Tom’s Blue-Green World

In the United States, it appears to be standard police policy to deliver punishment without due process to exactly one class of civil or criminal transgressors: peaceful protestors. Though some protestors, but not all, have been engaged in civil disobedience, it should not matter.  If someone is engaging in civil disobedience, they can and should be arrested.  There is no reason to cause pain before arrest, and anyone caught punishing peaceful protesters should be subject to jail time.

There’s even a 2005 precedent against the use of pepper spray on non-violent protestors:

San Francisco — An eight-person federal jury returned a unanimous verdict for the Q-Tip Pepper Spray Eight activists/plaintiffs, finding the County of Humboldt and City of Eureka liable for excessive force in violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies and Eureka Police Officers used unconstitutional excessive force when they applied pepper spray with Q-tips directly to the eyes of the eight nonviolent forest defense protesters in three incidents in 1997. Three of the activists were also sprayed directly in the eyes from inches away. Two of the young women were juveniles, aged 16 and 17.
[...]

They hope and expect that the verdict will reverberate far beyond rural Humboldt County to make it clear that police can not use the extremely painful pepper spray on non-violent people to coerce them to follow orders.

It seems their hopes have been dashed as police across the country have conveniently forgotten this precedent.

To put this into perspective, police did not tear gas Enron’s boardroom before arresting Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay.  They didn’t pepper spray Scooter Libby after his indictment for perjury, nor did they hit Rajat Gupta with batons before arresting him for insider trading.  These comparison may seem ridiculous, but even murder and rape suspects aren’t subjected to pain before arrest: why are non-violent protestors treated differently?

Look at all these nonthreatening postures and situations:

* Protestors sitting down, heads bowed, being sprayed at point-blank range, while the officer doesn’t even bother to lower his safety visor.  Note this was done before attempting arrest (full video):

A protestor is shot at point blank range, right in the face, while her arms are behind her back:

4’10″ and 84 years old:

Dozens of US citizens in the past few days have ended up in the hospital after exposure to pepper spray, including a pregnant woman.    There’s a reason that pepper spray is considered a “less than lethal” chemical weapon: people can die from anaphylactic shock.  Additionally, the contents and propellents used are toxic and/or carcinogenic, especially in higher doses:

“If an officer is faced with a situation in which his life is at stake, it makes sense to respond in a way that will leave both people alive,” says Lew Pepper, a physician at the Boston University School of Public Health. “But there is no justification for use of toxic and potentially cancer-causing agents for crowd control for civil disobedience. There are better ways to deal with political speech.”

In addition to pepper spray, there are other less-than-lethal weapons also being misused against non-violent protestors.  For example, Scott Campbell, a photographer in Oakland, was punitively shot with a rubber bullet while obviously posing no hazard to the assembled officers.  He has filed suit against the Oakland PD with the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mark my words: not only is the use of “less than lethal” weapons on non-violent protestors outrageously bad policy, but there will be lawsuits that cost taxpayers millions of dollars.  So far, the only excessive force case that has approached resolution is against NYPD Sargent Bologna, who lost 10 vacation days for pepper spraying four women in September, though the victims are still trying to get criminal charges brought against him.

The only bright light I see is in historical precedents, which tends to overwhelming come down on the side of non-violent protestors engaged in civil disobedience.  Remember a small, frail man named Ghandi that received numerous beatings, but eventually led mass acts of civil disobedience that drove the most powerful empire into submission? That is one precedent that protestors may want to keep in mind.

Ignoring the environmental risk issues, there’s also a financial argument to be made against nuclear power, and it’s what convinces me that nuclear is not where we should be putting our money. I’m a fan of Amory Lovins, who wrote this anti-nuke article that appeared in “Nuclear Engineering International” – talk about being in the belly of the beast!

Basically, nuclear reactors cost too much and have excessive financial risk when compared to distributed micropower (like wind, solar thermal, solar electric, etc). A new nuclear plant involves significant risks over time, from permitting issues to environmental issues, as well as a lead time measured in decades before power is generated. In contrast, distributed micropower is usually up and running in 1-5 years, with far fewer hassles than nuclear.

Mr. Lovins also makes the point that the market has already decided to invest in micropower rather than nuclear, and is adding more than ten times as much global capacity per year. In addition to being much cheaper, they provide more climate solution per dollar and per year than money spent towards “good” nuclear power plants. Why put money down on a solution that might be working in 10-20 years (nuclear), when you can invest in something that will be working in 3-5 years (wind, solar)?

This isn’t just theory: it’s happening now, and investors are voting with their wallets. Wind power capacity in the US has been growing by about 30% annually, but in 2008 it grew by 50%, accounting for 42% of all new US power capacity in 2008. In China, installed wind power doubled from 2006 to 2007, and again from 2007 to 2008.

Wind is still only 1.3% of world capacity, but by 2020, I expect that number to be 5-10%. Even if a ground is broken on a new nuclear power plant in the US, it is unlikely to even be online in 2020 after winding it’s way through the appeals courts process.

A relatively long article from 2003 about social networking I recently re-discovered:

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

My biggest takeaway from the article is “You can not separate technical and social issues”.  On one level, this is an obvious statement – of course the existence of the telegraph or email will change how people interact – but looking a bit deeper, it’s less obvious that the minute details of the medium will control how people interact within the system.  There are sometimes ways for users to modify the system to their needs, such as the user-led use of the “#” convention on twitter, but even this example relied on the search function being able to search using pound signs.

“You can not separate technical and social issues”  appears to be a general rule.  Not only does this apply to social networking, but it also applies to architecture and lawmaking.  “A Pattern Language” does a good job describing how people interact depending on the details of physical setting and surroundings.  Similarly, the details in the Constitution about the US House and US Senate are the reason the Senate is the more deliberative body.

In all these cases, the technical and social issues are intertwined, and understanding this concept can save a lot of heartache when trying to figure out why a group of online users are not behaving like you were expecting.  The details can have unintended consequences, and the devil is, as always, in the details.

This is the work of local artist Alex Zecca, who “managed to get all the way from Presidio to Grant” on before police pulled up with sirens and lights, and made him remove all the stickers, restoring Bush street.  Heh.

The mood here in San Francisco is bright and smiling.  Just a couple of blocks from my house, revelers took over a section of Valencia street until the wee hours, setting off fireworks and singing the national anthem, and for once, without a trace of irony!

Obama’s win has put me into a reflective mood, thinking about how crushed I was in 2004, and feeling like a weight has been removed from my shoulders now that someone is headed to the White House that I can presume good faith with.

It also has me thinking about the minor role I’ve played in the national electoral landscape, mostly done under various online pseudonyms.  I’m happy that I was able to contribute to this historic win, and in measurable ways besides just financial support to progressive democrats.  However, I want more, and I’m trying to figure out what that means.

Now that Democrats have a trifecta, the hard work begins tomorrow of attempting to influence governance in a progressive direction, rather than just playing electoral politics.  I’m sure Obama will disappoint progressives over and over and over during his presidency, but for now, I’m savoring the moment, and enjoying the political art.

A new refinery by Hunton’s has been announced, it it is said that “All of the carbon dioxide will be captured and sold to the oil and gas industry for enhanced oil field production”.

Capturing the carbon dioxide must make sense for economic reasons to Hunton’s, but just imagine: if there was a tax on carbon emissions, even a small one, how many innovations would spring into use?  Right now, there’s no reason for a profit-seeking business to capture carbon if there is any associated cost, which has to change if we’re going to address the challenge of climate change. Regulations really can work for the greater good, honest!

On a related note, there’s a lot of noise in the press about biodiesel and ethanol having a poor energy balance, sometimes reported as “taking more power to make than you get out of it”.  What’s been ignored is just how much power it takes to refine oil into a usable product (with the notable exception of Canadian coal sands, where it takes 4 barrels of oil to get 5 barrels out).  The power needed to recover and refine oil is already enormous, and it’s rising as the oil that is recovered these days comes more often from marginal fields, as well as from fields that yield heavier products.  Also, as fields are aging, the field overhead combined with declining production means more power per barrel is being used. Improving the energy balance of fossil fuels with modern refineries (like Hunton’s) is one place where the majors could, and should, be investing.

Before the chemical fertilizer industry took over, people collected pigeon droppings in Iran using pigeon towers.  If you’re going to have pigeons around anyway, might as well make them work for you! The thousands of stoops inside the tower are arranged so that all the droppings go to the floor, making them easy to collect.

More pictures (and h/t) to Dark Roasted Blend

This essay by Devilstower is a great tie-it-all together essay connecting the S&L bailout, the Enron debacle, and the current sub-prime mortgage crisis.  In short, deregulation of an industry was followed by a meltdown in the same industry in less than a decade.

As he points out, Goldfinger (from James Bond) said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action.” The deregulators, including McCain, leave taxpayers on the line yet again for hundreds of billions of dollars, and it’s hard to believe it’s any sort of accident.

The longer oil stays above $100/barrel, the more alt. energy schemes like this will be able to come to fruition.  Right now it is just a theory, with a pilot plant in “18-24 months”, but it is representative of many potential localized solutions to the energy crisis.

“CETO technology involves attaching submerged buoys to seabed pump units. The buoys move in time with the ocean and as they do the pumps deliver sea water at pressure ashore via a pipeline. The water under pressure then drives hydro turbines which generates the electricity.”

From Renewable Energy Dev

With all of the horserace articles and posts clogging up the intertubes, I thought I’d highlight some info-filled profiles I read recently.

First is a NY Times article on Palin based on interviews with over 60 people that worked with her over the years.

Secondly is a SF Chronicle article on Obama that also interviews many people he came into contact with over the years.  People are decidedly more impressed with his intellect and character than those that came into contact with Palin.

Earlier this week, I received a copy of Lyle Estill’s most recent book, “small is possible: life in a local economy” (Amazon link). He is a local businessman that also serves as the primary scribe for a community of people in Chatham County, North Carolina, that are big into the localism movement.

In his book, he’s not advocating just local fuel, or just local food, but local almost _everything_. The Part II chapter headings say a lot about the book as he talks of what can be done locally:

• connecting ourselves
• feeding ourselves
• housing ourselves
• fueling ourselves
• financing ourselves
• educating ourselves
• entertaining ourselves
• healing ourselves
• governing ourselves.

I wrote about Lyle and his community in a trip report after my ex-girlfriend and I drove 4000 miles, visiting many different biodiesel plants across the country.  Quite unexpectedly, in the introduction of his book, he called me a “current-day Alexis de Tocqueville”, and credited my trip report as the genesis of the book! I knew that he had liked my trip report, but had no clue that the ideas in it had a life beyond the trip report itself.  I’ll be sure to post a book review as soon as I’ve finished it.

In the extended entry is the original trip report from November, 2006 (which disappeared after the great blog crash of 2008).  I think it’s held up surprisingly well to the past 2 years.  As a quick update on the players featured in it:

* Dorn said he got “less than 100 gallons/acre” from sunflowers in New Hampshire, but it was a poor growing year, and another field he planted got about twice that but didn’t dry, so it wasn’t harvestable. I think this is actually a pretty good number for such a short growing season in a northern climate.

* Piedmont Biofuels is at 100% capacity from what I hear, putting out 1M+ gallons of fuel per year. They’re using chicken fat from the local Tyson chicken plant, located just 3 miles away from their plant. Due to unfortunate feedstock economics, they are currently exporting all of their fuel to Europe, causing much angst within the local-fuel community, though the biodiesel co-op collects thousands of gallons a month of used fryer oil for local distribution.

* Biofuel Oasis is now getting most of their fuel from Bentley Biofuels, as they were hoping to do, but they want to do even better by getting it from an Oakland-based producer, Blue Sky Biofuels, which should be in full operation later this year.

(continue reading…)