The Plastic Problem. Some Culprits:Bisphenols and Phthalates

 In this  and subsequent blogs I  will lay out some of the major classes of chemical compounds in involved in  manufacture and production, distribution, utilization, disposal and recycling of plastics. It is by no means inclusive, just the primary players that we have data points on. More than 350,000 chemical compounds have been made in the past 70 years.  Only about 20% were ever tested in any fashion. There are about 80,000 registered chemicals in the US of whom less than a dozen have been  regulated.(source Linda Birnbaum,podcast with Nate Hagens Jan 21, 2025, The Great simplification.

 Some of these chemicals used in plastics will be familiar to you and others probably not.  The most widely used are bisphenols,  and phthalates . Bisphenols and Phthalates are plasticizers which are added to plastics to increase flexibility, durability, transparency and longevity. They are similar in their effects on biologic systems. They are especially toxic to mollusks, invertebrates. and fish when they show up in bodies of water because they leach out  so readily. They are similar in uses and effects so in a sense talking about them separately can be misleading. Lets start with BPA, Bisphenol A being the poster child.You will likely know it from the baby bottle and sippy cup controversy within the past 15 years. It has long been known as an EDC(endocrine disrupting chemical) and despite hundreds of studies  over decades the FDA responding to the Chemical companies lobbying allowed it to be used in Baby bottles, water bottles and food packaging. But retailers in 2011 and many states did voluntarily remove it from shelves in 2011 responding to consumer pressure and not FDA regulation.. The FDA did nothing for years but finally did ban it from baby food/formula containers in 2013. At this point I feel the need to add a big culprit to my list: The FDA!  It reads: FOOD and DRUGS which is ridiculous on the surface. . It is like having the FAA combined with EPA under one roof. The FDA IMO has failed dismally at regulation of both food and drugs. At the very least it should be broken into two agencies. Another important fact is the the FDA has concerned itself with ACUTE and not chronic toxicity of both food and drugs.  This has been pointed out by many scientists. This applies to both acute and chronic disease and the FDA has ignored chronic disease caused by certain “ foods”. An example is that the FDA has stated there is no risk to high sugar consumption acutely when it has long been known to be  one of the dominant causes of the Metabolic syndrome when consumed  heavily chronically. I have addressed this in a previous blog and will do so in the future. It is also well known that chemicals and additives banned in Europe and Asia are not banned in the US by the FDA. Sorry about that rant. Let us return to our EDC’s………….

      BPA was discovered by Alexandr Dianin in 1891.  An interesting factoid about phthalates  and Bisphenolwas  was their discovery in the 1930’s that they had estrogenic effects  like Bisphenol, when the search was on  worldwide for a synthetic estrogen. We knew 90 years ago  of their potential for endrocrine effects! But these two classes lost out to diethylstilbesterol(DES) being developed about the same time. More on that later. BPA really entered industrial production in the 1950’s with the development of epoxy adhesives and polycarbonate. BPA was mixed with phosgene(YES! one of poison gasses of the first World war!)  and  it made a hard plastic: polycarbonate. Polycarbonate was a durable plastic so hard that it was bulletproof. It was easily formed into cheap food and liquid containers  when it was licensed in 1963 without any published safety information(!). Bisphenol found its way into other plastics such as polyacrylate,polyethylamide,polyester, polyester-styrene, polysulphone.  Also polyethylene(as in water bottles), polyethylene terphthalate(a pthalate) and pvc as a hardening agent, antioxidant and stabilizer. It is still with us and is ubiquitous. It is found in free form on  some thermal printing papers, cosmetics, medical equipment, sports equipment, many toys, clothing, food and drink containers  and other goods.

Bisphenol production(2022) was said to be 10 billion kg/yr. It cannot be usefully and economically recycled (like almost all plastics!!!), and ends up in landfills leaching out into groundwater, dust, dirt and air. The USGS has seen concentrations as high as 6 mg/ltr and Japan has estimated that 84% of all EDC estrogenic activity in their country is due to just to Bisphenol. BPA  can be measured in 93% of all US citizens and it is a cumulative poison. The good news is that its half life is only in days to hours  unlike another class of chemicals we will visit, the “forever chemicals”, PFAS. You would think that Food and drink companies would have removed it decades ago but you would be wrong. Most of the  International soft drink companies like Coca-Cola, Monster energy drinks and General mills still use it because Bisphenol products are part of the business and profit model of  BIG  Processed Food and Big Fast food companies. They continue to use it for food safety considerations and long shelf life which to an extent is true, But it poses other more hidden and delayed food safety risks which they are happy to ignore. These companies and the production companies like Dow, Dupont and their Trade group the American Chemical Council use the well thumbed playbook of the tobacco companies of denial, obfuscation and delay.. I would not accuse them of criminality or evil because it is useful  and fair to look at both sides of an issue. If the FDA says they can use these poisons then they are off the hook when they do. There is a huge database of medical conditions related to just this chemical and its relatives and I will only hit upon some of the more proven established conditions but the potential list is very large. I will also explain the exact biophysiological mechanisms altered and how and why they work to do their nefarious effects.  I realize I may lose a few of you. Sorry!

                                                                                                                                             There has been a steady rise in  population “excess deaths”beginning to rise above baseline in the past several decades and there is no doubt in my mind that this is largely due to  chemical environmental and dietary substances. It is almost guaranteed to be multicausal with a HUGE amount of factors, most of which will be difficult to tease out individually. It will be difficult to remove chemicals like Bisphenol by legislative action but we as individuals can do a lot to reduce their impact on our lives. If we don’t use it, they wont(may not?) make it. I will humbly offer my suggestions  in a future blog.

     Let us look at the mechanism of EDC’s of which BPA  is a big player. BPA looks to the human body like an estrogen or an androgen hormone. It mimics their action on both short and long term metabolism. BY binding to various receptors it can block the action of hormones  even at very low concentrations. For example we know the BPA is an antagonist of the thyroid hormone precursor. It interferes with thyroid synthesis, secretion and signaling.

        We  also hear almost daily about the drop in sperm cell levels and production worldwide, worse in certain regions. BPA  decreases sperm cell motility, and spermatogenesis. That hits both the quantity and quality of sperm. But wait! There’s more. Men exposed to daily elevated levels of BPA show reduced sexual desire and libido, reduced erectile function and orgasms. These effects have been found not only in humans but in mice,cattle, chickens and even fish!!! The signal paper was   a meta study of over 7500 abstracts and papers in 2017 byLevine, Swan, at al., in “Human Reproductive update”.

They said that sperm concentration in the developed world  from 1973 to 2011 had fallen from 99 units to just 47, a compound rate of almost 2%/yr. This has continued since then and even has accelerated in some regions. It is believed that the etiology is chemical toxicity which almost certainly starts early in fetal development and comprises epigenetic factors.(I will address the fascinating  phenomenon of epigenetics in a future blog). This was not good news to the chemical companies and they of course are fighting back. The American Chemical council used the old legal argument:”Correlation is not causation.” This despite a large raft of studies showing exactly that using in vivo and in vitro studies of humans and mammals.       

       As a sidebar I  would like to insert the work of Jeremy Grantham, who authored a paper https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/chemical-toxicity-and-the-baby-bust_viewpoints/which created quite a stir about this sperm depletion issue.

                  Jeremy Grantham is a  British investor and philanthropist  who considers this phenomenon of sperm  and  birth decline and deferred childbirth the” greatest threat to the human race”. He focused on this in an excellent paper in 2020 in the publication GMO.com.  entitled “Chemical Toxicity and the Baby Bust.” He posts graphs from the WHO and the US National center for Health Statistics  also showing large jumps in auto immune diseases   such as Type 1 DM, MS, Asthma, Celiac disease and autism. I commend readers to read his excellent paper. Jeremy was influenced by a well known book”Empty Planet: The shock of global Population Decline” published in 2019. I am not persuaded that this is due solely to chemical toxicity . There are other drivers of acute and chronic  disease. The list is not short.

    Let me end this blog. There are more chemical culprits every bit as terrifying as Bisphenol and phthalates. We will visit them in the next blog.

 

 

The Plastic Problem: overview of the industry

 

       My blogs dealing with the health problems of plastics would be incomplete without looking at the scope of size and importance of the Fossil Fuel and petrochemical industry to the world economy. These are dull but significant statistics but we need to know them to gauge the size of   plastic production now and going forward. You have to include all the  sectors of Oil and gas production. In the US alone Oil and gas employment in the US was 10.3 million people accounting for 8% of US GDP(source:EIA) Worldwide there is said to be more than 65 million people in the energy sector(IEA 2019). Another important factor is that petrochemical feedstock currently accounts for 12% of global oil demand. This slated to increase to 30% by 2030 in only 5 years. As I mentioned in my blog 5 years ago the bulk of petrochemicals is in plastics by weight and volume. 63% of global petrochemicals by weight is plastics.  The remainder excluding fertilizers is non plastic chemicals like paints and adhesives, phrmaceuticals and pesticides,, detergents and cleaners etc ad infinitum.The sectors of plastics are packaging(36%) construction(16%), textiles(15%) vehicles(14%), consumer products(11%) as well as a variety of others in declining parentage  including clothing, electronics etc. A recent paper (Iluminem.com 7/25/2024) said that plastics production will TRIPLE by 2060!!!!  In 2022 it was 400 Million metric tons with an increase to 1231 MILLION metric tons in only 35 years! I give these terrifying numbers as what we are up against if we want to mitigate the disease disaster we will be facing if these increases occur.

       I would invite the reader to look at Google Earth to see the size, impact and location of these companies and I guess I should mention who and where they are just in the US and Europe . Dow Chemical is the gorilla in the room and has plants worldwide with an enormous one at the “Freeport Complex”  south of Houston Texas.  There are many petrochemical plants all along the Gulf Coast as far as Louisiana run by oil companies like Exxon, Occidental, Chevron etc. One of the Europe’s largest is in Ludwigshavn Germany with BASF. The Port Of Antwerp, Belgium has seven of the biggest ten companies on a sprawling site. I am not even including the new plants in the Middle East and China and Asia or South America. But I digress…..

         Returning to the plastic production numbers…... Currently(2022) the world production is 400 MILLION MT. I   have been discussing how serious the plastic problem is now with ONLY 400 million MT. The problem if the world TRIPLES production in the next 3 decades is unimaginable and simply must not happen. To get any faint hope of dealing with this problem we will need to at least flatten the curve and perhaps Cap plastic production. This clearly a global issue requiring global policy initiatives, the most recent being  the  Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee  meeting in Busan South Korea  in late November last year which has been described as a dismal failure to rein in  plastic production. I will try to point out  what leverage we  might have as individual consumers to try to enact policies to limit the health and pollution damage going forward but until we can educate the world population on the extent of the health problem,  the situation is unlikely to change. It is said that when a problem cannot go on it will stop. A nuclear world war or an asteroid impact comparable to the Chicxlub meteor strike 65 million years ago would stop the plastic juggernaut and a worldwide recession might slow it. Ultimately since oil and gas resources are finite,when they terminally deplete plastic production will as well. But humans are also finite and if they deplete, so will the need for plastics. The world will certainly be OK in the long run but the human experiment may not be. We may only have a generation or two left to have even a small hope to arrest this looming crisis. We are of course in the midst of a series of intersecting crises like loss of biodiversity, the climate emergency and pollution. I would include the health disaster of the metabolic syndrome which includes the obesity epidemic, hypertension, diabetes, dementia, cancers and CV disease. I will attempt to show how they are related in a systems analysis. To say this is all very very complex is an understatement. In my next blog I will focus on the types of plastics, their source and probable  toxicity. Down the line I will offer some suggestions on individual strategies to try to save our health and the health of our unborn citizens.

The Plastic Problem: It's much worse than you think

Five years ago last month I posted a blog on a global environmental problem just beginning to peek over the horizon:https://cal48koho.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/the-plastic-problem/. In this series of blogs I want to review and expand on that post. I will address the current and looming heal risks to plastics. These health risks are coming about from direct exposure to plastic and its chemicals and from plastic waste accumulating in the environment and even contributing mightily to climate change.. Five years ago the media's environmental focus was on global warming/climate change and the emergence of a strange disease in Wuhan China. My blog has long had an emphasis on energy and sustainability issues, and by energy I specifically mean fossil fuel energy . Most other energy forms derive from fossil energy. What piqued my interest in plastics more than five years ago was an interview with a former oil executive in which he responded to the question of why some existing refineries were being shut down and no new ones being built. I have forgotten his exact phraseology but the gist of his response was that the oil and gas companies were profit driven enterprises and the profit in petrochemical manufacturing exceeded and extended the profit in simply refining the oil into gasoline and diesel. Petrochemicals are of course chemicals derived from oil and gas and he felt it was petrochemicals that would be a dominant profit driver for the oil companies going forward. The most important petrochemical product in terms of tonnage and variety is plastics. The point I need to mention again is how confusing it can be to calculate energy content and cost of energy because as a global commodity they are measured in metric and English units AND in volumetric and mass units. For example a metric ton(2204 lb or 1000kg) of oil or natural gas have similar btus, a bit over 43 million btus. A barrel(bbl) of oil will set you back today $77(2/2025). For that bbl you will get 5.8 million btus. To get the same 5.8 million btus in nat gas you will only have to pay $20. This is about the same spread in cost and btus as it has been for decades and my point is nat gas on a btu basis is a bargain compared to crude oil which is an important issue if you are wanting to produce plastics in your petrochemical complex using  natural gas and refinery fractions. If natural gas and oil were priced in energy content they would both be $77. Natural gas and NGLs(natural gas liquids) or hydrocarbon liquids are the main inputs for plastics production. Natural gas is basically a byproduct of oil drilling and for decades the low value of nat gas meant that the companies just flared the gas to get rid of it. It is still done today worldwide. Because it so cheap, it is a very low cost feed stock to make petrochemicals or plastics which is why oil producing companies and countries are building petrochemical plants instead of oil refineries. Follow the money as my wife Karlene says. Petrochemical plants are sprouting up around the world like mushrooms after the rain with everyone getting into the act, not only in the Gulf Coast but in the Middle East especially. Natural gas production has been increasing worldwide which is increasing Ethane production(C2H6), the most important natural gas fraction for plastic production. In the US we even have dedicated Ethane tankers for export. If you are following along with my drift you may be starting to worry about this Ethane juggernaut. I was worrying 5 years ago.!!! My opinion is that we need to curb Ethane OVERPRODUCTION because it leads to plastics overproduction and over utilization. Later in this blog or subsequent ones I will propose possible strategies to curb and regulate plastics. Because I am a Medical Doctor(retired) I will emphasize what a health disaster plastic and chemical exposure is posing to world health and the environment. You may already be aware of how bad this situation is but it is much worse than you think. If the plastic/chemical contamination of the population and the environment continues on its current trajectory , human and animal life will imperiled, perhaps severely. In future blogs I will  address health risks from plastics and their embedded chemicals, how and where the pollution emanates from extraction, production, utilization and disposal. For the scientifically inclined I will try to show how and where these chemicals act to destroy human and animal health. I will also describe how absolutely enormous the  chemical corporations and countries are to the world's  economies and practical difficulties in trying to curb their influence. I will also try to offer practical actions we can take individually to mitigate or eliminate these harms. The climate environmentalists and alarmists had 10 years of a spokesperson like Gretta Thunberg to draw attention to the climate emergency. We could use someone with that stature right now to confront chemical/plastic toxicity. There are many practical mitigating actions to adapt to  the risks of a warming world. Our warming world is a slow moving crisis on many levels. It is small potatoes to the risks of chemical plastic pollution which has the potential to destroy the health of humans  and animals in  this century by sickening and crashing populations.

Should you buy a JDM car and import to the US?

 Here is a post for you folks wanting to import  a low mileage car from Japan. They are called JDM cars(Japanese Domestic Market). My experience was mixed possibly because of who I purchased it from.  You can only import cars older than 25 years into the US or older than 15 years if imported into Canada. I found a white Camry wagon called the Gracia. The pics looked great. Mileage was 89000 kms or about 50000 miles. It had a nifty radio touch screen and cloth interior with faux wood trim, no dents, no rust. I paid about  $2800 for the car and shipping to Tacoma was another $2000. I ordered in in Nov 2022 and it finally arrived late December 2023 or about 14 months after I ordered it. It was supposed to be shipped in  early Jan 2023 but that didn't happen. Problems with transport I was told. This went on for 8 months with the same excuse and finally the emails dried up. No car and I was out 5 grand. Scammed I assumed. Finally in early fall 2023 I decided to write  registered letters to the Tokyo Times and to the CEO of the company telling of my plight and demanded immediate shipment or my money back. Nothing for a month from the newspaper or the company  and then finally an email from the CEO's office giving me an exact shipping date of November and an arrival to the Port of Tacoma in December. They promised import documents which you need to fetch it and get thru customs. They were to be sent DHL to my home address   about when the car left Japan. They never  arrived. The car did and the Port people said "Come and get it!" You have to use a customs broker who helps you to file the correct forms. You have to get the Japanese import  documents translated as well which costs money($130). The Custom broker I used charged about $750 and she was absolutely wonderful and competent but without documents I was up the creek. After 10 days the car starts to accumulate storage charges of about $25/day. I had been calling Japan and leaving texts from  well before Christmas but no one answered. It seems they take a LONG Christmas/New Years vacation but finally after New Years I got a text saying my documents had JUST been sent  DHL and they arrived in Wyoming in the first week in Jan of 2024, this year. From then on things moved swiftly and my broker got everything approved and I drove to Tacoma and returned with my Camry a few days ago. But it was not the  low mile  condition Camry I ordered. It did not have 89000 kms. It had 250000! It did not have a nice double din radio. It had a big hole where the radio had been and a broken bezel  trim panel from inexpert removal. The Car  Jack was also removed.  So they either sent me another white Camry wagon or they lied about the mileage and removed the radio. That is the bad news. The good news is that this wagon is pristine for a 1998 and has had excellent service clearly obvious when I put it on a lift. No rust, all the fluids like new and great tires exhaust system, drive lines etc. I am still trying to negotiate some settlement with these folks but so far no communication other than " we will get back with you."  My fees after the car arrived were about $1000 for the broker. Excess storage charges were $460 and then there was my travel about 1900 miles RT with motels,meals  dolly rental and mods to my Tahoe which came to almost another $1000 and then another $250 for a tow truck when my 4x4 Tahoe got mired in deep snow passing through Idaho.. 

       I have learned a few things from this episode and I can offer some advice for anyone contemplating importing a car from overseas, primarily Japan.  One useful website is Japanesecartrade.com. This is a clearing house of information on the used car export trade. There is also an association called JUMVEA which is composed of 213 member exporters. There are different levels of membership depending upon time in business and feedback from buyers and other Japanese rating organizations. The highest level is "Gold."These exporters buy their older used cars on daily auto auctions. all over Japan. They bid on these cars and so can you but you have to use them do offer your proxy bids OR you can just buy from them directly. I bid for several months without success and I used two dealers who were well established and members of their dealer association. They were SBT and Integrity Exports. I found they gave excellent service but they were unable to find the car I wanted, a  25 year old Toyota Camry Gracia wagon. I ended up going to a  small recently admitted dealer member of JUMVEA  who happened to have one.  I have chosen not to reveal its name for obvious legal reasons. When I attempted to buy it by wiring funds from my local bank, my banker called me and said he was concerned about the risk I was taking. His objection was the company had a minimal website which had only been up and running for 8 months and they were unable to get feedback from buyers using that company or meaningful financial information. I then went back to the internet and tried to find any news, good or bad on the company and could find nothing. After mulling this over I decided to go ahead. It was my money, my risk  after all. . The bank discouraged me but wired the funds. And you know the rest. The reason the big dealers didn't have many  old Camrys was obviously their low value. They preferred to deal in older high value cars like LandCruisers and Prados , Camper Vans and Mercedes. There are many organizations here in the US that regularly import used JDM vehicles for USPS mail delivery vehicles as well as those desirable LandCruisers which are often available in excellent condition with low miles and no rust.Japan is a small country with a small road network and excellent mass transit and most cars get little use. It can be a good deal and Youtube is full of videos on the process. The problems I had were poor dealer service and communication and some level of misinformation verging on fraud, I suppose. But in the end despite all these hurdles, I ended up with a satisfactory older and very rare stationwagon never available in the US after 1996, albeit for a very stiff price of nearly $7000 after all costs were taken into account. Would I do this again? The answer should be obvious.

     
                                                                                                                                                

 

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Fourth Turning Is Here:
by

Neil Howe

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The Fourth Turning is Here(2023) by Neil Howe is a must read as a retrospective summary of 500 years of AngloAmerican history as influenced by 25 generations. I was impelled to review it because some of reviews in my opinion were incomplete and inaccurate. I hope this overview will help the reader to better appreciate and understand this important book.
Neil Howe is a modern polymath known for his book “The Fourth Turning(1997)” which he co-authored with Richard Strauss which was my introduction to the theory of cyclical history as seen and influenced by the behavior of generations. Howe and Strauss had written 2 previous books with a similar theme. Their thesis which was in no way original was a cyclical view of history with repeating patterns of societal events influenced by the different generations which strongly influenced and shaped the direction and outcome of those events. The cycle followed approximately 85-100 year periods which encompassed one long human lifetime composed of an arbitrary 4 generations. Howe and Strauss gave each generation peculiar names which follow in the set order of :Artist, Prophet,Nomad, Hero and then repeating with Artist superimposed upon the cycle length of 85-100 years which he labels a saeculum. These 4 generations were then superimposed upon significant historical events. These historical events were in turn divided into 4 segments which lasted 20-25 years and labeled as “Turnings.” The first turning started with “crisis, the next, awakening, the next, unraveling and then repeated again with crisis. FOUR is the magic number throughout the book. There are 4 seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter and four periods in a human life, four types of temperaments:sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. There are 4 elements: earth, air, fire and water. There are 4 characteristics of matter: hot, cold,wet, and dry, and so forth. These are ancient concepts going back many millenia. Are you getting the picture?
This number FOUR dominates the structure of the arguments posed in the book.
The next important concept is how humans understand time and changes over time. There are three(not four) types of ways to understand time: chaotic time, cyclical time, and linear time. Chaotic time is common in premodern societies and has no pattern. Events follow upon events with no rhyme or reason. Cyclical time sees events following a series of repeating events. Cyclical time has a long historical basis. This is how Strauss and Howe view history. The last view is Linear which is the view that history follows event upon event as “progress”. Linear history has a beginning and an end. Time is thus unidirectional. This is the prevailing view in the current civilization in his opinion..
Neil Howe adheres to the cyclical view of historical events and spends 578 pages trying to show a cyclical pattern of events in history, in economics and demography and his big leap in this book is to state confidently that the events unfolding in this 21st century will likely follow with the same pattern and duration of past 100 year long “saecula” influenced and driven by the various generations. . The book is thus a prediction of what we can expect this century if we think that history follows cycles. He spends a large section of the book analyzing the events since 9/11 to the present laying out in great detail(too much detail!!) on the morphology of the impending "Millenial Crisis" along with other likely crises, financial, social, international which will lead up to an Ekpyosis, a sort of final conflagration of the Fourth Turning. A global war, a Civil war are included in the mix. He seems very confident in the trajectory and the outcomes.The book is thus a prediction of what we can expect this century if we think that history follows cycles. But it is well to keep in mind the wisdom of Yogi Berra who said “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
I was impelled to write a review of this book after reading both commercial and reader reviews of the book, some of which implied that this view of historical events was Neil Howe’s personal “Theory.” In fairness to Howe, he nowhere in the book claims that his theory of history is original. He follows a long line of historians from the 14th century Islamic genius Ibn Khaldun who wrote a ground breaking theory of history entitled Muqaddimah,”Introduction to History.” Howe’s achievement in this book is his encyclopedic and detailed and painstaking examples to buttress his view of generations determining cyclical sequences of events. At a minimum this book is a wonderful and unique book of history which I found endlessly fascinating. A section I particularly enjoyed was his concise summary of great historical events from the present all the way back to the War of the Roses. The reader should keep in mind that this is primarily a view of relatively recent Anglo-American history, not Asian, not European or Russian history. It is retrospective which is what history is. The value and perhaps the flaw in this book is his eagerness to predict in agonizing detail future events based upon past events which he thinks will closely follow a script of past Saecula. I will leave it to the reader to ponder and decide the validity of Howe’s thesis. I will offer some gentle critiques of this important book.
The first is Nate Hagen’s idea that our civilization of people are a Superorganism. We are an entity of 8 billion people acting out our roles on the stage with our own thoughts and actions which are interrelated in an impossibly complex web of action/reaction. The superorganism has been characterized as a complex adaptive system. Howe in an excellent section in the book invokes this non linear complex behavior invoking chaos and complexity theory. This branch of “science or mathematics/statistics, says that seemingly insignificant perturbations in one area can influence outcomes is a distant unrelated realm. This is the so called “butterfly effect” attributed to Lorenz in Chaos theory where a flapping of a butterflies wings in Brazil could determine distant weather events like a tornado or hurricane. The superorganism concept by its non linear complex nature would seem to imply prediction would be impossible or unreliable.
Another “weakness” if I can call it that, is the limited scope of his model, 4 or 5 hundred years of just American history. Howe does give examples of other civilizations which may have followed similar cyclical patterns of generationally determined events. But these examples are nowhere near as detailed and complete as his Anglo-American model.
Howe skips over other cyclical events of history like the collapse of civilizations which is certainly part of a general theory of history. There are many proposed theories of civilization history where the civilization goes kaput. How did the various generations influence those outcomes? Instead Howe cones in on the late 2020's and early 2030's as the culmination of the crisis, the Eckpyosis in which it all comes together or falls apart.
    The prime focus of the book hence its title is that we are approaching a “crisis” turning in the current and perhaps next decade which will likely involve social unrest and war. He does not think that this crisis will end our American civilization. It will just be a period of crisis which will remove deadwood and bad societal functioning which will be followed by a “Spring” Turning of rebuilding and renewal and cooperation and community reestablishment. That is his hope and certainly all our hope. My opinion is that “This time it’s different. It may be very different.
My contention is that his model may be flawed in some respects because his models were of a world with mostly less than a billion humans and just some tens of millions in North America. The society was rural. Communication was nil. Almost everyone were farmers. The Industrial Revolution had not occurred which would be powered by fossil energies of coal and oil. The role of this energy in the trajectory of the American experiment is ignored by Howe. Neil Howe is entirely "Energy Blind."Nowhere does he mention the inevitable decline of the fossil energy sources that define our civilization. His examples of how America overcomes the crisis years and embarks on a rebuilding of society and new infrastructures and industries into an "awakening" is at times to my ears too glib and certain. Where will the energy and the money come from? How all this happens depends upon which generation is in charge doing the work and pulling the strings. Since each generation share different "Weltanschuungs" their outlook and problem solving strategies differ, some times radically. Will the dominant generation be aging "Gen Xers" or Millennials? This is not the world of America today. Seven eights of us are urban in near constant communication completely reliant upon complex systems of technology using long supply chains from distant ports. Our opinions are molded by a few large corporate media sources and as a people we are not self sufficient in providing the basics of even food and water and shelter. Many would argue we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. The fossil energy which supports the economy is finite and soon to be in decline. My point is that there are many many other factors which will influence events beside how millennials or Gen Xers or aging baby boomers react.
   I think Howe ‘s contention of cyclical historical trends are persuasive and as I said endlessly fascinating. He is certainly a brilliant intellectual historian and his notes and bibliography is over 100 pages. I must admit I had difficulty following his various models of the generations and how each generation cooperated or clashed but that may be my failing. I think it is fair to say there was a lot of repetition in the text with perhaps too many examples used to buttress his opinions. He has VERY strong opinions and certainties with which the reader not agree. This reviewer is skeptical of certain outcomes hoever confidently expressed. Yet Neil Howe is a brilliant and engaging man and has given many excellent interviews to the media such as on YouTube. I leave the validity of his predictive conclusions to the reader’s judgment.



 

NET ZERO:NET NONSENSE

 

      Well I may be back to blogging on energy and its role in our lives. I only have done this to try to understand the dynamics of this complex self regulating superorganism we call our current civilization. I have said that if you can’t understand or even try to understand this civilization without seeing it as part of a complex system and complex systems can’t be understood without using the tool of systems analysis. I have the opinion that energy is the keystone resource of our civilization and that means fossil energy. The most important fossil energy is Oil but Coal and gas are also crucial. Without these energy sources we would still be reliant upon the muscle of our animals and ourselves. Most of us would still be laboring by the sweat of our brows to stay warm and to feed ourselves. That changed when the coal miners digging in the coal pits of Newcastle found themselves knee deep in water unable to increase coal production which was the new miracle energy source of the 18^th century. Europe had cut down its previous energy source “trees.. and now coal  production was imperiled.

   It fell to a British inventor, Thomas Newcomen in 1711 to step in with a practical solution. He designed a pump powered by steam from burning coal which operated a pump to remove the water from the mines. It was crude but it worked. It was not the first attempt at utilizing the miraculous power of steam. In the first century AD a Greek called Hero who lived in Alexandria came up with the first device to try to utilize the power of steam to run a “machine. That insight never developed legs for a variety of reasons  Coal mine pumping technology was steadily improved and it wasn’t long before other inventors saw the incredible utility of steam to use it for powering all manner of machines. Oil eventually supplanted coal in many uses and gas supplanted oil right up to this day.  We have always had energy from biomass(mostly wood)  and some water and wind power but even today fossil fuels are still 82% of world energy. We have economists and politicians telling us that because all this burning of fossil fuels is creating carbon dioxide emissions which are heating up our planet, that we need to reduce or eliminate them if we are to “save” our planet. Instead of getting our energy from finite sources we need to get our energy from “renewable” sources which have no emissions to heat up the planet. What’s more we are told we must try to remove these emissions as well which will in theory reduce and eventually and hopefully reverse planetary warming. We will have to “decarbonize” our energy and if we have to continue to use these fossil fuels for a while longer we will have to invent ways to remove Co2 as well as use little or none going forward. Every problem has a solution, right? This is the solution.  All future energy will be from renewable energy. If we have to use a fossil energy source we will have to offset that emitted energy with technology that remove it so there will be no net increase in emissions. That is the “net zero” part of it. How this is supposed to be done will be by means of technology not yet invented and current methods such as increasing the efficiency of existing machines and using less energy to heat and cool our homes and factories. If you build a Tahoe you will have to offset the energy of that Tahoe from the build to the energy emitted during its life time by planting trees for example. That will keep the energy to a net of zero  emitted C02.  Of course we will try to pour investments and subsidies iinto something more effective by inventing methods to “capture” those emissions. Something is bound to be invented if we pour enough money into research and development. Good old American Know How will eventually save the day. These ideas come out of the mouths of politicians and analysts and economists. They also flow from the mouths of school children and adults who see the damage of a warming world possibly dooming their future.

      All of this activity to reduce global warming or climate change has led to a kneejerk response. Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels.  Ergo stop burning fossil fuels. It has become a single issue with a single solution encouraged and promoted by conferences and meetings for the past several decades generating more proposals and aspirations from politicians and economists full of sound and fury and to date: signifying nothing!!!  Is Net Zero a stupid idea or one whose time has come? In this and following blogs if I write them, I will try to lay out why the Net Zero movement will be hard pressed stopping the trajectory of climate change.

In fact Net Zero is a terrific idea and one that should be implemented whenever and wherever practical.  But remember: Net Zero is not reducing emissions,. It is offsetting emissions. Reducing carbon emissions should be the necessary ambition to be pursued as a policy objective if it could work. The problem is that a Net Zero framework  can’t and won’t solve the emissions of CO2 in the world’s industrial economies. I will try to show why doing something as simple as decarbonizing our energy supply by stopping the combustion of coal, oil and gas as a crash program is flawed and impractical. That we should do everything in our power to reduce emissions  is laudable and essential but in order to attack this one aspect of industrial global pollution we simply must try to look at it with a big picture perspective. That is, we need to look at the entire world. Think of the world as a forest. We cannot just focus on just one tree in the forest. Concentrating on global warming from carbon emissions s just one aspect of one tree.

     There is likely more than one cause of global warming/climate change and human induced CO2 production by fossil fuel burning is certainly a major cause but I will not enter that discussion. If the major cause is C02 from burning fossil fuels that is a cause that will eventually go away starting in this century. We are past peak production of oil, gas and coal in most regions. It is a problem with a solution and the solution will be depletion. In the next blog I will try to layout the role of fossil energy in developing and maintaining our industrial economy.

Is sugar poison?: review of Robert Lustig's new book "Metabolical."

      I have someone you need to meet. I mean REALLY need to meet. I met(saw) him at a lecture a few decades ago when I was attending a medical conference in  the Bay Area  He is Bob Lustig MD, a professor and pediatric endocrinologist who is starting to be noticed because of his health warnings of excessive sugar and processed food consumption. His lecture to medical students was my first exposure to the evils of sugar consumption. That is, the evils of fructose consumption. Fructose is the evil twin of sucrose, table sugar. Thus table sugar is about ½ glucose, AKA dextrose, and ½ fructose. I will sketch out the damage that sugar, fast food and the gigantic processed food industry has wrought upon the US and world population in the past 50 years. Bob and his research group wrote an article in the NY Times in 2011 asking if sugar was toxic? This was news to the world and created a furor in Big food and big Ag and sugar industries who counter attacked fiercely.

       Bo went on to write a book called “Fat Chance” in 2013 and a companion volume “The Fat Chance Cookbook.” I may review and refer to them as well but this review is for his latest (2021) book entitled “Metabolical.”

      If you want to see the body shapes of America before our current epidemic of hypertension, obesity and diabetes just turn on Turner classic movies of films from the 30’s and 40’s such as “It’s a wonderful Life”. What do you see? NO FAT PEOPLE. Ok maybe a few chubs and compare that to the folks you might see at the Atlanta airport, a hub of America. It’s stunning. What happened to the US in the past 5 or 6 decades?

What happened is  the “Metabolic Syndrome.”  I need to tell you that this is a really terrible term which needs a better catchy name but we will have to wait until someone comes up with a better moniker.

     What you need to know is that the Metabolic Syndrome is a collection or constellation of “diseases” that are linked by a common thread of damage and dysfunction at the cellular level and most notably at the mitochondria, that organelle inside every cell that usually is referred to as the “powerhouse” of the cell.  Those of you not well versed in physiology and biochemistry may even now be struggling and thinking this book may not be for you but you are wrong, with the emphasis on DEAD wrong.

     Metabolic Syndrome  refers to what happens to the body when  fed the wrong food rather than “Real Food”. Real food is what Michael Pollan referred to when he said it was food that his grandmother would put on the table in the years before processed food dominated food offerings. You can tell real food because it does not come with an “ingredient list” or a food label. It is what grows in the ground and on trees and bushes, what lays eggs and grazes on grass and swims and thrives  in open unfettered water. It includes grains and legumes and forbs consumed by people and animals.  Anything else is not real food. Even wheat is not real food if it only includes white flour from the endosperm of the wheat berry. Whole wheat is only real food when it includes the bran and the wheat germ as well as the endosperm which is mostly carbohydrate, some protein  and a few micronutrients. This goes for all the grains. If you grind up the wheat and throw away the bran and the wheat germ, you are left with “processed” food.

    Bob Lustig states repeatedly that consumption of processed food and sugar is the cause of the Metabolic syndrome which may affect as much as 88% of the American population. The primary defect in metabolic syndrome  is at the cellular level and most specifically at eight processes within the cell which go awry leading to improper and inappropriate routing of fat to the liver and to visceral fat which lines your abdomen along with subcutaneous fat,” butt fat”.  It is associated with insulin hypersecretion and insulin resistance. The most obvious manifestation is obesity.   Obesity   may be a “symptom” of the metabolic syndrome, a biomarker, if you will. Obesity associated with the metabolic syndrome is not THE problem. Obesity of course can be a serious problem associated with things like respiratory and orthopedic issues.  Interestingly perhaps 20% of obese people do not have metabolic syndrome and will live long and as much as 40% of  thinner folks may have metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome includes hypertension and cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and probably dementia as well as some autoimmune diseases such as ankylosing spondylitis.

    Accordingly it all comes down to diet primarily and lack of exercise as the etiology of the metabolic syndrome.

  The real value of the book is how and why we came to this terrible situation in which most of the developed and developing world is unhealthy because of bad food.

Lustig lays out a long list of missteps and wrongheaded policies at the governmental and corporate level starting with dust bowl policies and terrible totally wrong recommendations such as the low fat policies put into place by nutritionists misled by shoddy research from people like Ancel Keys in the 70’s. Once industry started trying to market low fat foods the population rebelled because the food tasted like cardboard. Industry’s solution was to add sugar and salt and a variety of preservatives and other chemicals to overcome eating cardboard. Society was  also changing. Women were entering the workforce and people felt that buying boxes and cans of processed and nearly prepared food was so much easier than making their own meals from scratch. And along came McDonalds and other fast food chains that did all the work and got you in and out with a supersized double mac, giant order of fries and a 32 oz coke for less than $6. Over 1200 calories for less than $6.

      Lustig lays out the list of villains and it is a long one indeed. They include doctors and dentists and nutritionists and Big Pharma, big AG and feckless politicians whom he names by name.  The biggest nutritional villain is sugar. Lustig presents data on sugar consumption which was about 15 gm(3 tsp) a day  after WW`1 and  about 40 lbs per person/year  in the “70s to 130 lbs(!!!) by 2010. An important driver of this sugar consumption was soda , sports and energy  drinks  and fruit juices. A 32 oz soda from McDonalds has 95 gm of sugar, 19 teaspoons!      Another telling statistic was that of the 600,000 foods in grocery stores over 80% have added sugar!
And it was not only sugar but lack of fiber  that was damaging our bodies. Removing fiber from foods damages the gut. The trillions of “Good” bacteria in the large intestine need to be fed properly to develop a healthy biome and it is fiber, both soluble and insoluble fiber that feeds these beneficial critters. If you don’t feed the “good” bacteria their proper diet of fiber you get an influx of “bad” bacteria which leads to all manner of problems like “leaky gut” syndrome. The other important toxin is fructose in sucrose and honey and maple syrup , agave and most especially high fructose corn syrup, a chemically derived ultra cheap sweetener. The problem with fructose toxicity is almost identical as the problem of alcohol toxicity because fructose can only be metabolized in the liver and therein lies the problem. The metabolites are aldehydes…think formaldehyde. Excess of alcohol and fructose end up in the liver and visceral fat with terrible consequences among which is inflammation. Fatty liver disease and alcoholic liver disease may progress to inflammatory cirrhosis.

   At this point I need to tell the reader that Bob’s earlier book “Fat Chance” is an easier read for the lay person . Metabolical has about 30 pages in Part 2 that I found extremely useful and valuable to a detailed understanding of metabolic syndrome. But a disclaimer here: I am a doctor who studied biochemistry and physiology and I majored in chemistry. If you didn’t, you may find this dense and incomprehensible. In fact Bob even suggest skipping over it to his excellent recommendations of how to self diagnose and discuss this  intelligently with your physician . I think that is fine but I do suggest the reader trying to understand the disease at the cellular level and if necessary come back to review or seek other sources in books or on youtube.

   One of the more interesting sections of the book dealt with the addictive properties of sugar and other additives to fast and processed food such as caffeine and Lustig makes an analogy with the crimes of the Tobacco industry doctoring nicotine content to increase addictive properties. He also goes to great length to describe why all these chemicals and additions and subtractions to food are done which has mostly to do with stability and shelf life. Recall the stories of 30 year old Twinkies!

     He also discusses at some length what diets exist and why some are better than others at ameliorating metabolic syndrome. It’s not all good news. Some of the depressing revelations have to do with the concept of epigenetics in which the dietary missteps of a pregnant mother influence the health and long term outcome of her fetus. Allowing children unfettered access to sweets and horrible foods like sweetened morning cereals can doom a child not only to cavities but to long term sugar dependence.  Once a person has loaded up his liver and visceral fat and arteries, removing it can prove very difficult to reverse.

     I will let the reader draw his or her own conclusions upon understanding the value of real food and avoiding consumption of “unreal” food.  Over the past decade we have made changes to our diet and now eat almost entirely real food such as grinding our own grains, raising our own livestock and poultry that graze on grass, eating wild game and having large gardens. This can be difficult for urban apartment dwellers but most of us have access to farmers markets where you can look the farmer in the eye. Get used to it. Real food costs more. Processed food  and fast food which I call “fast garbage” is cheap and subsidized and convenient if you are by nature lazy.

 Real food is the key to combating the metabolic syndrome. And don’t forget exercise. Exercise is a lousy way to lose weight and if that is the only reason you do it, you will be sorely disappointed. Regular exercise generates increased production of mitochondria, lowers serum cortisol, aids your sleep, diminishes stress and if you’re lucky gives you doses of endorphins, your runner’s high.

      There is one thing which Robert Lustig  gave in his detailed recommendations in both books which I found particularly useful. He divides food into 3 colors: red foods, yellow foods and green foods. Red foods might be that big slab of chocolates cake slathered with ice cream which you can have occasionally, even once a week. Yellow foods are foods such as potatoes or white flour pasta, high carbohydrates maybe 2 or 3 times a week and green foods are almost all fruits and vegetables eggs  and whole grains to consume anytime and often.  Lustig  does not specifically mention foods I would call “black foods” which should never be consumed but it is tacitly there all through his book if you read between the lines. Never NEVER drink sodas or sweetened drinks or any fruit juices. Oranges and apples, yes. Orange and apple juice juice, never. The fiber in the fruit is the antidote to the fructose. And renounce all fast food outlets. Avoid them like the plague.

   Finally Bob lists what can be done to combat the giant industries  on a political level who have been willfully destroying public health and that of course is enacting laws and issuing fines to the culprits much like what was done to big tobacco. That means laws and of this I am less sanguine. I live in a wonderful state full of libertarians suspicious of the “nanny state” who want to issue laws restricting your freedoms like taking away your guns and now your sugar! I think a more realistic strategy is educating the public that sugar is a poison in large amounts. Use a little occasionally and if it is in the ingredient list on the box, just put it back on the shelf.

    I have just a tiny quibble with Bob’s sugar as a poison concept.It is the fructose that is the real poison. If you simply must have some sweet in your life, substitute Glucose, commonly known as dextrose. It is expensive in small quantities and so we buy it bulk in 50 lb sacks which can be obtained online or in places like brewer supply stores. If the recipe call for sucrose and you don’t want to give up the yummy tang of molasses or brown sugar, try using only 50% sucrose and using dextrose for the other 50%.  If we bake sweets, that is how we use sugar. BTW, Karo corn syrup is pure liquid dextrose.

      Bob mentions in his book that people’s attitudes can change and prohibitions enacted. MADD have sut drunk driving accidents way down. Seat belts in cars were ignored and ridiculed and now who would climb in a gar without snapping on their belt. Even trans fats were in all bakery goods and are now gone. If you value your health and those you love you must read this book. Now that Bob is retired he is finding time for interviews with people like Nate Hagens on Youtube.