Author Archives: Tom Lewis

Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye

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Dear Bernie:

For the record, for what it’s worth, I never thought that you could save the world. That would have been far too heavy a burden to lay on you. But I did think that a government led by you might provide some palliative care as the industrial world continues its inexorable, slow-moving crash. Now it looks like we’re not even going to get that.

And the thing is, man, you almost did it. Four years ago you showed us how an individual candidate could take big money out of presidential politics and run a credible race on small donations. Before you did it, there wasn’t a political person on the planet who thought it was possible. Freed from the constraints of the oligarchs, you advanced policies that actually would have helped ordinary people, at the expense of the morbidly wealthy. Continue reading →

Wind Energy Coming to a Bad End

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Mr. Damocles, please go to the nearest courtesy phone. We found your sword. (Des Moines Register photo)

The reason that industrialism kills whatever industrialism touches is that it has only one answer to every question, one solution for every problem: scale it up! Get big or get out! But as I and many others have been pointing out for years, the economies of scale sought by industries are always accompanied by a dark twin: concentration of risk. The bigger the manufacturing plant, the lower its unit costs of production, but also the greater the pollution emitted, the denser the traffic generated in a small area, etcetera. The other thing to remember about these penalties of industrialism if that many of them are deferred. By the time the full effect of the pollution is felt, the owners of the factory have grown rich, sold out and retired. 

This is what is now happening to the wind-generation industry. The first of the giant wind turbines erected are reaching the end of their service life — much sooner than anticipated — and it turns out, nobody worked up a plan for that. The school-bus sized nacelles and generators can be refurbished or their steel recycled, but the vanes are another matter. They are too big to die.

The blades have been increasing in size since the first of them went up circa 1985, but to pick a median size, a 200-foot blade contains nearly 19 tons of epoxy, fiberglass, PVC foam, wood fiber and other stuff. That’s almost 60 tons of stuff (per turbine) that can’t be crushed or recycled or composted. So what do you do with it? Take it to your friendly neighborhood landfill.  

If this strikes you as a small problem, let it strike you again. First of all, the blades were expected to outlast the turbines, which were expected to last at least 20 years. But the units are barely making 15 years, the blades failing because of manufacturing defects (mostly), lightning strikes, and unusual local wind conditions. So they have to come down. Continue reading →

The Road to Driverless Hell is Paved with Good Deceptions

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The driverless car, like the unicorn, is often described, even portrayed, but seldom ridden.

Eric Adams, writing about this subject on TheDrive.com, startled me the other day by pointing out that five years ago, nobody was talking about driverless cars. But then the huddled masses rose up as one and demanded universal driverless cars as a fundamental human right.

Um, no, that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Big Tech and Big Auto, seeing massive global declines in sales of, and interest in, their products, decided that the way to convince future consumers to go into debt for something they don’t really need was — ta-da! — the driverless car. They also concluded — and in this they were absolutely right — that any company that could create a little buzz about their prospects for making driverless cars would have firehoses of cash turned their way by wealth managers, hedge funds and the like. Continue reading →

New Rules for Old Words in 2020

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In this country, no one is above the lexicon laws. And I say what the laws are. Well. On this blog, anyway. And I have decreed some new lexicon laws for 2020. They apply to anyone who discusses politics henceforth, and all fines are tripled for those who get paid to talk politics on cable TV — now about one quarter of the adult population. 

The following words and phrases are banned, and shall no longer be uttered:

    • Electability. This is not a thing, it does not exist. To say someone is electable is like saying they live a charmed life, just before they get run over by a truck. The person said to have the most electability in the civilized world in 2016 was Hillary, and the man with the least was the Donald. The only way to know if a person is electable is to count the votes, after which the person is either elected, or not.  Never speak this word again.

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Who Deserves to Die? And Who Gets to Decide?

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The murder of another human being is forbidden by every religion and outlawed by just about every civilization in the history of the world. “Thou shalt not kill” is supposed to be non-negotiable. Of course we’ve been negotiating it forever.

There’s the “just war” tradition, a long series of awkward arguments to the effect that a soldier can slaughter thousands without a technical violation of the commandment, so long as the war was declared for good reasons by morally superior people — which of course we had, and are, and they didn’t, and aren’t. 

British imperial forces in 18th-Century America sanitized their souls with the doctrine that firing a volley in the general direction of an enemy force that was lined up and firing at you — and that was how everybody was supposed to fight — did not constitute murder, should you actually hit someone. But when Indians and frontiersman began shooting at the British from behind cover, requiring the soldiers to actually aim their weapons at individuals — well, that required a whole new series of ethical gymnastics. Continue reading →

Back to the (Hunter-Gatherer) Future

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Why is this guy smiling? Because if he lived before agriculture, he had a bigger brain and a better life than you do.

Every passing day, it seems, more evidence comes to light that agriculture is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Not only industrial agriculture, but agriculture itself. The story we tell ourselves is that we were savages stumbling around the jungle being eaten by tigers when we learned how to plow, and civilization ensued, with all its benefits. Because of agriculture, we tell ourselves, we ate better, lived longer, flourished, and humankind ascended to the pinnacle of evolution. The story makes us smile and feel good about ourselves, and like most such stories, it’s a lie.

We have learned much in recent years about who we were before we were farmers. For 300,000 years we were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small bands of a few dozen each. We “remember” our long-ago lives as “nasty, brutish and short,” and “red in fang and claw.” We tell each other that such people lived only to about 25 years of age, but that’s a corruption of the concept of “average”: if they survived infancy, they could count on living well into their 60s. We envision lives of endless, backbreaking labor just to stay alive, when in fact recent studies estimate that hunter-gatherers needed only 24 hours a week or so of modest effort to do everything required to supply their basic needs of food, water, shelter and clothing. (Offer that deal to a present-day warehouse worker or lawyer and see if they would take it.) We were healthy — our bodies and our brains increased steadily in size over the generations. Continue reading →

T-Mobile and the 5G Con

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Can you hear me now? No? If that’s a 5G phone, come closer.

All television ads annoy me, some infuriate me, but the one they started airing a couple weeks ago induced hyperventilation. It was T-Mobile, announcing their inauguration of the country’s first and only 5G cellphone network. In took this personally because I have said repeatedly here that this was never gonna happen. Was I (gasp) wrong? Or are they lying? You want three guesses?

As it has been hyped for lo, these many months, 5G (or fifth generation, aka the Next Big Thing) cell phones use extremely high frequency radio waves, called “millimeter waves” that permit data to be transferred at extremely high rates of speed. There is no evidence at all that the downtrodden masses are crying out for more smartphone bandwidth with which to watch kitten on Facebook, but the marketers are convinced they can make us want it, and spend heavily to get it.

The marketers are desperate. Global sales of smartphones have been declining for a year and a half (there was a slight upward tick in Q4 2019) despite blandishments including three (count ‘em three!!) cameras per phone, foldable screens (that break almost immediately) and bigger batteries. No? Okay, how about 5G? Continue reading →

Invasion of the Zombie Books

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A book does not have to be about zombies to be a zombie book. Let me explain.

Okay, this probably has nothing to do with the crash of the industrial age, but it sure has something to do with the rot in our culture. I refer to the practice of book publishers who bring a long-dead best-selling author partially back to life by hiring someone to keep writing in the style of the deceased, so they can keep the cash registers going ka-chink. The book stores and sites are stuffed with “Robert B. Parker’s” new Spencer novels and “Tom Clamcy’s” latest military-industrial-complex romps, despite the fact that both men have long gone to their reward. 

Of course there’s nothing new about publishers and writers trying to guarantee bestsellerdom in advance. They want all book sales to be way above normal. I had several college friends in English Lit who analyzed best sellers — number of pages, number of sex scenes, number of pages between sex scenes, length of car chases, etc. — in order to design a best-seller template. Oddly I have never seen any of their names on any best-seller list.  Continue reading →

Where Farming is Booming BECAUSE of Global Warming

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Wait, what? A renaissance in agriculture, here?

Most stories about climate change and agriculture are about the destruction of crops by droughts and floods and storms and plagues of migrating insects. But there is a place, in America, where agriculture of the right kind — small-scale, diverse, regenerative, low-impact — is flourishing because of global warming. Of all places, it’s Alaska.

The number of farms in Alaska increased by 30% between 2012 and 2017, while the total number of farms in America declined. Most of that growth was in small farms of nine acres or less. And in that same time period the value of farm products sold directly to consumers doubled, to $4.4 million. Warming temperatures (Anchorage experienced 90 degrees Fahrenheit last summer for the first time ever) and longer growing seasons (by 45% since 1900 in Fairbanks) have opened the way for growing plants that could not have survived there before.   Continue reading →

Cuba: Still Sustainable After All These Years

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Faced with a choice between growing food and playing soccer on this field, Cubans showed us what we all are going to have to do pretty soon.

Last month, EcoWatch ran an article on urban farming in Cuba, holding the practice up as a way to feed cities and countries that find themselves in deep crisis, as Cuba did in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Deprived overnight of its primary source of food and energy imports, and its primary customer for its sugar cane exports, the country faced starvation. The people began to grow food without benefit of fuel, chemical sprays and fertilizer, because they didn’t have any fuel, chemicals or fertilizer. They began to grow food in backyards and on sports fields because they had no way to transport food to distant markets. And they made it work. 

I’m bringing this to your attention now for two reasons. Okay, three. One, it’s interesting. Two, it gives me a chance to point out that I wrote about this five years ago, in an article titled “The World’s Most Sustainable Country: What? Cuba?” And three, it gives me a chance to ask for your help in solving a mystery that is driving me nuts. Continue reading →