its magnitude. To this day, the cause of this phasic oxygen deprivation is unknown, though several theories seem to be prominent among oceanographers and marine biologists. Some have even considered this phenomenon to be part of a natural, long-term cycle of ocean behavior.  But, no significant letup has occurred and in 2006, the most extreme case of anoxia took place in which coastal waters lost all detectable oxygen levels for four weeks. In that instance starfish, mussels and rockfish died in large numbers, while other, more mobile fish were able to flee the hypoxic zone, which grew to 3,000 square kilometers. Furthermore the region has been monitored for oxygen content at different depths going back to 1950 and from 1950 to 1999, no anoxic events were recorded (see Fig 1).

The fishing industry along the coast of Oregon has been understandably alarmed about this recurrent hypoxic condition, as fishing brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year into the economy. But Oregon’s hypoxic summer coastal waters are part a global problem, though the causes of ocean hypoxia vary for each region and always have a local component as well. Increasingly the oxygen content of our ocean waters has been receiving more attention and there is broad agreement on the impact that global climate change may have on ocean oxygenation levels, including i)  a failure to properly mix the water column through changes in oceanic currents, that could be seriously impacted by global climate change and its effect on the natural oceanic currents which exchange cool norther waters with warmer waters near the equatorial zones and ii) the warming of the ocean water itself reduces its capacity to dissolve oxygen, a strict reality of chemical reactions.  According to the 2007 IPCC report, from the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature have risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 meters.

Biologists believe that the magic number for oxygen comes in at about 2 ml/l, below which much of the ocean fauna cannot exist; there are now large regions of our ocean, particularly those near tropical areas, where the intermediate depths of the water have reached this level of incompatibility.  While there is plenty of evidence for an increase in the temperature of the ocean over the last fifty years, so far, there is no evidence that the normal ocean currents have been altered by global climate change conditions, at least not for the major currents we concern ourselves with. If there is a compensatory side to global climate change, it is that tropical storms, whose frequency and magnitude can be correlated with ocean water temperature, help to force mixing of the ocean water with the more oxygen rich air, serving to overcome other tendencies to form oxygen-depleted zones, though the significance of this so called “benefit” has been hard to guesstimate. Who wants to be on the sidelines cheering on another Katrina?

The Oregon coast is part of a large West Coast ocean ecosystem, in which shallow, oxygen-rich ocean water, found at depths up to about 50 meters, leads to much deeper, oxygen deficient water found beyond the continental shelf, where depths become hundreds of meters or more. Those deeper regions are poor in oxygen but rich in nutrients. Measurements of oxygen levels as deep as 600 meters have been ongoing in the Oregon region for decades, which, until 2002, did not reveal coastal water hypoxia (Fig 1, left). So, if eutrophication doesn’t explain Oregon’s coastal oxygen deficiency, what does?

The most parsimonious explanation for Oregon’s summer anoxia seems to be that the deeper oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) has been upwelling at higher rates than normal and mixing with the more superficial oxygen-enriched waters in disproportionate ways that did not happen before, but might still be part of a very long periodic cycle that could last for decades or more. Others suggest the more obvious,  that what’s going on in Oregon is a perfect storm created by changes in weather, climate and ocean currents. If so, this should alarm all of us, because it illustrates how quickly the ocean environment can change. We must remember that 71% of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean water.

This new mixing between the two pools of ocean water not only tells us that the oceans can change quickly, but that they can do so with a surprisingly quick lethal outcome. There is clearly a balance force at work here in nature with ocean water mixing that is difficult to comprehend, but mind-numbing to appreciate when it doesn’t work to its historic perfection. It’s hard not to get analytical about this observation without thinking how finely tuned it all is, how interdependent the global system is and then wonder how badly out of tune we have forced mother nature’s engine for sustaining life on the land as well as the ocean. Surely we need to learn better than we ever have that land and ocean are joined at the hip. Excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is acidifying the ocean, but doing so much more and in so many different ways, most of which we cannot yet articulate. Perhaps our very survival is the biological experiment. But for this experiment, mother nature is sitting on the sidelines, as we started the ball rolling on this one.

We use models to predict the impact of global climate change, but with the oceans, we have a laboratory. We should all be jumping into the oceans and making measurements! If we can’t save the country, let’s put everyone to work saving the planet!

RFM

(below is a copy of the figure illustration taken from the Chan et al Science article (note: hydrocasts are water samples obtained from a group bottles that are coupled to one another and sunk to get samples of water at different depths)

Fig. 1. Taken from a Science Brevia paper by Chan et al (Science, 319, 920, 2008). Dissolved oxygen profiles during the upwelling season (mid-April to mid-October) in the upper 800 m of the continental shelf and slope of Oregon (42.00°N to 46.00°N). (A) 1950 to 1999 from the World Ocean Database and Oregon State University archives (n = 3101 hydrocasts, blue). (B) (A) with additional data for 2000 to 2005 (n = 834 hydrocasts, green). (C) (A) and (B) plus data for 2006 (n = 220 hydrocasts,red). The black vertical line denotes the 0.5 ml/l threshold. (Insets) Overlapping locations of hydrographic (blue, green, and red) and remotely operated vehicle (black) stations through time and the 100-m and 1000-m isobaths.

He recently proposed a plan that would cut the budget deficit dramatically by 2020, through draconian cuts in taxes and spending. Normally, one would hope that the stupidity filter would have limited the exposure of this idea, by now an ancient, but persistent Republican solution. I believe this Republican retread is now in the Old Testament. But, the Washington Post made a big deal of Ryan’s  plan and reported that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicated that indeed, the budget deficit would be cut in half by 2020 if government adhered to his ingenious prescription. But, in one of Paul Krugman’s best op-ed pieces in some time, he points out that the CBO only calculated the budget savings based on the decrease in government spending and did not figure in the lost Federal revenues from the tax cuts. Oops! Obligingly, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center took up the issue and made the appropriate calculations, indicating that the tax losses from Ryan’s plan would be $ 4 trillion over the next decade, so adding the two figures  together–tax cuts and cuts in government programs– gives a deficit of $ 1.3 trillion or about the same as the estimate for the current fiscal plan of the Obama administration. Ryan achieves his miracle by cutting taxes on the richest 1%, while increasing taxes on everybody else. Then too there are unspecified cuts, most of which will come later by dismantling Medicare. As Krugman points out, this is the same plan that Newt Gingrich, another genius Republican, suggested in 1995, as the Republicans assumed command and control of Congress. You will want to read Krugman’s article, as my summary here doesn’t do justice to his wit, sarcasm and simple arithmetic.

RFM

We won’t know the true impact of the oil spill on the animal life in the Gulf of Mexico for many years to come. This is because the entire area has a rich endogenous sea life, but it is also an area where many migratory fish, birds and other aquatic life come through during their migratory movements, so evaluating the full scope of this problem will mean years of study. Should any part of that body of knowledge be funded by BP and kept secret, it would be a travesty against  scientific principles of discovery and dissemination of scientific information. For BP, the only thing sacred is the image of its giant corporation, linked to its profitability. BP’s behavior in securing scientists who will have limited capacity to fully reveal their findings makes a mockery of science itself and paints a very unfortunate image of those scientists who agree to carry out studies under such constrained reporting circumstances and under a cloud where their own work will be tainted with the possibility that it’s been diluted or altered for consumption by corporate interests rather than public health and freedom of scientific exchange. In my opinion, any scientific research supported by BP that is related to this spill should not be admissible in peer-reviewed journals. Indeed, it is up to reviewers of any papers submitted to such journals to evaluate the source of their funding and determine whether there is an ethical violation of a corporate-sponsored study that does not give full disclosure. This is not merely a problem with BP and the oil industry. We see this kind of behavior with the pharmaceutical industry, which tries to manipulate reports so that only the most favorable outcomes are highlighted. I’m afraid it will take a much higher level of awareness by the public to learn how to evaluate starkly conflicting reports, when one is published in a peer-review journal and is funded by an unbiased sources, such as the National Science Foundation vs results published by an oil consortium, with a fancy title, but nevertheless funded by the oil giants. You don’t have to go beyond Congress to see which reports are favored by which major party.
RFM

A gripping story, describing three generations within a family (the Nicholson family in Grafton, Mass) who experienced three different transitions in our economy, including the post-WW II, post-Vietnam and today’s recession, was published a few weeks ago in the New York Times. For the millennial generation of 18-29, the unemployment rate, officially at 14 percent, approaches the level  for that group during the Great Depression. But, now add to that the 23 percent that have stopped looking for work, based on Bureau of Labor statistics, and you come up with a whopping unemployment rate of 37 percent, the highest it has been in more than three decades and within the range of the 1930s. For young adults seeking work today, this is their Great Depression. Adult unemployment in the Great Depression reached about 20% of the work force (though numbers for this period are not as accurate as today’s; some numbers that are higher for unemployment during the depression did not include classifying workers in emergency work, like the temporary work created by Federal jobs programs, etc as being employed).

Among the millennial generation, a college education helps, but the unemployment rate among college-educated young adults is currently at 5.5%, or nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession in 2007. That is the highest level by two percentage points, since the bureau began keeping records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college. A college degree is no longer an insurance policy against prolonged unemployment. We have hollowed out our economy and exported many would be good paying jobs. So far there are no signs that things are getting better for any group of workers in our economy, quite independent of their level of education. Indeed, recent economic forecasts suggest that our economy will contract before it expands, as stimulus money runs dry and nothing is available to pick up the slack.  Europe’s decision to introduce an anti-Keynesian fix to their problems, beginning with Greece, is compounding the issues we face in reaching for a more global and balanced economic recovery. So what happened?

A major fault line in our economic recovery strategy was the insufficient level of the stimulus package we engineered to soften the blow of the collapse. If we had invested somewhere between two and three times what we did invest as our stimulus package, we surely would have been seeing more light at the end of the tunnel by now (too much of the stimulus package was in the form of tax breaks, which are often not used or used late). Very likely, we would have started seeing new job growth through a stronger nurturing of the new economy we will require,  as new businesses could have been generated based on the richest resource we have–our scientific and technological skill level, which now lies fallow because of poor investment decisions and too much money spent on propping up banks and corrupt financial institutions. This unfortunate outcome, the lack of a sufficient Keynesian response to our financial collapse, has left us with rich bankers and unemployed young people. Is that an even sensible trade? Where will our economy come from that we need in order to generate good-paying jobs that can fill the void and the reduce the vast unemployment debt we have accumulated as the biggest obstacle for our future? Right now we seem to be content to let the bankers get away with it and allow our young people to suffer. They are paying the real cost of this economic disaster.

The youngest member of the Nicholson family, caught in exactly this circumstance, remains optimistic about his future, a very different outlook compared to those who went through the Great Depression in the 1930s. Let’s hope we can right our ship in sufficient time to reward his optimism and start generating the new economy by investing in the one area where we stand a chance of regaining leadership–the art and science of saving our planet and learning to live within the limitations of  finite planetary resources. Are we that stupid? Have we been out-Foxed? Is corporate power too much for us to resist and prevent us from reshaping our economic foundations? I don’t think so, but these numbers for the unemployment among young people must become more broadly known and right now the traditional media that we rely on for news refuses to get down and dirty in the places we need in order to flush out and reveal the truly suffering class, our youth, who are currently spared from despair by their innate optimism. How much longer can that last? It would be better for all of us if it didn’t last much beyond tomorrow because it is fixable.

As a companion to the worst recession since the Great Depression, we have a political and financial system that got embedded in the army and acquired the art of generating financial bubbles. Those same people that gave us our bubbles, including the dot com and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, have given us a solution by a massive transfer of wealth that has yet to be recognized as such. Scott Nicholson’s good paying job went into buying a Goldman Sachs executive a new house and a new boat and a twenty five year lease on an expensive boat slip in Long Island.

According to Lou Dubose, editor of The Washington Spectator (highly recommended), here is what the banking industry visited on our economy: $14 trillion in lost household wealth; 8 million jobs gone, not yet returned or even on the horizon (thus the need for brand new ones); 200 community banks closed and more than $14 trillion in bailouts accompanied by a staggering increase in deficit spending needed to keep the economy out of a depression (it just wasn’t enough to give us a good jump start). The credit default swaps that swamped our economy were created by speculators that didn’t actually own the stock in question. What they made was a bet about whether one stock might default and another investor gave them  credit default swap insurance against that happening. Neither investor actually invested in the company per se. By the time credit default-swap trading destroyed the economy, 90 percent of the traders were speculators and many of them were banks. Furthermore, it was the Wall Street bond lawyers who wrote the “Commodities Future Modernization Act” that Phil Gramm held up as the wave for our new future in 2000. With the final regulatory constraints out of the way, over the counter derivatives went from $100 trillion in 2000 to $600 trillion when the economy collapsed in 2008–that was 10 times the GDP of the entire world! Graham was Wall Street’s operative in the Senate, but the bill had strong support from Clinton’s Treasury Secretary (Larry Summers–now in charge of Obama’s National Economic Council). Not surprisingly that bill also had the strong endorsement of Alan Greenspan. The same people who engineered our financial meltdown are now engineering our recovery. Any wonder why we are not seeing anything close to a recovery? Is there any doubt why the recovery that was engineered for us to enjoy is not enjoyable at all? Obama hired the wrong team. We need a new one. For starters, I would recommend Joseph Stiglitz.

RFM

RFM

In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

In response to CNOOC’s offer for UNOCAL, the Republicans, ever anxious to demonstrate why the free market system doesn’t apply to essential commodities, moved to prevent the sale by attaching an amendment to the Energy Policy Act on July 26, 2005, calling for a four-month review of China’s energy policies. This effectively killed CNOOC’s chances for acquiring UNOCAL, as another bid for the company from Chevron was coming up. The Chinese saw the writing on the wall and withdrew their offer, but remained in hot pursuit of oil contracts throughout the far reaches of the globe.

The unsolicited offer from the Chinese to purchase UNOCAL brought chills to the American spine about energy policies and raised new questions about whether the United States had the right policies in place to secure its own energy future. If China was looking for oil in America’s backyard, maybe that’s because there isn’t any more oil in all the other backyards? That was a question for which Americans wanted an answer. Or maybe not.  One of the problems that traditional oil companies face is the rising tide of nationalism in oil company ownership.  Thirteen of the top fifteen oil producing and reserve holding companies are nationally owned, including Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwat Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Pertoleos de Venezuela S.A., National Oil Corp of Libya and the  Nigerian National Petroleum. The top eight companies in terms of oil reserves are all nationally owned.  The only international oil companies in the top fifteen include Lukoil (Russia) and Chevron (USA).  Many have argued that with nationalization of such an essential economic commodity as oil, those companies that remain private will increasingly operate at a disadvantage, as nationalized companies form relationships between governments that enhance shared oil reserves but also go deeper to promote trade and solve other issues to enhance the arrangement. International oil companies, like Shell, Chevron and BP can’t negotiate such holistic deals. Thus, Saudi Arabia is increasingly selling oil to China.

The urgent state of Americans over oil reserves was a driving force for the new gas and oil drilling leases that the Obama administration announced earlier this year, many of which are now on hold because of the Gulf spill, though I doubt this action will last for very long–there’s too much American panic. A state of  urgency  has now reached every oil and gas producing organization around the globe, as countries and companies try to enter into new relationships to secure oil and gas reserves as far into the future as possible.  It appears that no stone will be too sacred in our global thirst for oil and gas. While we move sluggishly to think and talk about getting off the oil habit by becoming more self-sufficient in energy, and moving away from fossil fuels, the rest of the world is buying up as much of the reserve oil supply as new energies are unleashed to discover more. But, while drilling more, they are finding less. The United States could reach a permanent new oil crisis before any transition in energy dependency takes place. That fear will haunt every administration beginning with the current one. Suddenly, a new world order is taking shape out there, one based, not on the size and extent of one’s economy or military, but instead derived from the sense of national security that a country can bestow on its citizens by guaranteeing energy capacity well into the future. Right now that future seems to be measured in twenty year increments. So alarmed was the Bush administration over the future of oil in the American gunsights, that in January 2008, Bush met with the Saudi king Abudllah during a swing through the Middle East and and pleaded on behalf of the beleaguered American public for increased production to ease the price of gasoline. Normally that would be a role for an oil company executive, but those days are over. We are now talking about the future of our national economy.

The global need for energy promises to expand in a major way within the next twenty years, primarily because of the huge growth anticipated by the expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies. China’s energy demands were at 68.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2006, amounting to 15.6% of the world’s energy consumption. But in 2030, the Chinese energy projection is for 145.4 quadrillion BTUs and 20.1% of the world’s oil consumption.  In the next 20 years, China will have to add the equivalent of what Europeans currently consume if they are to meet this expectation. Projections for India are almost  equally  expansive, though less overall: in 2006 India energy consumption was at 17.1 quadrillion BTUs and in 2030, they are projected to need 31.9 quadrillion BTUs or about 4.5% of the world’s energy. Right now things look best for China. They have a lot of hard currency on hand and can afford to pay top $ for energy contracts. In the meantime, America is bogged down in wars that we cannot possibly win and we suddenly appear to be very disadvantaged in many cases when competing with nationalized oil companies.

The major unanswered question about our oil future is this: Obama recently used the BP Gulf oil spill to sound a clarion call for national action to get out from underneath the heal of oil companies, begin to diversify our energy sources and move away from fossil fuels. It seems simple enough: diversify our economy by expanding it into the production of renewable forms of energy and conservation and, as an added benefit, save the planet. But, if you were sitting in the White House and you had a choice to remove subsidies from oil companies, or better yet, begin to charge oil companies and gas consumers a tax to support this energy transition, would you do it,  given the new form of panic that seems to have set in by the CNOOC offer for UNOCAL and the ongoing BP Gulf oil spill? It will take a considerable and risky amount of political capital to make the sensible choice, because one oil shortage later and your ticket to Mount Rushmore, if you think that’s where you were headed, would be suddenly exchanged for a ticket to Palookaville.

Note added: the quantitative numbers on energy consumption and projections were taken from Michael T. Klare’s book “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: the New Geopolitics of Energy.”

RFM

Twain was an avowed anti-militarist and abhorred the empire wars he watched America engage in, including the Spanish American war, in which he describes, in the new biography, American soldiers fighting in Cuba as “our uniformed assassins.” You can see why the author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” might pause before allowing remarks such as that to come into print during his lifetime. But Mark Twain had a tragic life. He almost committed suicide once in San Francisco before he became a famous writer, after which he experienced serious debt problems and witnessed the loss of many of his family members to sudden illness. Twain was a great humorist, but his sharp sense of humor was the frosting that covered a layer cake of tragedy and worry. Nearly everyone has read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, as it remains required reading in public schools (I hope). Twain once said that he is not an American, he is the American and who can disagree.

As we all await the first of the three new volumes on Mark Twain’s autobiography to arrive, you might find it interesting to review the life of Mark Twain as told in the excellent documentary by Ken Burns, available on Netflix as a DVD or streaming video.

When thinking about human evolution, I can’t help but remind myself of  one of the remarks that Twain made, which  surfaces in the Ken Burns documentary. He said “I think God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” As one of Twain’s biographers said, what made Twain unique was space and slavery. The America Twain grew up in was a gigantic space, unrivaled as such in the known world and slavery was a part of that new space, which any humanitarian had to address. Twain did address slavery, after the Civil War in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, published in 1885; in so doing, he changed forever the American understanding of slavery, race and prejudice. It has been argued that without “Huck Finn” the civil rights legislation of the 1960s could never have been passed, or at least it would have been considerably more delayed. The cultural penetration of a great novel, when read by most Americans,  is hard to deny but not easy to fathom.

At the time of his death, Mark Twain, who had struggled all his life against the Samuel Clemens within him, was the most famous writer in the world and, when seen walking the streets of any city in the world, would be surrounded by people hoping to hear a remark from him about any subject that pleased him. He adored and sought out visible public adulation and was comfortable speaking on virtually anything that pleased him. In general, when he spoke, it also pleased those that gathered to hear his remarks.

RFM