Author Archives: Tom Lewis

Here comes our genetically engineered future.

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Mosquitoes are annoying. What is more, they carry, and infect humans with, infectious diseases — dengue, malaria, Zika and the like. Humans would be infinitely better off if all the mosquitoes were wiped out. We’ve agreed on that, and have been trying to accomplish that, for a hundred years or more. Now, at last, high technology has arrived to save us from this evil.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. 

A commercial company in Brazil (no doubt awash in grant money and dizzy with prospects for future profits) genetically altered a strain of mosquitoes with a gene they said would kill the mosquito’s offspring immediately after hatching. Released into the wild to breed with the pesky, disease-laden mosquitoes — you know,. the evil ones — the genetically mutilated insects would cause the mosquito population to plummet, and cases of Zika and dengue to virtually disappear. What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading →

Greenwashing the Wind

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On the right, a windmill of the kind used for hundred of years to do specific tasks — usually pump water — in specific locations. It was built mostly on site, using mostly renewable materials. On the left, the modern industrial version. Hold your applause.

Of all the bulls crashing about in the “renewable energy can save the world” china shop, none is more grotesque than industrial wind power. I have never come upon an array of behemoth wind turbines looming over a mountain ridge in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or elsewhere without feeling like I’ve been transported into the movie version of War of the Worlds, without expecting to see the flash and crackle of laser beams shooting down attack helicopters. The feeling of doom they inspire, it turns out, is appropriate.

To misquote Buckminster Fuller, “Industry kills what industry touches.” They take a good idea like organic food and turn it into industrial food. We get interested in living off the grid on solar energy and they give us enormous solar “farms” and a whole new grid. We think about hoisting a wind turbine above our house to help with the energy demand and they say, no, wait, we’ve got a better idea that makes a whole lot of money and sounds green. 

So they gave us wind turbines. Now we have 57,000 of them in 41 states, a number that has more than tripled in ten years. This is great, says the industry, because it’s renewable energy, not like that terrible old fossil fuel energy that polluted the air and kills the planet. But it turns out — especially now that the earliest wind turbines have reached the end of their service life and are posing one of the world’s worst recycling headaches — that the case for industrial renewables is not so great. Continue reading →

Blinded by the Light

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This is where solar power shines: providing power needed by the site, on the site, without the grid.

I remember clearly the horror I felt when the truth about the new-generation solar panels from the well known company of Solar One Illinois was revealed to me which was quite surprising to hear as it was so good. It was a field day of sorts, at a farm, during which we  were learning about a massive solar installation, sufficient to power not only the house and barns but an array of commercial freezers and refrigerators. Older solar panels required thick cables to route their 12-volt output to an inverter that changed the voltage to 110. But these new panels, we were told, each contained its own inverter and so yielded 110 volts without the need for thick cables or an external device.

It was only later, and tangentially, that the downside of this new development was revealed. Someone said something about how nice it must be to live without fear of the grid going down. The response was that well, actually, if the grid went down this enormous solar array would stop producing electricity because the solar panel’s inverters required an external power source to function. Continue reading →

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

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When they finally saw how powerful the all-powerful Wizard really was, they were really surprised.

Two revelations in the last week about the economic statistics generated by the government revealed the breathtaking scope of the lies, damn lies and statistics that have been deployed to convince the American people that their economy is healthy when it is not. Scam number one, of course, is the claim that the president “manages” the economy. All you have to do is count the variables, and if you ever finish counting, you will see how preposterous this idea is. But the idea has been sold, and so every president — and all the minions who serve him — has to maintain the fiction that he’s in charge, and everything is swell. Continue reading →

You Can Smell the Fear

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Nothing to worry about. It will all blow over. Yes, I’m sure.

The world is siding into a recession that has no visible bottom. Globalism — the genius plan for exploiting the world’s poorest people to get cheap gadgets for the world’s richest people — has failed. Consumerism — the genius idea that if you just offer people cheap gadgets and credit cards they will keep spending forever and everything will be okay — has failed. Trickle-down economics — the theory that says all will be well so long as the very rich get very richer — has failed.  Quantitative easing — the notion that if you create money from nothing and give it to large corporations so they can buy other large corporations, prosperity will ensue — has failed.

And worse than any of these things, Bernie Sanders is closer to the presidency of the United States than he has ever been.  Continue reading →

The Sublime Art of Doing Nothing About Everything

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Being lazy is easy. Doing nothing about everything is a difficult profession aka politics.

The highest achievement possible for the typical American politician is a Zen-like state in which he or she appears to be in vigorous motion doing important things,when in fact he/she is completely still, doing nothing. This became the ultimate goal of politics shortly after the Reagan Revolution convinced all Republicans, most Democrats, and most people, that government action is not a solution for anything but is in fact the problem. 

Despite the enormity of the fraud involved in demonizing all government action while benefiting greatly from most of it, one cannot help but admire the artistry of those who maintain the illusion of trying to help people while not doing anything of the kind. Continue reading →

Ethanol: Many Unhappy Returns

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In the good old days (1929, here) a gusher like this paid you over a hundred times what you put into it. Today, not so much.

In the early part of the 20th Century, when a wildcatter struck oil, he got a return on his investment of 100 to one. For every unit of energy he used to find and bring the oil to market, he got 100 units back (money is simply a token for the energy, a marker of its value). On that EROI — energy return on energy invested — of 100:1, more than on any other single thing, rests the advent of the Industrial Age and the American Empire. When we discovered oil we won the lottery, a lump sum payment of enough cheap energy to do whatever we wanted to do, until it ran out. 

It hasn’t quite run out yet, but something else almost as serious has happened. Today, when an oil company extracts shale oil from rock by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) the EROI is five to one, one twentieth of what it used to be. From a well that costs many multiples of a standard oil well to build and operate, and that will be depleted in three years instead of the traditional 20 or more. This set of facts, more than any other, explains why the Industrial Age and the American Empire are in their final throes.   Continue reading →

Putting Lipstick on the Dow

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The day the Plunge Protection Team slept in: February 5, 2018, the worst day in stock market history.

You and I are not among those who think the soaring American stock market, whose Dow Jones Industrial Index just reached a new all-time high, signifies a soaring American economy. Like everything else Trump says, that is clearly a lie. You and I are aware that the stock market has become the favored casino of the One Percent, where they gamble with their unearned wealth, intent on getting more.

Meanwhile back in the real world:

  • When you add up all the profits of all the corporations in America for the past year, there aren’t any. As a group, they have been losing money for over a year;
  • retail store closings are expected to hit 12,000 by the end of this year, 50 per cent more than the previous record set two years ago;
  • global trade is slowing precipitously, while global debt is rising calamitously;
  • the stock-trading desks at the global mega-banks have had their worst half-year in a decade (and that is much of what banks do to make money these days — roll the dice in the Big Casino. Making loans to productive businesses is, like paying taxes, for the little people);
  • stocks are, by any rational measure, hideously over-priced and are being bought primarily by companies buying their own stock so that their earnings per share continue to rise even as their earnings continue to fall. 

Continue reading →

Don’t Say Anything, But We’re Losing This War

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A house teeters on the edge of an eroding cliff in San Clemente, California. The sea will take this house, and thousands more, but we can’t talk about it.

The summer of 1942 was a special time in the modern history of the United States because for several months both coasts were under armed attack by hostile powers. German U-Boats were sinking Allied ships within sight of the Florida and Carolina coasts, wreckage and the bodies of dead sailors were constantly washing ashore. In June, Japanese forces invaded two islands in the Aleutian chain off the coast of Alaska, which they occupied for almost a year.

In the summer of 2019, both coasts of the United States are under attack by a hostile force far more formidable than Japan and Germany in the 1940s, one that is winning every pitched battle, while the leaders of the Federal government and of many states insist that the enemy does not exist. Continue reading →

The Next Worst Thing Yet: Facial Recognition

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Law enforcement and security forces around the world, as well as operators of airports and commercial buildings, are racing headlong for bragging rights for having deployed facial recognition technology to try to  spot bad guys and confirm IDs in all kinds of situations. From the FBI to ICE to several big-city PDs, agents have been caught trolling through drivers-licence files with software designed to identify illegal immigrants, wanted criminals, and other miscreants. 

It’s another huge and successful con, perpetrated by marketers of cameras and software on an endlessly gullible audience who want desperately to believe that artificial intelligence is not artificial, that machine learning is real learning, that robots can do everything humans can do only better. The inconvenient truth is that facial recognition does not work. Continue reading →