WARNING:WALL OF TEXT!!!
Starting a discussion with the words "You don't know
what the fuck you're talking about" doesn't really leave much room for a
real exchange of views.
Because I do know, at least I think I do know, my subject,
and to deny that at the beginning leaves my entire process of reasoning dead on
the floor, devoid of credit or substance.
Why, little Jimmy, of course there is no such thing!
uh, Mom, look at your foot.
EWW what is it?
It's a land crab, Mom, like I told you.
What?
A land crab. They don't have them in Coquille, but we're in
Sumatra now, and they are all over the place.
(fainting noise offstage)
Enough nonsense.
The position as I understand it is
1 It's too dangerous
2 The pipeline is illegal
3 Fracking is immoral.
1. It's Too Dangerous
The discussion around point number one raises some very good
objections. The opponents term the possible destructive failure of the physical
plant a low-probability high impact event. True, the destructive event would be
very very unacceptably destructive. Ugly. Dead people everywhere.
Too close to population centers. Less than 2 miles from the
plant to Sunset middle school where my son the highly educated and
sophisticated liberal progressive did his 6th and 7th grade. This is the best
objection. But, if you must insist, and
they should insist, they could make the builders pay to move the schools and if
the opponents would get with the program they could make that happen. There's
that kind of money in the thing. And they will pay their 1% in lieu of taxes,
because there is so much money involved that it will be a cheap way to reduce
the Clauswitzian "friction" of haveing this facility in operation.
Here's where we differ, and where the true believers will
stop reading.
That the probability
of a destructive event is very very low, nearly out of the realm of
possibility. Of all the LNG facilities around the world there has never been an
explosive event involving a whole
plant. And this one will be state-of-the-art brand new, with all the safety
bells and whistles that extremely big money can buy. Not because the owners
give much of a rat's ass about little kids, damn their capitalistic hearts, but
they do care, deeply, about their 9 billion dollars in plant costs and their
untold hundred billion dollars of profit they plan to realize over the plants
useful life. These folks are serious about their money, and they aren't in the
habit of investing it where there is the slightest chance of catastrophic
failure. They don't whitewash this shit, or kid themselves in their greed. They
are far too greedy for that. They are absolutely cold-blooded about risk
assessment at this scale.
The energy industry has a bad reputation from the habit of
BP and other -penny-pinching actors of fucking around with safety at their
extraction facilities, but when they aggregate the product you get such a
density of value that the gloves come off and the reading glasses go on and
some careful thinking gets done. It becomes a different animal.
The thing the opponents don't grock, and I do, is the scale
of this fucker. 6 to 9 billion dollars for the plant. The biggest industrial
installation in the state's history. Bigger than the Intel plant in Hillsboro.
And that number is what I trust to be very well taken care
of.
So even if that fact, and my extension of it into the above
argument fails to convince you to support this project, let it be a cold
comfort to you after the thing is
built. If there is one thing the big money boys are careful about protecting,
it is their investment. Stash the baby with the gold and you will not be far
wrong.
It was said that my position is nostalgia. "If North Bend could only be like it was." I say North Bend because I am a total chauvinist about the town. I don't give a shit about Coos Bay the town. I care about the bay, and my town North Bend, and only then about Coos Bay the town because you can't deal with North Bend without also dealing with Coos Bay. But if you think I want Coos Bay/North Bend to be like it was in the glory days you are much mistaken. Let me disabuse
you of that notion. Far from it. See for yourself.
Coos Bay/North Bend, back in the day when the timber
industry was booming, was dirty, and noisy, and stinky, and crude, and
destructive. Populated by people who were destructive and rude and ignorant to an astonishing degree, or culture-bound and straight-laced and as prejudiced about virtually everything as it is humanly possible to be. Provincial would be a compliment. Paleolithic is more like it. To
think I would ever want those days back is an insult. I hated that the
mountains were being raped and the carcass sold off and taken away and the gut
piles stinking to heaven.
I want a new industrial style. One that is interconnected. I want an economy that is not based on kissing tourist ass. An economy that does not depend on perpetuating the myths of the white-haired generations. One that can hold its head up and who has to think through the working day and who says at the end of the day I do work that is a man's work, not a servant's. I want there to be people who can afford shit, who want to make their houses nice, and can pay the property taxes without pain, who will vote for a better library and for a new school. People who live in a town that will kick your ass, figuratively speaking, if you get out of line, not a town that will cower in fear that you might take your Winnebago someplace else, where something besides a gambling den is the big employer. A town that has self respect.
Savvy?
The second safety topic is Fukishima and the
subduction zone. Yes that would be bad. Very bad. Unacceptable. How do you
calculate the probability? And how does that relate to the possibility?
I don't know.
I relate to it in a way that is open to criticism. I don't
know, and I chose to ignore the chance of natural disaster since the danger
cannot be calculated in a meaningful way. Climate science is one thing, but
this geologic activity prediction is not climate science. Past occurrences are
predictive in a general way, but the science is not as well understood, and
there are many variables that are unknown. Why we haven't had a 9000 year quake
in 13000 years is not fully understood, and the raw horse-race probability of
the thing would lead you to think the
fucker was a bit overdue, but whatever it is that has held it off for 4000
years may just as easily hold it off for another 4000 or it might happen
tomorrow.
But you cant stay in the house your whole life because it
might rain or you might get hit by a bus. Not if you want a life. You have to
accept some risk. If you cant tolerate that risk move to Kansas. Oh, right,
tornados.
I say build the plant.
If you make your living off tourists then you won't like the
next part of my position.
For the first 100 years of its existence, the Coos Bay
area's economy was extractive. Selling mother earth and her products. Coal,
then Timber, then Fish.
I hang out in a small boat on the bay and I do not object to
the presence of commercial oyster patches because we have all got to get along
and people who work hard make a modest living thereby.
I don't object to the fish plants cutting up the flowers of
the ocean, the beautiful fishes, although I would like to see the process
become more sustainable, and it is, too slowly in my view, but still, okay, go
ahead and catch the fish and sell them, it is good to eat and it is good to
work and it is good to live in an honest world of work.
I like going up the river into the mountains especially in
the summer time to walk in the forest or along the streams and enjoy the shade
and the greenery and swim in the clean cool water.
I even enjoy mushroom hunting in the Coos County Forest even
though that forest is actively managed and my mushroom patches may be gone when
I get there when that part of the trees get their turn at the saw. The place is
beautifully and carefully managed like the entire Coast Range forest could and
should be which would allow for a generous harvest that would feed a
substantial sawmill industry with all the attendant sideshows of trains and
ships and barges and saw shops and Emporiums to sell Hickory shirts and
Roameos.
The key is balance. The thing that was utterly lacking in the original race to rape the forest
of its best and brightest giants and those are gone and the culture that took
them is gone too and I say good fucking riddance.
I just read "Hard Times in Paradise" by a guy
named Robbins about the end of the timber industry in Coos Bay and let me tell
you that was some depressing shit right there. I lived through it, and got over
it, taking my consolation from the way the town smelled better after, and the
fucking clanking and roaring from the mills all night long was gone and the
bigass log trucks with the smoke and roar are gone and good fucking riddance,
The extractive economy is dead, and I don't miss it and I
don't want it back.
So in order to remain a town the people need a few jobs and
the obvious choice is to become a
"transfer payments" economy bolstered by the tourists that come in
the summer to enjoy the ocean and the forest now that the stupid ugly mean and
destructive loggers are gone. Transfer payments is a way of saying retirees
that get their money in the mailbox. Its a putdown.
Or find a new industry.
I feel strongly the spiritual difference between a town that
has an industry and a town that lives off tourists and retirees. I prefer the
industry even though it is less esthetically pleasing. There is a spiritual
strength and an honesty in making something, or facilitating the making of
something, however that falls out, a difference to the serving of people that
pass through. It has to do with the primary process of creating the things of
life. The farmer has a primary relationship with food, the carpenter with
shelter. The banker has a very abstracted and many times removed relationship
with the stuff of life. I was a banker once, and I felt like a ghost. A Marxist
would say I was a parasite. Then I learned carpentry, and I felt good about
living, and I respected myself, because I knew about the human need for shelter
and was a part of that process at a primary level.
So when I say and industrial town feels different than a
tourist town this is what I am talking about.
And I say the towns of the South Coast have a choice to
make, to be extractive, or abstract servers, or industrial, I choose the
latter, and I say the fact that this shit represents and investment of a shit
ton of money and that these bozos that
put this together would take much better care of 9 billion dollars than they
would of their own kids.
So it is not that I want the old days back, far from it. But
the only thing about the old days that made it endurable was that we had a
primary relationship with the elements of human life. My position is that the
spiritual honesty of that primary relationship that results from an industrial
economy is desirable to the degree that the risk of this plant is acceptable
because it is lower than the opponents think it is
2.Eminent Domain.
The law has been used plenty of times for economic gain.
Sure, they can't take your land for Joe blow to build a tire store, but they can and do take land to build highways and
airports. They even use it for real estate developments, though I think that's
wrong but the point is the use of eminent domain to build industrial
infrastructure is well established. Yes it is different than the import
argument, public good, we all need this gas for energy, but it is well within the established uses
to build industrial capacity that provides jobs and tax benefits. SO that, even
if I also think it is stretching things too far and I don't like it one bit and
if it was my land I would fight it but it's not illegal. They do that shit all
the time.
3. Fracking is Immoral.
You bet it is. You got my full agreement on that. If you
argue that we shouldn't handle the fruits of the immoral tainted tree then you
shouldn't have earned comfy livings exporting the logs of vast clearcuts. All
you longshoremen shut the fuck up.
Fracking is on its way out. Not altogether, but there seems
to be a growing pushback and a gathering storm about the practice and I predict
a long and bitter and possibly bloody fight about it in the near future,
Especially if we get a second straight 8 years of progressive or at least
Democratic government.
I think there's a pushback about fracking that is just
starting. I think it will get much bigger and stronger and bloodier. It adds to
the following tendency a reluctance to export natural gas at all, in the
backstage bullshit that surrounds this stuff, a strong motive of NOT exporting
LNG because there are industrial uses for it as a raw material, not just the
substantial need for it as a source of energy.
Our industry has been hamstrung forever by the cost of LNG
both as an energy source and as a raw material for fabric and pharmaceuticals
and plastics. So now that is no longer a scarce commodity the domestic
industrial users are saying hey not so fast lets see how much of this
stuff we need here domestically before we ship it offshore to our industrial competitors.
Which leads us to a fourth objection that the CAVE (Citizens Against
Virtually Everything) people don't know about yet, because they think
they know all the material while in reality they are chasing their own
tails.
4. Export policy
This objection has a LOT of traction behind the scenes.
The position of LNG as a plentiful resource is new thinking.
It hasn't yet been fully grokked by the leadership of industry and
policymakers. The Obama administration has been extremely, remarkably slow to
develop a policy toward export. They have issued 2 TWO Only permits for export
plants, one in Texas and one in Louisiana. There are 15 or 16 applications in
the hopper awaiting decision. It is not a done deal.
In fact, I expect that only 1 or 2 more will be issued in by
the Obama administration. There is a lot of pressure to NOT export and to let
the American industrial system see how much of the stuff it can absorb at these
cheap rates, because we desperately need some kind of an industrial advantage
in the competition for manufacturing contracts and this is a rare opportunity
for American industry to get a leg up.
3dWorldTour conclusion
So, surprise surprise, I will be very surprised if the
Jordan Cove Project will ever get FERC approval, for the same reason that the
import version got its approval so shockingly quickly. Industrial demand for
cheaper LNG.
