Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan

SOURCE: Elli Ward (sayjaz3@hotmail.com) SUBHEAD: Apollo Kauai announces public meeting to discuss 2010 - 2030 Energy Sustainability Plan.

  
Image above: The Port Allen KIUC diesel powered electric generating plant provides 75% of Kauai energy. Photo by Juan Wilson.

EVENTS CALENDAR - Thursday, January 7, 2010 - Public Meeting - "Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan" A public meeting will be hosted by SENTECH Hawaii and KPAA to present the Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan 2010-2030 (KESP) draft report being developed for the County of Kauai.

The Plan has identified renewable and energy efficient opportunities that can help Kauai achieve energy independence from imported oil over the next 20 years.

Thursday, January 7, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at the Peace & Freedom Convention Hall, 4191 Hardy Street, Lihue; doors open at 5:30 p.m. To review the plan, it will be available online January 4 at: www.KauaiEnergySustainabilityPlan.com.

 EVENTS CALENDAR - Friday, January 8, 2010 - Interactive Webinar - "Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan" SENTECH Hawaii will host an interactive webinar to present the Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan 2010-2030(KESP) draft report being developed for the County of Kauai.

From the comfort of your own computer and via conference call from your phone, you can participate in the online meeting from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm.

The Plan has identified renewable and energy efficient opportunities that can help Kauai achieve energy independence from imported oil over the next 20 years. Webinar log-in instructions are available at www.kauainetwork.org or call KPAA at 632-2005.

KIUC's Future

SUBHEAD: On Thursday, 7 January 2010 KIUC will have a special Board Meeting that will include public comment.

Image above: Residential solar-voltaic generating system in Timaru, New Zealand. From http://www.smartenergyltd.co.nz/on-site-power-generation  

By Juan Wilson on 5 January 2010 in for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2010/01/kiucs-future.html)

On 10 August 2000 the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported:  

"The Kauai County Council yesterday "concurred" in a decision by Mayor Maryanne Kusaka to spend up to $100,000 to hire a consultant for an appraisal of Kauai Electric. Left open was the question of whether the county would use the appraisal to fight the purchase of Kauai Electric by a local business co-op before the Public Utilities Commission or as a preliminary step in an attempt by the county to purchase the utility." 

Such a course would have entailed risk. There may have even been discontinuity in service for a bit. Had the Kauai County let Kauai Electric go bankrupt, or refused to bailout then owners Citizen's Communications Company, we might be in better shape today. Had the county moved forward in taking over the failing utility, today we might have a debt free, non-profit publicly owned electric company... in other words - a real cooperative.

A BAD DEAL
But that was not to be, and in 2002 when Kauai Island Utility Cooperative took over Kauai Electric for whopping $215 million. From then on the Garden Island was condemned to live with a debt-burdened private utility company with no clue as to how to face the future.
 The underlying agenda for KIUC has been to not have anything disturb the lives of those that live on Kauai. That means no interruption or reduction in service. That means no significant change in lifestyle or working arrangements.

The result is that KIUC it wants to maintain continuity at any cost. KIUC has plans to move away from diesel fuel as the primary source of energy production on Kauai. It's just that how and when that happens just doesn't match up with how reality will unfold.

• KIUC plans to build another fossil fuel plant on island is patently absurd.
• KIUC is committed to a bio-fuel plant in what was once a sugarcane mill.
• KIUC wants to use 100 acres of farmland to build a solar thermal generator. 

This is so we can keep on doing what we are doing without a pause. All these plans amount to just burning more stuff (raising CO2) in place of growing food or living with less electricity. KIUC is not a cooperative. It is a monopoly corporation that has a huge debt obligation that the residents of Kauai are enlisted to service. It seems not capable of doing what is necessary to lead us into the future.  

A GOOD DEAL
KIUC should have adopted a strategy, that has often been suggested, that would lead to financing a distributed residential generating capacity rather than a centralized large scale system. These residential capacity would be home photo-voltaic systems, and home wind-generators (both built with battery storage capacity).

These residential systems would be attached to a "smart grid" operated by KIUC. Then KIUC would buy all the power provided by these residential systems; sell collected power to those not generating power; and charge a modest access fee to all attached to the cooperative's grid.

There are simple capitalizing instruments, like credit unions, that could offer to loan money to purchase residential generating systems that would at the cost we pay for KIUC power today. Over time KIUC would back away from being a power generating corporation and embrace being a the cooperative network of a distributed power-generating community.

An important point is that people need to realize that they can only use the energy that they can afford to produce themselves themselves. This direction is the opposite of the strategy KIUC is pursuing. They talk about conservation and alternative (centralized) energy sources, but the reality before us requires massive demand-destruction (using much less power) and distributed generation. Bottom line:

We need to burn less - not more! KIUC's schedule to meet its alternative generating plans is decades too late of the oncoming changes at hand.

The ability of financing true change in the KIUC system came and went with the peak of the housing bubble. We may be past the $147/barrel oil of 2008, but in 2009 oil prices nearly doubled to $80/barrel. If there is any economic recovery oil will be past $100/barrel is a flash. If there is no recovery we won't be able to afford KIUC's future plans.

Even so, there are important changes that can be made with little cost. Our state Public Utility Commision (PUC) would need to be involved and KIUC would have to alter its mission from "centralized reliability" to "distributed-flexibility". Three proposals bear repeating:  

ONE - Buy power from Co-op Members:
KIUC needs to get the cap lifted on co-generating restrictions (buying power from residential system). They should buy all power provided by users (at a reasonable discount). That means running the meter backwards and providing payment to co-op members.  

TWO - Let Co-op Members Buy From Each Other:
A condition of KIUC co-op membership is that members are restricted from buying power from anyone but KIUC. That is a damper on solutions we need to experiment with.  

THREE - Finance Distributed Power Generation:
KIUC should institute a non-profit financial program for small-businesses and home-owners to acquire wind and solar generating capacity.  

REALITY CHECK
It appears that neither the KIUC directors or cooperative members are comfortable with the future that is approaching. They dream of techno-fixes or any other means by which things might be kept just as they are. But that is just not going to happen. Each of us needs to determine how we will provide much more of our own energy, food, transportation and entertainment. If we act effectively we will be more independent and self-reliant. Things won't be worse than they are now - just different.

WHAT:
Special Meeting of the Board of Directors of Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC)  

WHEN:
Thursday, 7 January 2009 at 10:30am  

WHERE:
KIUC Main Conference Room at 4463 Pahee Street, Lihue, Kauai  

WHY:
Public Comment as required and consideration of Green Energy Team contract extension.  



See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Municipal Bonds for Solar Panels 11/6/09

Immodest Proposals

SUBHEAD: Replacing self-defeating habits of the current system with effective incentives our society needs to establish.

By John Michael Greer on 30 December 2009 in Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/immodest-proposals.html)

  Image above: Detail of "The Tax Collector" by Marinus van Reymerswaele (1490-1567). From http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/10/20/1313217.html

Longtime readers of this blog may not be surprised to find that, after three posts explaining in detail why significant reforms are impossible in the current American political system, I propose to spend several more posts talking about significant reforms that might be part of a functional response to the crisis of our time. I freely grant that there’s irony involved, but proposing useful changes that won’t be enacted right away is by no means as pointless as it may seem in an age of just-in-time ordering and instant gratification.

It’s a safe bet that if something can’t last, it won’t, and the political situation in the United States today may just turn into a poster child for that old but by no means outworn maxim. Most of the world’s nations have replaced one political system with another at least once in the course of the last century; the process can certainly be traumatic, and it doesn’t always solve the problems that forced the change in the first place, but it isn’t the end of the world.

Whatever crises drive the existing order into its final implosion, and whatever national traumas supervene until some degree of stability returns, there will be a place for new policies when the future government of the United States, or the regional governments that succeed it, get to work picking up the pieces. Nor, of course, is this blog only read by Americans; and for all I know, some of the ideas I plan on discussing here might strike a responsive chord elsewhere.

One word of caution, though: readers expecting me to offer them a ticket to Utopia are going to be disappointed. There’s a common notion that everything that’s wrong in the world is the fault of the institutions or personalities officially in charge, and can be fixed by replacing them with some other set of institutions or personalities. That notion has been tested more thoroughly by history than any other hypothesis I can think of in the social sciences, and it’s failed abjectly every time.

Maybe we should finally get around to admitting that people will not behave like angels no matter how (or whether) they are governed, or who (if anyone) does the governing; and, in the process, admit that human beings are incurably human – that is, capable of the full spectrum of good and evil all by themselves – rather than moral puppets who can be expected to dance on command to the tune of a good or evil system.

 It’s easy to come up with a perfect system of human society, so long as it doesn’t have to work in the real world, and it’s very easy to compare a perfect system on paper to the failings of a system in the real world, to the latter’s detriment.

Nearly always, though, what John Kenneth Galbraith said about innovation in finance is just as true of innovation in political and social institutions: what gets ballyhooed as new and revolutionary thinking is normally the repetition of a fairly small set of fallacies that worked very poorly the last dozen or so times they were tried, and will work just as poorly this time, too.

Those systems that function at all are fairly few in number, though there are a lot of minor variations on the basic themes, and the ones we’ve got now – representative democracy in politics, a market system in economics – have certain advantages. Though the current examples are troubled, corrupt, and at very high risk of being overwhelmed by the consequences of some very bad decisions made over the last few decades, the basic systems are noticeably less dysfunctional most of the time than most of the alternatives.

Thus I’m not going to present a grandiose plan for the complete transformation of everything, of the sort that have been in vogue among social reformers for so many years. Instead, I’m going to suggest a handful of limited, tightly focused changes that I think have a real chance, if they were to be implemented, of canceling out some of the self-defeating habits of the current system and replacing them with effective incentives toward the sort of habits our society needs to establish.

I could start in any number of places, but the one I’ve chosen for this week is the seemingly unpromising field of tax policy. That’s a subject on which a great deal of nonsense abounds just now. While at the public library here in Cumberland the other day, I found a book titled The End of Prosperity.

This – I was about to describe it as meretricious, but that would be unfair to honest prostitutes – this pointless waste of inoffensive trees, then, claims that if the US government raised taxes to a level that might just actually pay for the services it provides, the result would be, well, the end of prosperity.

Somehow the authors managed to ignore the fact that in the 1950s, when American prosperity was by many measures at its all-time peak, people in the upper tax brackets paid well over 2/3 of their income to Uncle Sam, and that the country has by most measures become less prosperous, not more, as those tax rates have been lowered.

There’s a reason for that, and it ties back into the distinction I made in several earlier posts about the differences among the primary, secondary, and tertiary economies. The primary economy, which is nature, and the secondary economy, which is the production of goods and services by human labor, are subject to negative feedback loops that tend to hold them in balance.

The tertiary economy, which is the exchange of money and other forms of abstract wealth, is subject to positive feedback loops that drive it out of balance in ways that unbalance the other two economies as well. The core of those feedback loops is the way that accumulations of paper wealth multiply in value, and so anything that drains those accumulations and puts them in the pockets of people who spend their money on groceries, instead of more paper, tends to stabilize the economy.

That’s what the high tax rates of the Fifties did, and it’s not accidental that the more drastically tax rates have been cut in the last three decades, and the more tertiary wealth has been shielded from taxes by special capital-gains tax rates and the like, the more drastically the tertiary economy has manifested its usual tendency to run to extremes and blow itself up in the process. Still, there are arguably less scattershot ways to drain off excesses from the tertiary economy, and the tax code also meshes very poorly with the primary economy, with its emerging reality of scarce resources and overburdened natural cycles.

In a world where the accelerating exploitation of natural resources and the accumulation of paper wealth are major sources of problems, while the human labor at the core of the secondary economy is the most renewable resource we’ve got, we arguably tax the wrong things.

At the risk of veering off entirely into fantasy, then, let’s imagine a new tax code that taxes the right things instead. In this imaginary code there are no sales taxes, and no taxes on income from wages, salaries, dividends, and rents – that is, no taxes on the secondary economy at all. Instead, there are two classes of taxation.

The first, affecting the primary economy, is on natural goods and services; the second, affecting the tertiary economy, is on interest income, capital gains, and all other forms of money made by money. The taxes on natural goods and services follow the same rough line of logic as property taxes do at present. The federal government, as trustee for the American people, already effectively owns all the real estate within its borders – when you buy property, what you’re buying is the right to use that property within the limits of the laws and the national interest, which is why China can’t just contract with private landowners to buy a couple of disused fishing harbors on our west coast as bases for its navy. The same principle could reasonably apply to every other resource in the country. When you pump oil from the ground, you’re depleting part of the patrimony of the American people, and you should have to pay the government for that privilege. When you dump smoke out of a tailpipe, equally, you’re using the nation’s atmosphere as the gaseous equivalent of a landfill, and once again you should have to pay to do that.

Every natural resource of every kind would be subject to the same sort of tax. Now of course this would mean that the prices of many goods and services would go up considerably. Since everyone would have the money they wouldn’t have to spend on income and sales taxes, this may be a little less of a burden; but the crucial point is that people can avoid resource taxes by their personal choices.

If you buy a hybrid car, you’re going to pay a lot less in petroleum tax, and a lot less in tailpipe tax as well – though the extraction taxes for the rare earth minerals in the batteries and electronics may set you back a bit, as they should.

If you don’t own a car at all, you laugh all the way to the bank. Similarly, the price of a product made from metal mined from the earth includes the extraction tax for the mining, but the price of a product made from recycled material doesn’t; thus the manufacturer has a big incentive to use the recycled material and undercut the competition.

 The second set of new taxes targets a different problem, one discussed already in this post. Right now, with the tax laws we have, it’s to the economic advantage of businesses to pull their money out of producing goods and services, and put it into blowing bubbles in the tertiary economy of paper wealth.

That’s why General Motors manufactured more financial paperwork than cars for quite a few years, until it got into a head-on collision with bubble economics. From a broader perspective, that’s why America produces so few goods and services nowadays, and so much in the way of essentially hallucinatory paper wealth. Taxing financial income, but not earned income, does a fair amount to reverse that equation.

If putting your money into bonds or derivatives means any profit you make suffers a significant tax bite, while putting your money into producing goods and services means you pocket the profits tax free, those derivatives and bonds will look a lot less inviting.

Notice also how these two kinds of tax work together to take an even larger bite out of one of the most mistaken economic priorities of our time, the replacement of human labor by machines. In case you haven’t noticed, the US has an unemployment problem; even before the most recent bubble burst, good working class jobs were very hard to come by.

There are plenty of reasons why that happened, but tax policy that makes employers pay half again or more of the cost of a worker’s wages in order to hire that worker certainly haven’t helped. Eliminate those taxes, and place taxes on energy and natural raw materials instead, and in a good many cases a worker instead of a machine becomes the most cost-effective way to do the job.

Other arrangements could easily be devised to accomplish the same ends. The point I want to make with this extended exercise in nonfinancial speculation, though, is that some of the ways Americans do business, and pay (or don’t pay) for government services, simply don’t fit the realities of an age of ecological limits.

A tax code that burdens the secondary economy – which is the economy that actually produces goods and services, remember – while encouraging the wasteful plundering of nature and the bubble-blowing antics of the tertiary economy is not going to help us weather the storms of the near future.

A tax code, any tax code, that does the opposite – that makes it more profitable to employ human labor to meet human needs, and less profitable to disrupt the natural cycles that undergird our survival or to feed speculative excesses that pump imbalances into an already troubled economy – could be a very helpful asset in a time of crisis, and could be put in place tolerably easily, without having to tear an entire society to pieces and rebuild it from the ground up. Would such a new tax code solve all our problems?

Of course not. To my mind, though, it’s exactly the attitude that insists that we have to find a single solution that deals with all our problems that helps put any constructive response to those problems out of reach.

If we’re to face the difficult future ahead of us with any sort of grace, that worthwhile achievement is much more likely to happen as a result of the tentative, uncertain coping mechanisms sketched out in Warren Johnson’s useful little book Muddling Toward Frugality than it is to unfold from some grandiose plan to reach a perfect world in a single leap.

Monkeying with the tax code so that it rewards the economic behaviors that might help us get things of value through the approaching troubles, rather than rewarding the economic behaviors that will only make things worse, is one example of this sort of muddling; others will be brought up for discussion in the weeks to come.

The Futility Economy

SUBHEAD: The people in charge of things will lose their vested legitimacy in a flash, and the institutions they command will become irrelevant overnight.

By James Kunstler on 4 January 2010 in Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/01/the-futility-economy.html)


  
Image above: Closing a Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York, a 1957 Norman Rockwell art-directed Colorama by Ralph Amdursky and Charles Baker. From Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/american-dream200904  

It's the first business day of the new year and oil is trading above $80 a barrel, which means the price has re-entered the danger zone where it can crush industrial economies. This is a central element of the predicament we find ourselves in.

The US economy is essentially a Happy Motoring economy. During the whole nervous period since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, American gasoline consumption hardly went down at all, though so many other activities collapsed, from house-building to trucking. Yesterday, The Seattle Times published a story with the idiotic headline:  

Oil Touches $80 on US Economy, Demand Optimism.

Apparently, they think high oil prices are "a good sign."

How much can a nation not get it? Would $100 oil ignite a new orgy of "consumer" spending and another round of investment in commercial real estate? Welcome to the Futility Economy. This is the economy where Nature and its material companion, Reality, punish us for our stupidity and fecklessness. This is the economy that will tear the United States apart, after it bankrupts us at every level, and mercilessly drives the population down by one-third through starvation, homelessness, violence, disease, and sheer political cruelty.

Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years -- whatever model of it you have in your head -- that is definitely not what we are going back to. Like one of Dickens's Yuletide ghosts, Reality is leading us by the hand into new circumstances. We resist like crazy. We throw our hands over our eyes.

We don't want to look. We want to return to the comfort of our dreary routines -- living in places that aren't worth caring about, weaving endlessly in freeway traffic, drawing a paycheck at the air-conditioned cubicle, inhaling Buffalo wings by the platterful, with periodic side-trips to the state-chartered casino where there's always a chance of scoring a lifetime's income on one lucky bet. And at the end of the day, you can retire with a simulated prostitute on your laptop screen! And not even have to fork over a dime -- except perhaps for the Internet connection fee.

Reality is taking us out of that familiar, if sordid, realm, whether we like it or not. Our destination is an everyday economy where you rarely travel far from the place you live, where you have to make provision for you own health, your own old age, your own income, your own diet, your own security, and your own education.

If you're really fortunate, some or all of these necessities can be obtained in conjunction with your neighbors in the place where you live -- but don't expect an increasingly mythical federal government to supply any of it. Expect a new and different way of organizing households based on extended families and kinship groups.

Be prepared for agriculture to return to the foreground of everyday life, where farming is back at the center of the economy. Think about how you will cultivate your best role in a social network so the things you do will be truly valued by the other people who know you. Learn how to make your own music and write your own scripts. Try to study history. Resist cults. Keep your mind clear and your senses sharp.

Even if you have a dim sense that this is where we're headed, most of you probably want to stay where you are. The investments we've made in the current mode of existence are so monumental that we can't imagine letting go of them. This will be the theme of American life for the next couple of years as we struggle mightily to escape the confining armor of the Futility Economy and move closer to ways of life that have more of a future. Right now, all the power and authority in our culture has dedicated itself to remaining inside that old armor.

The Master Wish around the country, including among people who ought to know better, is that we can "solve" our economic problem by finding some other way to run all the cars. Even hardcore environmentalists yammer incessantly about hybrid and "plug-in" cars as the "solution" to our blues. One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to "save" the giant car companies. This is exactly the kind of signature behavior of a Futility Economy. It's based on the idea that we have to continue driving cars all the time and for everything, at all costs.

The religion of the Futility Economy is Techno-Triumphalism, which is the belief that an endless sequence of magic tricks performed by shaman scientists can defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which rules the universe -- which true scientists ought to know cannot be defeated. Their colleagues, the shaman economists believe in parallel magic tricks, such as the idea that increased borrowing can "solve" a problem of runaway over-indebtedness. These are the actions that currently engage the people in charge of things in our society.

Given this current state of things, and the current course we're on, my guess is that when the falsity of these ideas and actions are exposed, they will become evident not gradually but very rapidly and shockingly. The people in charge of things will lose their vested legitimacy in a flash, and the institutions they command will become irrelevant overnight. The process would be traumatic for all of us as routines we counted on for a thousand particulars of everyday life vanish or collapse. A Great Indignation will rise across the land over the perceived swindles involved. A lot of effort will go into avenging the swindles instead of rebuilding an economy out of the ashes of futility.

Personally, I would like to see a different outcome. I'd like to see a new birth of intelligence, perhaps in the same way that President Lincoln invoked "a new birth of freedom" after an earlier convulsion in our history. The question is: do we have the resources of national character left to make that happen?

How much land do we need?

SUBHEAD: How much land is actually needed for human sustainability?

By Peter Goodchild on 1 January 2010 in Culture Change - 
  (http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=585&Itemid=1)

   
Image above: Illustration, by Bryan Christie, for CNN article on Detroit urban farming.

[IB Editor's note: This article is a response to the Fortune magazine/CNN.com report on Detroit's urban farming trend "Can farming save Detroit?". The author has provided some basics on crops and human needs.] 

The amount of land needed for farming with manual labor would depend on several factors: the type of soil, the climate, and the kinds of crops to be grown. The highest-yielding varieties are not necessarily the most disease-resistant, or the most suitable for the climate or the soil, or the easiest to store. The weather also makes a big difference: too little rain can damage a crop, and too much rain can do the same. Unusually cold weather can damage some crops, and unusually hot weather can damage others. Without irrigation -- relying solely on rain -- the yield is less than if the crops were watered.

 But here are some rough figures. Let us use the production of corn (maize) as the basis for our calculations, and for now let us pretend that someone is going to live entirely on maize. “Corn” or “maize” here does not mean the vegetable that is normally eaten as “corn on the cob,” but the types that are mainly used to produce cornmeal; these are sometimes referred to as “grain corn” or “field corn.” Corn is very high-yielding and can be grown easily with hand tools, but it is only practical in areas with long periods of warmth and sunshine; even in most parts of North America it is not easy to grow north of about latitude 45.

A hard-working adult (e.g., a farmer) burns about 5,000 kilocalories (“calories”) per day, or 2 million kilocalories per year. With non-mechanized agriculture, the yield of corn is about 2,000 kg/ha. The resulting food energy is about 7 million kcal/ha. Under such conditions, then, 0.5 ha of corn would support approximately 2 people. (The data can be found in David Pimentel’s many writings on this subject.)

 Potatoes require about 50 percent less land than “grain-corn,” but they are troublesome in terms of insects and diseases. Wheat, on the other hand, requires approximately 50 percent more land than maize to produce the same amount of kilocalories. Beans require about 100 percent more land than corn.

“Root crops” such as turnips, carrots, or beets have yields at least 10 times greater than corn, but they also have a much higher water content; their actual yield in kilocalories is slightly less than that of corn. To determine whether a country can feed itself with manual labor, we need to look at the ratio of population to arable land.

With manual labor, as noted, 0.5 ha of corn-producing land can support only 2 people. Any country with a larger ratio than that would be undergoing famine. The problem might be relieved to some extent by international aid, but without fossil fuels for transportation such international aid would be negligible.

And this ratio is for corn, a high-yield crop; we are also assuming that crops will not be wasted by feeding them to livestock in large amounts. In the early twenty-first century, according to the CIA World Factbook, the world as a whole has a population-to-arable ratio of 438 people per km2 (square kilometers).

Conversely, less than half of the world’s 200-odd countries actually pass that test, and many of those are countries that have relatively low population density only because they have been ravaged by war or other forms of political turmoil.

The Arabian Peninsula, most of eastern Asia, and most of the Pacific islands are far too crowded. Even the UK scores badly at 1,069:1. There might be serious conflicts between the haves and the have-nots, and isolationism might be a common response.

See also:  
Can Farming Save Detroit? 12/29/09 CNN Money - 
(http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm) 

.

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.

 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)



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.]


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.

 

By Wisma Bernama on 29 December 2009 in Bernama.com -  

(http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsindex.php?id=464999)

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

[IB 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.]

"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 on 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.

---

History of population on Kauai  
 

By Juan Wilson on 30 January 2004 for Island Breath -

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. T

he 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 for Island Breath -
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: Sustainability 2/11/04

Early Hawaiian Agriculture

SUBHEAD: Research determines acreage Hawaiians used for growing.

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



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

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 - "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.

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


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

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.”

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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.] .