Good night and good luck.

Originally published: Apr. 1, 2009

Bob Harmon, my grandfather, was a newspaper man. He was hired in 1954 to serve as a sportswriter for The Advertiser-Tribune, a small newspaper serving Tiffin, Ohio. In 1976, he moved on to other projects- he coached baseball, worked as a salesman and, later in life, discovered a remarkable talent for painting- but the journalism experience stuck with him. Twenty years later, he returned to The Advertiser to write a lifestyle column that would make him a local celebrity. These columns always ended with his trademark phrase:  ”At least, that’s the view from here”.

During one of my summertime, teenage year visits, he and I went out to breakfast in town. In the diner, we were approached at least a dozen times by people that wanted to shake his hand or comment on one of his articles, the topics of which usually fell into the categories of town history or family shenanigans. He would smile widely, shake the person’s hand and listen as they told him their own story.

The Advertiser-Tribune ran a note in 2000 informing readers that Bob Harmon was battling cancer and posted his address, suggesting that notes of well wishes be sent. 300 arrived within the first three days. The Toledo Blade came to his house in early December of that year to do a feature on his life and works. The piece highlighted some of his memorable stories and expressed the connection the man had to the community and the community to the man.

On December 5, 2000, Bob Harmon- always the dedicated writer- dictated an article to his wife Arden about his struggle with the disease. He died twenty three days later, in a hospital bed in his home, surrounded by family, friends and hundreds of cards sent in by his readers.

I’ve been thinking about my grandfather a lot lately, wondering what he would say about the number of newspapers that have already shut down, with more soon to follow. And I’ve thought about the societal costs of losing those papers, beyond the obvious, staggering loss of the on the ground reporting that most internet reporting and blogging relies on.

John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney- authors of the forthcoming book Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy- have an article in The Nation that discusses how newspaper journalism reached this precipice and how it might keep from falling over the edge completely.

The causes, they say, are not the internet or the economic recession. The decline began back in the 1970s, when the spirits of “corporate ownership and consolidation” led managers to “to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus.”

Advertising money began seeping out of the industry as early as the 1950s due to television. And the 1990s saw an explosion of watered down journalism, a technique that worked financial wonders for television news but turned off newspaper readers:

The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the “Octomom.” They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life and death.

No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today. Older Americans have been giving up on old media too, if not as rapidly and thoroughly as the young. If we are going to address the crisis in journalism, we have to come up with solutions that provide us with hard-hitting reporting that monitors people in power, that engages all our people, not just the classes attractive to advertisers, and that seeks to draw all Americans into public life. Going backward is not an option; nor is it desirable. The old corporate media system choked on its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to that of the recent past.

The authors suggest that the best way to solve the financial crisis in the industry is through government intervention. They raise and strike down the inevitable protests of government subsidiaries being poisonous to free speech. When the press was first established, there existed postal subsidies, printing contracts and paid notices- all sponsored by the government with the aim of creating a diverse industry. The modern press complex also benefits from government sponsored licenses, copyrights and privileges that are rarely mentioned lest they blow a hole in the “free market enterprise” curtain that’s been drawn.

The truth is that government policies and subsidies already define our press system. The only question is whether they will be enlightened and democratic, as in the early Republic, or corrupt and corrosive to democracy, as has been the case in recent decades. The answer will be determined in coming years as part of what is certain to be a bruising battle: media companies and their lobbying groups will argue against the “heavy hand of government” while defending existing subsidies. They will propose more deregulation, hoping to capitalize on the crisis to remove the last barriers to print, broadcast and digital consolidation in local markets–creating media “company towns,” where competition is eliminated, along with journalism jobs, in pursuit of better returns for investors. Enlightened elected officials, media unions and public interest and community groups that recognize the role of robust journalism are going to have to step up to argue for a real fix…

We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

Their proposed fixes include a postal rate elimination for publications that receive very little advertising money, a $200 tax cut for newspaper customers and funding for school newspapers so that younger generations have a tangible relationship with the press. Comparing the U.S. to other nations that already have strong press programs in place (Canada, Japan, Germany and Britain, to name a few), we should be spending $10 billion annually now. But we are only putting forth $450 million a year, a dismal amount in an age when trillions upon trillions are being tossed into the black holes of insolvent financial institutions. The plans proposed by the authors would cost $60 billion over the next three years and essentially restructure- and revitalize- the press industry.

The mainstream media has been framing the demise of newspapers as a lost battle against a technological age. But that’s incorrect. It is the lost battle of an inquisitive culture to financial and corporate behemoths. It isn’t a question of whether the newspapers should survive or not but rather how and in what form they should carry on. That there needs to be a national press structure is without question. What that looks like remains to be seen.

At least, that’s the view from here.

Photo by JustLuc used under a Creative Commons license.

Zach Carter has an article up at The American Prospect detailing how the ratings agencies stand to benefit from the Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility (TALF). TALF is the Fed program announced last winter (but just getting into action) that puts forth $1 trillion in non-recourse loans to holders of AAA rated asset backed securities (the “assets” here being a wide variety of new loans). The problem Carter highlights comes with that “AAA rated” part.

There are three main ratings agencies that essentially have the markets by the, err, bulls: Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s (aka S&P) and Fitch. Each agency has their own rating system but they’re fairly similar, with the top ten ratings being considered investment grade and AAA being the cream of the crop. The assignment of a AAA rating theoretically means that whatever it is stamped on- say a CDO pool- is low risk. All of this would be well and good if the credit agencies were behaving responsibly. Hint: they’re not.

These credit raters were also essential to the process of packaging sub-prime mortgages into extraordinarily complex securities that would later become the “toxic assets” trapped on the balance sheets of banks around the globe. The process began with investment banks buying hundreds of mortgages and packaging them together into a byzantine security to sell to investors. Since the sheer complexity of this new security rendered it effectively impossible to analyze, investors relied on credit ratings to determine just how risky it was. Fueled by a false confidence in rating-agency credibility, the market for sub-prime mortgage securities exploded between 2001 and 2006 from about $100 billion to over $1 trillion.

The ratings were bunk. Many mortgage-backed securities that earned AAA ratings — the highest grade a rating agency can bestow — turned out to be nearly worthless, and the value of the securities market plummeted 70 percent between January 2007 and December 2008…

There were two basic problems with the credit-rating agency business model. First, they were not paid by investors who used their ratings, but by the investment banks that created the securities. This gave the agencies overpowering incentives to inflate ratings.

Second, the agencies were not legally required to ask for the information needed to accurately rate securities. When that information was available, they often chose to ignore it, knowing that awarding high ratings meant generating big profits and that too much information could cut into revenues…

The New York Times ran a great article last year on the role Moody’s in particular had in the economic collapse. There was the reliance on unstable formulas, irresponsible optimism regarding the housing markets and the obvious conflicts of interest. The other two weren’t any better in their behavior. TIME named S & P’s Kathleen Corbet as one of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis“.

But what does all of this have to do with TALF? As mentioned above, the Fed requires the asset backed security pools to have a AAA rating in order for them to be awarded the non-recourse loan. And it is the big three agencies that will be providing those ratings:

…The central bank has made an inexplicable decision to outsource its analysis of the quality of these consumer loans to the very rating agencies that helped create the financial meltdown. Instead of staffing up to evaluate borrowers’ ability to repay new credit-card and auto loans, the Fed is simply agreeing to finance any investment in a consumer loan security that receives a AAA rating from at least two major rating agencies. Just as the rating agencies are starting to lose revenues as a result of their malfeasance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke are rushing in to flood them with business…

TALF is not only funneling money to the culpable, it is reigniting the securitization process that created the current economic firestorm. Credit-rating agencies have proven that they are more than willing to assign top ratings to economically destructive sub-prime securities. Under TALF, thousands of loans will be packaged into securities that are nearly impossible to analyze, with no quality assurance from anyone except discredited rating agencies. These securities will create artificial demand for consumer loans, encouraging banks to issue loans to consumers who cannot afford them, knowing full well that they can pass the loan off to investors financed by the government. This has already caused a disaster once. It’s hard to see how it will turn out better when the consumer loans are made amid near-depression economic conditions.

As if ratings arbitrage wasn’t enough of a problem before the crisis began. This setup echos the Geithner Plan in demonstrating the Administration’s unwillingness to properly restructure the carcass of the economic system before trying to resuscitate it.

Originally published: Mar. 11, 2009

This is a chart of the CDS spread from yesterday, courtesy of Baseline Scenario, and it paints a less rosy picture of Citgroup than the company’s memo (and Wall Street’s reaction). Credit default swaps (CDS) are essentially insurance policies issued against bonds (or bond-like investments) that allow the investor to put most of the risk in the hands of others for a fee. They have serious drawbacks (see: AIG, near collapse of) but have historically served as indicators as which direction things are heading.There are those who think that the market is so broken at this point that CDS spreads don’t offer reliable readings but there are others who think they’re still worth a glance.

The basics of how this spread deal works (again, from Baseline Scenario):

The price of a credit default swap is referred to as its “spread,” and is denominated in basis points (bp), or one-hundredths of a percentage point. For example, right now a Citigroup CDS has a spread of 255.5 bp, or 2.555%. That means that, to insure $100 of Citigroup debt, you have to pay $2.555 per year.

CDS exist for various durations and on many different kinds of debt. If someone doesn’t specify the duration or the type of debt, he is usually referring to a 5-year CDS on senior debt. That means that the contract will be open for 5 years, during which one party (the insured) pays premiums and the other (the insurer) promises to pay off if Citigroup defaults. If there is no default within 5 years, the insurer gets to keep the premiums.

Look at it from the standpoint of the insurer. If Citi doesn’t default, I get $2.555 x 5 = $12.775. If Citi defaults immediately, I have to pay $100. That implies that I think there is about a 12.8% chance that Citi will default (ignoring the time value of money). Actually, my expectation of a default is actually somewhat higher, for a couple of reasons. First, if Citi defaults 4-1/2 years from now, I have to pay $100, but I’ve collected the $12.775 in the meantime (assume premiums are paid at the beginning of each year for simplicity), so my loss is only $87.225. Second, in any case I don’t have to pay the full $100; I only have to pay $100 minus the value of the security, which is unlikely to be zero even in the case of a bankruptcy. For example, Lehman bonds were only worth 9 cents on the dollar (so insurers had to pay out 91 cents), but Washington Mutual bonds were worth 57 cents. So my net loss will be lower, which means that my expectation of a default is higher. (The expectation is the money I expect to gain if there is no default, divided by the net amount I expect to lose if there is a default.)

That excerpt is from an article written in November. As you can see from the chart, Citi currently much higher than the 255.5 bps used in the example. It posted yesterday at 585 bps, which was actually a 55 bp tightening based on the optimistic mood. Using the same, simplistic equation from the excerpt, if you had $100 of Citi debt, you’d have an annual fee of $5.85. From the insurer’s standpoint (again, on a 5-year CDS) that would be $5.85 x 5= $29.25 that they would earn if Citi doesn’t default. The insurer belief that Citi is going to default would be over 30% after adjustments.

Compare that to JP Morgan (the bottom, fuchsia colored line), who are considered the best of the worst banks, and you’ll see a wide gap. I’m not going to look up JP’s exact bps but let’s set it at 230 (or 2.30%) for simplicity. That would be $2.30 on a $100 investment. For the investor, 5 x $2.30= $11.50 with a likely default risk right around 15%.

As noted above, this is more a hint than a tea leaf reading. But it appears that Citi still has a very long way to come regarding investor confidence.

The art from Loser Pet Shop allows you to root for the underdog. Well, there’s not actually a dog but there is a seasick goldfish, night blind owl and frog that fears the undead. All the prints are 8″ x 10″ and cost $20.00, though the cat and frog are also available in a  5″ x 7″ size for $12.00.

It is impossible to name one culprit behind the current economic crisis because there were so many correlated pieces that went into this disastrous puzzle. But collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) -specifically, those of asset-backed securities (ABS)-were, continuing the puzzle metaphor, a large corner piece.

To understand CDOs, you have to know a little bit about the securitization of mortgages. A homeowner gets a mortgage from their bank, providing the bank a monthly income of loan payments assuming the homeowner doesn’t miss payments/default/etc. That bank will often sell the rights to the mortgage income payments to a second bank for a price that’s near what they would’ve earned in the long run from the mortgage.

The buyer bank is usually an investment bank that will securitize this newly purchased mortgage by putting it in a pool with many other mortgages. The pool has an overall price (total of all the mortgages inside) and can be divided into tranches, or slices, to sell off individually. What is being sold off is a portion of that mortgage backed income stream. A pool can have thousands of slices and an overall price in the hundred millions.

The tranches are priced based on risk- the lower the risk, the higher the price and vice versa. In a CDO, the tranches from one pool are tiered in such a way that those with the least risky loans get paid first and those with the riskiest get paid last. When people began to default on their mortgages at astounding rates, the funding for these pools began to dry up with the impact moving quickly up the tier.

As I mentioned, that explanation is a simplification. These transactions are complex to the point that the bankers aren’t always sure what is going on. According to the Financial Times, the banks that are to face Geithner’s stress test regulators are trying to figure out exactly what happened to those CDOs:

In recent weeks, bankers at places such as JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia have been quietly sifting data trying to ascertain what has happened to those swathes of troubled CDO of ABS.

The conclusions are stunning. From late 2005 to the middle of 2007, around $450bn of CDO of ABS were issued, of which about one third were created from risky mortgage-backed bonds (known as mezzanine CDO of ABS) and much of the rest from safer tranches (high grade CDO of ABS.)

Out of that pile, around $305bn of the CDOs are now in a formal state of default, with the CDOs underwritten by Merrill Lynch accounting for the biggest pile of defaulted assets, followed by UBS and Citi.

The real shocker, though, is what has happened after those defaults. JPMorgan estimates that $102bn of CDOs has already been liquidated. The average recovery rate for super-senior tranches of debt – or the stuff that was supposed to be so ultra safe that it always carried a triple A tag – has been 32 per cent for the high grade CDOs. With mezzanine CDO’s, though, recovery rates on those AAA assets have been a mere 5 per cent.

I dare say this might be an extreme case. The subprime loans extended in 2006 and 2007 have suffered particularly high default rates and the CDOs that have already been liquidated are presumably the very worst of the pack.

Even so, I would hazard a guess that this is easily the worst outcome for any assets that have ever carried a “triple A” stamp. No wonder so many investors are now so utterly cynical about anything that bankers or rating agencies might say these days.

A triple A rating is the highest possible and carries with it an implication of low risk. It may seem odd that a high risk tranche could carry that rating but it only means that it is less risky than the other slices in the pool. When the money flow stops coming in, it will be the last level to dry up.

This rating is assigned by a ratings agency. Hilzoy wrote of the ratings agencies:

And how about those ratings agencies? They would have done a better job using a Magic 8-Ball to rate the CDOs. (“Signs point to junk!”)

The ratings agencies happen to be another large corner piece of the economic catastrophe puzzle. There are three major agencies: Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch. TIME magazine recently named S & P’s leader- Kathleen Corbet- as one of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis due to the agencies mismanagement (intentional and otherwise) of the ratings system in relation to CDOs. The New York Times ran an excellent article last year about the troubles at Moody’s.

It is a rare occasion that I watch a movie outside the horror genre. I’ve read Fangoria, stopped in at Bloody Disgusting and squealed in delight when I discovered that my digital cable package included free movies from Fearnet. I know the territory well. It isn’t lost on me that the genre has some glaring flaws- namely misogyny and racial stereotyping (or exclusion). But there are a lot of horror films that don’t suffer from that at all.

For those who avoid the horror genre for its depiction of women, I would suggest you check out Ginger Snaps, a female character driven werewolf movie released in 2000. It became one of the top grossing films in Canadian film history and launched two (not as good) sequels.

The main characters of the film are teenage sisters Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Bridgette (Emily Perkins), outsiders who have formed their own private world. Neighborhood dogs have been turning up slaughtered and, after an altercation with a female bully at school, the sisters decide to take a late night stroll to the bully’s house to stage a fake death for her dog. During their walk, they encounter a real dog corpse that is still warm. Ginger, who has just begun her first period,  is then attacked by a creature, which- and this isn’t a spoiler- was a werewolf.

The film continues to follow Ginger’s transformation and Bridgette’s attempts to find a way to save her sister.  The only secondary characters in the film that get considerable screen time are their female bully, a boy at school that likes (and later sleeps with) Ginger, a drug dealing gardener who hits the original werewolf with his van and the girls’ somewhat dopey mother (played by Mimi Rogers). All of the characters in the film are well written but the women make out better in this film. The boy at school is mostly just a potential love interest while the gardener is a sidekick for Bridgette once Ginger begins to prioritize her life around being bitey.

This trailer has some mild spoilers but nothing that should ruin your enjoyment of the film:

If it hasn’t already been made abundantly clear to you which side of the Russian-Georgian conflict the American media is supposed to be on, the Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili entitled “The War in Georgia is a War for the West“. I’ll summarize the article for you: “I underestimated how much Russia would overreact to my country’s attempts to forcibly reclaim South Ossetia with poorly trained troops. And I thought you guys in the West would have my back. I’ll frame it using words like ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ that you all like so much. Now send help. Seriously.”

If you spent the weekend watching creepily tiny gymnasts vault over things, here’s a little Caucasus chaos recap. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are regions within Georgia that declared themselves independent over a decade ago (but, under an offer by Russia, over half the residents of South Ossetia are officially citizens of that country). The U.N. doesn’t consider them independent regions but that’s how they (and Russia, who also happens to own North Ossetia) see themselves. Last Tuesday, Georgia- who was under a ceasefire agreement- forcibly entered South Ossetia after claiming separatists there had bombed Georgia. Peacekeeping officials from Russia were in South Ossetia at the time of the attack. Russia did not take this well. Their reaction led to Russian troops being moved into South Ossetia and Abkhazia (reasonable under the circumstances) but also to air attacks in other regions of Georgia (there’s the rub). And all hell broke loose from there. Lives lost, damages done and no real end in sight.

Even before Saakashvili helpfully spelled it out with a WSJ headline, it was fairly obvious that he had expectations about the West rushing to his aid. Those expectations aren’t completely unfounded. The U.S. helped get him into his position during the Rose Revolution. Georgia helped us out in Iraq, donating the third largest amount of troops. We “repaid” them by giving those troops supplies and training. George W. Bush favors Georgia joining N.A.T.O. and Georgia favors Georgia being in the E.U.- going as far as to fly the flags of that organization (of which they’re not a member) on their governmental buildings.

Saakashvili has had two clear goals since he took the reigns: 1) to make Georgia a player on the global stage and 2) to take back South Ossetia and Abkhazia (which would show his power, give Georgia “their” land back and throw a nice middle finger at Russia in the meantime). But he miscalculated how much help would come from the West and entered his country into a battle that it is incredibly unlikely to win. Russia’s army is bigger, stronger and better equipped and it has the people living in the regions being attacked on their side. Even if Georgia somehow- miraculously- got Russia out of the equation, the residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are not going to allow their regions to be peacefully reabsorbed into the country that attacked them.

It doesn’t really matter at this point who is right and who is wrong. Georgia needs to get out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia needs to stop bombing random areas of Georgia. The West (the U.S. especially) has its fingerprints on this situation a little too much to just let it play out. But the best thing that the officials traveling to the region to attempt a ceasefire negotiation can do is stick to that goal and encourage both countries to go back to their sides and stay there. The U.S. really only has the capability to carry on one war it shouldn’t be involved in at a time and the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts already have that seat.

Originally published: Jun. 9, 2009

I signed on to my Google homepage the other day to see this article in my science headlines, about the problems found in carbon offsets. And it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about how problematical these are in response to this Five Thirty Eight post. In a remarkably (for 538) link- and numbers-free post, Robert Frank criticizes people who are dismissive of carbon offsets, saying that they are an important and valuable part of the battle against climate change. Allow me to disagree.

Carbon offsets do sound pretty great. Here I am, a concert promoter, and I know that Going Green is pretty “hip” these days; the kids are really into it. But I need a lot of lighting, electricity for all the vendors, a sound system, bottled water, I have to fly or truck in all sorts of stuff, and my performers are insisting on private helicopters, fresh sushi, green peanut m&m’s, freshly made strawberry-pear smoothies, and buying from the Farmer’s Market isn’t going to cut it. What can I do? Hey, no worries! Call a carbon offset company, and pay someone else to not pollute. My money might go towards helping to reforest an area, for carbon sequestration, or to help build a windfarm. Or you’ve got a nice new beach resort, and you want it to be green and eco-friendly. Big ol’ solar panels or wind turbines off the coast aren’t too pretty, but you still need air conditioning and working blenders and a pool. So get carbon offsets, pay someone else to put up solar panels, and bam!, your little piece of carbon-spewing paradise is completely green. Well, except for those exotic plants and pesticides, but you’re still doing your part.

Frank would say, yeah, so, what’s the problem? We need to cut carbon, and it doesn’t matter who cuts what. Generally speaking, looking only at climate change, yes, that is true. We just need carbon out of the atmosphere. But with that narrow, if ambitious, goal, do offsets work? They could. But they probably don’t. Currently, there’s not a lot of oversight. There have been a couple of GAO reports on this. Within the United States, where carbon offsets are voluntary, the FTC, EPA, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Services are all involved in carbon offsets in some way or another, with most of the regulating going to the FTC. And you need to have a lot of oversight to make sure the projects are real, that they wouldn’t have happened without the money, and that the un-emitted carbon hasn’t been sold to several different investors.

That last one is called double selling-or triple- or quadruple- or quintuple selling.

“One of the things the FTC will investigate is “double selling,” Kohm says. “So, for example, if I have solar panels on top of my store and then I sell somebody else the right to claim that carbon scrubbing, I can’t then claim the carbon scrubbing for myself, as well.”

“And if somebody were selling that two or three times, then that would be a deceptive practice that the FTC would need to take action on.”

More importantly, though, environmentally speaking, in this case you are not offsetting your carbon. Selling those credits might make sense if everyone is allowed to pollute so much, and you can buy pollution credits from one another- a cap and trade system, for instance. But unless as your offset you buy solar panels and put them on my store, making me carbon-neutral, you’re not offsetting anything. If my solar panels are already there, you’re just paying me to say that I pollute and you don’t. You’re buying happy feelings, self-righteousness, and not a lot more.

Which leads to another problem, that of additionality. In order for a project to be an offset, it has to have only happened because of the new money. For instance, if you start planting trees on your property to build a nice windbreak, because you like trees, and you know it’s good for the environment, and I find out about this and give you some money, I didn’t offset anything. My carbon is still there, and whatever good your trees do is because of your action and yours alone. And these sorts of problems are rampant. Remember when Hollywood decided the Academy Awards would be carbon neutral? They didn’t do it by cutting down on any of the glitz and glamour. Instead, they bought offsets. Businessweek looked into the seven companies the Academy bought offsets from. Six of the seven said the money was nice, but unnecessary-the projects were already in the works, and were going to happen anyway.

In the end, though, it is the moral attitude carbon offsets embody, which Frank sees as unimportant, that anger me. I do think that carbon offsets have a place, at least in the short term, as we transition towards a more environmentally ethical society. It can be a way for raising funds for new methane capture, or reforestation projects. But for the most part, that is not how they work. Far from being one tool in the box used by people who truly are concerned, instead they’re used by people who know they need to be concerned but really love their suburban lifestyle. And so they buy some green indulgences; forgive me father, for I drive an SUV. Buy $100 worth of carbon credits and all is forgiven. And that, to me, is almost of even greater concern. When offsets are used to assuage our conscience, rather than to transition towards lasting-change, they may cause greater harm than good.

The only way we will truly halt global climate change is by a significant change in our lifestyle. We’re going to have to be willing to have smaller spaces, drive less, carpool or take the bus more. At some point we’re going to have offset all that we can offset, and if people are still using more and more resources we won’t have accomplished anything. And while finding new forms of energy and protecting forests are great, and we should stop increasing our carbon output, that is not all we need. We need to actually decrease our carbon output. We need to start treading more lightly, not only because of climate change, but for a host of environmental reasons. Carbon offsets help put that off, but that’s not necessarily good. In fact, the GAO studies both point out that if offsets are cheap enough, they can actually delay new, necessary R&D into more environmentally friendly options.

Conspicuous consumption needs to drop. For our economy, for our environment, for our souls, we will need to become less materialist, and more conscious of the effects of what we do. Right now offsets let us pretend that that’s not the case. So instead of putting your money towards offsets, why not put it towards a bike, or local food, or cloth napkins and reusable water bottles. And remember to turn off the lights.

In my art I strive to communicate several things to my viewers.

The first is a scientific understanding of the world. I want my paintings to communicate on a level that is subconscious to most viewers, which will trigger them to think critically about natural phenomena. I use the visual analogues of poetic devices to create metaphors for scientific reality, allowing the viewer to be submersed in mythico-religious imagery familiar to them from the Western cannon. That imagery, which speaks to them on a subconscious level, tells them a story of scientific reality. Whether that is innate to the subconscious and the images, or conditioned by upbringing within a given culture is debatable, but the results are the same: a visceral message is passed.

Also, I want to bring Eastern thought into the Western artistic tradition. The philosophical foundation of Taoism can be used as a starting place to contemplate the natural world in a scientific manner. Additionally, I try to use humour when I can to set the viewer at ease, to make him or her feel comfortable thinking about the implications and layered meanings behind a particular piece. Absurdity is, I feel, a gateway into realms of higher understanding, for what can be more absurd than the creation of art itself, in the face of a universe many billions of times older than our entire civilization? Once we have embraced that, and come to the understanding that it does not matter, we can do anything.

Anything at all.

Q: You have your first solo show lined up for early September. How did that come about?

Well, it’s not actually my first solo show, depending on how you look at it. I’ve filled up coffee-houses and restaurants on a couple of occasions in the past. This is, however, the first time I’ll have a solo show in a curated gallery, albeit a small one.

I’m slowly learning that, in art as in everything, connections and networking are far more important than they ought to be, perhaps more important than how good you are. You can be amazing and prolific, and all of your paintings will just gather dust in your basement, unless you make the effort to get it out there. I got this show by trying to get myself out and around — the specific connection was InLiquid, a non-profit group in Philadelphia that connects local artists and gives them web-space, for a modest fee. That group has introduced me to a lot of other interesting and forward thinking artists in the area, as well as provided announcements for upcoming shows and calls for artists. I’m trying to work my way into a couple of other emerging artist groups in the city (ones with real gallery space and more physical connections), but, even though they’re for “emerging” artists, they still seem to want a bit more history than I have. Hopefully this show will open a few doors for me, in the art world.

Q: What is the process of putting together a show? How do you select which pieces make the cut?

How do I put together a show? Usually I get onto a theme or two while I’m painting, and, no matter what I do, I’ll have a dozen or so paintings that “match.” So, when selecting pieces for a show, I try to keep those grouping together — in late 2006 I painted a large number of very overtly biologically themed watercolours. In mid- 2008 I worked intensively with Brandon Phillips to create a series of thirty mixed media works, on the theme of spiritual journeys and enlightenment. It simply comes out that way when I work, and the pieces self-select.

Q: What are your preferred mediums? What draws you to them?

I’ve always worked primarily in watercolour. It’s my first love, medium-wise. The only art classes I’ve ever had were early in high-school, and the teacher was a watercolourist. Her teaching style, though, was not really technique based — she gave us all the materials we wanted, and just let us experiment (also, there were only two of us in her painting class). I’ll be forever in her debt for that… freedom to play is essential to learning art in a way that enhances your creativity, I think.

I’m drawn to watercolour because of the elements of disorder, of that are inherent to the medium. You can never control the water exactly, no matter how good and precise your technique — that’s why you can look at a photo-realistic watercolour painting and tell that’s a watercolour. Or maybe that’s why there’s no such thing as photo-realistic watercolours. Controlling that chaos is where I find the most joy in my paintings: using the uncertainty of the medium to my advantage. I think that’s why a lot of people don’t like it, actually: they find the uncertainty to be frustrating, and they’ve never learnt how to make use of it. They grew up on graphite pencils and acrylics, which are like speed to the LSD that is watercolour. More precise, more controllable, but not as pretty.

Other than watercolour, I do mixed-media collage. My friend and colleague Brandon Phillips introduced me to the idea, a few years ago, and taught me a lot about it. Once I felt comfortable working in collage, we did a large series of collaborative works together that have been shown it a couple of places, most notable at the Make It show, at the XYZ Gallery in Blacksburg VA. I, like Brandon, prefer to work with the texture and feel of a mixed media piece, rather than focusing on the images. Brandon’s work tends to be narrative in nature, but mine has, to me, the feeling of Jackson Pollack — I’m trying to tell a story, but an internal story, composed of shape and colour. What it means in the end is dependent upon the viewer.

Q: You recently backpacked through Britain and did sketches rather than taking pictures. Why?

Have you ever really looked at a landscape you were taking a photograph of (unless you’re a photographer by trade or inclination)? I don’t think many people see what they take pictures of, in a way. Not deeply, not wholly. I drew pictures so that I’d be forced to really see it.

Q: Your educational history is in science. How does that play into your approach to art?

I studied biology in university, with an emphasis on ecology. I also minored in chemistry and psychology. I’ve always been attracted to science — there’s something about the idea and the ideal of cold pure empiricism that I find irresistible. Perhaps it’s a deep respect for, and desire for, the truth.

I try to paint pictures that draw upon common symbols and imagery in the Western world, particularly religious imagery, to tell stories or facts about scientific reality. I want to communicate my love of science, my respect for its truth-seeking ability, to the people that see my paintings. I want them to feel the same awe that I feel when I think about the age of the universe, or the size of a single cell.

I also want to say something about religion. I think part of my love for science comes form a deeply religious upbringing — I was brought up to respect the truth, to hold it sacred. Never-mind that the truth I was taught as a child was a shallow, juvenile shadow of a religion that had done great and terrible things for humanity in its day, I was taught that truth was important, was meaningful, was something worth the effort. That has stayed with me, though the religion has been sloughed off. I try to incorporate the transition I went through, the metamorphosis of religion into science, of knowledge based on authority to knowledge based on personal experience and reproducible experimentation, into my art as well. I use religious imagery and symbols to tell scientific stories because the images are widely know and interpreted in the same way by most people. But I also use them because I want to subvert their meanings. I want the Virgin Mary to be the Universe, giving birth to our Earth and our Sentience; I want the baby jesus to be the zygote in womb, any zygote in any womb,every zygote in every womb. I want it recognized that Odin is Jesus is Gilgamesh — war gods, all, and all heros, all saviors, and all a grand metaphor for the interactions of people with the global ecosystem.

Q: Are there common themes or inspirations that you find yourself returning to time and again?

There are… the previous question touched on this pretty heavily. I find myself painting scientific and religious stories, together, to bring it all full circle. I think that the ritual, the symbolism, the security, the community of a religion is important to humanity in a deeply psychological way, and I don’t think we should lose that. However, I don’t think all of that is worth the bigotry, the abuse of power, and the brainwashing of our children that religion gets us. What I want to do is tell stories that make people think for themselves, about their religion, about scientific finds that the New York Times reports, about their own relationships: about anything at all. Religion won’t go away overnight, and because of the psychological need for some of the things that it provides, combined with the mindless drive for self preservation that any meta-organismal bureaucracy has, it likely won’t go away at all. The only way we can fight it is by subversion. The only way to fight ignorance is with knowledge; the only way to fight complacency is by teaching people to think for themselves. Those are the themes I return to again and again.

Q: What other artists (visual or otherwise) do you gather inspiration from?

I take inspiration form a lot of artists: I try to view as much art as I possibly can, to take it all in and learn from it all. I identify greatly with the surrealists, and I love Abstract Expressionism, but I’d not really call myself either. Tanguy, in particular, has taught me a lot about flow and composition, about perception, and about how to make  a painting have a deep psychological meaning with out showing anything “real” in the painting at all. And all with out saying anything at all.

On the other hand, I take a lot of inspiration form the artists I know. I’m influenced by ideas I can talk out with friends and partners. I’ve worked with Brandon Phillips and Marc Wagenseil, in Virginia, and the musician and writer Andy Woodward in Pennsylvania. Right now I am embarking on a collaborative project with Adam York Gregory, of the UK. These collaborations teach me and influence me more than any work I could look at, study, and copy ever could.

I’m also influenced heavily by music. I’ve worked with the bassist Andy Woodward for several years now. As our friendship has grown, he’s taught me that music can get into your consciousness, and really have an effect that no one would expect or see, if they weren’t looking for it. So I listen to music when I paint, and I find that what I’m listening to changes the painting a great deal. And now I know myself well enough that I can find the right music to influence the mood of a painting in the way I want –  I couldn’t plan it out and do it, but I can plan the direction of the process, if that makes any sense. Try it: take a pencil and just doodle while you listen to a Tool song, and a Vivaldi piece. I can almost guarantee you that the two pieces will be different in tone when they’re done.

Art pieces featured (in order of appearance):

1. An atypical soil profile, watercolor on paper (2007)

2. Squid heaven (Where do we go when we dream?), mixed media (2007)

3. Knighton clock tower, ink on paper (2008)

4. Lao Tzu and a Bird, India ink on paper (2007)

5. Three Stooges, watercolor on paper (2007)

Originally published: Feb. 7, 2009