While I’m typing our daughter is driving to the airport where she will board an aircraft for a rare visit home. The flight is on-time despite Iowa’s winter weather.
Except to attend Mother’s funeral, she hasn’t been home since April 2016. We are looking forward to seeing her as phone calls, text messages and email are not enough.
I cleared the driveway to allow ingress and egress. If she wasn’t coming I may have left the snowfall for another day. Once she’s home, I’m not sure if anyone will leave the house for a while.
We are thankful for the Federal Aviation Administration and the work of the pilots and crew of the airline and airports. Thankful for safety on this winter flight.
In 2018 NextEra Energy Resources announced plans to retire the Duane Arnold Energy Center (DAEC) — a 615-MW nuclear power plant located in Palo, Iowa — before the end of 2020.
NextEra’s main customer at DAEC, Alliant Energy, will buy out its contract in September for $110 million, sourcing electricity instead from NextEra’s wind generation fleet. The move is expected to save Alliant Energy customers $300 million over 21 years.
There are no plans to replace Duane Arnold with new nuclear generating capacity.
Two essential problems with nuclear power plants are they cost too much, and a lack answers to the question of what to do with spent nuclear fuel. These problems are political. In our current political climate that makes them unsolvable, practically speaking, even though potential solutions exist for both.
Certain environmental groups favor nuclear power to replace coal as an emissions reduction tactic. On its face this is belied by the urgency of the climate crisis.
“Nuclear, especially next-generation nuclear, has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change,” climatologist James Hansen said on Dec. 3, 2015. “The dangers of fossil fuels are staring us in the face. So for us to say we won’t use all the tools (such as nuclear energy) to solve the problem is crazy.”
The challenge for nuclear energy is the timeline for market penetration in the industrial age. It will take too long.
Cesare Marchetti of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis did research which suggests the historical trend on implementation of new technologies such as wood, coal, oil and gas takes 40-50 years to go from one percent to 10 percent of market share. Nuclear energy occupies about 12 percent of current global market share. It will take almost a century for an energy source to occupy half the market. The world doesn’t have 50 years, and likely longer, to wait for nuclear energy sources to gain acceptance and growth the way coal, oil and gas have.
Even if political issues surrounding nuclear waste disposal could be resolved, the financial cost of building out a fleet of new nuclear power plants would likely follow the course of the Georgia Power Vogtle Plant expansion, which, when they broke ground, was the first nuclear power plant contemplated in 30 years. Despite proclamations of “making American nuclear cool again,” by then Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the Georgia Public Service Commission questions whether the plant will be economically viable if going on line is delayed much longer. New nuclear energy remains too expensive, especially when compared to renewables and natural gas.
Renewable energy (wind, solar, hydroelectric) is further along than nuclear in its evolution as an energy source. At 31 percent of global market share, we remain decades away from achieving 50 percent market penetration, according to Marchetti’s analysis. At the rate we are going, elimination of coal, oil and natural gas from the energy production mix for electricity won’t occur in my lifetime, and likely not the lives of the millennial cohort. By then all of this electricity talk may be rendered moot by the climate crisis.
There are no big-picture answers to the trouble of an over-heating planet in a 500-word blog post. What remains clear is our problems are driven more by politics than by technology and reason.
It is critical we root out influence and corruption in government. To do that it will take voters who care about our future and are willing to make the hard choices necessary to address the climate crisis.
In any case, from my vantage point, it seems unlikely nuclear power plants will be part of our energy future.
Today I simplified the appearance of this blog and renamed it Journey Home. Isn’t that where we are always going?
The archives are printed and on the shelf — 14 years worth. I look forward to many more years of posting here although I hesitate to be specific because at a certain age, one never knows.
It was one degree below zero when I woke at 4:30 a.m.
It has now been 24 hours of freezing temperatures and perhaps the beginning of an extended streak. If this pans out I can prune fruit trees assured of their dormancy.
That’s what winter is about here in Big Grove Township.
The Iowa precinct caucuses are coming up on Feb. 3. I’m not ready to chair my precinct yet but will be in the coming two weeks. It’s surprising how much my view of the caucuses has changed since I became politically active again.
Our family walked into the 2004 caucuses together but weren’t sure John Kerry was the right choice. Our daughter brought along a copy of the local newspaper with a candidate comparison in it. In the end we all stood in Kerry’s corner.
After Kerry lost the general election I decided to do my part to regain the presidency for Democrats in the 2008 general election. I met Barack Obama in the rope line at the 2006 Harkin Steak Fry and wasn’t impressed. I ended up devoting many hours to supporting John Edwards, beginning with an October 2006 event at the public library. On caucus night Obama had the most people in the room. Hillary Clinton and Edwards had the same number so the caucus chair flipped a coin to determine who would get another delegate. Team Hillary won the game of chance.
Edwards placed second in the statewide delegate count and his staff dispersed to three other early states: New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Edwards ended up with one elected delegate when the decision reached the second district convention. It was clear then he would not win the nomination. When Obama formally won the nomination at the Democratic National Convention I supported him.
In 2012 Obama was the presumed nominee and I ended up leading the caucus for two precincts in nearby Graham and Cedar townships instead of my own. I remember we watched a closed circuit television address from the president. There was dissent in supporting Obama but in the long run nothing came of it.
In 2016 I again worked hard, this time for Hillary Clinton. She easily won our precinct caucus with enough people in our group to send 14 of them to make Martin O’Malley viable and deprive Bernie Sanders of a second delegate to the county convention. It was a close race and Hillary prevailed in Iowa just barely getting more than 50 percent of the delegates at the state convention.
This year is different with a slate of many great candidates. I support Elizabeth Warren for president but haven’t been campaigning for her like I did for my candidates in 2008 and 2016. It’s not that I don’t care because I do. It’s that whoever wins Iowa, the nomination will be decided in other states, maybe as soon as March 3 Super Tuesday.
Whoever is the nominee, Democrats will mostly be united to defeat the expected Republican candidate. The trouble is Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) aren’t the deciders. In Iowa, Democrats make up 30 percent of the electorate according to January 2020 numbers from the Secretary of State. Republicans comprise 32 percent. It’s been clear all along that factors besides political party affiliation will decide the outcome of the 2020 general election.
For now, the Iowa caucuses are first in the nation. I’ll note that Vermont and Minnesota have already started early voting so it’s not a clean first. We still have a lot of media attention, and people are deciding for whom they will caucus. My hope is someone else will step up to the Democratic central committee to fill the two slots at caucus so I don’t have to. My political work this year will begin in earnest once we have a nominee this summer.
In the meanwhile, I have a garden to attend as soon as spring arrives. There are also fruit trees that need pruning.
Friday I ran errands before the winter storm hit. Errands means filling the automobile fuel tank with gasoline, buying a lottery ticket, and driving south on Highway One to the grocery store in the county seat to purchase organic celery, frozen lima beans and sundry other items not available locally.
The storm hit between noon and 1 p.m. depositing a fluffy, four-inch covering of snow on everything.
It wasn’t a blizzard as one could easily see into the distance through the small, falling snowflakes. The wind wasn’t blizzard-bad. It gave me a chance to try out the electric snow blower I bought at the home, farm and auto supply store on Dec. 12., a concession to aging.
Our rural electric cooperative buys electricity from CIPCO (Central Iowa Power Cooperative). Their electricity generation fuel mix is coal, nuclear, hydro, landfill gas, wind, solar, natural gas, and oil energy resources, according to their website. They haven’t updated the breakdown by fuel source since 2016 which showed 38.3 percent coal, 33.7 percent nuclear, 27.0 percent wind, solar, hydro and landfill gas, and 0.5 percent natural gas. I could say we have a nuclear powered snow blower… or not depending on how I feel on any given day. Yesterday I was thankful I didn’t have to shovel as the work went quickly.
We need energy to fuel a modern lifestyle and there is not a lot of control outside our personal habits. We use electric appliances and there is no reason to change back to natural gas, the most recent alternative. Our home heating is a forced air, natural gas central furnace supplemented by an electric blanket in one bedroom and a space heater in my writing room. We have no fireplace and burning wood isn’t a sustainable option. We use an on-demand, natural gas water heater which has served us well. I learned about on-demand water heaters while visiting a friend in Vienna, Austria in 1974.
We got rid of incandescent light bulbs long ago and do our best to turn off lights when not using a space. I occasionally forget the light is on in my writing room and leave it on overnight. We consolidate trips to major cities in our vehicles, combining work days with shopping and other errands. We spent an average of $3.65 per day for electricity and natural gas in 2019 and $2.55 per day on gasoline to operate my car. When we upgrade my 1997 Subaru there will be an opportunity to change to electric or get a more fuel efficient vehicle. Same for the other car in the house, a 2002 Subaru. As we age I can see owning only one automobile.
I still use gasoline to power yard equipment including our mowers and trimmer. I tried a Black and Decker electric trimmer but it wouldn’t hold a charge long enough to finish the whole yard, even with two batteries. When it broke after years of service I got a Stihl trimmer with my discount at the home, farm and auto supply store. I didn’t use a gallon of gasoline for the trimmer in 2019. I don’t like mowing the lawn unless it is to collect grass clippings to use as mulch. In 2019 I filled up my 5-gallon gas can twice: once at the beginning of the season and once in July. It’s still half-full. I expect to purchase a gasoline-powered rototiller for the garden. Like with the snow blower it is a concession to aging.
A snow day is a chance to bunker in and get caught up on desk work. I wish I could report I had. Instead I read, watched snow fall, and wondered about our collective future in an environment where the weather event was unremarkable, but its late arrival this winter is an unmistakable sign about our warming climate. I need to get to work today, as do we all.
Reducing speed, I turned on the flashers to descend the ice-packed road leading to the Coralville Lake. One car was already in the ditch.
Frozen rain covered everything Wednesday morning. The city where I was bound cancelled bus service for “safety reasons.” I’m from here and knew how to make it safely into work on time.
I spent part of my shift at the home, farm and auto supply store loading pallets of granulated salt on flatbed trucks and trailers for contractors that extract a living from the frozen landscape. These guys, and they were all men, don’t work for big companies or government. As one secured his load with well-used straps he asked me how many pallets we had left. I told him and expected him back if he needed more.
The margin is thin on salt sales. Even so, with customer traffic light because of the weather, the store would take any sales we could get.
Some special projects fell into my lap. Tonight I’m scheduled to interview one of Iowa’s U.S. Senate candidates for Blog for Iowa, and next week I do a phone interview with Thom Hartmann whose last two books I reviewed. I had no intention of spending my time this way but the opportunities presented and I took them. In addition, our daughter is making a rare trip home the last weekend of the month.
The new year is bringing too much stuff to do. Part of me welcomes it, and part struggles to keep up. It is great to feel alive and engaged in this frozen Iowa.
I ordered a printed version of this blog through the end of last year. It’s the first step in changing the appearance.
The WordPress theme I use is free and serviceable. Maybe I’ve gotten used to it. I like the posts on the left and links on the right with a link to the about and reading list pages in the header. Clean and simple so readers can focus on the text. I want to change the photograph of the apple blossoms though.
Because of reduced personal cash flow I had gotten behind in making a paper archive. With a reasonable retirement income and a small amount from Mother’s estate I could get caught up. When the archive volumes arrive there will be about ten inches of blog books comprised of a few thousand pages on my shelf next to my hand-written journals.
I began blogging in 2007 after our daughter graduated from college. I didn’t understand it when I began but this writing would eventually take the place of journaling. Personal information is scrubbed off and each post was better proofed and edited than my hand-written diaries. It is a modern day instance of an English diary like those of Samuel Pepys who we studied in high school English class.
Blogging is among the most important things I do each day. My readership has grown, although for a long time I didn’t think I would find an audience. Everywhere I go in public I encounter people who are readers, indicating a reality of sorts. It is a gratifying feeling.
For the last ten years blogging has been a way to work through aspects of my life. Some things, like yesterday’s review of Thom Hartmann’s book, are specific and set in time. What is better has been the major topics about which I wrote in multiple posts, including the role of low-wage workers, challenges of a local food system, and trying to understand our national and local politics. Blogging is a formal way of writing that can yield a personal conclusion about life in society.
When we moved near the lake in 1993 I set up my desk about 20 feet from where my writing table is now. The desk is still there, although it is piled with stuff: old printers, boxes of documents and books, loose items — potential jetsam from a life weighed down by old artifacts. As my autobiographical work proceeds, the process includes going through every box and bag to re-purpose, recycle or discard everything I can bear to part with… after relevant stories have been extracted. I expect it to take a couple of years.
Other writers don’t keep a blog with so many posts as can be found here. To each their own. Blogging is a way to write that became primary. A place of my own where readers can stop by when something attracts their eye. It is a form of self-expression over which the author has uniform and almost complete control. Trying to make it worthwhile for readers creates an incentive to write better. Writing better has been my endgame.
I note from the clock on my computer it’s time to head upstairs, fix breakfast and get ready for a shift at the home, farm and auto supply store. During winter I want and need to get out of the house and into society. At the same time I’m tempted to call off work and persist in this bloggery through the day into nightfall. I won’t do that. I’m too much the product of an education in the 1950s and 1960s where I have a responsibility to social commitments. Still, I linger on a few more minutes in the glow of my desk lamp camped out on what remains of the Iowa prairie.
I have a sense today will be a good day. I can’t wait to find out.
It is a commonplace that effective organizations, especially political ones, should be “grass roots” driven. It is so commonplace the words are virtually meaningless.
Let’s think about this. What drove the election of the current president was a strong movement fed by the fertilizer of unlimited free speech in the form of dark money from a billionaire-led network. It was a grass roots movement supporting a demagogue. It yielded a predictable result, one we’d convinced ourselves wasn’t possible.
The basic validity of the movement to elect President Trump is hard to question. People are free to support political candidates and elect them to high positions including as president. The underlying efficacy of such movements is mitigated by deception and lies told to further its intent. Despite the number of presidential lies and false statements, people persist in their support of the president and the right wing propaganda machine provides many handles for voters to hold fast to the Trump train.
People mistake a participatory democracy as being grass roots driven. It isn’t necessarily. As Thom Hartmann points out in his book The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote — And How to Get it Back, about six percent of eligible voters nominated Trump as the Republican candidate, eight percent nominated Hillary Clinton as the Democratic one. Hartmann’s message is more people should participate in elections.
Grass roots movements are important. Whether they can make needed changes in our governance is an open question. In our current right wing media-dark money-oligarchical society participatory democracy and being grass roots driven aren’t the same thing.
Our recent school board election is an example of a grass roots movement with more positive results. We had six candidates and the community joined together to vet them and pick two to serve. Our collective actions during the run up to the election made a change in the board’s composition. We elected a woman to serve with four other men. She has deep roots among families in the district and the electorate believed the board would be better for her service.
Does characterization of support for a political candidate as “grass roots” make a difference? Probably not. It becomes one more meme in a media environment of too many memes and not enough thinking. I get that tallgrass prairie plants have deep roots. If we hadn’t decimated the ecosystem in which they thrived it might be a more appropriate metaphor. Just like native prairies of Iowa meant something a hundred years ago, grass roots politics are rooted in an era of progressive politics no longer relevant in today’s ubiquitous right wing media and dark money environment.
Instead of coming up with descriptors, politically active people should encourage more people to participate in elections. What we know with some certainty is if everyone votes, common sense solutions to our problems are likely to prevail. Participatory democracy is the way to go.
The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote — and How to Get it Back by Thom Hartmann is a quick but important read for people who want or need to review the history and origins of today’s concerted, well-organized campaign to make it more difficult to vote for some while making it increasingly convenient for others.
It answers the question what can we do to ensure everyone has a voice in our democracy? It’s a page turner intended to teach us things we didn’t know about voter suppression.
Hartmann takes readers through the founders’ reasons for curbing the right to vote for Native Americans, women and slaves, the growing influence of moneyed interests beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court case Buckley vs. Valeo, the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education on voting, and more. The final section of the book offers solutions in the form of points of action to protect our fundamental right to vote.
“But isn’t Hartmann preaching to the choir?” engaged readers might ask.
What’s important about this book is it retells the story of voting in America from an actionable perspective. It is easy to read and understand with a focus on how to increase voter participation, eliminate political gerrymandering, end “voter caging,” and more.
Many of us are familiar with Ari Berman’s 2015 book Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. It is a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which people interested in politics should read if they haven’t. What Hartmann adds to the discussion of voting rights is the history of voter disenfranchisement that is baked into our constitution, along with what readers can do to protect and restore voting rights going forward.
Thom Hartmann
In the final section of the book, Hartmann puts potential solutions to voter suppression efforts in high relief. Many may understand aspects of his narrative already. The benefit of reading the book is its long-form and coherent narrative.
So often our ideas about voter suppression are formed by snippets of information in various media about specific aspects of the overall effort. Increasingly social media is a key driver for informing our opinions, yet it presents an incomplete picture. It is not enough. What has been lacking is a more comprehensive look at voter suppression efforts and how to combat them in easy to understand language. Hartmann delivers that and more.
I found the book empowering. Last week I met a woman advocating for D.C. statehood for a group called Iowans for D.C. Statehood. I signed up as an endorser yet told her D.C. was not enough and explained the logic Hartmann put forward in his book about adding additional states. The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote — and How to Get it Back well prepared me for the conversation.
Below is a clip of Thom Hartmann reading from his book. It will be available on Feb. 11, 2020. Click here to order your copy.
Among the things I received from my late mother’s estate was a box of letters I wrote her.
A lot of my letters were from the period 1976 until 1979 when I was stationed in a mechanized infantry division in Mainz, Germany.
I read them last night. The topics were pretty mundane.
12 Nov 78
APO New York 09185
Mom,
Just a short note to let you know that I completed French Commando School without serious injury and in good spirits. In case you didn’t get my last letter I arrive in Moline 20 Dec 78 at about 8:30 p.m. on Ozark flight #873 from Chicago. I hope to be going to France again in the time before I return to Davenport. I will visit Normandy Beach and a number of the famous cathedrals. Til then keep the faith, drop me a line to let me know how things are going on the home front.
Love, Paul
I wrote her as much as she wrote me. I kept all of her letters and someday I’ll be ready to read those too.
As I followed the vein of letters over the last 24 hours I found a series written by my maternal grandmother while I was in Europe. They were mostly responses to mine, although what I wrote her did not survive. She was very good about writing me, and explained her health issues in great detail. She wrote often about my cousin Linda who was stationed in Spain at the same time I was in Germany. While Grandma was being treated for a heart attack her physician had a heart attack so she had to get a new doctor, she wrote. I like to think her writing letters to me helped her understand her condition. I know writing has that effect on me.
There was a flurry of letters from friends during the investigation to secure me a top secret clearance. I warned people the feds were coming and most of them wrote back after their interview. I got the clearance, although the information I was able to access was pretty dull. Just because it’s top secret doesn’t mean it’s that interesting. I remember their letters more than the secret stuff.
We are out of the age of many hand-written letters. With “forever stamps” I don’t even know how much posting a first class letter costs. Email is quicker, cheaper, and we get to save a copy if we choose.
Phone calls are also inexpensive. In Germany I did not have a telephone until my appointment as battalion adjutant. More people had to reach me after hours. If the balloon went up (meaning the Soviets crossed the border), we would be rounded up from the compound where Americans lived by knocking on doors.
How to use this archival material is an open question. I’m still trying to figure out what I have, what warrants writing about, and what fits in a 100,000-word autobiography. Some of the memories have me returning letters to the box to save for another time.
Whatever the outcome of this autobiography, the writing of it will be the thing. Part of the journey of life. A way to escape from the pressing society around me that doesn’t know when to relent.
Journey Home 
You must be logged in to post a comment.