Economic issues – Page 5

In search of environmental justice

Since 1974, the people of the Walnut Tree community have lived in the shadow of Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Duke’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas. Not until 2008 were scrubbers installed on the plant’s stacks. For all those years, people in Walnut Tree were at Ground Zero for the plant’s emissions — fly ash, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and all the extremely toxic heavy metals that are found at trace levels in the wastes from coal combustion.

Unsurprisingly, people began to get sick. Also unsurprisingly, the official response was that the steam plant had nothing to do with it.

It would be difficult to overestimate the political and economic power of Duke Energy in North Carolina. Working largely through the Republican Party, Duke Energy (along with other fossil fuel fortunes including the out-of-state Koch brothers) helped engineer the Tea Party takeover of North Carolina in 2010. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 28 years. McCrory and the right-wing legislature have moved with terrifying efficiency to try to protect Duke Energy’s interests, to bring fracking and offshore oil drilling to North Carolina, to slow the state’s investment in renewable energy, and to weaken environmental regulations and the state agencies that enforce them. Part of the purpose of North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law is to distract people (and the media) from the rest of the right-wing agenda in North Carolina.

In February 2014, a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River near Eden focused the nation’s attention (at last!) on what Duke Energy and the politicians they own were trying to do in North Carolina.

Back in 2012, when I and a small group of sassy (and very smart) Stokes County citizens started the organization that we call No Fracking in Stokes, we had no idea how the fracking issue would play out or how it would end up connecting with the coal ash issue. There is much local history here that needs to be written, but by 2015 a powerful coalition had formed to fight not only for the environment but also for environmental justice in our obscure little county. Among these organizations are No Fracking in Stokes, Appalachian Voices, Clean Water for North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the NAACP. I sometimes refer to these organizations as the cavalry that rode in to help us.

As readers of this blog know, Stokes County is a rare piece of largely unspoiled earth in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful Dan River winds down out of Virginia, through Stokes County, and back into Virginia again. North Carolina’s most popular state park, Hanging Rock State Park, is here. Climb to the top of the Hanging Rock promontory and look around. You’ll see what we’re protecting. But because the county is controlled by Republicans, and because many of the people are poor and are too busy just trying to get by to pay attention, outside interests would like write the county off as an environmental sacrifice zone.

Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has gotten involved. That group held a hearing in Walnut Cove last month, specifically on the question of environmental justice in the Walnut Tree neighborhood. Last year, the Rev. William Barber, who has led North Carolina’s powerful Moral Monday movement, spoke in Walnut Cove. He also brought the resources of the NAACP to the struggle.

It seems quite possible that, in the larger statewide struggle to hold Duke Energy accountable and to expose the corruption of the Republican Party’s protection of Duke Energy, Walnut Tree will be Duke Energy’s Waterloo, because in Walnut Tree the legal questions relating to environmental justice become crystal clear.

These photos are from a cookout last Saturday in the Walnut Tree community. They’ve gotten organized. They have plans to build a community center. They have a legal strategy for getting the Walnut Tree community annexed into the little town of Walnut Cove (Walnut Tree desperately needs Walnut Cove’s water, which comes from deep wells that are a safe distance from the coal ash impoundments).

As someone from Appalachian Voices said, this is what winning looks like. It has taken 40 years, though we’re still not done.

Kill your dryer

According to an article at grist.org, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on electricity to power their clothes dryers. While appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines have made great strides in energy efficiency, dryers have not. In 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a “call for action” for more-efficient clothes dryers.

It was news to me that dryers sold in Europe, Australia, and Asia use heat-pump technology, which can cut energy use by more than half. Heat-pump dryers have recently come to market in the United States. They’re not exactly cheap, but I’m sure that, over the life of the appliance, they more than pay for themselves in energy savings.

Some people, I realize — for example those who live in cities, or in apartments — pretty much have no choice but to use clothes dryers. Heat-pump dryers could yield considerable savings and avoid a lot of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.

But when you live in the sticks, like me, and when you’re a cheapskate, like me, a $4.99 clothesline is the way to go. I don’t even have a dryer and don’t want one. Not only do clothes dryers eat your clothes, they give things that dryer smell instead of a fresh-air smell. I even like scratchy towels. Why am I thinking about this now? Because March winds are the best clothes dryer ever.

Farms and farmland: What are the trends?

This is the farm of my great uncle Barney Dalton in Laurel Fork, Virginia. Barney was born in 1876 and died in 1972, but his farm is still owned by his heirs, who work hard to keep it looking like it looked 75 years ago.

A story in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal (by my friend Meghann Evans) reports that Forsyth County, North Carolina, is working on a plan to preserve farmland. I’m all for it, though for Forsyth County it would seem that the plan is a little late. Though Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have not grown as fast as Raleigh and Charlotte, developers have been buying up farmland and turning it into suburbs for decades. It has been more than 25 years since I lived in Forsyth County, but decades of uncontrolled suburbanization is one reason why I would never be able to live in such a place anymore.

Meghann’s story about Forsyth County got me wondering about the trends in farmland.

Just a couple of weeks ago, actually, I was at a Stokes County Arts Council event and saw a friend who is co-owner of Stokes County’s largest real estate company. “How’s business?” I asked her. “Have property values gotten back up to the pre-crash peak?”

She said that farms are selling very well but that homes are still a bit of a drag.

I’m going to guess that one of the reasons that Forsyth County can even afford to talk about preserving farmland is that farmland is more valuable than it used to be. Developers can no longer buy up farmland dirt cheap and turn it into suburban gold. Driving through a place like Forsyth County, evidence of this change is easy to see. Suburban housing is still being built, but the housing is much more dense than it used to be. That is, new suburbs don’t sprawl as much as they used to because the land is not as cheap. Houses are much closer together. Much of the new housing consists of multi-story, multi-family units.

Worldwide, farmland is increasingly seen as a good longterm investment. Much of the investment in farmland is coming from corporations. In fact, here in Stokes County, one of the biggest land transactions in the past couple of years involved 1,000 acres of farmland in the Dan River bottomlands. The buyer was a corporate outfit from Greensboro. I still don’t know what they plan to do with the land.

One surprising new trend is that agricultural degrees are in great demand, and there aren’t enough graduates to fill the available jobs. Just this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 60,000 high-skilled jobs in agriculture are expected each year but that there are only about 35,000 graduates available to fill the jobs.

In a news release earlier this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “There is incredible opportunity for highly-skilled jobs in agriculture. Those receiving degrees can expect to have ample career opportunities. Not only will they be likely to get well-paying jobs upon graduation, they will also have the satisfaction of working in a field that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. These jobs will only become more important as we continue to develop solutions to feed more than 9 billion people by 2050.”

Though the corporatization of farmland ownership is disturbing, I nevertheless see it as an encouraging trend that farmland is becoming too valuable to be trashed by housing developers out to make a quick buck. For a young person trying to figure out what to do in college these days, I’d suggest horticulture with a minor in English. Wouldn’t that improve the world?

Lily (the abbey cat) gets nervous if her food bowl gets low and she can see the bottom of the bowl. She nags me until I fill it, and then she feels secure again. I feel the same way when I’m in places that are too densely populated, too dry, or otherwise too dead to support an exuberant population of living things. I need trees, rain, streams, good dirt, my own water from a well, an orchard, a garden spot, and some chickens. If the deer, voles, raccoons, possums, rabbits and even snakes rush in to live off my spot of land, then I’m flattered. At least I’ve got something for them to take.

Normally I’m at odds with trends. But the trend toward valuing and wanting to be near farmland is a trend I’m glad to see.

Nearby farmland

The abbey garden in a good year

Fiber gets closer

Generally, if I see heavy equipment anywhere within miles of the abbey, it’s a reason for panic. It means that someone is cutting trees to sell logs, or someone is up to some kind of mischief with a bull dozer. But there is one kind of machinery that is a joy to see nearby. That’s the kind of machinery that buries fiber optic cable.

This equipment was parked during the weekend about two miles from the abbey. It’s not clear whether the route of the new fiber will be on the paved road nearest the abbey. The abbey, by the way, is on an unpaved road half a mile from pavement.

One of these days, though I have no idea when, the abbey will have fast Internet.

Review: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Here are two must-read books for those who care about the human condition in an era in which we are immersed in a dumber-than-rocks political and media culture. I read Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century last year shortly after it came out. That book has received an enormous amount of attention among the intelligentsia and hardly needs a review by me, nor am I qualified to review it. On the other hand, Anthony Atkinson’s book, Inequality: What Can Be Done, ought to be in the hands of everyone who is politically active — or anyone who votes, for that matter.

Piketty’s book is an account of just how appallingly unequal societies have become. Atkinson picks up where Piketty leaves off and explores what might be done about inequality. He develops 15 proposals for reversing increasing inequality. These are not pie-in-the-sky proposals. They are common-sense reversals of the political choices that started around 1980, when an epidemic of voodoo economics and disguised greed (think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) got loose in our political culture and set us on the course we have been on for the last 35 years.

The common wisdom, as Atkinson points out, is that we can’t afford higher taxes on the rich or strengthening the social safety net, because globalization and technology have made everything different now. But Atkinson shows that to be nothing but voodoo. He devotes a section to the history of globalization and points out that there was a strong wave of globalization in the 19th Century, made possible largely because of technological improvements and economies in manufacturing and shipping. And yet it was during that period of 19th Century globalization that many modern reforms that reduced inequality (until the 1980 reversal) got their start. For example, in 1881 in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm I proposed old-age insurance. In 1885, Austria adopted compulsory health insurance. In 1902, the first worker’s compensation law was enacted in the United States.

Atkinson points out that econometric models, aided by fast and cheap computing, have become quite good at modeling what-if scenarios of changes in economic policies and taxation. Though the heirs of Reagan and Thatcher continue to believe and to shout about that higher taxes on the rich will stall economies, actual experience over the last 25 years shows no such thing — nor do the econometric models show any such thing. It is no accident that one of the first deeds of the our new Republican Congress was to castrate the Congressional Budget Office, forcing the CBO to go along with right-wing economic voodoo, which got us where we are today.

Inequality: What Can Be Done. Anthony B. Atkinson. Published May 11, 2015, Harvard University Press.

What blowback looks like

After the little town of Walnut Cove agreed to let the state of North Carolina (at taxpayer expense) drill a geological core sample on town property to test for the presence of frackable gas, what followed was an uprising. These photos are from a press conference called by the state and national NAACP to announce an environmental justice investigation into where these polluting activities tend to be located — near black communities.

What’s next around here?

The county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, April 21

In July, this blog will be eight years old. Soon I’ll reach the 1,000th post. Any blog that has been around this long is bound to go through changes and fallow periods. But I’m not going away. I’m just trying to get clear on what comes next.

One of the things I’ve had to figure out is just how much involvement I want to have in local politics. I learned during last fall’s political campaign just how exhausting local politics can be, especially when you lose. It took all winter to recover from the burnout. It’s tempting to stay hidden in the woods. I also think that local politics doesn’t make very good blog material, except insofar as the political drama here in Stokes County echoes what’s happening in other places.

I have rolled up my sleeves and decided to stay involved in local politics. Earlier this week, at the county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, I was elected county chairman for a two-year term. I also will continue to be involved with No Fracking in Stokes.

Rural counties like this one are in trouble. We are losing population. Our young people leave us because of the lack of jobs and lack of anything to do. Increasingly, jobs don’t pay living wages. Our social services and health departments are overwhelmed. Our schools are begging for help. Even worse here in Stokes County, it is thought that some frackable gas reserves might exist in our river basin, the Dan River basin. Conservatives and progressives have very different views on what needs to be done. Conservatives think that fracking is economic development. As a progressive, I can’t think of a quicker way to ruin and impoverish our county than to let fracking in. Our other assets, such as our state park (the most popular park in the state), our river, and our unspoiled rural beauty, have far greater economic value, economic value that would be ruined by fracking. But conservatives are suspicious of tourism, because it invites people into the county who will never vote Republican.

Conservatives want to fiddle while Rome burns and measure their performance by how low the tax rate is. The burning political issue in this county at the moment (other than a county budget that is not going to balance without a tax increase) is whether emblazoning “In God We Trust” on the side of the county courthouse requires that the county similarly emblazon “In Reason We Trust.” This comes on the heels of a drawn-out and divisive fight in the town of King about flying the Christian flag at a veterans’ memorial. It led to a lawsuit, which conservatives predictably lost. Conservatives somehow convince themselves that symbolic and sentimental issues like these are the things that matter most and around which our futures turn. Meanwhile, Republicans in Raleigh are busy selling off the state to the highest bidder. A test well to look for frackable gas is going to be drilled soon in the little Stokes County town of Walnut Cove. Our own state tax dollars will be paying for the drilling.

Our work is cut out for us.

An all-Republican board of county commissioners hears about “In Reason We Trust.”

The high existential cost of being rich

Source: careerassessmentsite.com

Do you know your personality type, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test? If not, with a little Googling you’ll probably find a way to get a quick and dirty assessment, if not the trademarked test. But the odds are that, if you are reading this blog, then you are not rich, and you are not an ENTJ.

So what’s an ENTJ? Of the 16 personality types described by the Myers-Briggs, ENTJ’s are the type most likely to get rich. Let’s look at the categories.

Extraverted vs. Introverted (E/I)

Intuitive vs. Sensing (N/S)

Thinking vs. Feeling (T/F)

Judging vs. Perceiving (J/P)

There are 16 combinations of these attributes. According to a report by the Career Assessment Site, ENTJ types are most likely to make a lot of money. That is, people who are extraverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging. There also was an article about this at the Motley Fool web site.

If there’s a kind of person that I just can’t stand, it’s ENTJ’s or ESTJ’s. They’re the opposite of people like me (and probably the opposite of people like you, if you are reading this blog). I am an INFP – introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Guess which type makes the least money? People like me — INFP’s. I’m pretty sure that’s because INFP’s don’t much care about money beyond what it takes to live reasonably well and to travel a bit.

I want to clear up some common misconceptions, though. Introverts are not shy. In fact, in my experience introverts often have more social skill than extraverts, simply because introverts pay attention, and extraverts never stop running their mouths. There is another misconception that holds that, if feeling is predominant over thinking, then you must not be very smart, and that if you are very smart, then feeling must be subordinate. That is extremely not true. The IQ’s of feeling types follow the same bell curve as all IQ’s. To be able to think sharply does not imply a devaluation of feeling. Feeling, after all, is the key to meaning.

So is money all that matters? Not to an INFP. It is meaning that we seek in life, not wealth and power. If there is anything that strikes existential terror into the heart of an INFP, it’s the thought of the inner poverty that can almost always be perceived in the lives of those who seek wealth and power. I don’t envy them. I feel sorry for them. They seek to fill their emptiness with things, and to compensate for meaninglessness with power.

Now, as for my income, I did OK. To be an INFP is not necessarily to be sentenced to poverty. I never got rich, that’s for sure. But I retired early, and I own my own time and my own thoughts. If an INFP can find the right niche, then creativity, kindness, and insight will be rewarded, even in corporate America.

I wouldn’t trade places with an ENTJ for all the money in the world.

Ken in the New York Times

Woody Welch for the New York Times

Ken has a longish piece to be published in Sunday’s New York Times. It was released to the web today.

It’s a sort of preview of his book, which will be released May 14.

How much coal to power our houses?

Duke Power’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Belews Creek, North Carolina

My post yesterday was about how many kilowatt hours of electricity the abbey uses on a cold winter day. Though I use about half as much energy as the average American, there are no grounds for boasting. When that energy use is translated into pounds of coal, it is substantial.

Here’s how we can do the math. Most of my electricity here probably comes from a coal-fired steam plant, because that’s the nearest generator. That’s Duke Power’s Belews Creek Steam Station. The Wikipedia article on the steam station gives some statistics on the station’s efficiency and tells us how many Btu’s of thermal energy are required at the station to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity. At Belews Creek, which is a pretty efficient steam plant, 9,023 Btu of heat is needed to generate 1 kWh of electricity.

Coal varies in its energy content, but a reasonable average for coal is 20 million Btu of heat per 2,000 pounds of coal. So one pound of coal releases 10,000 Btu of heat when it’s burned. Now we can do the math for roughly how much coal is required to supply the abbey’s electricity.

On the coldest day of January, I used 37 kWh of electricity. Translated to pounds of coal, that means that the abbey required 33 pounds of coal for heat, light, cooking, appliances, etc., on the coldest day of January. On the warmest day of January, it works out to 11 pounds of coal. For the month of December, I used 625 kWh of electricity. That works out to 563 pounds of coal for December. That doesn’t sound so good, does it? But at least my energy consumption is on the low side for an American.

In 2012, I used a total of 6,764 kilowatt hours of electricity. That means I’m responsible for burning just over 3 tons of coal in 2012. Now look at our sprawling suburbs, our bright lights, our wasteful buildings, and use your imagination.

If you’d like to do the math to roughly translate your own electrical consumption to an equivalent amount of coal, multiply the number of kilowatt hours on your electric bill by .9023. The .9023 number represents the coal-to-electricity ratio for North Carolina’s Belews Creek plant, but your local numbers probably don’t vary too much, and with a little Googling you may be able to localize your calculations.