Something to watch over us

The Earth should be monitored more carefully

May 12th 2012 by The Economist

ON APRIL 8th Envisat, Europe’s largest Earth-observing satellite, unexpectedly stopped talking to its users on the Earth below. Since then those users have been frantically trying to re-establish contact. They rely on Envisat’s radars and other sensors for a wide range of measurements, from the temperature of the oceans to the chemistry of the stratosphere. Scientists have used it to gauge ocean conditions for shipping and to investigate earthquakes; its data have been the basis of thousands of scientific papers.

Envisat had, unlike much of Europe, forgone early retirement: designed for five years of operation, it was on its tenth. Given its advanced years, you would think that planning for its eventual end would be well in hand. You would expect that successor instruments would already be in orbit, their measurements carefully cross-correlated with Envisat’s so that the elucidation of the scope and pace of global environmental change could continue seamlessly. You would be wrong.

Wilful blindness

Providing earthlings with a reliable, continuous record of their planet’s condition would seem a sensible aim in any circumstances. With the state of the atmosphere and oceans upset in ways whose consequences are not easily foreseen, and may well prove catastrophic, it becomes an imperative. You do not need to know every little thing about the environment in order to make policy about it. But only long-term measurements will allow researchers to get a reliable grip on the science of climate change and other environmental stresses. A firm grasp of the basic trends is a necessary precondition for understanding and for informed policy.

The governments that build and operate satellites like Envisat are not taking that necessity seriously. According to a damning report from America’s National Academies, the number of civilian Earth-observing satellites flown by the United States government looks likely to fall from 23 today to just six in 2020, and the number of instruments in orbit could drop from 90 to 20. The situation in Europe is somewhat less disastrous, but has its own problems. The European Space Agency is unwilling to move forward with a new generation of satellites that can monitor the environment continuously until the European Union promises to pay their operating costs.

find this article : http://www.economist.com/node/21554528

The New York Review of Books 
The Ultimate Corporation

JUNE 7, 2012
Bill McKibben

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Penguin, 685 pp., $36.00

_{The Strathcona Refinery, owned by Exxon subsidiary Imperial Oil, on the outskirts of Edmonton, Alberta, December 2008}

Exxon’s executives, as anecdote after anecdote in Steve Coll’s book makes clear, enjoy easy access to every president. Its confident CEO is “a peer of the White House’s rotating occupants” who can usually count on the administration to see things as he does. In fact, the president is often more pliable than the CEO, who often goes his own way, 

aligned…with America, but…not always in sync; he was more akin to the president of France, or the chancellor of Germany…. His was a private empire.

Coll makes clear in his magisterial account that Exxon is mighty almost beyond imagining, producing more profit than any American company in the history of profit, the ultimate corporation in “an era of corporate ascendancy.”

This history of its last two decades is therefore a revealing history of our time, a chronicle of the intersection between energy and politics that explains much about our present and more about our (dismal) future.

And one of the key points that comes through in every chapter is that Exxon mostly earned its power the old-fashioned way: not by political influence, but by prowess, hard work, and discipline. Coll opens by describing the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez and the fouling of Prince William Sound, the nadir of the company’s recent history—soon-to-be CEO Lee Raymond described himself as “chagrined…horrified and to an extent devastated.” He and the company responded to the tragedy by fighting every attempt to make it pay punitive damages—but also by embarking on a rigorous effort to change Exxon’s culture, unveiling to “its employees and executives a universal new management regime, the Operations Integrity Management System,” or OIMS, which one executive described as “more vinyl binders than you can possibly imagine,” covering every possible aspect of the company’s systems.

Exxon, far more than its competitors, did things “by the book,” and this was the book; its employees, if they wanted to remain, did not deviate. In fact, writes Coll, “those who stayed did not find OIMS ironic or extreme; they liked the culture of discipline and accountability.” And the results were inarguable: Exxon didn’t just make huge profits because of its huge size; its “return on capital employed” outstripped that of its peers year after year: 

Its exceptional ability to complete massive, complex drilling and construction projects on time and under budget meant that, in comparison to industry peers, it remained exceptionally profitable in recessions and boom times alike, when oil prices were high and when prices were low. 

Lee Raymond, CEO from 1993 to 2005, was intimidating, “Iron Ass” to his troops. He calculated, writes Coll, that given the size and sprawl of his global empire, the only way a chief executive could hope to extract disciplined results was to overdo it—that is, unless Raymond used his bully pulpit…to pound …

find this article : http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/ultimate-corporation/

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Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact. 

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate – the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace. 

– Mark Danner