Tuesday Open Thread

Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.

In his hearty tenor, Mr. Seeger, a beanpole of a man who most often played 12-string guitar or five-string banjo, sang topical songs and children’s songs, humorous tunes and earnest anthems, always encouraging listeners to join in. His agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. “We Shall Overcome,” which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil rights anthem.

Mr. Seeger was a prime mover in the folk revival that transformed popular music in the 1950s. As a member of the Weavers, he sang hits including Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” — which reached No. 1 — and “If I Had a Hammer,” which he wrote with the group’s Lee Hays. Another of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,”became an antiwar standard. And in 1965, the Byrds had a No. 1 hit with a folk-rock version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Mr. Seeger’s setting of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

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Tuesday Open Thread

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

— Charles Babbage

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Tuesday Open Thread

"Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice."

–Ambrose Bierce 

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Tuesday Open Thread

"He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

–Thomas Jefferson

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Tuesday Open Thread

"There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth."

–Charles Dickens 

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Tuesday Open Thread

"What you don't do can be a destructive force."

–Eleanor Roosevelt 

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Tuesday Open Thread

"Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all."

—Dwight D. Eisenhower 

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Tuesday Open Thread

"I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."

–Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Tuesday Open Thread

“Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.”

–Winston Churchill

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Tuesday Open Thread

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

–Mark Twain

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AFP News Tuesday Colorado Flooding Update

POLS NOTE: We're receiving a great deal of traffic from readers seeking information on the historic floods impacting the state of Colorado. Here's an update on the situation via AFP News.

Death toll from Colorado floods rises to eight (via AFP) The confirmed death toll from massive floods in the US state of Colorado has risen to eight, while more than 600 people remain unaccounted for, officials said early Tuesday. Helicopters resumed search and rescue missions, helped by clearer weather after…

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Tuesday Open Thread

"Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded."

–Charlie Chaplin

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Tuesday Open Thread

"Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it."

–H. L. Mencken 

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Tuesday Open Thread

UPDATE: We're live again, and hopefully running a lot better than we have recently. Please let us know if you find errors or missing content.

Please pardon our dust while we clean up from a major server migration. We'll have all content restored shortly, and hopefully you'll notice much better performance.

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Tuesday Open Thread

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."

–Henry Miller

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Tuesday Open Thread

"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."

–Victor Hugo

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Tuesday Open Thread

Randy Udall – A Comet Passes:

By Sally Odland, Steve Andrews, and John Theobald

"There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is."    – Albert Einstein

Last week our universe was rent asunder by the untimely death of our great friend, colleague and mentor, Randy Udall.   The passing of this lanky, unprepossessing comet of a man with his wide-ranging intellect, uncompromising honesty and stiletto wit leaves a wide vacuum in its wake.

We knew Randy primarily through his crusade to bring honest discussion of America’s energy predicament into public dialog and policy.  Randy started tracking and writing about world oil and gas depletion in the 1990’s.  He co-founded the US chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in 2005 and spearheaded five highly touted and provocative energy conferences, creating for a few years the ultimate big tent for international energy thinkers.   He was famed for his poetic speeches, wicked humor and accessible metaphor.  And also for his insistence on speaking truth to power, no matter its rank.

Randy was a formidable autodidact.  When he designed and built his passive solar house by hand, he taught himself plumbing.  Auto mechanics?  No problem.  In his two decades working with CORE—his Colorado energy efficiency group—and ASPO-USA, he taught himself the math and technologies of renewable energy and fossil fuels along with a fair bit of geology.  He learned by seeking out smart doers and leaders to probe them with questions that could vault him up the learning curves.

Randy was a contrarian thinker.  He worked problems from all angles, refusing to succumb to groupthink and revisiting old assumptions whenever new information came to light.  Because of this uncompromising truth-seeking and refusal to toe a party line, he held the respect of many people and groups that would not normally sit in the same room much less at the same table.  On any given day, his inbox might field emails from climate scientists, exploration geologists, energy historians, economists, utility operators, environmental groups, and—maybe his favorite—the people actually steering the drilling rigs.

He admired the immense brainpower and ingenuity of petroleum geologists and engineers to find and develop fossil fuels, and he understood exactly how much we rely on them to support the American Dream.  All the while, he looked for concrete ways to move houses off energy ‘life support’, individuals to a lower carbon budget and his country towards renewable energy flows.

There was always solid research behind Randy’s picturesque quips.  When he threw out one-liners like “Oil shale has less energy content than pig manure,” you could be sure he had calculated the per-ton BTUs of both.   If he noted that “Energy extraction is now the dominant land use in America”, you knew he had run down comparative numbers on acres leased for drilling versus agricultural acreage.

Always present in the moment and engaged with his audiences, Randy connected the abstract world of energy use to ordinary people’s lives.  He avoided graphs to tell the story, preferring visceral and iconic analogies.  To illustrate the power needed to fuel our electricity appetite, for example, he would show a slide of nude Lance Armstrong on bike, share data from a personal correspondence with Armstrong’s trainer, then inform us all that the most powerful man on earth can’t generate enough juice to run our hair dryers.  A presentation to hundreds of professionals in Boston might divert into a technical discussion of CO2 emissions.  The same presentation to a group of college students at UC Davis would morph into an analysis of the energy demands of their campus.

Unlike many pundits, partisans, educators and activists, Randy never punctuated his public conversations and presentations with moral judgments.   He refused to jettison facts or objectivity on behalf of a moral crusade.  As Garrett Hardin has said, “the tender flower of objectivity is easily crushed by what is taken to be the necessity of the moment.”  While Randy made damning comments like “Time may be our most precious resource . . . D.C. is fiddling that away while the petroleum burns” and “Without a scorecard, our policy responses are liable to stay stuck on stupid,” he did not characterize the American life style as evil.  Instead he dubbed us “the Oil Tribe” and made people aware of what that actually meant.

"‘So much for peak oil’ is a popular meme right now” he would say. “But there's a difference between reporting and quoting.  All this talk about Saudi America is misleading boosterism. “

“This notion that ‘it’s morning in America’ is simply hype.  The pore throats in shale rocks are 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. On these rocks, we've bet our energy future.”

“Eventually, the politics of energy has to surrender to the physics of energy.”

Randy never played off the Udall family name.  Virtually without ego, he shunned all self-promotion.  With his eloquence and charisma, people thought him a natural for politics and urged him to run for office to further his message.  But, in fact, he had no taste for that.  He exercised his public persona at great personal cost and would retreat for long stints to the wilderness to recharge his spirit and soul.

Randy died like he lived, questing nature’s energy flows, in the Wind River Mountains he so loved.  Death snuck up and felled him on the trail.  It is not hard to imagine Randy, led by his boundless curiosity, walking through the portal separating his last worldly step from the universal energy.

We loved Randy like oxygen and will miss him desperately.  His was a light the rest of us could navigate by.  What a privilege to have been hitched to his star for the ride.

Sally Odland is a former oil geologist and ASPO-USA board member, now at Columbia University.  Steve Andrews is a retired energy consultant in Colorado and a co-founder of ASPO-USA.  John Theobald teaches at the University of California, Davis.  Each worked closely with Randy to build ASPO-USA and advance critical discourse on America's great energy challenges.

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Tuesday Open Thread

"The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."

–Carl Jung

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