Monthly Archives: May 2015

Fighting Nepotism With Welfare

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Elizabeth Stoker BruenigThe sudden swell of praise for filial favoritism among conservative pundits comes as no surprise: combine a heavy emphasis on family values with an equally intense desire for money, and the outcome is what we from the South recognize as good ol’ boy networks, wherein a hapless dweeb who can barely manage a baseball team stumbles into the presidency because his daddy made a good run of it. Examples of the perils of nepotism are scattered throughout history, with lunatic kings and savage tsars and incompetent princes galore. But these are extreme cases. And furthermore, I suspect Williamson and Brooks are correct when they suggest that there really is neither an effective nor humane way to put an end to the many unearned advantages some lucky offspring glean from their kin.

Families will always prefer their own, and parents will always be inclined to do whatever is in their power to secure a future for their children. None of this is inherently wrong; indeed, these are the same impulses that have perpetuated the human race. The trouble is that some dynasties accumulate so much wealth and influence that the social mobility of other, less fortunate children becomes increasingly unlikely. Where Williamson and Brooks are wrong is to presume the solution to this problem needs to involve some tinkering with families themselves…

So I guess that, in the end, I’m with Williamson and Brooks: nepotism is here to stay, and there’s no sense in fighting the partiality of parents for their children, especially when it comes to jobs. To respect the sanctity of those family relationships — and to save the conservative commentariat the horror of anti-nepotism policies — we need only to make sure no other person’s future is compromised, which means putting a strong system of wealth transfer programs in place. Thus, poor kids everywhere can rejoice: welfare is (rich) family-friendly after all!

—Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
Welfare Is the Best Weapon Against Nepotism

Man Blames Obama for SC Republican Policy

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Luis LangYesterday, I wrote, Postmodern Politics and the End of Truth. In it, I bemoaned the fact that politicians aren’t held accountable — largely because the media has a postmodern attitude toward the truth — and that this is a great help to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Josh Marshall provided an excellent example of how this works on the personal level, Just Shake Your Head.

It tells the truly heartbreaking story of an ignorant Republican. Luis Lang is a “self-employed handyman” in South Carolina. He never had insurance — preferring to pay out of pocket. As everyone knows, that’s a dangerous decision. That is especially the case because Lang has diabetes. In February, he had a series of mini-stokes. As a result, he’s going blind, which greatly limits the amount he can work. If he’s going to save his sight and his livelihood, he needs expensive surgery — which he can’t afford.

So in desperation, he turned to Obamacare. But there was a problem. He’s in the healthcare no man’s land: in that great Republican state government created hole where he makes too much for Medicaid and too little for the exchange subsidies. If South Carolina had accepted the Medicaid expansion, Lang would be covered. Instead, he’s going blind.

And who is to blame for all this? “He and his wife blame President Obama and Congressional Democrats for passing a complex and flawed bill.” But it wasn’t the Democrats who left it up to the states as to whether they took the free money to cover people like Lang; it was the conservatives (Republicans) on the Supreme Court. It wasn’t the Democrats who decided not to expand Medicaid in South Carolina; it was the South Carolina legislature that has a Republican super-majority in both houses.

Marshall sums up the situation:

Lang broke the law by refusing to get health insurance coverage because he prided himself on being able to pay his bills out of pocket. But he got sick and actually had too little savings to cover even relatively small health care bills. By now open enrollment has closed. But he figured he’d be able to buy in if he got in a jam or waited till he got sick to buy coverage. Luckily the ACA’s Medicaid expansion covers him regardless. But the state of South Carolina refused to accept Medicaid expansion even though the federal government would pay for it. Lang is left in precisely the situation that would exist if the ACA had never been passed. So he blames Obama.

It isn’t my intention to put down Mr Lang. We all do reckless things. I truly hope that he manages to get to the care that he deserves. But he is an archetype of the Republican voter who can’t see that it is his own party that is responsible for his hardships. I agree with him: Obamacare is “complex and flawed.” But that’s because Republicans like the pre-ill Lang were absolutely against the simpler and more effective single payer system — the one that would have covered Lang all along so that he wouldn’t have had to spend all his savings just to get to this point.

I suspect that Luis Lang will die cursing Obama and the Democrats for his fate. And until then, he will continue to vote for Republicans who have done and will continue to do everything they can to kill him.

Obama Rightly Gets Slapped on TPP

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Barack ObamaIt’s been interesting these last couple of weeks, watching Obama going around acting like a petulant child about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It makes a real progressive like me angry. The president doesn’t act this way when the Republicans disagree with him. But when people in his own party disagree with him, they don’t deserve respect. He described Elizabeth Warren, one of the most earnest politicians I’ve ever seen, as “a politician, like everybody else.” No Mr President, you are a politician just like the rest of the rabble that are destroying this country. You are a politician just like the rest of the craven hordes begging for cash from the billionaire class. No Mr President, it is not Elizabeth Warren who is playing politics by asking that the details of the TPP be made public; it is you who are playing politics with your “Trust me!” act.

Well, yesterday the loyal but not authoritarian followers (which is apparently what Obama wants) struck back. I find the details of all this a bit confusing. But the basic story is that fast-track authority only got out of committee because Ron Wyden made a deal with Orrin Hatch to attach three other bills to it. But Hatch is a Republican and thus not to be trusted. Instead of packaging the three bills with fast-track authority, he made the bills separate. That made the deal pretty much meaningless. And that became clear when Hatch started making noises about pulling two of the three bills.

Behind the scenes, the Obama administration was putting on a full court press. Despite this, Sherrod Brown convinced the rest of the Democratic caucus to only approve fast track if the three bills were included in the same package. And he was successful. Only one Democratic Senator voted to allow a vote on fast-track authority. It’s a stunning rebuke of President Obama — and one that he richly deserves. I’m beginning to see what Republicans mean when they talk about him in terms of an “imperial presidency” — of course, those same Republicans don’t mind it when it is a Republican doing the same thing.

The fight is not over. In fact Sherrod Brown doesn’t think that he and the other Democrats will be able to kill fast-track authority in the Senate. He is simply trying to delay and improve the bill. But there is a good chance that the House — which is never as keen on “trade” deals as the Senate — will kill it. We can hope.

As we wait (in between calling and writing our members of Congress), David Dayen wrote a very informative article, The 10 Biggest Lies You’ve Been Told About the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And you know who’s telling those lies, right? That great truth teller in the White House and his minions. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the rundown:

  1. 40% — The TPP covers 40% of world’s economic activity. Well, sure; the US alone accounts for 22%. Big (deceptive) deal.
  2. Job Creation — Need I say more? See what Sherrod Brown has to say about that nonsense.
  3. Exports Only — This is something Dean Baker talks about all the time. It doesn’t matter what happens to our exports if our imports increase even more. And they will.
  4. Most Progressive — Have you heard Obama saying that the TPP is the most progressive trade deal in history? It turns out that Bill Clinton said the same thing about NAFTA. Also, Obama’s certainly wrong about this claim. And “most progressive trade deal” is like “least humiliating national sex scandal.”
  5. Changing Laws — We are told that the TPP will not interfere with our laws. Well, John Oliver has a few things to say about that.
  6. Never Lost — This relates to the last lie: we’ve never lost an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) case. Dayen has his own reasons regarding this, but I think agreements shouldn’t just be judged from our perspective. ISDS is already being used to harm weaker countries. This isn’t right.
  7. Weakening Dodd-Frank — I’ve already dealt with this issue. Obama claims he was the big force behind Dodd-Frank. He wasn’t.
  8. Stopping China — This is the idea that we can beat China to the punch with this deal. Again, Dean Baker takes this on all the time. The idea is to eventually have China sign on to this deal. Nothing we do here is going to make China any less of a powerhouse.
  9. Secret Deal — It’s not a secret deal! People will have 60 days to look at it! Right after he’s given fast-track authority. After that, no changes can be made to it.
  10. Just a politician — Well, I discussed this above. The implication is that Warren is a politician, but not Obama! He’s just doing what’s best for the country. As Dayen put it, “His interest in building a legacy, when practically nothing else has the potential to pass Congress the next two years, is a political interest. His possible interest in rewarding campaign contributors who would benefit from TPP is also political, or his desire to earn the respect of the Very Serious People who always support trade deals.”

I don’t expect perfection from anyone. I’ve even been willing to give Obama a pass on his drone program. But the TPP debate kind of sums up his whole presidency. Obama doesn’t get along with the Republicans, but he seems to have a special animus for the true progressives in the Democratic Party. This goes back at least to when Rahm Emanuel called us “fucking retarded.” That was Obama’s Chief of Staff. That’s Obama’s kind of Democrat.

Morning Music: Firesign Theatre

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How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at AllThis morning, we do something different. Instead of music, I thought we would do a little comedy. But not just any comedy — Firesign Theatre comedy, which is much more than just skits. In general, I find I have to listen to their albums many times to get a majority of what’s going on. My first introduction to the group was finding Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him that someone was throwing away. I was blown away. I had never imagined that such things were possible. The first track of the album is, “Temporarily Humboldt County.” It tells the story of the western invasion of the Americas in a brilliantly incisive way. Listening to it today, it’s a bit ethnocentric. But given it is comedy, it does a better job than most Americans today do. (I found this in the comments to my article, Ayn Rand and Indians.) Unfortunately, I mostly just find the track sad — brilliant, but sad.

Today, I want to highlight their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. The second side of the album consists of “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” — a 28 minute long parody of the hard-boiled detective radio play. It slips back and forth between the story and the telling of the story. And as usual, it is filled with puns. My favorite part is where the character Rocky Rococo — who has the voice of Peter Lorre — says, “I’m dead! This hasn’t happened to me since M!” Brilliant stuff.

Anniversary Post: Revelations of Divine Love

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Julian of NorwichJust a couple of days ago, I wrote, Student Refuses to Do Homework — Claims Religious Persecution. In it, one of the essay questions the young Christian refused to engage with had to do with Julian of Norwich, the 14th century Christian mythic, and how the patriarchy responded to her. Well, it was on this day in 1373, Julian was deathly ill and had the visions that she described in her great work, Revelations of Divine Love.

She had sixteen visions involving Jesus’ passion and the Virgin Mary. After she recovered, she wrote the visions down. She then spent the next two decades meditating on them and wrote them down in an extended form with analysis. It was the first book published in the English language by a woman. Julian lived during times of great disease and death. But as Wikipedia puts it, “[H]er theology was optimistic and spoke of God’s love in terms of joy and compassion, as opposed to law and duty.” That’s my kind of Christian!

Her book was radical for its time. In fact, much of it would be seen as heretical today — especially her feminization of God. But the book was not read all that widely in her lifetime. What’s more, she was probably seen as unworthy of comment, since she was basically a female monk — a religious recluse. So she managed to live well into her 70s. Good for her! And good for us! And most of all: 16 year old Christians should definitely spend time studying her!

Happy anniversary Revelations of Divine Love!

The Unusual Pluto-Charon Binary Orbit

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Pluto Animation - Click for Full SizeThe New Horizons spacecraft is just two months away from Pluto, so I find myself checking online compulsively for photographs. As of now, they are still pretty crummy: it’s still just about ten pixels on a side. I know: it’s small, it’s dark. But I’m excited. I’ve been waiting close to fifty years to get a good look at this over-hyped piece of space debris. I would think that we would get better and better pictures each day. But instead, I assume they aren’t taking pictures all the time because it takes power and they want to save as much of that as they can. The picture there on the left is about the best we have, which dates from last month.

But I learned something really interesting from an article by Alan Stern, Pluto: The Last Picture Show. Pluto and its relatively large moon Charon constitute an actual binary system. Now up until now, I’ve always been bugged by this term. The reason is that all planets with a single moon are technically binary systems. Take, for example, the Earth and Moon. The Moon does not orbit around the Earth. Rather, both the Earth and Moon orbit around the center of mass of the two objects. (Actually, it is far more complicated than that because technically, every other object in the universe is effecting the orbit — but don’t worry about that.)

With the Earth and Moon, the system is so dominated by the Earth that the center of mass is inside the Earth. The Moon has a mass of only a bit more than 1% of that of the Earth. But they are far apart: roughly 400,000 km. That puts the center of mass about 2,000 km inside the surface of the Earth. Charon, in contrast, is really large compared to Pluto: almost 12% its mass. On the other hand, it is close to Pluto: less than 20,000 km, or 20 times closer than the Moon is to Earth. But this puts the center of mass about one Pluto radius above the surface of the dwarf planet. That’s why you see Pluto in the image above moving in a circle. The same kind of image of the earth would show the same kind of thing, but the Earth would just be circling around itself — displaced, not really orbiting.

I don’t actually know of any other pair of objects in our solar system that exhibit this behavior. The truth is that the Moon with 1.2% of the mass of the Earth is highly unusual. Moons are usually far smaller than the planets that they orbit. For example, Phobos is just 0.00000002 times the mass of Mars. So the fact that Pluto managed to grab onto something as large as Charon is incredible. Of course, it probably was not the case that Charon was just sailing past and got captured by Pluto. It might be something more like how the Earth and Moon formed with a collision that resulted in two bodies. Or something else entirely.

Alan Stern summed up my feelings about this whole thing, “So, we’re just two months out — it’s nearly show time. What will we find? Not to tweak you, but I don’t know. No one does. That’s what makes this distant exploration so very exciting, so suspenseful, and so wonderful!” The truth is that we know surprisingly little about Pluto. And in just two months, New Horizons is going to come within 10,000 km of Pluto. That’s closer than Charon ever gets to the dwarf planet. It ought to be very exciting indeed!

The Psychopathic Army Choice

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CalvaryI’ve always felt there’s something inherently psychopathic about joining the army in peacetime. As far as I’m concerned, people join the army to find out what its like to kill someone. I hardly think that’s an inclination that should be encouraged in modern society, do you? Jesus Christ didn’t think so, either. And the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” does not have an asterisk beside it, referring you to the bottom of the page where you find a list of instances where it’s okay to kill people.

—Father James
In Calvary

Omar Khadr and America’s Sick Torture Program

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Omar KhadrWhat do creepy pseudo-sexual torture and Micky Mouse have in common? They are both results of the creative American mind! Those two sides of America came together in the case of Omar Khadr. He is Canadian, but his father took him to Afghanistan where he made the boy a soldier for al-Qaeda when he was just 15 years old. At 16, he was captured by US special forces. He was eventually sent to Guantanamo where he was sadistically tortured — apparently because the 16 year old boy was one of the “bad guys,” rather than a victim of war. If you want to know the gory details of the sick American mind that we have institutionalized, read Jeff Tietz’s Rolling Stone article, The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr. But you don’t want to know.

Max Fisher at Vox provides the relatively good recent news, The US Tortured a Child Soldier at Gitmo for Years. On Thursday, He Won His Freedom. But before getting to that, let me highlight one bit of torture that backfired:

Army Chaplain James Yee was assigned to Guantanamo, where he was surprised to find Khadr, an English-speaking boy, among the prison’s population. Yee later told the journalist Michelle Shephard that he would sometimes see Khadr reading a book of Disney cartoons. An interrogator had presented the book to Khadr during an interrogation, intending it as an insult. In fact, Khadr had been delighted.

I think it is really interesting that our official American torturer thought that giving Khadr a Disney comic book would be an insult. The torturer had apparently so dehumanized Khadr in his own mind that he couldn’t see that he was dealing with a boy — a child — someone who would delight in the playful antics of Mickey Mouse and Goofy. You cannot dehumanize other people; you can only dehumanize yourself; we have done so much to dehumanize ourselves in our efforts to dehumanize “the evildoers.”

Mickey MouseEventually, Khadr pleaded guilty to something that he apparently didn’t do so that the United States government could save face and so Khadr could be transferred to the Canadian government. As an American, that makes me feel so ashamed. I’ve been arguing about this for years, but it still stabs at me. As a child, I was taught that one of the reasons that America was great was that we, unlike other countries, didn’t torture people. I’m sure that wasn’t even true then. Regardless, now we know: (1) that we do torture; (2) that we do it in ways that show we have sick sexual fetishes; and (3) that we do it to children.

Omar Khadr is currently out on bail in Canada — living with his lawyer and his wife. He is currently appealing his guilty plea with the United States. We’ll see what happens to that. Clearly, the plea was coerced. But I doubt that the United States will ever admit to that. As it is, media outlets like NPR still won’t refer to the things that were done to Khadr, and so many others, as “torture.” No, we must continue the charade that only the bad guys torture. And since the United States is by definition not the bad guys, nothing it ever does qualifies as torture — especially when it is done to 16 year old boys.

Obama’s TPP Argument From Authority

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Obama Wall StreetPresident Obama is acting more and more like a drunk friend who is embarrassing himself in public. I want to put an arm around him and get him safely home before he can hurt anyone or embarrass himself any more. Most recently, he was talking to Matt Bai, Why Obama Is Happy to Fight Elizabeth Warren on the Trade Deal. Bai said, “Senator Warren said this week this pact could be used to roll back Dodd-Frank, which is closed to your heart…” The president interrupted him before he could finish, saying, “She’s totally wrong.” He went on to say, “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it? I’d have to be pretty stupid”

Massive fight with Wall Street? I don’t remember that. About the worst thing that I remember Obama doing against Wall Street was saying that some of them were “fat cats.” We could start by noting that Dodd-Frank itself, while an improvement, is still pretty weak tea. But I can’t remembering two things about Obama and Wall Street. The first is that Wall Street was among his biggest backers in 2008. The second is that he bailed out Wall Street while allowing home owners to just dangle. As Roger Hodge put it in The Mendacity of Hope, “TARP participants were asked to fill out a simple two-page form, several orders of magnitude less complex and less onerous than an application for unemployment insurance or food stamps.” So “Obama: Wall Street Slayer” is at best the figment of his imagination, or just a pretty story that he thinks he can get over on the rest of us.

Dean Baker has a deeper memory than I do, In Arguing for TPP President Obama Gets Carried Away in Resting on His Credentials as a Foe of Wall Street. He adds six specific examples:

  1. He has not sought the criminal prosecution of any executives at major banks for issuing or securitizing fraudulent mortgages, nor against executives at credit rating agencies for knowingly granting investment grade ratings to securities containing large numbers of improper or fraudulent mortgages.
  2. He opposed the Brown-Kauffman bill, which would have broken up the big banks.
  3. He did nothing to push cram-down legislation in Congress, which would have required banks to write-down the value of some underwater mortgages to the current market value of the home.
  4. He supported the stripping of the Franken Amendment from Dodd-Frank. This amendment (which was approved by a large bi-partisan majority in the Senate) would have eliminated the conflict of interest faced by bond-rating agencies by having the Securities and Exchange Commission, rather than the issuer, pick the rating agency. (The line from opponents was that the SEC might send over unqualified analysts. Think about that one for a while.)
  5. He only began to push the Volcker rule as a political move to shore up support the day after Republican Scott Brown won an upset election for a Senate seat in Massachusetts.
  6. The administration had to be pushed by labor and consumer groups to keep a strong and independent consumer financial protection bureau in Dodd-Frank.

I’m starting to get a really bad taste in my mouth regarding Obama’s recent TPP tour. He’s begun to sound just like the caricature of conservative lore. He’s the smart guy who knows what’s going on and all the little people just need to follow along. It isn’t necessary to see the see what’s going on with the man behind the curtain: just focus on the Great and Powerful Obama.

Right now, I don’t so much want to take Obama home as punch him in the stomach. Anything to shut him up. When any politician tells you to trust them while not allowing you to see what they are doing, the Scarecrow’s reaction is the right one, “You humbug!”

Morning Music: Stéphane Grappelli

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Stéphane GrappelliWill sent me a French language documentary about Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. I’m very fond of them both, but I must admit to being more of a fan of Reinhardt, even though my understanding is that it was Grappelli who really influenced Reinhardt. Sadly, there isn’t much on YouTube featuring Reinhardt. Part of the problem is that he died so young. Grappelli lived to be almost 90 years old, and he was performing almost to the end.

I remember my first introduction to Grappelli. I was at a garage sale and there was Paul Simon for one dollar. This must have been around 1980. I had never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan. But that first Paul Simon solo album was something entirely different. And on that album was an instrumental, “Hobo’s Blues” with Simon on guitar and Grappelli on violin. It was my first indication that those French had something special to offer.

Here is a nice international trio: Martin Taylor on guitar from England, Jon Burr on bass from America, and Stéphane Grappelli on violin from you know where. And they are playing in Australia. And they are doing the Rodgers and Hart classic, “Blue Moon.”

Anniversary Post: Alcoholics Anonymous

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Alcoholics Anonymous PropagandaOn this day in 1935 — Exactly 80 years ago! — the two most famous drunks in history met and formed the most successful cult in American history. Those two drunks were, of course, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith. I don’t think these guys really meant to do evil in the world. But that’s what they did. Rather than approach alcohol addiction as a health or social problem, they approached it as a religious problem. They explicitly when back to the Oxford Group — a movement of people who considered themselves sinners and who wanted to purify themselves. This is where the vaunted “Twelve Steps” comes from.

If you’ve spent any time actually reading the official AA discussion of the Twelve Steps, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, you will find just how arbitrary they are. While reading the book, about halfway through the steps I had a sudden realization: it was a first draft. You probably know the experience of writing an essay, being about a thousand words in, and realizing that you are making exactly the opposite argument you started out making. It’s a profound experience: discovery through writing. But Bill Wilson and his followers didn’t do that. They just forged ahead, contorting their arguments more and more to get to the end without having to rethink the system.

A Orange (who has written more thoroughly about AA than anyone I know of) wrote, “Those statements imply that the original members of AA looked long and hard for something, anything, that would work to save alcoholics from self-destruction, anything to break the cycle of addiction, and that the Twelve Steps were what finally worked for those pioneering alcoholics.” But that, of course, is not what happened at all. “The truth is that a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith [Bill] Wilson — a down-on-his-luck former Wall Street hustler who put on airs of having once been a prosperous stock broker — just sat down, in December of 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and fellow alcoholics Doctor Robert Smith and Clarence Snyder had started.”

None of this would matter, of course, if AA and the Twelve Steps actually worked. But they don’t. In fact, AA uses a kind of tautology, “It works if you work it!” So to them, people stay sober as long as they go to meetings. But the correlation clearly works the other way around: only people who are sober go to meetings. And, at this point, the vast majority of people who go to meetings do so only because they are forced to by the criminal justice system. If it weren’t for this, I doubt the group would attract 10% of its current members.

The other side of this is that Hollywood has pushed AA in a big way. You think Scientology is the biggest cult of Hollywood? No way! It’s AA! And make no mistake: AA is a cult. Some have claimed that it isn’t, because it doesn’t have a charismatic leader. But that is a misunderstanding of the movement. Bill Wilson (“Bill W”) of legend is that figure. He’s the one who wrote the Twelve Steps and they are consecrated. No one is allowed to say, “You know, that ninth step may not be such a good idea. Most people don’t like ex-druggies dragging them into their own little trips.” No. The Twelve Steps are perfect. They can never be questioned, just as the divinity of Jesus cannot be questioned. AA is a cult.

The only credible research I’ve read on AA’s effectiveness found two things. First, it found that AA was exactly as good as nothing in terms of how long it kept people off drugs. Second, it found that people in AA had relapse episodes that were roughly three times as long as those who were not involved in the program. That’s not too surprising. Consider first that AA tells addicts that they are powerless. But even more important, if you fall off the wagon, you know you are going to have to go back to the group and tell them what a terrible sinner you are. I know that would make me keep using for as long as possible.

AA is a great pox on our society — a kind of court mandated torture used on people who like drugs too much. And it has been harming our society for 80 years.

Desalination Will Not Solve Our Water Problems

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Poseidon Desalination PlantAs many of you know, I live here in the Bay Area of California — you know: the good part. And we are in the middle of the worst drought since well before the rise of the Aztec Empire. So we are looking very seriously at building a greywater system. For those of you who don’t know, greywater is wastewater that comes from pretty much everywhere but your toilet. For example, your dishwater is greywater. You wouldn’t drink it, but it is fine for other uses like watering your plants or for your toilet. It’s all about efficiency: using the water that you have the best way you can.

But whenever the subject of drought comes up, there is always someone who brings up desalination. We’ve got great big oceans. Why not just pull the salt out of it and give it to our cows? People like this idea because we have a long tradition of fixing problems via technology. But there is a general problem with this outlook on life: we have a statistically skewed sample to draw from. We are, after all, the people who survived. Human history is filled with climate changes that wiped out whole regions. And now that we humans are everywhere, we have the potential to wipe ourselves out on a global scale. Will there be “one weird trick” that will save us?

The best solution to our water problems was for us to take global warming seriously starting back about thirty years ago. But given that we can’t even take it seriously today, that is a fanciful thought. And most likely, the solution to the problems associated with global warming will be to combine a lot of different approaches. And desalination will probably be part of that mix. But it certainly isn’t a cure-all. There are many problems with it — and just as many limitations.

As Michael Hiltzik noted “desalination plants can’t be plunked down just anywhere…” The new billion dollar Poseidon plant rejected three other locations before deciding on Carlsbad where it is close to the Encina Power Station. This made it easier to get the energy that it needs and also reduced the environmental impact, since the power station is already doing that. Poseidon’s continued usefulness will depend upon Encina continuing to run (although it is a good bet at least for the foreseeable future).

The biggest problem with desalination plants is that they use a lot of energy. Of course, so does transporting water large distances. The most efficient desalination can actually use less energy. And one would hope over time that this will be more generally true. So sorry Captain Kirk, the pipeline ain’t the way to go. But still, desalination is expensive. According to Hiltzik, one acre-foot (325,851 gallons) of water from Poseidon will cost about $2,200. “San Diego currently pays $923 per acre-foot for treated water from the Metropolitan Water District. The Pacific Institute reported in 2012 that San Diego could obtain recycled water for as little as $1,200 per acre-foot, and that the marginal cost of water obtained through conservation and efficiency measures was as little as $150.”

A direct example will help. Desalination can be as cheap as (pdf) 3 kW·hr/m3. But it is more normally 4-5 kW·hr/m3. Compare this to pumping it out of the ground which costs less (pdf) than 0.2 kW·hr/m3. That makes groundwater at least 16 times cheaper. And this doesn’t take into account the fact that, for example, the Carlsbad facility will be using all hydrocarbon power, which adds to global warming.

Another problem with desalination is that it has other environmental problems. At the start of the process, “Ocean inflows suck up and kill larval marine organisms.” What’s more, all the salt that is taken out of the water must be put back into the ocean — creating areas that are super-salty. This has large environmental effects, at least on a local scale.

I’m not suggesting that desalination should not be pursued as a tool to fight against the many problems that global warming in causing us to face. But it isn’t the cure-all that many people think it is.