Goodbye Blue Monday

Al Gore's gamble

Dan Bednarz, Ph.D. is a peak oil activist based in Pittsburgh and has published articles on public health and administration.

Setting aside questions of feasibility, Al Gore’s recent “Generational Challenge” to convert the nation to carbon-clean electricity in ten years was skillfully choreographed. It was a timely, beguiling appeal to deepening despair and insecurity about the future.

Although Gore apparently has painted skeptics and critics into a corner, I believe he has entered into a losing gamble—with himself. He is betting that the effects of peak oil can be skirted—without ever mentioning it—as a byproduct of his electrification proposal. Notice that his plan promises simultaneously to “revive” the economy, save the environment, and contribute to national security, without explicitly addressing energy.

One of the consequences of peak oil is that there will be less energy to engage in economic activity. So choices, difficult choices, will have to be made (by whom?), about how energy is allocated for critical economic activities, such as realizing Gore's vision. Gore's plan has no difficult choices, just a rallying call to act now.

People I talk to, from the political left, center, and right, often react with an otherworldly look when I connect energy and economic activity. They came of age in a culture where cheap energy was taken for granted and perpetual economic expansion was apotheosized as a reflection of the cosmos and, therefore, good, inevitable and the path to secular happiness. They are not stupid; rather, they buy into the dominant mythology of their time and, it follows, lack experiential or theoretical knowledge to draw upon to imagine a world with less energy and limited or targeted economic growth—let alone contraction. So if Gore promises to revive the economy–a particularly handy bromide these days—he cannot entertain peak oil.

In fairness, we need to explore where Gore stands, if only to guess, on peak oil. To my knowledge he has never laid out his views, and his (two by my count) vague references to it at Constitution Hall signify a major opportunity foregone. If he was ever to take up the energy topic, this would have been the venue and the moment. This silence suggests that he sees peak oil as a non-issue. On the other hand, he told a questioner two years ago, “We should feel a great sense of urgency about the impending peak oil scenario because it is with climate change the most dangerous crisis we have ever faced, by far.”

It is relevant that Gore spent some time in this “challenge” lecture extolling the need for comprehensive policy analysis. He touted his boldness in this regard while ridiculing the “standard” illusions of politicians that lead to unrelated, often contradictory, self-defeating policies for what in fact is a bundle of crises at whose core is the consumption of fossil fuels. All well and good, but where will Gore's plan take us by shunning this “most dangerous crisis” of peak oil?

I believe he would reply that his plan ingeniously dissolves the peak oil predicament. He said in his lecture, “The answer [to these crises] is to end our reliance on carbon based fuels.” Therefore, I surmise that he thinks his plan automatically diffuses the peak oil threat—and this may be a second reason for pushing hard for a ten year timetable. So there's no need to bring up the unpleasantness of the depletion of a resource you are planning to stop using. It is a college debate-team gambit and politically clever, two characteristics we associate with Gore.

Dismissal of, or, in Gore's case, avoiding peak oil is common among those fervently committed to halting greenhouse emissions. They focus on the environment, yet peak oil is a geological phenomenon with vast socioeconomic repercussions they rarely consider. Further, one's “take” on peak oil’s severity and significance is connected with collective identity, how we define ourselves in relation to—please pick a concept you are comfortable with: mythology (J. Campbell); ideology (Marx); episteme (M. Foucault); paradigm (T. Kuhn); culture, or, more concretely, the American Dream, Gaia, etc.

Some who see climate crisis as the greatest threat humanity faces welcome the arrival of peak oil, as if its primary or sole outcome will be to serve their goals by lowering carbon emissions. They do not consider how our house-of-cards economy and our lifestyles rest upon oil. Nor do they come fully to terms with resource depletion, which is related to but not the same as polluting and plundering the earth’s ecosystems. They overlook how business-as-usual thinking will turn to coal and nuclear energy—probably in desperation—once we are on the downside of peak oil. This is just a sampling of the dilemmas peak oil poses. Hence, Al Gore has made a bet with himself—perhaps non-consciously—that we will be spared all this if we rush to enact his plan.

However, Gore’s gamble is a decade or more too late. Warning signs of peak oil are breaking out all over; and we’re merely entering, as Chris Skrebowski[i] notes, the foothills of cascading and intensifying problems. Indeed, I’d like someone to explain how our economy can revive, that is, grow, out of its latest bubble crisis under the emerging and enveloping constraints introduced by peak oil.

In this sense, Al's silence in light of the extraordinary socioeconomic changes now beginning is, I’m afraid, more of the “status quo” policy analysis he claims to have transcended. Put directly, for all his creativity and thoroughness Al Gore is ignoring a geophysical reality that is empirically worsening and threatening our lives with each passing day. Merely pressing the “Easy Button” to convert the infrastructure of electricity generation in ten years is reckless, no matter how dire our situation or how desirable the target of non-carbon based energy. Let me observe that this time frame alone invites a “haste over judgment and quality” mindset and multiple occurrences of Murphy’s Law. It follows that Gore appears to be overselling the science and technology supporting his plan, a topic others are addressing.[ii]

Indeed, his speech reveals a tension between the two roles he is playing in the climate crisis debate: public servant and private venture capitalist. We know his renowned role as the ultimate and tireless public policy wonk. Accordingly, he was introduced as a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President of the United States. Fair enough, he is both of these; yet I wonder how the audience would have reacted—with Gore standing before a backdrop of large American flags—if the solemn professional voice introducing him had cited his less publicized private role as a venture capitalist.

I know he’s already a multi-millionaire; but that never stopped Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. I think Gore believes venture capitalism is the appropriate market mechanism to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Making a ton of money for his partners and himself is necessary to the incentive package needed to motivate entrepreneurs to get things done. But is this the model to follow with peak oil at hand?

Let’s discuss Gore’s private interest in climate change since it highlights a great deal about the manner in which he is marketing the “generational challenge.” Last November he became a partner in a venture capital firm; to delve into Gore’s financial stakes in this partnership begin with Adam Lashinsky’s “Go West” column.[iii] Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Eric Janszen[iv] caused a stir by sardonically noting:

Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers…to oversee the “climate change solutions group,” thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize–winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob.

Janszen goes on to wryly insinuate the conflict between Gore’s public and private roles, writing, “Luckily, Al Gore will be making principled venture capital investments on our behalf.” Again, I do not care if Al Gore suffers from the cardinal sin of greed and, frankly, I would find this “explanation” wanting if he does. Janszen’s derision raises, nonetheless, a legitimate question about Gore commingling public—or utilitarian—and private (for profit) roles.

Let me close without further commentary by asking my reader to envision two reactions to what I wish Gore had said in his “Generational Challenge” lecture. The first reaction to imagine is that of the public; the second is that of his venture capital partners at Kleiner Perkins, et al. Here is what I wish Gore had included in his speech:

In the spirit of connecting the dots, I’ve got to say that peak oil—of which many of you may be only vaguely aware—is upon us. You see, my friends, it’s not 30 years off and therefore our progeny’s problem; and it’s not a simple matter of throwing a light switch to change energy platforms. For example, do you know that the governor of Vermont recently said he might as well declare a state of emergency right now, in the summer, because many Vermonters will not be able to pay their fuel oil bills this winter? Or that people are now stealing gasoline? And that the airline, trucking, and automobile industries are absolutely teetering on the brink from $120.00 a barrel oil? WalMart and even such seemingly unaffected institutions as healthcare are not far behind. Do you know that right now many municipalities are scrambling to figure out how to save on fuel costs lest they go bankrupt or radically cut essential public services? There are widespread and untold personal misfortunes playing out as well because of peak oil. Most importantly, it is now clear to me that we will not solve our climate crisis if we do not simultaneously confront the socioeconomic destructive potential of peak oil.

To fully appreciate our situation we need to connect a few more dots: we must admit that the economic/financial crisis remains unbounded. Who knows how wide and deep it will go and what effects it will have on our ability to finance our energy conversion? And this has to be said: we must deal with fresh-water scarcities and population pressures. In American the more people you have, the more energy and water is consumed. Above all else, we can agree that our nation’s institutions cannot withstand many more 2007s and 2008s without serious damage and possible breakdowns.

So today I’m asking you to do more than listen to me, join our movement, and write your members of Congress. Those are important tasks, but don’t involve you enough in shaping and contemplating our collective destiny. We need as a nation, businesses, industries and individuals to drastically reduce our consumption of energy. It’s simple to state, but it will not be easy to accomplish. You see, it will take immense amounts of energy to build this carbon free electric system I’ve laid out today; and with peak oil bearing down on us we will face energy shortages at the very moment in history when we’ll need all the energy we can produce to transform and reconfigure our way of life. This is a lot to put before you all at once; therefore, I plan to elaborate on these themes in a series of discussions about our nation’s future…

Notes

[i] Skrebowski, Chris. 2008. “Chris Skrebowski on BBC News.” Energy Bulletin. May 23. energybulletin.net. “This, if you like, is what I would describe as the "foothills of peak oil." This is the first peak that we've achieved. ... in light, low-sulphur crude... The next peak will be when the producer countries' exports start falling. Because their growth rates are differentially much higher than those in the West.

[ii] Cohen, Dave. 2008. “Clean energy redemption?” ASPO, February 13. aspo-usa.com. “Al Gore’s fantasy energy challenge.” ASPO, July 23. aspo-usa.com.

[iii] Lashinsky, Adam. 2007. “Clean energy will make Gore rich.” CNN Money.com/Fortune gowest.blogs.fortune.cnn.com. November 20.

[iv] Janszen, Eric. 2008. “The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash.” Harper’s Magazine, February. harpers.org. Source

Culture Change (August 5, 2008)

Civilization's golden era is teetering on collapse

June 28, 2008

The period from 1950 to 2000 will be remembered as the Golden Era of modern civilization, the pinnacle reached by humans after a million years of evolution. This brilliant half-century was sponsored largely by fossil fuels, especially oil, which brought unprecedented economic growth, plentiful transportation and a rich and diverse lifestyle.

But the new millennium has brought the end of cheap oil, and civilization is suddenly teetering on the edge of collapse. Even if we manage to scrape through (and it would require heroic efforts), life will change. We're at one of the most important turning points in history, yet we persistently ignore the coming meltdown and just want to party on. Nero would be proud.

So, why is civilization teetering?

First, peak oil has arrived. There is no better signal than the price of oil, which has skyrocketed past $130 and shows no sign of slowing. Some shrug and claim there's still a lot left, technology will find it and extract it. Others, as represented by the editors of Maclean's magazine, feel that we have grappled with costly oil before and by applying determined conservation and new efficiencies, we will cope.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Peak oil, this two-syllable piece of jargon, is another way of saying we are on the threshold of a major crisis. From now on the supply of oil will diminish each year, but population and demand will continue to grow. This is truly frightening because our modern industrial society is built on and totally dependent on this versatile fuel. It is the foundation for transportation, industry, agriculture, fishing and much more. As the gap between what economies and nations need and what they can get widens, bidding wars will erupt (they already have) and then shooting wars (one already has).

The globe is in for tough times because renewables like wind and solar simply can't be supplied in enough quantity to fill the enormous demand. As an aside, environmental organizations are doing an enormous disservice by promoting the fantasy of a feasible renewable energy and hydrogen economy.

Second, the world is facing a major food shortage. It took two centuries but the Malthusian Devil is finally banging on the door. For seven of the past eight years global production of cereal grains has not met consumption. The price of cereal crops such as rice, corn and wheat has doubled in the past year. Poor countries are hardest hit and food riots have broken out in more than 10 countries including Egypt, Cameroon, Morocco and Indonesia.

The United Nations recently announced that large segments of the world face immediate hunger now, and global food production must be doubled in the next 30 years.

But how is this possible? There are no empty lands to cultivate and agriculture is highly dependent on oil and gas to power machinery, to make pesticides and fertilizers and for shipping. Food prices are rising in lock-step with the price of oil. And now another body blow: the mad rush to harvest cereal grains like corn to make biofuels for cars rather than food for people.

The world's food situation is deadly grim, and it can only get worse, since we are adding 70 million more people to the planet every year.

As though the oil and food crises weren't enough, we're also staring down the throat of global warming, the most insidious threat ever faced by humans. Yet our efforts to curb carbon emissions are laughable and pathetic. It's an interesting insight into our human psyche that we can ignore such a serious problem.

Space doesn't permit me to discuss cool, clean water, another vital resource whose supply is becoming painfully short.

The Future

Major changes are in the wind. At the very least it will mean paring back our lifestyles including, for example, less flying and driving, which will drive a stake into the heart of tourism, one of the world's largest industries. Tourism-dependent places such as Phoenix that are located in a desert with obscenely sprawling suburbs are particularly vulnerable, and violence and societal breakdown are likely.

James Kunstler, in his book, The Long Emergency, predicts that the United States will degenerate into a set of autonomous regions, with major urban centers replaced by numerous villages.

Societal breakdown won't happen quickly nor everywhere, but be sure of this: Change is coming and although poor nations will be hardest hit, North America will not be spared.

We clearly need to think smaller eco-footprint with hybrid cars, smaller homes, diets with less meat, more bicycling and better recycling. If we all pitch in, these changes will buy us time-but only a little.

While oil brought good times, it also allowed human numbers to soar well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We cannot continue to ignore this basic underlying problem. It will yield not one millimeter of progress if we decrease our environmental footprint by, say, 20 per cent but the population increases by 20 per cent over the same period.

The crisis situation is unsolvable unless we also address the population problem. It's elementary logic, a no-brainer.

Curtailing human population, however, is a daunting challenge. I hope we're up to it, for the alternative is decidedly unpleasant.

Source: The Vancouver Sun

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

Published in 1932, Brave New World is a classic dystopia the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and certainly a novel of comparable literary importance. But whereas Orwell's gritty vision—one of state repression and naked official violence—drew heavily from the twin horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, Aldous Huxley vividly predicted the Information Age.

Huxley's World State is hyper-organized, technocratic, rigidly hierarchical, and highly technological. The rabble is kept stupefied and mindlessly happy with drugs and meaningless entertainment, and molded to state specification through indoctrination, propaganda, and genetic selection. Huxley's dictators, unlike Orwell's, are not obliged to burn books. No one has any desire to read!

In Brave New World Revisited, excerpted here, Huxley, writing twenty-five years later at the dawn of the Television Age, reflected upon his original vision and related it to the troubling trends he observed in contemporary America. Having set his novel several hundred years A.F. (After Ford), Huxley was rather surprised to see his predictions begin to materialize so quickly.

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exhalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least credible passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

In John Dewey's words, "a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood - particularly in those cases where falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. In certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists. They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the fields of physical science and technology. It is much more difficult in the fields of politics and religion and ethics. Here the relevant facts often elude us. As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends upon the particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose to interpret them. And these are not the only difficulties that confront the rational truth-seeker. In public and in private life, it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasoning offered for our consideration by others.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely similar terms. Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained, if the whole population were able to read, and if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word or in writing, and if by the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All is safe, all would be gained! Once more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson , it is true, was a realist as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. "Nothing," he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper." And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him), "within the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and civil liberty." Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances, though infrequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladitorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metephysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

— Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

John Ralston Saul on the erosion of Canadian popular sovereignty

This snippet was published in 1997. Feel free to substitute MAI with FTAA, TILMA, SPP, or other acronym of your choosing.

But the fundamental problem remains one of false populism in a growing crowd of false populist provincial leaders--a trend which is not balanced by any solid social leadership in Ottawa. The federal government resembles that of Louis St. Laurent's second term. A low-key, feel-good atmosphere distracts us from a general passivity before corporatist interests. A more accurate description might be complicity with corporatist interests. There appears to be little opportunity for the development of a positive nationalism which could address the social situation.

A small example: there is a slow rumble of concern outside of the political parties and the main media about an ongoing international negotiation on investment rules, or rather the removal of them. It is called the Multilateral Agreement of Investment (MAI). No one with power or a stable platform from which to communicate will engage the citizenry in a debate on the subject. When pushed, they may utter reassuring sounds.

The last decade has been filled with events of this sort; each of them representing another managerial step towards profound international restructuring. When you read the MAI texts—which as yet have no validity—it is clear that they represent an important move towards asserting the primacy of corporations or interest-based structures over citizen-based structures. And yet there is virtual silence fro our elected representatives. They are, after all the chosen leaders of the citizen-based structures.

Positive nationalism would involve the initiation of an open debate by those in positions of responsibility. Instead, the experienced citizen senses that we are now passively waiting for the initiation of a public-relations campaign designed to instruct us on the immense and inevitable good which will be done by our ceding another slice of our democratic legitimacy.

Of course, it won't be put that way. Instead there will be a chorus of received wisdom in the economic-administrative manner. This is now classic rhetoric, delivered with the assurance of religious texts.

You might ask if I am sure that the MAI will be so bad. Frankly, I have no idea. But why do I have no idea? Where is the debate which would enable me to make up my mind in a dignified adult manner? Where are our elected representatives? Why do they see their role to be that of the protectors of the various interests against the citizens who elected them? In private they express a weariness with the citizens' naivete. They, the leaders, know. Know what? The truth, of course, But how can they get the public, who understand so little, to go along with them? With this self-righteous burden on their shoulders, they dutifully do endless private polling and hire serial management consultants to advise them on how to get the public to go along with the truth they already possess.

My point is that whether or not those with power are right is actually of secondary consideration. The primary consideration is that in a democracy legitimacy lies with the citizenry. That's what makes a democracy superior to other forms of social organization. And the process which leads to important decisions is not simply supposed to include the citizen. It is supposed to use the intelligence of the society--which lies within the legitimacy of the citizen--in order to minimize the chances of making major mistakes. That is the primary characteristic of a democracy. That use of the citizenry's intelligence is what differentiates a democracy from the various sorts of dictatorships, whether direct and brutal or sophisticated and managerial in the corporatist mode.

What is most surprising about our elites is that they are unable to identify the effects of their actions. They don't see how their upcoming successful manipulations to put in place the MAI will simply increase the effect of their putting in place of the trade deals. That is, they will weaken the confidence of the citizen in the system and therefore favour the rise of negative nationalism over the positive. Perhaps most fascinating is the low level of confidence they have in the democratic process. I'm not referring to the short-term excitement of occasional elections. In effect, they identify more with the managerial idea of controlling power than the democratic idea of examining power and using it constructively. The attitudes of our elected representatives before these major questions resemble, if anything, those of senior courtiers in the eighteenth century.

— Reflections of a Siamese Twin by John Ralston Saul

My fellow Albertans

We suck.

Here's to 40 more years.