Organizing big numbers post-pandemic is the biggest challenge and will require a lot of creativity and energy - mostly from the under 30's. There were years before 1941 when most of the US ignored the war in Europe. Churchill said the Americans always do the right thing -- after they try everything else. Then the mobilization started at the scale needed to deal with the challenge. Maybe it won't take a Pearl Harbor to get it going. In the meantime it feels like the lobster in the warming pot.
> For one thing, Biden is clearly going in the wrong direction on federal oil and gas leasing. Many called that out. In November, the administration held a record-breaking sale of oil and gas leases in Gulf of Mexico waters twice the size of Florida. Potential impact was up to 600 million tons of climate pollution. The administration claimed a court order mandated it, but that was contradicted by its own internal analysis. In January, a federal judge threw out the leases because the administration did not consider the climate impacts.
Trump's Final Offshore Lease Shows Gulf of Mexico’s Long Future (Nov. 2020)
The US Oil Rig Count measures the number of oil rigs functioning in the United States. This indicator is important to track because it can give an idea of how much oil production is occuring. Historically, US Oil Rigs peaked in late 2014. The total number of oil rigs reached as high as 1609 before being cut to just 325 within 2 years.
US Oil Rig Count is at a current level of 497.00, up from 495.00 last week and up from 295.00 one year ago. This is a change of 0.40% from last week and 68.47% from one year ago.
he federal court ruling throwing out the leases came after all this. As I wrote, the judge said the administration needed to review the climate impacts. Story linked.
Private industry innovates; government regulates. Political feasibility always follows, never leads. It seems the pointy end of change will come from the innovators. Activism is vital in framing the understanding for change, but it also seems to create antagonisms the status quo simply pushes back against, resulting in resistance disguised as incremental change. Fund and support the innovators, market the solutions, and by-pass the fight.
It is a myth that government is not a source of fundamental innovation. The fundamentals of digital computing were the direct result of public research, from UK and US efforts during WWII. Eniac, the first digital computer, was done on a War Department contract to UPenna. The first internet was created by DARPA to link research universities. Much private innovation is on government contract. IBM’s successful 360 mainframe was developed based on earlier USAF contracts to create an air defense computer. The microchip contracts to Fairchild and Texas Instruments in the 1960s were the origin of the later PC revolution. Intel originates with Fairchild. Boeing developed the first successful jetliner on the same airframe as the KC-135 air tanker. SpaceX and Blue Origin ride off work done by the USAF and NASA st places such as the Marshall Space Center. Today’s solar and wind revolutions originated with the Carter Administration energy initiatives, and research continues at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which came out of those efforts. Even today, much of the work on pharma in general and Covid vaccines in particular is done by NIH and at universities under public contract.
Meanwhile, social and political innovation is very much a product of activism. As I wrote previously - That we have anything approaching a democracy in the U.S. can be credited to people working in popular movements. Senators are no longer appointed by state legislatures, but elected by a vote of the people, thanks to the populist and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. The suffrage movement gained women the right to vote. That took until 1920 to achieve nationally. Most Blacks could not vote in the South until the 1960s, after a hard struggle by civil rights workers on the ground, a number of whom lost their lives in the process.
Similarly, we would not have even our limited social safety net, most of which dates to the 1930s, without the advocacy of socialists and labor groups. Protections for labor organizing, also dating to the 1930s, were won by labor struggle in factories, on rail lines, and in city streets. Environmental struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s gained us legislation for clean air, clean water, and wilderness and species preservation.
In other words, most of what is decent in the U.S. was won by people organizing for change. If the ruling powers had their way, we would still live in a land where only white men could vote, the unemployed and elderly had to fend for themselves, labor had no right to form unions, and corporations were completely (rather than only partially) free to make rivers and the air open sewers. That is only a selection of many instances that could be cited. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States provides an encyclopedic record. Courageous and committed people joining together in common cause made the difference. https://theraven.substack.com/p/preparing-for-a-season-in-the-political?utm_source=url
Thank you, Patrick, for your patient and insightful response - however churlish I may have seemed. As you so rightly point out, activism is the seed of innovation. And governments actually can implement change for the public good. Your catalog of examples is a case in point. Solutions emerge where previously an absence or deficiency was detected. My concern of late stems from the magnitude of those deficiencies and the incumbent power structures arrayed against meaningful solutions.
Incrementalism is valuable when prototyping, but it rankles when it is the outcome of push back from those solely resistant to change. Luddites and the principal beneficiaries of the status quo. Political compromise tied to political survival and election cycles seems so trivial in the face of the fundamental issues in need of attention. Public service should be serving the public good regardless of the political implications. The opposite being the case (for obvious reasons of efficacy) is behind my support of private over public solutions. Public would be my preference, but private is potentially more agile. This, in the face of our current urgencies.
Many of the examples of social change you cite seem to persist in an interminable state of incrementalism - in some cases, moving through retrograde phases. The world is peppered with charters of rights and freedoms; yet, the "right" they profess is so often swatted down as wrong. And the debate continues for some reason. The charters devolve to drafts if not upheld.
So, is this accurate? Why is it taking centuries to standardize human equality? Why are the decades flying by in the quest to replace the fossil fuel economy? My biggest beef with the public arena is the devotion to incrementalism when it comes to previously settled arguments. I guess the answer is, because they are not really settled.
The observation of many technical and social innovations is that when picked up by the masses, the change can be fundamental and profound. All the better when the change is actually beneficial. I have also observed how research and development can result in solutions that find utility completely unintended by the developers. Build it and they will appropriate it. A well-worn example of this was the VCR that instead of being used to time shift broadcast TV viewing resulted in the local video rental store. Put innovation into the hands of the public, and good things can happen - organically and quickly.
I respect and honour the courage and commitment of people joining together in common cause - all too often under the threat to life and limb. I wonder, however, can fundamental change happen without taking to the barricades?
The powers arrayed against the level of change we need are imposing, and sometimes seem insurmountable. But so much is shaped by the public sphere we cannot resort to private solutions alone. The public sphere creates much of the infrastructure that we must change.
Transportation is a key example. As long as the government is expanding roads, it will drive sprawl, militating against non-auto alternatives. To an extent we can reduce climate pollution with electric vehicles, the private answer, but we need electric buses and bikes as well, and communities scaled to be walkable and bike-friendly. Roads and sprawl defeat that. Today we are seeing rapid advances in solar and wind, but they would not have happened without the public research I cited, and supports such as tax credits that overcome the lock-in and subsidies of fossil fuels. Solar and wind are now moving beyond the need for public subsidies, because public initiative provided the groundwork.
The public arena is tied up in interest. That is why people power is needed to overcome it. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both." It's can be painfully slow, and often suffers reverses. But we can't do without it.
I applaud the work you are doing to foster innovation. I think what we need is a combination of public and private. It's synergistic. Once the public sphere has created the platform, then private innovation can take off. (I happen to have taken part in organizing one of the first conferences on Earth aimed at getting information technology investors interested in clean energy investments, in Seattle in 2000, when you could barely get IT people to think about energy. In my wildest imaginations I could not have foreseen the investments by people like Gates and Bezos.) But if we don't address the public arena, and the way it shapes infrastructures and markets, the ability of private innovation to address problems will be severely constrained by the lock-in of existing systems and interests. Of course, there are issues such as police brutality that are so much in the public sphere that this is where they must be handled.
Organizing big numbers post-pandemic is the biggest challenge and will require a lot of creativity and energy - mostly from the under 30's. There were years before 1941 when most of the US ignored the war in Europe. Churchill said the Americans always do the right thing -- after they try everything else. Then the mobilization started at the scale needed to deal with the challenge. Maybe it won't take a Pearl Harbor to get it going. In the meantime it feels like the lobster in the warming pot.
> For one thing, Biden is clearly going in the wrong direction on federal oil and gas leasing. Many called that out. In November, the administration held a record-breaking sale of oil and gas leases in Gulf of Mexico waters twice the size of Florida. Potential impact was up to 600 million tons of climate pollution. The administration claimed a court order mandated it, but that was contradicted by its own internal analysis. In January, a federal judge threw out the leases because the administration did not consider the climate impacts.
Trump's Final Offshore Lease Shows Gulf of Mexico’s Long Future (Nov. 2020)
https://channel16.dryadglobal.com/trumps-final-offshore-lease-shows-gulf-of-mexicos-long-future
14 GOP state attorneys general sue Biden administration over oil and gas leasing moratorium
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/14-states-sue-biden-administration-over-oil-and-gas-leasing-moratorium.html
US to resume oil leasing after judge rules against ban
https://www.offshore-technology.com/news/industry-news/us-oil-leasing-resumes-court-order-biden-ban/
Yet the rig counts are down
The US Oil Rig Count measures the number of oil rigs functioning in the United States. This indicator is important to track because it can give an idea of how much oil production is occuring. Historically, US Oil Rigs peaked in late 2014. The total number of oil rigs reached as high as 1609 before being cut to just 325 within 2 years.
US Oil Rig Count is at a current level of 497.00, up from 495.00 last week and up from 295.00 one year ago. This is a change of 0.40% from last week and 68.47% from one year ago.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_rotary_rigs#:~:text=The%20US%20Oil%20Rig,from%20one%20year%20ago.
Drilling may be down but it’s coming back. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/u-s-oil-output-won-t-reach-pre-covid-high-until-2023-esai-says
he federal court ruling throwing out the leases came after all this. As I wrote, the judge said the administration needed to review the climate impacts. Story linked.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1076281662/federal-judge-canceled-gulf-oil-and-gas-leases-climate-change
Private industry innovates; government regulates. Political feasibility always follows, never leads. It seems the pointy end of change will come from the innovators. Activism is vital in framing the understanding for change, but it also seems to create antagonisms the status quo simply pushes back against, resulting in resistance disguised as incremental change. Fund and support the innovators, market the solutions, and by-pass the fight.
It is a myth that government is not a source of fundamental innovation. The fundamentals of digital computing were the direct result of public research, from UK and US efforts during WWII. Eniac, the first digital computer, was done on a War Department contract to UPenna. The first internet was created by DARPA to link research universities. Much private innovation is on government contract. IBM’s successful 360 mainframe was developed based on earlier USAF contracts to create an air defense computer. The microchip contracts to Fairchild and Texas Instruments in the 1960s were the origin of the later PC revolution. Intel originates with Fairchild. Boeing developed the first successful jetliner on the same airframe as the KC-135 air tanker. SpaceX and Blue Origin ride off work done by the USAF and NASA st places such as the Marshall Space Center. Today’s solar and wind revolutions originated with the Carter Administration energy initiatives, and research continues at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which came out of those efforts. Even today, much of the work on pharma in general and Covid vaccines in particular is done by NIH and at universities under public contract.
Meanwhile, social and political innovation is very much a product of activism. As I wrote previously - That we have anything approaching a democracy in the U.S. can be credited to people working in popular movements. Senators are no longer appointed by state legislatures, but elected by a vote of the people, thanks to the populist and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. The suffrage movement gained women the right to vote. That took until 1920 to achieve nationally. Most Blacks could not vote in the South until the 1960s, after a hard struggle by civil rights workers on the ground, a number of whom lost their lives in the process.
Similarly, we would not have even our limited social safety net, most of which dates to the 1930s, without the advocacy of socialists and labor groups. Protections for labor organizing, also dating to the 1930s, were won by labor struggle in factories, on rail lines, and in city streets. Environmental struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s gained us legislation for clean air, clean water, and wilderness and species preservation.
In other words, most of what is decent in the U.S. was won by people organizing for change. If the ruling powers had their way, we would still live in a land where only white men could vote, the unemployed and elderly had to fend for themselves, labor had no right to form unions, and corporations were completely (rather than only partially) free to make rivers and the air open sewers. That is only a selection of many instances that could be cited. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States provides an encyclopedic record. Courageous and committed people joining together in common cause made the difference. https://theraven.substack.com/p/preparing-for-a-season-in-the-political?utm_source=url
Thank you, Patrick, for your patient and insightful response - however churlish I may have seemed. As you so rightly point out, activism is the seed of innovation. And governments actually can implement change for the public good. Your catalog of examples is a case in point. Solutions emerge where previously an absence or deficiency was detected. My concern of late stems from the magnitude of those deficiencies and the incumbent power structures arrayed against meaningful solutions.
Incrementalism is valuable when prototyping, but it rankles when it is the outcome of push back from those solely resistant to change. Luddites and the principal beneficiaries of the status quo. Political compromise tied to political survival and election cycles seems so trivial in the face of the fundamental issues in need of attention. Public service should be serving the public good regardless of the political implications. The opposite being the case (for obvious reasons of efficacy) is behind my support of private over public solutions. Public would be my preference, but private is potentially more agile. This, in the face of our current urgencies.
Many of the examples of social change you cite seem to persist in an interminable state of incrementalism - in some cases, moving through retrograde phases. The world is peppered with charters of rights and freedoms; yet, the "right" they profess is so often swatted down as wrong. And the debate continues for some reason. The charters devolve to drafts if not upheld.
So, is this accurate? Why is it taking centuries to standardize human equality? Why are the decades flying by in the quest to replace the fossil fuel economy? My biggest beef with the public arena is the devotion to incrementalism when it comes to previously settled arguments. I guess the answer is, because they are not really settled.
The observation of many technical and social innovations is that when picked up by the masses, the change can be fundamental and profound. All the better when the change is actually beneficial. I have also observed how research and development can result in solutions that find utility completely unintended by the developers. Build it and they will appropriate it. A well-worn example of this was the VCR that instead of being used to time shift broadcast TV viewing resulted in the local video rental store. Put innovation into the hands of the public, and good things can happen - organically and quickly.
I respect and honour the courage and commitment of people joining together in common cause - all too often under the threat to life and limb. I wonder, however, can fundamental change happen without taking to the barricades?
The powers arrayed against the level of change we need are imposing, and sometimes seem insurmountable. But so much is shaped by the public sphere we cannot resort to private solutions alone. The public sphere creates much of the infrastructure that we must change.
Transportation is a key example. As long as the government is expanding roads, it will drive sprawl, militating against non-auto alternatives. To an extent we can reduce climate pollution with electric vehicles, the private answer, but we need electric buses and bikes as well, and communities scaled to be walkable and bike-friendly. Roads and sprawl defeat that. Today we are seeing rapid advances in solar and wind, but they would not have happened without the public research I cited, and supports such as tax credits that overcome the lock-in and subsidies of fossil fuels. Solar and wind are now moving beyond the need for public subsidies, because public initiative provided the groundwork.
The public arena is tied up in interest. That is why people power is needed to overcome it. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both." It's can be painfully slow, and often suffers reverses. But we can't do without it.
I applaud the work you are doing to foster innovation. I think what we need is a combination of public and private. It's synergistic. Once the public sphere has created the platform, then private innovation can take off. (I happen to have taken part in organizing one of the first conferences on Earth aimed at getting information technology investors interested in clean energy investments, in Seattle in 2000, when you could barely get IT people to think about energy. In my wildest imaginations I could not have foreseen the investments by people like Gates and Bezos.) But if we don't address the public arena, and the way it shapes infrastructures and markets, the ability of private innovation to address problems will be severely constrained by the lock-in of existing systems and interests. Of course, there are issues such as police brutality that are so much in the public sphere that this is where they must be handled.