What is the Earth's Intrinsic Value? or Exploit the Entropic Environment

Last week’s article, Bully the Bad Guys, began a four part series on President Trump’s unfolding agenda. If you haven’t already, you might to read it before moving on to this week’s article.

In the Trump administration’s first week they put a gag order on all employees of the EPA and the Department of Agriculture. This order prohibits all employees from communicating with the press or public, including the use of social media. This includes all research scientists. As of February 26, 2017 this order has not been lifted.

President Trump also signed executive orders authorizing the immediate restarting of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone Pipeline. Both of these pipelines had been reluctantly stopped by President Obama after unrelenting public pressure. President Trump obviously felt none of that pressure.  

The administration nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. What are Mr. Pruitt’s qualifications to run the Environmental Protection Agency? He sued the agency fourteen times in his tenure as Oklahoma’s AG. Thirteen of these fourteen lawsuits were with oil and gas companies as co-parties. These same co-parties also happened to be large scale contributors to his election campaigns. A reported $300,000 in total.

His confirmation was pushed through the senate last week so he could be confirmed before thousands of emails from his time as Oklahoma Attorney General were released. This was done in spite of requests of democrat senators to wait for the emails so a more informed decision could be made. These emails subsequently revealed an extraordinarily close relationship with oil and gas companies. He even copied and pasted an email from Devon Energy onto his own letterhead and sent it as a complaint to the EPA he is now tasked to head.

He was found to again be copying and pasting language from emails from lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in a complaint he filed with the EPA about ozone limits.

Mr. Pruitt is on public record denying the science that mercury “poses public health hazards.” It should be noted that while he was Attorney General of Oklahoma the number of lakes in the state listed for mercury contamination went from fourteen to forty. His contention during his confirmation hearing that states should be setting and enforcing environmental protection laws also needs to be pointed out.

Is it Mr. Pruitt’s intent that the EPA allow states to deny environmental science and allow their jurisdictions to become continually more toxic?

I am sure we won’t have to wait long to find out.

According to Myron Ebell, who ran the EPA transition for the new administration, the Trump administration is planning a one billion dollar budget cut in the first physical year. The 2017 FY budget is $8.27 billion. Down from $10.3 billion in 2010.

As we watch the dismantling of the EPA and other agencies in the government by this administration, we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions.

1.       Does the earth from which we are formed and sustained, our only home, have any value outside of profits corporations can extract from it?

2.       How important is clean air, clean water, and clean soil to me?

3.       Am I willing to stand by and watch as corporations collude with their political caddies in Washington to take us back to the fifties, sixties, and seventies with burning rivers, toxic smog, poisoned ground water, and subdivisions built on soil so fouled it causes cancer and birth defects in the residents?

4.       At what point do we value the health and vitality of flesh and blood humans, wildlife, and the ecosystem that makes life possible over the profits of soulless and rapacious corporations?

In his inaugural speech at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Pruitt called for civility. I wonder how long he expects us to remain civil while he ignores and suppresses the environmental science and insists on harming the population of the planet for the profit of his corporate donors.  

Daymare

It was a great weekend. I built another garden box in the backyard. We are going to be overflowing with fresh vegetables for the next seven or eight months. I was able to sit out by the fire pit three nights in a row. I wrote five new poems.

Rick Bass’ book “In a Little While” arrived in the mail on Sunday afternoon. In anticipation of the new book’s arrival, I reread “The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness.” I am always captivated by the poetry of his prose and how he is able to make the surrounding environment a participating character in the story. He may or may not be a genius, but he is brilliant and highly skilled at what he does.

I heartily recommend all his writing, but it is his fiction that is strikingly beautiful to the point it sticks with you. Like peanut butter sticks to the inside of your mouth and you can taste it long after you’ve eaten, so his words stick to the inside of your mind and heart. Often, this stickiness manifests itself in outward fashion. You may find yourself searching out solitary places in nature, or wandering outside at night just to look up and ponder the infinite beauty.

Start with “The Watch” and “The Hermit's Story.” Before you finish these two, you’ll be hooked and you’ll find yourself building your own Rick Bass library. Enjoy.

Now, onto what is going on in my eclectically jabbering brain…

I have this recurring daymare. It can’t be called a nightmare because I am fully awake when it happens. I don’t like “waking nightmare” because it is inaccurate and doesn’t convey my participation. And we do participate in our day dreams, whether or not we realize it.

I guess you could say I go into one of my creative trances and that would most definitely be true. But, daymare is the most accurate and conveys the sense of it succinctly.

As I was saying, I have this recurring daymare where the earth is a sentient being. In this scenario humans are not the pinnacle of creation, but resemble more the bacterial communities we now know are living within our own bodies. The earth is going about the living of its life. Creating, growing, and changing with age. Maturing into a personality that respects and nurtures life as best it can. It also has an evolutionary need to propagate its own species.  It seems the earth has only recently become aware of our existence in its biological systems. We have multiplied out of control to the point of becoming a sickness within the earth. Her immune system is now beginning to engage us. She is developing antibodies to defend herself and her vital organs. She sees us as an invading pathogen, like the Bubonic Plague, and is responding appropriately.

We must mutate and become beneficial bacteria if we are to survive as a species. I am not certain we can transform fast enough. I’m not even certain most of us care to. We see ourselves more like the parasite, the liver fluke. The liver fluke is a flat worm type parasite that lives in snail slime. When ants ingest the snail slime the liver fluke burrows into the ant’s brain. It then takes over the controls.

The liver fluke’s entire goal is to have the ant be its Uber driver. The ant’s sole purpose for existence is to take the liver fluke to its preferred host – one with a liver. Thus its name. This worm allows the ant to behave normally while there is no preferred host in the vicinity. But, when a preferred host is near, the liver fluke takes over the controls and directs the ant to station itself in the perfect place to be eaten by the preferred host.

In my weird daymare, I am always concerned that we are acting like the liver fluke, but the earth is far more evolved than our species. We believe the earth is here for us to subdue, exploit, and, once we have used it up, dispose of as we leap to a new host, but the earth is far more evolved than we are or can conceive of and it knows how to deal with parasites. I fear the earth is about to take a heavy dose of antibiotics genetically engineered to target Homo sapiens sapiens.

Will we mutate in time?

This is where my daymare always ends.

See you Thursday. 

The Race Against Running Out

Anyone who has read my writing for any amount of time knows I have a fascination with futurists and those at the foremost edges of our technological development. Whether it is growing new organs, creating prosthetic limbs, genetic engineering to prevent and cure disease, a transition to sustainable energy, transhumanism (humans merging with technology; as in incorporating technology into their own bodies), or a hundred other astonishing breakthroughs of science, I am easily taken in and my imagination runs away from me.

I’ve written extensively on the subject.

I’ve recently discovered there is another group of scientists, engineers, and researchers who are working to help humanity with an entirely different future. This movement’s most common name is Peak Oil.

Before you go running off, understand, I’m not talking about the folks who make the straight to Netflix documentaries telling you to stop paying your bills and find a “bugout” shelter in the wilderness because the oil is running out next month and the world will be plunged into a Mad Maxian dystopia by 2030.

I’m talking about real scientists, engineers, and researchers. Serious, sober folks.

These folks research how much oil we are using daily, how much is being discovered each year, how much is being extracted and at what cost from existing wells. Which techniques, regulations, taxes, and natural obstacles are being imposed worldwide. These folks also study which of these are being removed and for which reasons. Such as political, corporate, populace, and personal profit. There are more factors to account for than I can list or know of.

Most of these folks believe we have already passed the point of peak oil production across the globe. According to this theory, we will be producing less and dirtier oil each year until eventually it is simply too expensive to produce. Then a long regression back to a preindustrial life for humanity.

How long will this take?

Right now, authors like John Michael Greer (The LongDescent) say two to three hundred years. According to this theory, oil becomes more and more scarce, making other sources of energy less affordable. Which other sources of energy specifically? All of them. To greater or lesser extents, solar, wind, coal, geothermal, nuclear, and hydro-electric energy all require oil to create and maintain.

As we deplete the planet’s oil reserves, all these other technologies become more expensive as well.

Peak Oil theorists maintain, Futurism and the Oil Robber Barons (my term, not theirs) are in a race. The futurists are coming up with solutions as fast as they possibly can. The oil companies are pumping petroleum out of the earth as fast as their machines can bear.

And the futurists are losing.

The main reason the futurists are losing this race against running out is because of us. We are burning, using, and discarding every petroleum derived product they come up with faster than they can come up with them. We resist every regulation on how much energy an individual or population is allowed to use.

We refuse to be made uncomfortable in any way.

Price of gasoline too high? We make our politicians pay a price for it. Let the price get beyond a certain pain point and our politicians begin losing elections.

Our favorite exotic fruit is not in season? We chew on the grocery store manager’s ear so she knows to have it in stock next week. If she doesn’t, the luxury grocery store down the street will.

See or hear a Public Service Announcement advocating turning our furnace down and putting on a sweatshirt? Or, turning up the setting on our air conditioning and wearing less? Who is the government or anyone else to tell me what to do in my own home?

On and on it goes, right?

We all do it.

And that’s the problem.

None of us wants to be the first to unilaterally go without.

The peak oil theorists aren’t all that concerned about it though. They say we will all begin to get priced out of our energy in the next decade anyway. The choice to self-regulate will be taken away from us by the natural market forces of supply and demand. (You don’t really believe the government is going to allow its bomber and fighter planes, warships, tanks, rockets, etcetera to not have enough fuel so you can be comfortable, do you?)

Will the futurists win the race against us and the oil companies?

Will we plunge ourselves into a new dark age?

Will the futurists figure it out and deliver on the promise of a glorious future where humans tap into the unlimited resources of the universe and we spread out into the stars in magical journeys even Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, and George Lucas couldn’t come up with while being aided by the most powerful psychedelic substances known to man?

I have no idea.

I do know it is always prudent to pay attention and try to be prepared for as many possible outcomes as we can.