Yap Island Photo Journal

SOURCE: Andy Parx (andyparx@yahoo.com) covered this article here.
SUBHEAD: Just four decades ago Yap Island was much like Hawaii in the 18th century.


Image above: A typical Yap house in 1966 is part of Damon Tucker's photo journal.

[Editor's Note: Yap Island is about 15 miles long, 800 miles north of Papua New Guinea and 800 miles east of the Philppines. Please visit links for a delightful, educational, photo essay.]

By Damon Tucker on 13 December 2009 in Damon Tucker Blog -
(http://damontucker.com/2009/12/13/1966-yap-and-the-outter-islands-a-photo-journal)

In 1961, my mother, Su Rowe Tucker, moved to Pahala, on the Big Island where her father and mother (My Grandparents) Dr. P.E. (Ted) Rowe and Elizabeth (Betty) Rowe were the Physician/Surgeon for the private Pahala Hospital run by C. Brewer Corp.

In 1965, Dr. Rowe (my grandfather) was hired for two years by the US Federal Government to run the Yap Hospital from 1965 to 1967. In 1966, my mom and my two uncles, Bob and Mike Rowe, went to visit them in Yap.

The posts evoke mixed feelings showing an indigenous culture and a Michener-like juxtaposition with the fish-out-of-water westerners.

It’s a simple lifestyle that a short 40-plus years ago was apparently reminiscent of Hawai`i in the late 18th and early 19th century and it’s hard not to feel both wistful and angry that neither exists anymore today.

To see more:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Who
Part III: Moms Tale of Arrival
Part IV: A Yapese Party
Part V: The Homes and Structures of Yap
Part VI: Quotes from the Diary (Part A)
Part VII: Quotest from the Diary (Part B)

See also:
Island Breath: Hawaii before the crowds 10/12/07

The Oil Price Paradox

SUBHEAD: In 2009, world oil demand dropped for only the second year in a row while prices rose.


Image above: Illustration of a last-chance-for-gas station in the American west.
From http://eiuenergy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/summertime-blues

[Editor's Note -- It is the editor's belief that oil market prices have been manipulated in 2009 (here's how), a continuation of what happened in mid-2008, as falling demand would have otherwise seen oil prices remain low or fall. It is believed that manipulation up to the $70 to $80 per barrel level is a key level that is sought for both new investment into alternative energy development and for fiscal balance in a number of OPEC nations.]

By Wisma Bernama on 29 December 2009 in Bernama.com -
(http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsindex.php?id=464999)

"World Demand For Oil Has Dropped: OPEC"

World oil production demand has dropped for the first time since the early 1980's for the second successive year, as the world economy remains confronted with the deepest and most wide-spread contraction since the 1930's.

This observation was made at the 155th extra-ordinary meeting of the conference of the Organization of Petroleum and Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) that took place in the Angolan capital, Luanda last week.

In a media statement issued after the end of the conference, OPEC member States said that although the asset market prices have rebounded and economic growth has resumed in some parts of the world, it is not yet clear how strong or durable the recovery might be.

"With the world still faced by shrinking industrial production, low private consumption and high unemployment, the conference once again decided to maintain current oil production levels unchanged for the time being," the media release said, Nampa quoted as saying.

The OPEC members States, in taking this decision, said that this is proof of their repeated commitment to the individually agreed production allocations, as well as their readiness to rapidly respond to any developments which might place oil market stability and their interests in jeopardy.

The Secretariat is to continue closely monitoring the market, keeping member countries abreast of developments as they occur.

The situation will be reviewed at the next Ordinary Meeting of the Conference.

In taking the above decision, Heads of Delegation reiterated OPEC's statutory commitment to providing an economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations, whilst stabilizing the market and realizing the organization's objective of maintaining crude oil prices at fair and equitable levels, for the future well-being of the market and the benefit of both producers and consumers.

The conference called on the non-OPEC producers and exporters to work closely with it to support oil markets stabilization in the interests of oil market stability.

Environmental concerns were also discussed at the conference, while the oil market outlook for 2010 was also reviewed.

OPEC's mission is to co-ordinate and unify the petroleum policies of member countries, and ensure the stabilsation of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.

OPEC is a group of 12 states made up of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela and Ecuador.

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Peak Oil Demand

By Julian Murdoch on 9 December 2009 in Seeking Alpha -
(http://seekingalpha.com/article/176440-peak-oil-demand)

Between recent consumption data and the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2009 report released last month, it's time for some serious questions when it comes to oil demand. Perhaps the biggest is this: Will oil fields be ready to meet existing and future demand, or will low investment in capital projects now cause bigger problems later down the line?

The big news on Monday was that U.S. oil demand keeps falling, according to the EIA, who said that U.S. oil demand in September was 2.74 percent lower than previously thought. September consumption came in at 18.362 million barrels per day—not a good sign for oil bulls who have been looking for any sign of strengthening U.S. oil demand to support higher prices.

Furthermore, yesterday's This Week In Petroleum report (covered extensively by Brad Zigler ) showed that once again, crude oil inventories rose. We now have over 24 days' worth of supply—a full 2 and a half days more than we had this time a year ago.

These numbers jive with the latest World Energy Outlook 2009 report (WEO '09), in which the IEA forecasts 2009's global energy use to actually fall for the first time since 1981. I can't say that forecast surprised anyone: From the oil company bigwigs to the minivan-driving soccer moms, many have predicted a drop in energy consumption due to the economic crisis. In fact, a recent survey by accounting and consulting firm BDO showed that oil executives aren't expecting energy demand to rebound until at least 2011.

What was surprising, however, was the WEO '09 long-term perspective on oil demand.

The Incredible Shrinking OECD Oil Demand

Between now and 2030, says the IEA, global oil demand will grow just 1 percent per year, with demand reaching 105 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2030, or a 24 percent increase from 2008's demand of 85 mb/d. The IEA has been singing this tune for awhile; as The Oil Drum noted, the IEA has consistently dropped its 2030 demand numbers ever since its 2004 forecast of 121 mb/d. That 16 mb/d difference is a rather huge change of heart over the global financial crisis.

But what's most interesting is the specificity underpinning the demand numbers. Although demand is still forecast to increase, the real shocker here is the IEA's prediction that oil demand will actually drop for the next 20 years in OECD countries. Instead, the demand growth will come primarily from China, India and the Middle East:

Given that China and India are two of the fastest-growing economies in the world, growth there seems logical, but what's strange is the relatively large decrease in oil demand in the U.S., Canada and other OECD countries. Why the sudden decrease? Is it due to a sudden rash of widespread conservationism? Continued economic weakness? Or is it just that OECD countries tend to have slow, steady population rates, and their economies are at such a point that demand will remain relatively stable from here on out?

Regardless of the specific reason, the economic implications of this base scenario are somewhat staggering. If oil consumption is a sign of economic activity, then the implication here is that the U.S. is heading into an energy recession of epic proportions.

Maximum Kauai Population

SUBHEAD: In response to "Early Hawaiian Agriculture" article we are reposting one, from five years ago, speculating on maximum prehistoric Kauai population.

By Juan Wilson on 22 February 2004 in Island Breath -
(http://www.islandbreath.org/2004Year/09-science/science03population.html)

Looking at where the taro might grow

Image above: HI DBED map of modern Kauai agricultural productivity. Darkest color is most productive. White areas are considered urban and not agricultural.

Kauai Carrying Capacity The map above was created by a GIS system for the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism to identify the areas of highest agricultural productivity. They are Land Study Bureau maps and are available for the entire state at the DBEDT website http://www.ehawaiigov.org/dbedt/op/html/gismain.html. Note that the darker areas are the most productive. The maps were developed with the assumption that water is diverted from the valleys to reach some highland plains and that the water table of the Mana Plain is pumped to a low enough level for agriculture. Moreover, the areas that are developed as "urban", including such anomalies as the runways at the PMRF are excluded from the maps designations of productivity. None the less, to date this map is the best base map I have found to date to use as a source to quantify the areas populated by pre-European Hawaiian people. I have prepared a map that focuses on lowland valleys and areas where fresh water was readily available. The result is the map below. The brown areas in the map are places where I estimate that there might have been concentrations of Hawaiians. The total area in brown is 34,703 acres.

Image above: Theoretical map of places taro might readily be grown on Kauai by Juan Wilson.

Most sources agree that taro is a staple with a very high calorie yield per acre; higher than corn or rice. An acre of taro can yield a year round supply of food to support about 8 people. My estimate of pre-contact population is based on the assumption that the Hawaiians lived and farmed on the same land. This would mean that... A) as much as half the arable land would be occupied by non agricultural uses. B) in addition, at least half the land farmed would be 50% less productive in calories per acre than a lowland valley taro field. Item A) reduces the highest productive agricultural land to 17,185 acres. Item B) would support 8,593 acres with 8 people per acre, that would be 68,740 people. The remaining acres would be 50% less productive and therefore support 34,370 people. This would mean a total maximum Kauai population of about 100,000 people. If my estimate of maximum population is correct, that would mean that there would be about 1,500 people maximum in Kalalau Valley and 3,600 people in Waimea Valley when Cook landed there. Cook made a nose of those Hawaiians he could see onj landing. It came to about 500 people. Was only one in seven Waimeans seen by Cook? I doubt it so my sense is that the 100,000 population number for the island is high. However, I think it is not impossible that 100,000 people could be live on subsistence farming for some period of time prior to Cook's landing. In part because of its age, Kauai has been eroded into many flattened valleys. Due to a number of factors it is also blessed with an abundance of rain when compared with other Hawaiian islands. I am going to apply the same productivity analysis to the other islands. My guesstimate is that Kauai will prove to be higher than average in population density and therefore the total population of the chain will be closer to a half million than the one million that UH Professor David Stannard postulates (see article below). If this estimate is about right, that means that if you include the tourists and visitor population with the residents living here now, there are about as many people on Kauai today as there were when Cook landed over 225 years ago. So, if you take exception with my estimate, have more information, or another way of looking at pre-contact Hawaiian population, please email me. I think this is an important subject because it relates to not only what happened in the past on Kauai, but what the potential is in the future. It should impact our planning goals.

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History of population on Kauai
By Juan Wilson on 30 January 2004 -


Detail of "The Battle at Nu`Uanu Pau", on Oahu in 1795, by artist and scholar Herb Kawainui Kane

After cruising the internet for information about pre-contact Native Hawaiian population estimates I came across what might be the source of the recent higher estimates for population of Hawaiians prior to Cook's Landing at Waimea, Kauai in 1775. The source is from a computer website at the University of Hawaii Kapiolani Community College Microbiology Department created by John Berestecky. The source file is an interview with David Stannard, UH American Studies Professor. The subject of the interview is a book Stannard wrote, published in 1989 by UH Social Science Research Institute, and titled "Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact". The book postulates that eye witness Hawaiian population estimates (principally Captain Cook's and King's) were vastly smaller than the actual population. Cook's journals indicate that his estimate of Kauai population at 30,000 and King's island chain wide estimate 400,000 people. Subsequent scholars has thought King's numbers too high and using varying techniques have driven that number downward to a widely accepted range of 100,000 to 300,000. Stannard's book citizens King's and subsequent scholars work and concludes that there were 1,000,000 people in the Hawaiian chain in1775. There may be weaknesses to some scholars effort. Fortunately there are some records of how previous estimates were taken. Cook seems to have counted numbers at Waimea when he landed. Estimated numbers of communities of substantial size observed and extrapolated his results across all the island. King, on the other hand, adjusted his number to 400,000 with an estimate that 25% of the islands shore and mauka were uninhabited. Stannard's are as weak as any I have read about. Stannard took the contemporary population of Honolulu and spreads it over the largely rural central and northern shore areas and was able to maintain the population density of the settled areas of the north shore of Oahu. He argues that since you could fit them in they were their. I have not yet read "Before the Horror", but the interview seems to indicate that this technique (and we hope others) were extrapolated to arrive at Stannard's one million Hawaiian population estimate. Stannard refers to documentation that indicates that only 50,000 Hawaiians were left by 1875 after the epidemics introduced by contact with westerners wiped out large numbers of people. THis contrast of 1,000,000 people reduced to 50,000 by the indifference and cruelty of westerners tells us the true horror of the results. Yes there was indifference and cruelty; I would add there was selfishness and greed too. The higher the contrast in these numbers, the greater the crime. The Black Plague and other epidemics in Europe were due to contact with eastern micro-organisms. Stannard agrees with conventional wisdom that between the years 1350 and 1450 the bubonic plague reduced the population of Europe by half . If syphilis, mumps and other diseases destroyed half the Hawaiians by 1875; then the conventional wisdom lower estimate of 100,000 people in the islands would be reasonable. If 80% of Hawaiians were destroyed by European diseases then King's number of 400,000 Hawaiians would be reasonable. That's a lot of devastation without having to pave north Oahu suburbia over 1775 Hawaiian Islands. More later.

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What Population is Right for Kauai?
By Juan Wilson on 4 January 2004 -

A conversation with a friend about ancient Hawaiian society had me doubting what I will call an "Island Legend". Island Legends, like the urban variety, pass from person to person without much question. Their mobility rests on their ability to thrill and amaze the listener with the tale. I suspect another reason these legends persist is that they fulfill an agenda or represent a world view in some way.

The Island Legend in this case is the oft repeated statistic that before European contact there were once 200,000 Hawaiians living on Kauai. When I first heard this I was amazed. It was part of a set of stories that includes the one that newbies hear while looking into Kalalau Valley from the Kokee Lookout, "Did you know that 5000 Hawaiians once lived in the valley?". There are certainly many myths surrounding Hawaii. Some are strengthened by postulating a large ancient population. For example, I've heard one theory that Hawaii was an ancient Atlantis and the source of a great prehistoric civilization that populated the world and that has been lost.

Sustainable Self-Sufficiency for Kauai

Obviously, for the whole of humanity, the Earth is an island. A blue planet in the black of space. Sustainable self-sufficiency is the key for people living on an island, or a planet. People can’t live for long on an island if they burn down the forest, kill the animals and breed like insects. The Hawaiian Islands have always struck me as a little solar system of planets in a blue ocean of sky and sea. Each of Hawaii’s islands are surprisingly different each in its own way. And this island, Kauai, has been a blessed in many ways.

See also:
Island Breath: Sustainable 2/11/04

Early Hawaiian Agriculture

SUBHEAD: Research determines acreage Hawaiians used for growing.


Image above: Wetland taro growing in Hanalei Valley on Kauai, Hawaii.
From http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo448684.htm

By Helen Altonn 21 December 2009 in the Star Bulletin -
(http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20091221_early_ag_lands_identified.html)

Combining technology and traditional archaeology, scientists have identified thousands of acres of land farmed by early Hawaiians.

The findings also have implications for crop self-sufficiency in Hawaii -- that is, the possibility of ending the need for agricultural imports.

"At the peak of Hawaiian population, there were perhaps a million people," said Samuel M. Gon III, ecologist, cultural adviser and senior scientist with The Nature Conservancy. "It takes thousands and thousands of acres to feed all those people. Where was all that farmland?"

He said scientists began collaborating to find the answer to that question and the findings have broad implications for anthropology and conservation biology.

Early Hawaiian language newspapers referred to agricultural systems that aren't known today, either because they were abandoned, destroyed by sugar and pineapple cultivation or "they're in places where no one has looked," the researchers said.

They compared results of the computer models with what was known from more than 100 years of archaeological research to learn what has been lost.

The computerized model indicated a massive part of Kau on Hawaii island was suited for Hawaiian dryland agriculture -- thousands of acres above the South Point wind generator farm and below Mamalahoa Highway, according to the Conservancy news release.

Researchers expanded a project that began in the Kohala region to the entire Island chain, using so-called Geographic Information Systems modeling to see where early Hawaiians did dryland and wetland agriculture.

The technology could be used to determine the best habitats to grow rare plants, Gon said. The findings also suggest "we can wean our reliance on food from the outside world," he said.

A vast dryland farming system that grew sweet potatoes had already been discovered in the Kohala project with two former Honolulu residents as principal investigators: Peter Vitousek, a Stanford University ecologist, and Patrick Kirch of the University of California at Berkeley. Also participating was Thegn N. Ladefoged of New Zealand's University of Auckland.

The three joined with Gon, soil scientist Oliver A. Chadwick of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and environmental scientist Anthony S. Hartshorn of Arizona State's School of Earth and Space Exploration to apply GIS modeling across the state.

Their work is described in the Conservancy news release and in a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science entitled "Opportunities and constraints for intensive agriculture in the Hawaiian archipelago prior to European contact."

"We went to Google Earth to take a look," said Vitousek, who is familiar with the network of earthen and stone walls in Hawaiian dryland agriculture. He recognized the images on the screen. "There it was! You could see the walls. They're unbelievable," he said.

What was surprising in the GIS modeling, Gon said in an interview, was the coupling of taro or kalo with landscape flat enough and wet enough for its biology.

"The match between where kalo can grow and was grown was remarkable," he said. "Wow! Everywhere it could be grown pretty much it was being grown."

Kirch, an anthropologist who has done extensive research throughout Hawaii, said he was "blown away" by the huge extent of wet taro lands, especially on Kauai. "I really didn't have a clue it was so extensive. ... It was an incredible breadbasket of wet taro lands," he said in an interview.

The researchers said they were shocked at the extent of dry and wetland agriculture and the distribution, with dryland farming mostly on the younger islands of Maui and the Big Island and wetland agriculture on the older islands of Oahu and Kauai.

"People think the islands are the same -- that Hawaiians grew taro and sweet potatoes -- but they really are different up and down the archipelago," Kirch said.

"This has all kinds of implications, not just for the economic system in ancient Hawaii but the political system as well," he said, pointing out that dryland systems, subject to drought and harsh conditions, wouldn't be as productive as wet taro lands.

"I can see why (Maui chief) Kahekili and (Hawaii chief) Kamehameha wanted to conquer Oahu and Kauai to get rich taro lands. It's real interesting when you look at what was going on politically at the time of contact."

See also:
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat -
"The Transformation of the landscape in Waimea, Hawaii: Pre-Human..."
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/7089/2/uhm_ma_3048_r.pdf

UH Futurist Jim Dator

SUBHEAD: UH's director of Futures Studies says Hawaii's future depends on developing sustainable industries, not relying on tourism and military.


Image above: Jim Dator surrounded by the hi-rise tourist hotels of Waikiki.

By Christine Donnelly on 1 January 2010 in Starbulletin -
(http://www.starbulletin.com/editorials/20100101_Jim_Dator.html)

Jim Dator doesn't predict the future, he prepares for it. And the director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies says that as much as Hawaii residents may bid good riddance to the rocky first decade of the new millennium, and assume that 2010 can only be better, that prospect is far from certain.

"I don't want to sound too negative, but there are some very worrisome factors," said the University of Hawaii professor, whose center is affiliated with the UH political science department.

Hawaii, dependent as it is on tourism, military spending and imported oil, must develop ways to sustain itself or remain buffeted by outside forces, said Dator, 76, who joined the UH faculty in 1969.

Besides teaching, he advises governmental, military, business, educational, religious and public-interest organizations around the world, often facilitating dialogue between groups that have competing or conflicting visions for the future.

His wide-ranging interests are reflected in his academic background, which includes a doctorate in political science from American University and certificates from the Virginia Theological Seminary and Yale University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages.

He and his wife, a lawyer, raised four children in the Waikiki condominium where the couple still live.

QUESTION: What will Hawaii look like in the next few decades? I don't mean just physically, but also culturally, politically, economically?

ANSWER: As a futurist, I seldom use the word "will" because that implies an ability to predict, and we can't do that. What we can do is look at all the available information and decide what scenarios seem most likely, given the wide variety of factors that affect any outcome. ... So I would say that in Hawaii we can expect the continuing demographic change in which the once-dominant Japanese group becomes smaller. ... It will be a culturally different mix than we've had in the past 20 years (with a growing percentage of Caucasians, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders). ... Hawaii has an increasingly aging population and a moderately low fertility rate, and so, combined with economic factors, we can expect a slightly lower population over the next 10 years.

Q: What about politically?

A: Going along with those demographics we can expect a continued weakening of the dominance of the Democratic Party and certainly of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Hawaii. However, if the economic situation eventually gets as bad as I expect that it could, then political radicalization could occur. If the worsening economic situation really gets desperate then we could see a left-wing rise or even an ultra-right swing ...

Q: Why do you think Hawaii's economy could get that bad?

A: Our major economic bases at this time are tourism and U.S. military spending and both of those are very fragile and not very good, if you are interested in local sustainability. Over the years I have been using the phrase "the unholy trinity plus one" to describe in a metaphorical sense the concerns I have about Hawaii. These factors need to be studied as one, thought of as being integrated, rather than as separate issues. They must be dealt with together.

Q: What are they?

A: One is peak oil, or the end of oil, or the energy transformation that must come. It's suggesting, in effect, an end to oil before a comparable energy source comes online. And that certainly will affect tourism and everything else in Hawaii. Our food is shipped in. We use oil to generate our electricity. No other state is as dependent on oil as we are.

Q: What's the second factor?

A: The second is environmental issues, the questions of global climate change, global sea level rise. Absolutely nothing done in Copenhagen or anywhere else has made the slightest dent in that problem from a policy perspective. More likely than not there will be severe environmental challenges for the state and the world. It's not that Hawaii is going to be uniquely impacted, but that the availability of leisure time and money and so forth will change as the rest of the world deals with this. They just won't have as much time or money to devote to leisure travel.

Q: And the third factor?

A: The third factor is the economy itself. Since the early 1980s, the global economy ... has been growth based upon debt. This was described years ago by Bush the elder as "voodoo economics," and that, in fact, is what it is, and what the whole U.S. economy has been since then, based on the hope that people would be willing to go increasingly into debt. So the U.S. economy has been one bubble after another, based on a huge number of highly complex debt instruments that have now collapsed in a heap. And yet the very same instruments are still being used, and new debt instruments have been created, in the hope that the economy will continue to recover this way, built on more debt. But eventually the falseness of this type of economy becomes apparent and cannot be sustained.

Q: It sounds pretty grim.

A: It's extremely grim. So those are the three elements of "the unholy trinity," but let me explain the "plus one." The plus one is the fundamental inability of the American government to do anything about it. We're in a really untenable position as far as using deficit spending on the part of the government to get us out of our problems. We in Hawaii are very definitely the canary in the coal mine here, and, therefore, we need to do much, much more to become self-sufficient in terms of energy and food over the next decade.

Q: What about the short-term outlook for tourism in Hawaii? There's supposed to be an uptick.

A: If there is a slight upturn in the economy, and if China is able somehow to continue to avoid the deep negative consequences of the global economic crisis, then tourism could see an uptick from Asia, from China. But China is also suffering from all the things I just mentioned: It's aging, it's building debt. ... So for the long term, tourism would not be our major industry ....

Q: What might replace it?

A: This is where the right-wing, left-wing extremism element comes into play ... I don't want the article to say that I am predicting that these things will happen. I'm just saying that the possibility that they could happen is sufficiently great that there needs to be a public discussion about how to prepare and therefore prevent this scenario.

Q: So how should we prepare?

A: Not convert more agricultural land into developments, housing, hotels — that sort of thing. We need to not only preserve our existing land but also encourage those people who want to farm to try to farm. We need to become largely self-sufficient in terms of food and basic necessities. The movement away from oil — much, much more needs to be done in that area. We should repair existing infrastructure, but to build new housing and tourist developments I don't think is a good idea now.

Q: You've written a great deal about space exploration and settlement. Are you surprised that humans have not yet built large-scale space settlements?

A: I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed, ... and this is one area where everything I am going to say is going to be at odds with everything I just said: I remain a total space fanatic, including the possibilities for space tourism, and I fully support Hawaii being a full actor in space activities.

Q: Closer to home, what do you think is in store for the University of Hawaii?

A: The administration and some faculty seem to be assuming that we are in for a very bad time economically but will bounce back fairly quickly. Boy, do I hope that's the case, and I'll be very, very pleasantly surprised, and in no way disappointed, if I'm wrong. But I just don't think the economy is going to recover in that way. I think we should be taking a hard look at what kind of university we need and renew our focus on agricultural and industrial activities to help sustain Hawaii into the future.

End of "Free" TV?

SUBHEAD: Happy New Year! Recent news concerning the future of how TV is delivered indicate the end of the free (but ad filled) ride.

By Juan Wilson on 1 January 2010 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2010/01/end-of-free-tv.html)


Image above: Cover of double issue TV Guide magazine from 3/31/08.
From http://img339.imageshack.us/i/returningfavoritesnf3.jpg

Prediction for 2010 - No more "free" TV

Last year my wife, Linda, and I cut off our Time-Warner subscription to cable TV. We were sick of most of it, and found we watched less junk and chose what we did see more carefully by using Netflix and internet streaming of video we were interested in.

Fox & Time-Warner
Soon that may not be a choice, but a necessity. A war is underway that will likely end in the disappearance of free "broadcast" TV programming. Two recent news threads that underline this possibility is the threat by News Corporation of pulling all its Fox TV television from Time-Warner cable distribution. That would mean here in Hawaii, where Time-Warner is the only cable provider, that there would be no Fox News, The Simsons, Fox NFL football, American Idol, and other Fox productions.

On the surface the argument is about money, but the underlying story is about distribution of content. In the past it was advertising that was the magic ingredient that made free TV possible. A big problem is that advertising on television is a failing business model. Without advertising to grease the wheels its hard to see how content and distribution can remain "free".

"Free" is never quite that. Historically, to receive any form of TV requires the end user spending some money on equipment, and today, and an account with either a cable-TV, cable-internet, or telephone-internet provider. Of course, Pay-TV has been around for decades. Some of the best TV programming has been from premium channels the likes of Home Box Office (The Sopranos, Rome, The Tudors), People have gotten use to the idea that they have to pay for that kind of original programming, as well as live special events and newly released movies.

But in the near future people may have to get used to the idea of paying for Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, CSI Miami, and Dancing with the Stars.

NBC/Universal & Comcast

Another deal to keep an eye on is the one where Comcast (the nation's largest cable network) buys NBC/Universal. That means the NBC, CNBC, MSNBC cable operations as well as NBC broadcast TV and all of Universal Studio's movie library, production facilities and theme parks.

It is in doubt that Comcast will pay the billions required to own the production of programming only to give it away "free". So if you want to watch "Law & Order", Conan Obrian's "Tonight Show", Keith Oberman's "Countdown", or Jim Kramer's "Mad Money" you may have to have a subscription, or buy the show.

For a few years Apple's iTunes Store has been selling TV show like "Lost" for $2 a pop. That maybe the model that works for others as well. Today www.Hulu.com is one of the most popular ways to see TV programming on line. You can catch the last "Saturday Night Live" you missed for free with excellent display quality and a modest amount of advertising. That may not be true soon. Hulu is operated by a consortium of TV content providers. Two major players are Fox and NBC TV. These two companies will be moving quickly to create new modalities.

I suspect that by the end of 2010 Hulu will be a pay-per-view operation with an iTunes Store ambiance. My guess is prices will be about 50 cents a half-hour for programs. Below are a couple of background stories on this issue.

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NBC-Comcast Deal Puts Broadcast TV in Doubt

By Brian Stelter on 7 December 2009 in the Newe York Times -
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/business/media/07nbc.html)

From Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC brought Milton Berle, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson into the nation’s living rooms, then broadcast local news to New York City for decades. Last Thursday, it was a stage for a cable takeover as Comcast announced a plan to acquire NBC Universal.

There, in Studio 6B, a town hall meeting for NBC employees opened with Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal chief executive, introducing “our new friends from Philadelphia,” and closed with a formal welcome to the Comcast family by Ralph Roberts, the cable operator’s 89-year-old patriarch. Mr. Roberts received a standing ovation.

For employees of the most storied part of NBC Universal, the broadcast network, one question lingered: will we fit into this cable family?

The studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza — and shows like “30 Rock,” which parodies NBC’s corporate culture — will not be going dark as a result of the deal. But employees inside both the thriving news division and the ailing entertainment division of the National Broadcasting Company still have reason to be anxious about it.

At every turn, Comcast has emphasized to its own shareholders that the deal’s purpose is to gain control over NBC Universal’s fast-growing cable channels. The writer and humorist John Dillon observed Thursday that in the 2,742-word news release about the deal, the broadcast network was not mentioned until word 2,170. There is even talk of changing NBC Universal’s name to play down the broadcast association.

The deal is structured to give Comcast a controlling 51 percent interest, with its partner, General Electric, initially retaining 49 percent.

“Everyone’s now talking about NBC as a cable company, and Comcast is a cable company,” a longtime NBC News staff member said. “I guess we’re wondering, do they like broadcast?”

On the record, they do. Comcast says NBC and its affiliate structure will remain intact for the time being. All day Thursday, Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, whose fortunes have come from converting broadcast viewers into cable customers, talked up broadcast as “an important part of the fabric of America.”

“We’re very committed to trying to see ways to make it successful,” he said in an interview on the cable channel CNBC.

Later, in a conference call with reporters, the first question was about the viability of broadcast, leading Mr. Roberts to say of NBC, “I think there’s more upside than downside.” He said Comcast would seek to “restore it to No. 1.” Similarly, the G.E. chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, said on CNBC the same morning that his “top priority for next year” is to get NBC back in first place.

“Let’s make no mistake, where we are today as a broadcast network is unacceptable,” he said. “And I share responsibility with that. That is job one.”

Even as its news programs remain top-rated, NBC has seen its fortunes fall sharply in the last decade. In prime time, the network ranks a distant fourth, and its 10 p.m. program, “The Jay Leno Show,” is increasingly the butt of jokes.

The network’s “Saturday Night Live” alluded to the network’s losses over the weekend, with the host of “Weekend Update” joking that the final sticking point to the deal was “G.E. convincing Comcast that it’s still 1996.” With that, the logos for NBC’s “Must See TV” shows of the 1990s — “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “E.R.” — were flashed on the screen.

The weakened state of the network aside, NBC employees said in interviews that they only sensed low-level anxiety about Comcast’s takeover, in part because changes are not expected until after the deal closes. The companies expect regulatory approvals to take a year or more. But one of the staffers acknowledged, “Some of us are worried that they’re going to have sticker shock over what it takes to do it on the broadcast side.”

Some employees said they were relieved to hear Comcast executives say at the town hall that widespread layoffs were unlikely because there is little overlap between the two companies. The employees requested anonymity to speak candidly and describe the town hall meeting because they were not authorized by the network to speak.

Strumming a Comcast-branded guitar to celebrate the Comcast news on Thursday, Conan O’Brien, the host of “The Tonight Show,” joked about the deal having “no apparent redundancy issues.”

If anyone feels redundant, it would be the NBC affiliates that deliver their signals over the air; they will now be part of a company that provides its programming via cable. Mr. Roberts said in interviews that he did not foresee changes to the NBC affiliate structure, but was not specific about how far into the future he could see.

Comcast has not yet contacted the affiliates. “From what we’ve read and what we’ve seen, their interest in content certainly aligns with ours, so there’s reason to be optimistic,” said Michael Fiorile, the chairman of the NBC affiliates board and the chief executive officer of Dispatch Broadcast Group, which owns NBC stations in Indiana.

Comcast could toss a lifesaver of sorts to the broadcast business by supporting per-subscriber payments to stations, or so-called retransmission agreements. Comcast was noncommittal about retransmission last week, saying only that it hoped to play a constructive role.

In a letter aimed at Washington lawmakers and regulators who will scrutinize the deal in the coming months, David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, expressed support for NBC on Thursday. He wrote, “Notwithstanding the turbulence in the current media marketplace and the ongoing threats to the business model of a national broadcast network, the combined company remains committed to continuing to provide free over-the-air television” through its owned and operated stations and its local broadcast affiliates.

Comcast also said it would “preserve and enrich the output of local news, local public affairs, and other public interest programming” on NBC’s stations. Public interest groups opposed to the deal called Mr. Cohen’s letter weak, noting that it did not make any funding commitments for local or national news.

Not surprisingly, Comcast did not commit to keeping the name NBC Universal after the deal closes. Internally, the company will house its stake in NBC Universal inside a unit called Comcast Entertainment. Some Comcast executives are keen on using the Comcast Entertainment name in the future, although it is doubtful that the “NBC Nightly News” will become the “Comcast Nightly News” anytime soon.

Talking to CNBC on Thursday, Mr. Roberts suggested that the NBC name sometimes distracts from the fact that NBC’s cable channels are “fantastic.”

“In a way, sometimes their name gets in the way of that,” Mr. Roberts said. He started to say that he had talked about that fact with others, then cut himself off, saying instead, “we’ve joked about that.”

---

Fox Giving Time-Warner 3 hour reprieve

By Eric Deggans on 1 January 2010 in The Feed -
(http://blogs.tampabay.com/media/2010/01/fox-giving-time-warner-and-bright-house-a-little-more-time-before-pulling-channels.html)

Fox channels remain on Bright House this morning as the two sides are still negotiating to reach a deal. The original three-hour contract extension which kept Fox from pulling its channels at midnight on New Year's Day now has been extended again to 11 a.m., according to Bright House spokesman Joe Durkin.

Local Fox affiliate WTVT-Ch. 13 reported this morning that both sides hope to reach a deal before the 8:30 p.m. start of tonight's Sugar Bowl game featuring the University of Florida football team.)

Fox has delayed the decision to pull its network affiliates and some cable programming from Time Warner and Bright House Networks cable systems, providing a three-hour extension its rebroadcast agreements as the New Year began.

The cable systems were expected to lose access to Fox's channels at midnight, following a struggle over compensation for the retransmission agreements. The outage would affect more than 1-million Bright House subscriber households in the Tampa Bay area and about 850,000 households in the Orlando area.

A spokesman for Fox would not say how long the delay would last in an email just after midnight. But a spokesman for Bright House Networks confirmed the cable systems have been given a three-hour delay while negotiations continue in Los Angeles.

The Orlando Sentinel, quoting a statement from local Fox-owned affiliate WOFL, said Fox had agreed to a three-hour extension, pushing back the time Fox shows would disappear to 3 a.m. on the East Coast and midnight in Los Angeles.

But Fox spokesman Scott Grogin would only confirm in an email that "we're still negotiating and going to give it a little more time."

The extension meant that Tampa Bay area viewers saw Fox News reporter Rick Leventhal count in the New Year, just before a song from American Idol winner Kris Allen. The reprieve also allowed Fox to avoid spoiling viewers' New Year's Eve revelry on the East Coast, pushing back any programming outage to a time when much of the country would not be watching TV.

The possibility that Fox might remove its programming from Time Warner and Bright House cable systems brought a flurry of activity today, including a lawsuit filed by a Tampa lawyer trying to bar the action (it was denied) and a letter from Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski asking for a temporary extension.

While Time Warner Cable has shown a willingness to avoid an outage, agreeing to enter binding arbitration and a 30-day cooling off period suggested by a New York congressman, Fox owner News Corp. has shown little willingness to follow suit.

Sports fans in Florida were particularly incensed at the possibility of missing Fox's airing later today of the Sugar Bowl, featuring the final performance by University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow as a collegiate player.

Tampa's Fox-owned affiliate WTVT posted a list of places where area fans could see today's Sugar Bowl game if an outage occurred.

Both sides have mounted extensive media campaigns to press their side of the issue with consumers and the public. Fox's Web site can be found here, while Bright House's online home is here.

In another cable fee fight gone bad, Scripps Networks has decided to pull its popular cable channels The Food Network and HGTV from the Cablevision system after its contract expired at the start of the New Year. The removal, affecting more than 3-million subscribers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, was sparked by Scripps' efforts to increase its retransmission fees for the channels.

"We wish Scripps well and have no expectation of carrying their programming again, given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers," read a statement issued last night by Cablevision.

[Author's Note: As I have been writing this article a news story broke. Fox and Time-Warner have backed away from the deadline of today to end their relationship. a deal was struck to keep Fox in the Time-Warner distribution network See http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/01/01/time_warner_cable_and_fox_strike_new_deal.]

.

Relying on California for Food

SUBHEAD: Grocery prices keeping getting higher: How high will they go? Nobody knows for sure, not even the MANB, the state agency charged with monitoring produce prices.


Image above: The Central Valley of California in better days.
From http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/potd/2006/11/death_valley_national_park.php

By Alan D. Mcnaire on 30 December 2009 in Big Island News -
(http://www.bigislandweekly.com/articles/2009/12/30/read/news/news02.txt)

Hawaii's food prices have soared over the past few years. Fresh loaves of unsliced bread that used to cost a dollar at KTA's bakery are now $2.79. The cost of everything, from almonds to strawberries, have risen, often drastically. And they're likely to go higher in the coming months, thanks to factors including a major drought in California's central valley, reduced rainfall in (Big Island's) Waimea "vegetable belt" and increased fuel and shipping prices.

How high? There's no way to predict, because the state's agency that monitors produce prices and imports has been shut down.

The Hawaii State Department of Agriculture's Market Analysis and News Branch (MANB) was abolished earlier this month as a cost-cutting measure. It was a tiny agency -- eliminating it saved the state only three full-time positions and one half-time job -- but it served an important function.

Since 1946, the MANB had been collecting wholesale data on fresh fruits and vegetables and disseminating that information to wholesalers, farmers and decision-makers. One of its duties was to track fruits and vegetables coming into the state and shipments from the neighbor islands into O'ahu.

The abolition of the MANB comes at a time when the Legislature has been struggling to increase the state's food independence.

Earlier this year, it passed HB 1271, which was designed to "Ensure Hawaii is energy and food self-sufficient and sustainable to the maximum extent feasible," only to have the bill vetoed by Gov. Linda Lingle.

Now the state may be unable even to measure whether Hawai'i is making progress toward food sustainability, or is becoming even more dependent on crops raised elsewhere.

One Hawaii Department of Agriculture (DOA) official, who preferred to remain anonymous, noted that while the cutting of DOA inspectors has gotten press attention, an inspector could be trained in six months. An agricultural statistician would need much more time to be brought up to speed. And trained people weren't all that was lost.

"All the relationships that have been built since 1946 -- that's gone," he lamented.


Image above: Sand dunes in California's Death Valley.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_dunes_in_death_valley.jpg

California Dust Bowl?
The Weekly found out about the loss of the MANB when we called the Department of Agriculture to find out what effect a drought, now in its third year, in California's Central Valley might have on Hawaii's food supplies. A DOA spokesperson told us that because of the budget cuts, they couldn't give us an answer.

An article entitled "The New Dust Bowl" in the November-December issue of the investigative journal, Mother Jones, noted that California "has long boasted the world's richest agricultural economy, reliably producing more than a quarter of the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables. But it's done so in defiance of ecological reality."

"It now appears that water-wise, 20th century California was an anomaly, a relatively wet period in the midst of a historical cycle of severe drought," noted the article.

Climate change also was playing a role: "By the end of the century, scientists predict, Central California could experience temperatures rivaling Death Valley's and face the loss of 90 percent of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the region's main water source."

The article describes a desolated region where 85,000 houses are in foreclosure, 35,000 jobs have been lost, hordes of unemployed farm workers wait for hours for food handouts, and farmers are simply giving up on their farms: Almond and fruit orchards are being uprooted for firewood and thousands of acres formerly planted in wheat, vegetables and other crops have returned to desert.

Some of that doomed produce was almost certainly bound for Hawaii.

In the MANB's Nov. 4 Honolulu Wholesale Market Report -- the last that the agency issued before it was shut down -- shows nearly all of the imported fruits and vegetables listed came from California.

The only exceptions were some potatoes from Washington and Idaho, some Washington apples and some Central and South American bananas.

The California drought was interrupted briefly in October, when the remnants of a tropical storm actually caused flooding in some farm areas. But the long-term forecast remains bleak.

On Dec. 9, the California's Department of Water Resources released an initial allocation of only 5 percent of the water it was contracted to supply to state water projects, which furnish water to 750,000 acres of farmland and 25 million residents.

That initial allocation was the lowest figure ever, according to Western Farm Press, which noted that the DWR had initially released 15 percent in 2008, and had eventually released only 40 percent. (Westernfarmpress.com is one of the better sources of up-to-date information for California agriculture. Most of the stats available at the California Department of Food and Agriculture's own site date back to 2007 or earlier.)

"The initial allocation figure reflects the low carryover storage levels in the state's major reservoirs, ongoing drought conditions and federally mandated environmental restrictions on water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to protect endangered fish species in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta," Western Farm Press reported, noting that the populations of four endemic delta fish were at all-time lows.

There were a few bright spots, despite the drought. Tomato production was up, for instance; apparently as production fell in some drought-struck regions, new producers started up in areas that still had water.

The Central Valley is also Hawaii's main supplier for another vital foodstuff -- rice.

California has half a million acres of rice under cultivation.

Here, at least temporarily, the news is good: Western Farm Press reported in November that the California rice crop was 8 percent larger than last year's, and that crop yields were up 192 pounds an acre.

But unlike some other crops, rice was near the head of the line for water allocations.

That may change in the future. A Sept. 8 Los Angeles Times editorial chastised the Legislature for not doing more to curb agricultural water usage; it called for farmers to "move away from growing such water-intensive crops as cotton, barley and rice."

Other challenges
Lacking its own figures, a Hawaii DOA spokesperson recommended that we contact the island's produce suppliers directly to get answers to our questions.

We tried to reach a number of grocery chains and wholesalers; all but one either said their information was proprietary or simply didn't return our calls before deadline.

The exception was Michael Quanan, the produce manager for Suisan. Quanan said his company got about 65 percent of its produce from California, and he thought the drought was raising prices here.

But so, he maintained, were a number of other factors, including vog, reduced rainfall in Waimea, increased shipping costs and a lack of competition in the air freight business.

"If there were more wide-body direct flights, maybe shipping would be less expensive," he said, noting that "Now it's just United Airlines that have the wide-body into Kona...

This time of year, there are a lot of bumped containers -- passengers fly before freight, and sometimes our crates just don't come."

The cutback in the number of state agriculture inspectors is also adding to costs; he said; his drivers were having to wait an extra half an hour to 45 minutes before shipments were released at the airport.

Meanwhile, at least in Kona, the company's fruits and vegetables were sitting out on the hot tarmac, since there was no covered receiving facility.

With all its farmland and its numerous farmers' markets, the Island of Hawai'i is, of course, better off in terms of food sustainability than is O'ahu.

And according to Quanan, individual consumers here might be less affected by California's drought problems than are the island's resorts.

Local farmers, he said, were often geared toward selling at farmers' markets, and often can't supply the volumes of produce that the hotels require.

"Right now with all the big hotels, they push local first, but with the local shortage, they have to go with the California market," he said.

Another expense is irradiation.
Many Big Islanders know about that local papayas go through an irradiation facility to kill pests before they can be flown to the mainland.

Far fewer probably know that produce such as turnips and radishes must be irradiated before it comes here.

Right now, says Quanan, there's only one facility in San Diego that can perform that irradiation.

"After you tack irradiation and the freight, you're talking at least five bucks a pound," he said.

So there are a lot of uncertainties about our continued supply of imported food, especially from the Golden State.

With no one at the Department of Agriculture to keep tabs on that supply, the uncertainties grow even larger.

Astyk's 2010 Predictions

SUBHEAD: A 2009 scorecard and the year ahead. Practice losing farther, losing faster.

Image above: Illustation from United Kingdon online crystall ball.
From http://www.future-forcast.co.uk/crystal-ball

By Sharon Astyk on 30 December 2009 in Casaubon's Book -
(http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2009/12/2010_predictions_practice_losi.php)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster

- Elizabeth Bishop

I suddenly realized that my sense that I had time to do my end of year wrap up was rapidly becoming incorrect - New Years is tomorrow, of course, but somehow it snuck up on me. I tried to enlist my family in helping me with this project, but Eric flatly refused to have anything to do with it (his comment was "I can't decide whether it would be more unpleasant to be wrong or right, and in that case, the only good choice is to shut up."), and the boys' predictions ranged from the purely personal and highly unlikely (Four year old Asher's "I'm going to turn into a butterfly!") to the bizarre ( Eight year old Simon's "Humans will encounter snortlepigs.") to the perhaps a little too mundane (Six year old Isaiah's "I'm going to take my pants off and run around the room.") So no help there.

So let's get down to brass tacks, but before I do, let me post my standard, official New Years Predictions disclaimer which goes like this: "I don't think everything that comes out of my ass is the high truth, and neither should you." Remember what you are paying for this wisdom, and value it accordingly.

And if you were valuing my last year's predictions about that much, well, you got your money's worth. After an astonishing degree of correctness in 2008, I got cocky and predicted a much faster decline than we've actually seen. I was way wrong.

2009 Scorecard

So how did I do this past year? Let's take a look (note, I've edited these a bit for length, you can see the originals at the above link, as well as how I did in 2008):

1. Some measure of normalcy will hold out until late spring or early summer, mostly based on hopes for the Obama Presidency. But by late summer 2009, the aggregate loss of jobs, credit and wealth will cause an economic crisis that makes our current situation look pretty mild.

This would be my big old screw up - I figured that even the huge cash infusions of the bail out couldn't hold out against the massive loss of assets, and I was wrong. I'm still a little bit impressed (in a horrified sort of way) the way crazy accounting tricks, the mortgaging of our future for short term gains and crazy lies have been deployed. Back in December, I really wouldn't have guessed that the Obama administration would go as far as it has in selling us out to the corporations. I still don't think the problem is at all fixed, but I was definitely wrong about the pace of things, because I overestimated the ethical considerations of the new administration. I shoulda known better - mea culpa.

2. Many plans for infrastructure investments currently being proposed will never be completed, and many may never be started, because the US may be unable to borrow the money to fund them. The price of globalization will be high in terms of reduced availability of funds and resources - despite all the people who think that we'll keep building things during a collapse, we won't. We will have some variation on a Green New Deal in the US and some nations will continue to work on renewable infrastructure, but a lot of us are going to be getting along with the fraying infrastructure, designed for a people able to afford a lot of cheap energy, that we have now.

I think I called this one. Back last winter much was being made of the potential of national health care, of our investments in Green Jobs and major programs designed to benefit the little guy. What did we actually get - the crappiest possible national health care, largely to the benefit of the insurers, a lot of roadwork to nowhere, and cash for clunkers.

3. 2009 will be the year that most of the most passionate climate activists (and I don't exclude myself) have to admit that there is simply not a snowball's chance in hell (and hell is getting toastier quickly) that we are going to prevent a 2C+ warming of the planet. We are simply too little, too late.

I got this one too, sadly. Oxford held its 4 degree conference and Copenhagen put the nail in the coffin of real climate activism. Multiple studies released revealed that even with the most ambitious plans (and no country is enacting the most ambitious plans) we'd fail to keep below 2 degrees. We now know that we're going to pass the critical point. And it doesn't suck any less than I thought it would.

4. 2008 will probably be the world's global oil peak, but we won't know this for a while. When we do realize it, it will be anticlimactic, because we'll be mired in the consequences of our economic, energy and climate crisis. Lack of investment in the coming years will mean that in the end, more oil stays in the ground, which is good for the climate, but tough for our ambitions for a renewable energy economy. Over the long term, however, peak oil is very much going to come back and bite us all in the collective ass.

This one we can't answer yet. There are still people I trust making the case for 2010 and still people calling out 2005. The difference between them, however, is pretty small. Certainly, though, the IEA confirms that A) We will be seeing peak oil again and B) Lack of investment is a biggie. We'll call this one undetermined as of yet.

5. Decreased access to goods, services and food will be a reality this year. Some of this will be due to stores going out of business - we may all have to travel further to meet needs. Some will be due to suppliers going under, following the wave of merchant bankruptcies. Some may be due to disruptions in shipping and transport of supplies. Some will be due to increased demand for some items that have, up until now, been niche items, produced in small numbers for the small number of sustainability freaks, but that now seem to have widespread application. And some may be due to deflation.

I jumped the gun again. We've seen some of this, but not enough to be significant. I was wrong.

6. Most Americans will see radical cut backs in local services and safety nets. Funding will simply dry up for many state and local programs.

Yes, but not as acutely as I expected. The enormous federal bailout put money into state coffers that allowed them to defer their problems - so far, California while effectively bankrupt, for example, hasn't actually defaulted, and New York is still holding on. My prediction that state unemployment coffers would be overwhelmed was right, but the federal government did step in, as I also predicted. Some service disruptions have occurred, particularly among the poor and disabled, but they haven't been as widespread as expected.

7. Nations will overwhelmingly fail to pony up promised commitments to the world's poor, and worldwide, the people who did the least harm to the environment will die increasingly rapidly of starvation. This will not be inevitable, but people in the rich world will claim it is.

Called it. This is precisely what happened.

8. We will finally attempt to deal with foreclosures, but the falling value of housing will make it a losing proposition. Every time we bring the housing values down to meet the reality, the reality will shift under our feet. Many of those who are helped will end up foreclosed upon anyway

Yup. The much-vaunted foreclosure program failed to work for a whole host of reasons and most people who were helped ended up in foreclosure. Got this one.

9. By the end of the year, whether or not we will collapse or have collapsed will continue to be hotly debated by everyone who can still afford their internet service. No one will agree on what the definition of collapse actually is, plenty of people will simply be living their old lives, only with a bit less, while others will be having truly apocalyptic and deeply tragic losses. Some will see the victims as lazy, stupid, alien and worthless, no matter how many there are. Others will look around them and ask "how did I not see that this was inevitable?"

Yes and no. I think most people would agree we haven't collapsed, although a minority looking at our situation would argue that we have, we just haven't noticed yet. But I do think that the mainstreaming of a language of collapse is occurring - I see more and more ordinary people asking "how bad can it get?" That said, however, I think that the bailouts have done a great deal to (falsely) convince people that things are better than they are and that we can continue on as we are. And yes, there's a lot of hostility towards the poor - and a lot of sudden realizations that we're one of them.

10. Despite how awful this is, the reality is that not everything will fall apart. In the US, we will find life hard and stressful, but we will also go forward. People will suck a lot up and retrench. It will turn out that ordinary people were always better than commentators at figuring out what to do - that's why they stopped shopping even while people were begging them to keep buying. So they'll move in with their siblings and grow gardens and walk away from their overpriced houses, or fight to keep them. Some of them will suffer badly for it, but a surprising number of people will simply be ok in situations that until now, they would have imagined were impossible to survive. We will endure, sometimes even find ways of loving our new lives. There will be acts of remarkable courage and heroism, and acts of the most profound evil and selfishness. There will be enormous losses - but we will also discover that most of us are more than we think we are - can tolerate more and have more courage and compassion than we believe of ourselves.

I think I got this one right, maybe more right than most of the others. In the good news we saw 8 million new gardeners last year. We saw more people cutting back and saving more. We saw a new shame about conspicuous consumption. Trusting people to mostly be people turns out to be the best bet of all.

Not an official numbered prediction, but I claimed that 2009 would be the year that we officially "collapsed" - not into Mad Max or cannibalism, but in which things we expect to work, we assume will always remain the same stopped working. I was wrong about that. I think we came very close to having that happen, but deferred the collapse. How long did we defer it? That's the big question. I don't think it is possible to put it off inevitably - at some point the bills come due. I made the mistake of thinking that most people in power might prefer to pay the price sooner, and have the price be smaller. In retrospect, I have no idea why I thought that. We've decided, as usual, to put off until later what is unpleasant to deal with today.

In 2008, I got about 8 1/2 out of 10 right. This past year I'd say 5 1/2 out of 9, with one (the year of the oil peak) still up for grabs. We will reconvene come next December to figure out how I did this year. But here's my list for the coming year:

I've decided to call this year "The Year of Losing Faster" - because I think the theme of this year and the coming decade will be loss - loss of economic stability, loss of dreams and expectations, loss of the ability to predict how much food and energy will cost you, loss of normalcy in every respect. We put off our troubles - but they are coming back, and are not lighter for being put off.

2010 Predictons

1. 2010 will mark a (probably dramatic) resumption of the economic crisis, which will not be short or pleasant. I keep pointing out that the two most recent deep economic downturns (1971-1982, 1929-1941) both lasted more than a decade, and I think this is most likely a fair translation of the current hype of "jobless recovery" and "low growth rates." The reality is that we're not going to experience a major economic recovery anytime soon, and I'd be somewhat surprised if we didn't see a substantial further downturn.

2. We will face deflation, probably simultaneously with fluctuating and sometimes extremely high (at least in relationship to people's ability to pay) prices for food and energy, which will confuse people who think that "inflation" means "higher prices." This will not change the fact that we are having deflation.

3. The trend towards growing your own, small home livestock, and home food preservation will continue to grow and expand - people who never thought they would know the word "compost" or touch a chicken will do so - and love it. Local food producers, on the other hand, may find that people are starting to cut back on organic, more sustainable food due to budgetary cconstraints as the "jobless recovery" turns out to be "long term joblessness."

4. A basic conflict between generations will begin to emerge and simmer as younger people realize that the concentration of wealth in the baby boomer generation isn't going anytime soon, and youth joblessness rises, and people realize that their expectations are less than their parents'. I doubt that this conflict will emerge in any dramatic way in 2010, but I think its groundwork is being sown right now and this will shape the politics of the next decade.

5. There will be a fragmentation of mostly fairly unified fronts among climate change activists and scientists as we are forced to deal with the revelations of last year - that we're not going to stay below 2 degrees. It will become increasingly uncertain how to respond and what to advocate for, and people will begin dividing up into camps much more dramatically than in the past.

6. Either the economic crisis or some other crisis (swine flu mutates, new climate change related disaster, military conflict with somewhere that most Americans can't find on a map... whatever) will give the US an excuse to take climate change mostly off the table as a subject. We're too busy! This is too important! Monies promised to poor nations will not be delivered.

7. Surging in Afghanistan won't help. (Ok, I needed one gimmee ;-)).

8. As I've been predicting for years, most of our energy and ecological crisis will show up as further economic blows. That is, it won't be a question of whether the grid fails or we run out of gas, but whether you can buy gas. The most likely reason you will lose power is because your utility company disconnects you. The need to respond to and clean up the next natural disaster will push everyone's resources just that much further. Peak oil and climate change will hit us hard in the next year and the coming year, but they will look like money worries and tight budgets and cut services and growing poverty, not like being underwater - at least mostly.

9. At least one very dramatic, totally unexpected game changer will come up, and change the terms of the discussion entirely. (Hey, I needed one risky one that makes me look good if it comes true ;-))

10. Most people won't look at 2010 as the year it all went to hell. But looking back from 2015 to 2005, they will know that somewhere in there, it all went to hell, and well, this was right there in the middle.

Happy New Year, everyone - I wish for all of you that all my bad predictions are wrong!

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Kunstler's 2010 Conclusion 12/28/09

Airport Attack on Gene Pool

SUBHEAD: Environmental radioactivity will fall more heavily on some than on others.


Image above: Collage of Pamela Anderson in airport x-ray machine.
From http://www.blogiversity.org/blogs/cstanton/archive/2009/10/14/controversy-over-naked-x-ray-at-airport.aspx

By Albert K. Bates on 29 December 2009 in The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2009/12/airport-droids-attack-human-gene-pool.html)

"If it's something that's going to improve safety, then I don't have any problem with it, I have nothing to hide."

— Ashley Houston, 32, as she waited for a plane in Phoenix (Reuters)

If you were against transhumanism before, perhaps you should give it another look. Our bodies are the product of a billion years of nature’s evolutionary processes, but the War on Terror is about to irrevocably corrupt our gene pool, causing untold immune system and other genetic damage to future generations, and possibly rendering the DNA coding that we are based on unacceptably toxic.

We may need to port our intelligence to a machine, or to cyberspace, if “human” intelligence is to survive in today’s toxic environment.

While Homeland Security has installed Backscatter Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) into airports while successfully avoiding an environmental impact statement, and the Justice Department is now fighting FOIA requests for technical specifications (filed by EPIC, Electronic Privacy Information Center), we already know that backscatter radiation may interfere directly with DNA. Although the ionizing radiation is small, the terahertz waves the machines generate do more than show your private parts to the screener. They have been found to “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.”

Radiation waves occur naturally in the environment, and we’re hit with them all the time. But should we bombard ourselves with them unwillingly every time we want to board a flight? Initially the machines were supposed to be voluntary. Suddenly they are not.

The TSA issued a blog saying:

“Backscatter X-ray technology uses X-rays that penetrate clothing, but not skin, to create an image. Millimeter wave technology uses sensors to collect millimeter wave energy to measure the difference in radiated energy relative to each object against a common background (the human body produces these signatures in typical screening applications) to construct a composite image.

“For comparison purposes, the X-ray dose received from the backscatter system is equivalent to the radiation received in two minutes of airplane flight at altitude (.04 millirem by backscatter [2 scans] compared to .0552 millirem for two minutes of flight).

“The [non-ionizing radio frequency] energy projected by the system is 10,000 times less than a cell phone transmission (.00000597 mW/cm2 for millimeter wave technology compared to 37.5 mW/cm2 for a cellphone).”

We don’t know about you, but whenever we hear a government agency use these kinds of comparisons we check our wallet.

Backscatter X-rays are nothing like the cosmic radiation we get at high altitudes, flights included. Nor is background radiation — or cellphone radiation — safe, thank you very much.

Medical science already knows how much terahertz radiation is safe for the body to absorb: none. You can think of it like sunlight — a little may be fine while a lot, you frequent flyers, may be deadly. However, where ionizing radiation is concerned, there is something called the superlinear dose response that wrecks that sunlight analogy. Middling range exposures are fine because they destroy the cells they hit. Low range exposures are far deadlier, because DNA is mutated but the cells survive to divide.

Our genome is smaller than that of an ear of corn, with about the same number of genes as an earthworm. DNA’s secrets are not just in the genes, but in the way the code is arranged. In the human cell, certain chemical bonds are crucial to the integrity of the genetic code and breaking just a few of these bonds may endow the code with a permanent alteration. When a mutated gene is responsible for regulating normal cell growth, an uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer, can develop. When mutation occurs in the procreative cells or in the developing embryo, birth defects can result. When mutation occurs in the blood-forming tissue, impairment of the immune response system can result, and this can increase susceptibility to an entire spectrum of human disease.

Radiation is therefore said to be mutagenic (cell-mutating), carcinogenic (cancer-causing), teratogenic (birth-defect inducing), and immuno-suppressing (resistance-impairing). All of these effects, which begin at a submicroscopic level, remain invisible for extended periods of time until they reach observable proportions. The latent period may be decades in the case of an incipient cancer, or it may be centuries in the case of a genetic effect.

Even where the risk is very slight, if the population to be exposed is very large — several billion air-traveler-exposures annually — the epidemiological burden is overcome and real deaths result. Far more deaths, it may be (we won’t know as long as FOIA immunity reigns) than deaths from terrorist air hijackings.

Most predictive models also make the assumption that the exposed population is homogeneous. In fact, there are subgroupings for susceptibility in the population, and equal radiation exposure can increase disease by five to ten times in the more susceptible groups over the less susceptible. All men are not created equal, and the burden of environmental radioactivity will fall more heavily on some than on others, depending on their genes. Children are very vulnerable. Fetuses even more so. As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has acknowledged,

“Because our present state of knowledge precludes all possible meaningful quantifications of the relative radiosensitivity of a given individual, it is true that persons are not necessarily equally ‘protected’ by current federal regulations designed to protect the general population as a whole.”

- Jeannine Honicker v. United States of America, et al.

One concept of the genetic mutation process put forward by the National Academy of Sciences employed a line of nucleoproteins in a normal sequence something like this: AGT-AGT-AGT-AGT-AGT-AGT-AGT.... In this model the DNA code is read and transmitted in groups of three proteins. Consider what happens if the sequence is disturbed, such as when a speeding terahertz wave dislodges one protein in the chain. The entire sequence is thrown off until two counterbalancing breaks occur that throw it back into correct order. Until then it is read: AG-TAG-TAG-TAG-TAG-TAG-TAG....

Suppose the AGT sequence was for brain cells, but the TAG sequence was for stomach muscles. You could get something pretty weird happening. It may have been from mutations such as these that all of us evolved. As a species, we arrived at our present form by selection of favorable mutations and elimination of unfavorable mutations, which is not to say it was a pleasant process for those individuals with the unfavorable mutations.

The rate of genetic translocations in humans caused by ionizing radiation and estimated in the current the scientific literature ranges from 24 to 1,330 translocations per unit of radiation (rad) per million live births per generation. It takes on the order of 100 generations to eliminate each unfavorable mutation from the genetic pool, whether it is for a fruit fly or a baboon.

Biostatistician Rosalie Bertell has suggested that elevation of the background level of mutagens in combination with mutations which interfere with normal reproduction could result in sudden species extinction, which, if the species is humans, by the time we recognized the threat, we could be powerless to counter.

The US Supreme Court has marked this territory with a bright line. Where rights to be protected are clearly enumerated, are “so rooted in the traditions and conscience of the nation as to be ranked as fundamental,” or are “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” so that failure to protect them would mark a departure from first principles, federal authority should be conditioned upon the demonstration of an overriding interest of compelling importance, the absence of less damaging alternatives for meeting that interest, and some method of limiting or restricting the scope of the excursion and redressing the injustice created.

Over the past decade, in the United States alone, we’ve had sixteen million flights that got to their destinations without incident for every flight that was victimized by crime. Should we punish the millions of safe passengers to deter the one criminal? Should we sacrifice our future genetic heritage for the sake of an abstract, and likely unobtainable, perfection of our “security?”

How we define security matters. We should force ourselves to thoroughly examine alternatives in the future before embarking upon any new governmental encroachments, or putting new wrinkles on old encroachments, that carry species-ending health implications.

And Mr. Obama, tear down that secrecy wall.