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A few more notes on the now-postponed Keystone XL pipeline.

First, I love our neighbors to the north dearly, and would in fact like to go live among them. Nothing against Canada. But I do not love the international oil industry, and I certainly don’t love the revolting corner of it occupied with boiling tar sands into petroleum plus vast amounts of carbon pollution even before the resulting petroleum is burned. Oil is a bad choice of fuel source for a lot of reasons; oil from tar sands is even worse.

Which gets to a second point about this “ethical oil” concept that Canada, or at least its oil industry flacks, like to go tooting about. Canada is a peaceful, friendly democracy, unlike so many of the world’s other petrostates. So America should source as much of our energy from the Canucks as possible, they argue, given that we’ll presumably be sourcing it from repressive and/or anti-American regimes, otherwise. There are two problems with this.

One, of course, is that it presents a false choice, in a couple of ways. There’s the fact that oil supply and demand are, obviously, a global market; just as Canada threatens to send its oil to China if we don’t approve the Keystone pipeline, the “unethical” oil of other petrostates will be purchased by other economies if it isn’t purchased by us. It’s still in some sense nice to be able to say “well, at least it isn’t our money going to prop up a medieval theocracy, e.g.,” but if the end result of oil bought and sold is going to be about the same either way, the actual utility is minimal even from an “ethical” perspective. (more…)

For those who care(?) I ought to note that book reviews may be wanting for the next several weeks. I’ve committed to a pretty dense schedule of work, which is certainly not my ideal way to spend the remainder of the summer, but I’d prefer to do a lot of work for this one client in particular now rather than next winter since the long drive to their office is at least safe, now. Anyway. I can share a number of notes on one book:

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East
Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac

So, full disclosure, I skipped about 100 of this book’s 420 pages, and then read the conclusion, but I’m calling it close enough. Mostly because chugging through the 300-some pages I did read was punishment enough that I feel I’ve earned it.

Which is not to say that this is a bad book. I think the book was a good idea, badly handled. (more…)

The issue of “packing up and moving” has been on my mind for some months, now. Actually, as I have come to realize, a number of up-sticks-ing-related issues have been on my mind, which may ultimately be too disparate to synthesize into one grand, unified-field-theory post.

The loose theme of “I don’t like it here and I’ll leave” touches on a lot of concepts and phenomena. Immigration. Capital flight, broadly including such things as mega-profitable sports teams and other corporate gorillas extorting money and favorable laws from communities with the threat of relocating, as well as the notion that if we dare try to tax back any of the growing portion of society’s wealth which financiers are soaking up, they’ll go overseas and we’ll be sorry. And the benefits of freedom to leave one’s surroundings for a new start and how to weigh them against the risk of an ignorant, indifferent, “throw-away” social attitude.

There’s also my personal struggle with whether and moreover how to bail out on my home country, of course. Which got unexpected company, recently, with a declaration of similar ambition from my younger brother. And this, finally, gave me what seems like a useful perspective from which to consider at least some of these relocation issues. (more…)