Keystone XL Pipeline: Unofficially Canceled

Officially, the announcements about the Keystone XL Pipeline project are noncommittal. The State Department’s Inspector General is looking into the serious irregularities in the overview of the project, which include public hearings run by lobbying firms instead of government officials. According to reports, the White House has decided to look into an alternate route for the pipeline that would have a reduced threat of environment damage, and that is expected to be announced to the public this afternoon.

Changing the pipeline route won’t change much, though. There are problems with the route, but the fundamental problems with the pipeline are economic. The oil fields in and near Alberta will deliver only a modest amount of oil, and at a higher cost of extraction than the world’s currently active oil fields. With those limitations, the Alberta-to-Texas route doesn’t much any sense, unless you’re the owner of a refinery in Texas. The project stands a better chance of financial success if the oil doesn’t have to be carried the length of the continent for refining. The oil could easily be refined and used entirely in western Canada and the adjacent border states of the United States.

The premise of the project, of a massive public effort on behalf of an ill-conceived project that will only benefit a few people in Texas, helped to inspire a large-scale protest action last weekend, in which protesters circled the White House while carrying a large balloon in the size and shape of the proposed pipeline. The Texas oil refineries’ hope of getting the project quietly approved have obviously failed. Realistically, the announcement of a delay can be understood as a way to quietly cancel the whole project after the 2012 U.S. elections.

Confidence and Ability Are Overrated

Two current stories show that two of the most important personal attributes according to folk wisdom and management theories — a record of achievement and an air of confidence — don’t guarantee meaningful results. In Italy, the billionaire-investor running the country is prepared to throw up his hands in defeat and step down from his post. At Adobe, 750 layoffs are on the way as the company abandons plans to be the go-to source for cross-platform user interface development. Adobe had huge successes with software in the past but, despite a massive effort, couldn’t deliver a competent development environment. Berlusconi’s history proves he knows how to handle money, but he couldn’t find a solution to his country’s financial woes.

Credit Card Strategies for an Imagined Expansion

Consumers this month have been cutting up their credit cards for Bank Transfer Day. At the same time, several of the largest credit card banks are in the middle of the biggest marketing push to sign up new customers for credit cards. When you hear this, it almost sounds as if credit cards are a good deal for banks and a bad deal for consumers.

But wait a minute. Just last year the banking industry was screaming about how much money they would be losing on credit cards after the new rules went into effect.

These banks involved in this reversal of strategy either were wrong last year when they imagined that credit cards would become a money-losing business, or are wrong now to spend around a billion dollars to sign up 2 or 3 million new cardholders.

The worrisome thing about the new credit card rush is that the economic forecasts it is based on might be mistaken. The banks are particularly eager to sign up new cardholders now because they imagine the economy and job market will have to improve soon. The most eager adopters of this fall’s credit cards will be using them on the same theory. It is the same error, of course, that created the home mortgage mess six years ago. Maybe the economy will be booming again next year. But if it is not, the consumers and banks who make a move into credit cards now may just be creating the next credit mess.

Why Large-Screen TV Prices Are Falling

The 3-D fad is over. In the television business, the main focus has returned to large-screen televisions this Christmas season. But most American households that had a use for a large-screen had already purchased one by 2010.

When manufacturers are trying to keep selling into an already saturated market, that is reason enough to expect big price cuts. And there is another, more fundamental reason for lower prices of televisions this year. Engineering and design improvements have improved the manufacturability of the video displays. Flat-screen televisions now cost less to make than they ever did.

But even prices as much as 40 percent less than two years ago may not spur enough demand to sell all the televisions that manufacturers can make. Consumers who purchased a television within the last three years will subconsciously avoid the television promotions in stores, not eager to discover that the unit they paid $4,000 for is now worth less than $2,000. With banks in the news again, many households will think twice about making a frivolous purchase on a scale that resembles a monthly mortgage payment, perhaps opting to delay until the mortgage is paid off.

This, then, could be the last year in which large-screen televisions dominate Christmas-season store layouts. Everyone who was holding out will have a chance to buy a large-screen television in the after-Christmas, pre-Super Bowl sales of January. After that, manufacturers will have to cut back on production, and retailers on floor space, to a scale that fits a replacement-cycle product.

Starting a New Chapter, Today

This month I am participating in National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. I will attempt to write a 50,000 word first draft of a novel during the month of November. Every year, tens of thousands of novels are written this way. I have never written a full-length novel before, but I have written plenty of nonfiction books and short fiction, not to mention this daily blog, so there is little doubt that I will now be able to write a full-length novel. The only suspense is the question of how well I can do it in one calendar month.

One of the advantages of writing a novel this quickly is that the story can’t get boring. Thus far, I have written five chapters in five days, and to finish the novel during the month, I will have to continue writing nearly one chapter per day.

In the traditional novel form, and in the novel I am writing, each chapter is a new threshold. That is, the lives of the characters change just enough during the course of a chapter that the events of that chapter could not occur in the same way in the previous chapter or the next chapter instead. This convention gives rise to a familiar life metaphor.

There are actually two familiar metaphors or cliches that come from the experience of a novel. You “turn over a new leaf” or “turn the page” when you change a single habit or let go of something from the past. This level of change in life is like going from the right-hand page in a book to the left-hand page that follows on the other side of the same sheet of paper (called a “leaf” when it is bound into a book).

A bigger change, when you change your way of living so much that the previous pattern of daily action is no longer possible, is “starting a new chapter in life.” You might move to a new town, get divorced, start college, quit smoking, or change careers. People think of these big changes occurring only every couple of years. We all know people who have gone twenty years or longer without this level of change in their lives. On the other hand, there are also times when change is forced upon us, and we start a new chapter in life whether we are ready or not.

This especially tends to happen to characters in novels. In the novel I am writing, the main character has gone through five chapters in less than a month. As the writer, I have had to experience these new chapters on a daily basis in my imagination in order to write the narrative that forms the novel. It is not necessarily easy. I spent Friday getting comfortable with the idea of working on a road maintenance crew on a remote highway, only to wake up Saturday and have to follow a rumor that spreads through a town overnight. The pace of NaNoWriMo does not allow me to stand still long enough to get completely comfortable with the circumstances of any one chapter. I must move on as surely as the sun rises if am to reach my destination by the end of the month.

But I can do that. It is not so easy, but it is not so hard either. And if I can do it in my imagination, as a would-be novel writer, I must also be capable of doing it in my actual life. The imaginary mind is the same mind as the real-life mind. If I can imagine something in enough detail that I can write it out coherently in 2,000 words, then I can imagine something else in enough detail that I can live it all day long.

Furthermore, if this is a possibility for me, then it must also be a possibility for people in general. We are all capable of advancing from one stage in life to the next without the need for a long pause of years or decades in between. We can experience a threshold change between one day and the next.

If we have this capability, why do we employ it so infrequently? Well, why did I wait until November and NaNoWriMo to write my first full-length novel? Often, we are just waiting for life to tell us it’s time.

But more than that, it is a matter of doing the work. It is one thing to say, “Yes, I really want my life to change. Yes, I really, really want to change.” It is another thing to apply a disciplined imagination to your objectives, to spend hours working out the details of the next step forward in your life, giving it enough attention that it forms a picture consistent in itself and consistent with where you are arriving from.

Who has the time to do all that? I am only doing it today, for my novel, because the NaNoWriMo schedule says I have to finish during the month of November. But if you decided that you could take the time, it seems to me, you could start a new chapter in your life today.

And then, if you could spare the time again, you could start another new chapter tomorrow.