Author: martinmackerel

The Violence Inside

Earlier this week I had an emotional meltdown over Freddie Gray’s murder and the subsequent events in Baltimore. I wrote several tweets that were openly calling for the death of cops. I’m writing this blog post not to retract those comments, but to explain them.

The police mutilated Freddie Gray’s body in a way that I can’t even comprehend the physics of. I know the police can be animals, but that level of horrific brutality shocked me to the core. Not only were several cops were involved, but we know from cases like these that even cops not directly involved will lie and cover up for their co-workers and that prosecutors and attorneys general will avoid any punishment for the cops whatsoever. The Coup has a line: “Every cop is a corrupt one.” Absolutely true.

Every cop is a bad cop, because they all support this kind of brutality. “Police whistleblower” is an oxymoron – cops do not testify against other cops. Cops are, in a sense, not individuals. Becoming police means becoming a part of a mass that has no true understanding of justice or fairness – it is a depersonalized, sociopathic force to maintain the existing social order.

Thinking about how the Baltimore police mutilated Freddie Gray’s body ignited a murderous rage in me. I wanted to see cops killed. I wanted to kill cops myself. I still do. I want to watch a cop’s blood pour out into the gutter. I have seen fear in a cop’s eyes and it is a beautiful thing. But now I fantasize about watching the light fade from those eyes.

This very hateful and violent impulse is a scary thing to face in myself. But I see no value in denying it. It’s there, the mirror image of the sickness that the cops carry, that they give into. It has been one thing for me to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s words about how violence leads only to violence, and how hatred only leads to more hatred. It was one thing to become angry at the police and realize that that is a deliberate effect of state violence.

It is another thing entirely for me to personally plunge directly into the abyss, to not just intellectually think that someone should be killed, but to passionately desire their brutal death. I grapple with this twisted fact that the very evil I see in the world and fight against, rises up inside me and that my own strong drive for justice can become poisoned, taken over, transformed into the very thing I detest.

This has led me to go back to some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, particularly his Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. His six basic points about nonviolence are not easy. They can be very, very difficult. While I still wouldn’t rule out some kinds of violent action in order to get to a better world, my intense reaction this week reminded me to go back, again and again, to these fundamental points, in particular the fifth point. It is a struggle for me to avoid the “internal violence of spirit”, but its appearance has been a lesson for me.

Investing to Support the Clean-Energy Revolution

While I’m definitely anti-capitalist, for the meantime, capitalism is the social form we have. So I am investigating the best ways to limit climate change within that system, while at the same time looking to overcome it.

One way to work within capitalism is in the directing of your money, both as a consumer and as an investor. Here are the results of my research into some “green” ways to invest.

Financing installation, not companies

I am focused on directly financing the rollout of existing clean energy technologies – primarily wind and solar – rather than financing R&D or buying stock in clean-energy companies. Since I still work full-time, any investment income is taxed at a high rate. But most of the investment instruments that finance the direct implementation of these technologies are income-generating assets (which makes sense). Therefore I am specifically looking for things that I can buy through my retirement accounts.

In any case, most of my investable money is in my retirement accounts (IRAs that were rolled over from 401k funds). I have them all at Vanguard, and it’s easy to set up a brokerage account. From there I can buy anything publicly traded.

YieldCos

The main type of investment I’ve invested in (of the money devoted to clean energy) is the YieldCo, a relatively new type of investment that provides a steady stream of income. The idea is that the YieldCo effectively owns income-generating assets like wind farms and solar installations and distributes most of the income as dividends. YieldCos buy these assets from developers; the developers can then take that capital and use it to build new wind farms and install more solar. Usually each YieldCo is closely tied to one developer, which does raise the potential for conflicts of interest.

I did some investigation into some of the available YieldCos. I picked a few for purity and yield (like meth). By yield of course I mean how much the dividends amount to as a percentage of the purchase price. By purity I mean how much of their assets are in clean energy. One in particular, NRG’s YieldCo, has a high percentage of dirty energy assets (natural gas power plants and even coal power plants) in order to have the tax equity to take full advantage of the federal Investment Tax Credit available for solar and wind. While I understand the rationale, I’d prefer my money to be used to fund as close to 100% clean energy as possible. And as you can see, it’s quite possible:

This graph is from an absolutely excellent overview (about a year old) at Forbes called Clean Energy Yield Cos: Growing Pains.

Continue reading “Investing to Support the Clean-Energy Revolution” →

Dinosaur Mating and the Endgame of the Fossil Fuel Era

The Fossil Fuel Endgame

It is my contention that we are currently witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel industry.

After years of high prices for crude oil (~$100/barrel for Brent, just under that for West Texas Intermediate), prices starting falling in late summer 2014 and have been sitting for the past few months at just above half their former prices. The proximate cause of this fall is the decision by the Saudis to go after market share rather than keep oil prices high.

I believe this decision marks a turning point in the history of oil. It’s not short-term but permanent.

The average barrel of oil has become more difficult to extract over time, and oil prices have risen accordingly. The Saudis are sitting on enormous reserves of cheap-to-extract oil, and have benefited from the increased prices. A couple of years ago, their reserves looked like a steadily appreciating asset – worth more in the future (when oil would likely be more expensive than now).

However, we have two major new factors: renewable energy is rapidly decreasing in cost, and real climate policy in the major economies (US, China, EU) looks inevitable. Now oil is likely to be less lucrative in the future – and most of it will have to be left in the ground. This graph shows just how dramatically the price of solar has dropped in recent years (wind has seen similar though less dramatic improvements over time):

That means that oil is now a depreciating asset and it makes financial sense to sell it now, even at historically cheap prices. It’s like a gold rush in reverse, as the endgame of the fossil fuel era plays out. The Saudis have single-handedly cut the price of oil in half and have announced their intention to push prices lower if need be. So oil prices won’t be going up any time soon.

At today’s prices, Canadian tar sands projects are totally untenable, and Bakken shale oil is marginal: oil will continue to flow from existing wells, but new wells will only tap the most productive spots. This means that the need for North American crude-by-rail will dry up over the next year or so. In particular, we’ve seen the Pittsburg WesPac project be re-proposed, but this time without the rail terminal. And the Kinder Morgan crude-by-rail terminal in Richmond, CA apparently stopped receiving shipments in February 2015.

Dinosaurs Mating

Recently Shell announced that it would buy the BG Group (an LNG – liquefied natural gas – supplier) at a 50% premium in a huge deal. Far from being a sign of a robust and growing industry, this reminds me of nothing so much as the “dinosaur mating” of the big mainframe manufacturers as their product became less and less relevant over the course of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the face of inexorable improvements in price/performance of clean energy technology, a growing fossil fuel divestment movement, and increased clamor for a price on carbon or other way to tackle climate change, I think we will see more of these deals in the future as the industry contracts and slowly dies. Our goal should be to hasten the death of this industry in order to limit the damage it’s still able to inflict.

Update

This Financial Post article, “Saudi Arabia was worried about a danger much bigger than shale when it blindsided oil markets“, supports much of what I say here. The Saudis are worried about the peak and then decline of demand for oil, in part because of its replacement by clean energy. If anything I think they’re not paranoid enough.

How do we get from here to liberation?

Some thoughts on property destruction, violence against the police, and the Black Friday Ferguson solidarity protest (#BlackoutBlackFriday) in San Francisco.

After the non-indictment of Darren Wilson on Monday, November 24th, 2014, very militant protests erupted all over the country, with more the next night and in the days following. The protests explicitly aim to “shut it down”, to interfere with business as usual. Protestors blocked many freeways, closed many a mall, halted BART service across the Bay for two and a half hours on Friday, and some protestors damaged and/or looted property in Ferguson, Oakland, and San Francisco. And in San Francisco there was definitely violence against individual police officers.

The cries of outrage against the response are weaker than usual. We seem to be at a very interesting moment in history in which more people seem sympathetic to property destruction and rioting as a response to the consistent, long-standing dehumanization of African-Americans and their mistreatment at the hands of police. The excellent piece Hey, Step Back with the Riot Shaming has been shared on Facebook tens of thousands of times, and even Time magazine – Time! – has an article entitled Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting.

Late Thursday night I re-watched Do the Right Thing (which I last saw as a teenager around the time it came out). I’m glad I did, as it helped me manage my anger and leaven it with an understanding of the tragic results of acting too directly on that anger. The title of the movie comes from this short clip, that at first reflection seems otherwise unrelated to the rest of the movie:

It’s a good motto to live by, and one that arguably Mookie fails to heed when he calmly and deliberately fetches a garbage can to throw through the window of the pizzeria, sparking a riot that ends in the building burning down.

Continue reading “How do we get from here to liberation?” →

Public Comment to the EPA on the Clean Power Plan

The folks over at 350 Silicon Valley have made a web page that explains really easily how to send a letter to the EPA regarding the Clean Power Plan (the plan to limit climate-related pollution from coal plants). Their aim is to send 1000 letters by the deadline of December 1st – and they already have almost 800!

 

November 12, 2014

To Whom It May Concern:

I support the Clean Power Plan and recommend that it be made as strong as possible.

Everything the climate science tells us is that things are worse than we thought: our impacts are greater, our limits are lower, than we thought just a few years ago.

There are several possible “tipping points” that we may cross soon regarding global warming that could make our planet toxic to most life as we know it.

It is imperative that we address climate change with drastic and immediate measures, harshly limiting the use of all fossil fuels, from coal to natural gas.

Please do everything in your power to curtail the use of fossil fuels and promote renewable, clean energy.

Sincerely,
Martin MacKerel

Zero Diesel: A Pathway to Environmental Justice and Climate Sanity

TL;DR: Diesel is bad. I’m proposing a campaign called Zero Diesel with two differentiators: 1) a focus on network effects: attempting to increase the network benefits of electric vehicles and decrease the network benefits of diesel, region by region, and 2) organizing parents of asthmatic children (with a focus on poor people of color) to use people power to force companies and government agencies to pay the costs of electrification. When necessary, we’ll engage in antagonistic action (e.g. boycotts and direct action such as blockades and interference with business as usual).

Why: Diesel is a Climate and EJ (Environmental Justice) Villain

After four decades of the Clean Air Act and the EPA, we still have 200,000 premature deaths a year in the US due to air pollution (7 million worldwide), as well as a staggering load of asthma and other health issues. One of the biggest culprits is diesel combustion, which is an outsize contributor to smog formation as well as the production of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter below 2.5 microns in size. This is absolutely tiny — by comparison, an average human hair is 70 microns in diameter. High levels of PM2.5 are linked to hospital admissions and death as well as the aggravation of asthma and other respiratory problems.

This pollution is not evenly distributed, of course. The residents of areas heavily impacted by air pollution tend to have more melanin and less money. So we end up with a situation where poor children of color are disproportionately afflicted with asthma, leading to obesity, emergency room visits, and missed school days — a cascading series of impairments on an already vulnerable population.

In addition, diesel is particularly bad for climate pollution. While it is better than gasoline in terms of CO2, it produces a lot of black carbon — one of the worst short-term contributors to global warming.

Climate and Electric Vehicles

In order to drastically reduce our emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change (“greenhouse gases”), we have to do two things: 1) electrify everything and 2) switch to clean sources of electricity. I think that #2 is actually easier than #1 — it’s easier to change a few tens of thousands of power plants than hundreds of millions of cars — and in fact #2 is well under way, due in part to financial considerations and in part to a massive grassroots movement against fossil fuels. That’s not to say that we don’t need to continue to organize and force the transition to clean energy; the market is headed in the right direction, but it won’t be fast enough on its own. But #1 is the weaker point right now.

In particular, the installed plant of over one billion automobiles worldwide poses a formidable obstacle to weaning ourselves from fossil fuels for transportation. A push for mass transit will help, but personal automobiles as well as trucks and commercial vehicles of many kinds are likely to continue to be needed for decades at least. While electric and hybrid vehicles are finally doing well in the market, they are still a small percentage of vehicles sold and a minuscule fraction of actively used vehicles. Part of the issue is that there are strong network effects: the charging network for electric vehicles (EVs) is still in its infancy while the refueling network for liquid fossil fuels is pervasive and standardized. At this juncture we need extra-market forces to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

Continue reading “Zero Diesel: A Pathway to Environmental Justice and Climate Sanity” →

A Virgin Galactic rocket exploded. Good.

It’s unfortunate that a pilot died, but it’s good that a Virgin Galactic rocket launch failed and crashed.

Virgin Galactic’s whole purpose is to start a new industry: space tourism. Many people have paid $200K and up to get a seat on a short space flight.

First of all, such luxury indulgences are obscene in a world where so many lack the most basic necessities.

But even more glaringly, we are faced by the urgency of climate change. It is criminal to invent a new industry that requires truly obscene amounts of energy based on fossil fuels at a time when we need to rapidly and drastically scale down the use of such fuels.

The Virgin Galactic program should be shut down; if Richard Branson won’t do it, governments should outlaw it. If they won’t do it, people should pressure potential customers to boycott it, and should engage in direct action to shut it down. All of the capital put into Virgin Galactic should be put into ramping up wind and solar energy and energy efficiency programs.

The crash of a Virgin Galactic rocket is a good thing for humanity as a whole.

Kinder Morgan lockdown interview and transcript

Early in the morning on Thursday, September 4th, 2014, eight people locked down to the gates of a crude-by-rail facility owned by Kinder Morgan in Richmond and prevented trucks from coming or going for three hours. Later that afternoon, two of the organizers (one of whom was me) were interviewed on Andrés Soto’s half-hour show on KPFA, in which we talked about the action, the dangers of crude-by-rail, and the context of the larger climate movement. The transcript is below.

But first, a great overview video:

Blockade the Bomb Trains! Lockdown at Kinder Morgan 4 Sept 2014 from Peter Menchini on Vimeo.

El Show de Andrés Soto on KPFA 3:30pm, Thursday, September 4th, 2014

Here’s the full audio – about half an hour.

Transcript of El Show de Andrés Soto on KPFA Thursday, September 4th, 2014

[Music and intro up to 00:38.]
Andrés: This is El Show de Andrés Soto, formerly of the Morning Mix.

Crude-by-rail. The Bay Area’s been targeted for dangerous Bakken crude deliveries to refineries throughout the Bay Area. There was an important action yesterday in Everett, Washington, to halt crude-by-rail and one this morning in Richmond. There’s also a critical court hearing in San Francisco tomorrow to stop the Kinder Morgan crude-by-rail operation in Richmond. We will speak with the key organizers of the action in Richmond today and talk about all of the events and activities, today on El Show de Andrés Soto on KPFA 94.1 FM, sometimes the people’s radio station. All of this and some very cool music.

Continue reading “Kinder Morgan lockdown interview and transcript” →

Letter to Kern County Board of Supervisors on crude-by-rail project and refinery re-opening

Apparently Kern County wants to increase crude-by-rail and re-open a refinery. That’s a horrible idea, since we need to start closing refineries and move to all clean energy, immediately. Here is my letter of comment, sent through an action page hosted by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Comment

Subject: Reject the Alon Bakerfield Project
You would do well to read California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s January 15th, 2014 letter to the City of Pittsburg, CA regarding a proposed crude-by-rail terminal there. Many of her concerns apply to this project, including:

  • the issue of cumulative emissions on an already highly-impacted community,
  • the increased and novel risks of transporting extreme crudes such as diluted tar sands bitumen and Bakken shale oil, and
  • the effects that new fossil fuel infrastructure may have on California’s ability to meet its own (legislated) greenhouse gas emissions goals.

The full letter is available at http://pittsburgdc.org/?p=655

To protect our climate and meet California’s greenhouse gas emission goals, we must not build any more fossil fuel infrastructure. Period.

Martin MacKerel

Update

The letter can be found at https://www.scribd.com/document/200688980/Letter-from-Kamala-Harris-CA-Attorney-General-to-Pittsburg-regarding-the-WesPac-EIR

What is Islamophobia?

I just had a bit of jolting experience.

I wanted to make some notes (on actual paper, for once), and I grabbed a notebook. The notebook had all kinds of random scribblings: notes about books; ideas for blog posts; to-do lists started, amended, re-written, and abandoned; German vocabulary for understanding something by Walter Benjamin; notes from a USPTO Software Patent Roundtable. I mean this thing is random. Various projects that never got off the ground over the last five years.

And I think to myself, why don’t I rip out the pages relating to the more thoroughly dead projects? As I start to do so, I stop briefly. I look down at the page. It’s got Arabic letters on it.

And I remember that one time I saw that the tiny, hole-in-the-wall mosque on my block taught weekly Arabic lessons, all levels, beginners welcome, etc. And I decided to check it out. It was a very informal affair, taught by a native speaker to a handful of students with very little knowledge of Arabic. I quickly realized that this class would progress very slowly, if at all, and said, ok, well I checked it out. And thought no more thereon.

When I paused at the page, though, it wasn’t because of this memory. It was because some tiny part in the back of my brain said, woah. Hold up. This is dangerous stuff. Might need to put that in the shredder, not the recycling. What if the feds were searching the garbage and this tidbit just elevated your KST score?

Well, it didn’t say all that. The tiny part of my brain just said “woah”. But behind the woah was a lot of forethought about danger. And although I regard the scenario as far-fetched, unfortunately it’s not as far-fetched as it used to be. (After all, we now know that the US government takes a picture of the outside of every piece of mail and that their procedures for “No Fly” lists and evaluating “Known and Suspected Terrorists” are decisively Kafka-esque.)

This is the power of state-backed Islamophobia today. It reached way into the back of my brain and planted this fear not of Muslims, but a fear of Islam as a dangerous subject, a known or suspected terrorist, a bad reputation.

When will we tire of their games? The war on Communism, the war on drugs, the war on Islam. It’d be pathetic if it didn’t have such dire human consequences.