Code of Ethics for Elected Officials

A lot of elected officials, especially at the Federal level, have started using social media, some fairly heavily.  This has been met with mixed feelings.  Some people see this as increased government transparency, while others have seen this as political propaganda.  Either way, participation in social media presents a serious conflict of interest for elected officials.  While it definitely can and probably should be used to increase government transparency, it can also be used to influence people and to spread propaganda, misinformation, and even downright lies, and it has actually been used this way.

As such, we need a code of ethics for elected officials, that includes but is not limited to the use of social media.  I would like to suggest a set of ethical rules for elected officials.

1. Elected officials should always specify whether a social media post, video, recording, or other publication is being produced in an official capacity.  Ideally, elected officials should always use separate accounts for official and personal communications, and the personal accounts should not reference the elected office of the official in any way.
2. Social media content published in an official capacity should stick to facts.  It should not contain propaganda, personal opinions, campaign advertisements, promotion of political or personal agendas, or anything else not directly related to the job the person has been elected to.  Statements of intent to vote on a particular bill in a particular way are appropriate but should avoid any explanation except, "This is what my constituents want".  (And even that explanation might come back to bite you, if it turns out they don't want that.)
3. Official publications that contain information later discovered to be incorrect should be amended whenever possible, noting the error and resolution, and if it is not possible, an official retraction should be published as soon as the mistake is discovered, and reasonable effort shall be made to direct all past, present, and future consumers of the original publication to the retraction.
4. Official publications should generally be reviewed by advisors and/or peers before being published.
5. Official publications should adhere to any standards, regulations, and policies set by the government body the elected official is a member of.
6. Unofficial publications should avoid any and all implication that they might be official in nature or otherwise represent anything other than the personal views of the official, including but not limited to using a separate account for that does not mention the office of the user in the username, profile, or any other publicly accessible information associated with the account.
7. Unofficial publications should avoid accidentally or intentionally using the public profile, fame, wealth, or any other benefit afforded by the public office to endorse or promote any particular political agendas, and indeed, elected officials should generally limit unofficial publications to sharing facts and personal opinion in neutral ways that do not promote or otherwise argue in support of any particular position or platform, even if adherence to this rule feels like it hampers freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
8. Unofficial publications should not be produced or published during time an elected official may reasonably be expected to be working, including any time the body the official is a member of is in session, for bodies that are not active constantly.  For bodies that are constantly active (including the Executive Branch), officials should not produce or publish unofficial publications at any time where doing so would interfere with the work or take time away from the work that would cause even minor negative effects, and ideally any such personal projects should be worked on only during specifically scheduled time off (for example, vacations).
9. Elected officials should surrender access to any and all social media accounts used for official publications upon retirement (whether voluntary or through the loss of an election or expiration of a term limit) from the position.  Ideally, the account should transferred to the ownership of the government body the official was a member of, which will act as caretaker to preserve the account and its contents for consumption by the public.  If the official is later elected to office again, ownership may be returned for the duration of service.
10. Retired elected officials should continue to abide by the terms of this code of ethics with regards to their private social media accounts, with the exception that they may engage more fully in the endorsement of personal political opinions, so long as they continue to avoid using the fame and other benefits associated with having held public office to gain an unfair advantage over other figures who have not had the benefit of holding public office.
11. Retired and current elected officials should never take advantage of the benefits of holding or having held public office for profit or personal benefit of any kind, including the use of official publications for gaining advertisement revenue, the use of official publications in campaign advertisements, the use of official publications for endorsing or advancing personal political agendas (or personal agendas of any kind), the leverage of experience in elected office to claim any manner of authority or special expertise on any matter (including paid speaking engagements), or the engagement in any kind of compensated work for any entity that the official has accepted any form of lobbying from.

Each element of this code of ethics is designed to avoid specific problems that are common today, as outlined below.

1.  Many elected officials, especially those in Congress, are currently using their position to gain fame, for future personal benefit and for the purpose of advancing personal political agendas.  This is not the purpose of elected office, and it is a misuse of taxpayer money that pays the wages of these officials.  Separating official communications from personal communications will help regular citizens separate legitimate concerns related to the job from the personal politics and agendas of the officials.  Public office was never intended to be used as a stage from which to endorse a political platform or other personal agenda.  Public officials are elected to represent the will of the people, not to preach or impose upon the people their own wills.
2. As with 1, the separation of the job from personal opinions is important, and without that separation, elected officials can and do abuse their positions to promote their own platforms, instead of doing their job, which is to represent the will of the people.  The only valid reasoning for voting in a particular way on a bill is that it is what one's constituents want or is otherwise more consistent with the will of those who the official represents than the alternative.
3. Accuracy is critical to transparency.  The people cannot make informed choices when voting, if the information they have is not accurate and up to date.
4. Oversight is wise and necessary in ensuring this code of conduct is adhered to.  It is clear that not all elected officials understand the difference between personal opinion and their job.  Oversight may help them to learn that difference, and if it doesn't, at least it may prevent more egregious violations of this code of conduct.  Oversight will also help to catch factual errors before publication, avoiding the need for excessive retractions.
5. Again, oversight is wise and necessary.  This provides governing bodies with the ability to more narrowly define what is and is not appropriate in an official publication.  This includes censorship of sensitive material that could pose a security threat if published, as well as general rules of civility and propriety in official publications.  Official publications will reflect on the quality of the governing institutions, thus they have a right to regulate the nature of those publications.  (For example, a Representative angrily swearing in a statement about the President reflects very poorly on the House in general, as well as on her constituents and on the U.S. as a nation.)
6. The use of elected office to promote personal political agendas is a serious abuse of power that needs to be stopped.  Again, the purpose of elected office is to represent the will of the people, not to promote one's own political agendas.  Using the benefits of public office to help promote personal agendas is an abuse of power and a theft of taxpayer money.  No elected position should be used to gain an unfair advantage in promotion of personal agendas over those who do not hold any elected position.  To do so is unethical and undemocratic.
7. Merely seeing the title of an elected official in the username or profile text of an account could imply that the publication is official in nature, and it will definitely provide an unfair advantage based on the elected office of the person.  Those seeing an unofficial account for the first time, who do not already know the name of the official, should not be able to tell from the account that the account is owned by an elected official.  It is impossible to enforce complete fairness, as it is unreasonable to require elected officials to use pseudonyms for their personal accounts, but as much as possible, fair practices should be observed, which is why it is suggested that elected officials should generally avoid active promotion of personal agendas on their private accounts, even if doing so seems like it gives up certain rights.  (Note that it is also traditional for the President to release his or her tax records, despite the fact that the privacy of such personal records are generally regarded as protected by the Constitution, so this is not an unprecedented ethical rule.)
8. The time an elected official is being paid to work should never be used for personal activities.  Elected office is a job, and the wages payed to elected officials are payment for labor rendered.  An elected official who is working on personal projects during work time should rightly be fired, just like any other employee who did the same thing would.  It is completely and entirely inappropriate for any elected official to be spending paid work time on personal projects, and accepting full payment for work time partially spent on personal projects is theft against one's employer, in this case the American people.
9. Official publications of elected officials legally belong to the employer of the officials, which is the American people, and thus should be preserved for the use of the people as desired.  In addition, allowing retired officials to retain control of official accounts would allow them to abuse those accounts.  Thus, all official accounts that are not currently in active use should be preserved by the body those accounts are accountable to, both to minimize opportunity for abuse and to ensure the preservation and public availability of the contents of those accounts.  A government cannot remain transparent when ex-officials retain the power to destroy official publications.
10. Retiring does not absolve an official of ethical responsibilities.  Retired officials should not be restricted in public participation in political discourse and promotion of personal agendas, as they are no longer bound to the job of representing the will of the people, but they still should not be allowed to abuse or otherwise leverage their status as retired public officials to gain an unfair advantage over those who have not served in elected office.
11. Abuse of power of this nature is rampant in our government currently, and it interferes seriously with the democratic process.  It is common practice for elected officials to cultivate special relationships with for-profit businesses and other profitable organizations to create future opportunity for themselves once they leave public office.  This results in the drafting and passage of laws and policies designed specifically to benefit special interests, often at significant cost to the general public, purely for the personal benefit of the elected officials.  This is an abominable and wicked practice that undermines democracy, violates the will of the people, and causes significant harm to the people.  This should be regarded as blatant bribery, and all elected officials guilty of this practice should be impeached and thrown out of office, then tried for the high crime of bribery (and/or solicitation of bribery) and sentenced to long prison sentences, without options for house arrest, intermittent imprisonment (like nights or weekends only), or parole.  (And maybe if high profile, wealthy people actually had to pay the same price for their crimes as poor people, our prisons would be less cruel and abusive to prisoners.)  Elected officials should be legally and permanently barred from working for any company or organization they have ever been lobbied by, and they should also be barred from taking any sort of payment or compensation for any work they do that they would not have had without serving in an elected office.  In addition, any official content produced while in office was paid for and thus belongs to the people, making it a violation of copyright law to use it for personal profit or benefit without the express permission of the people.

The fact is, a significant amount of the corruption in our government could be quelled, merely by enforcing a code of conduct addressing these elements.  This does not exhaustively cover all possible forms of corruption (for instance, the practice of earmarking funds for states as a tacit bribe for the passage of some unpopular bill), but it covers some of the most destructive and most common types of and motivations for corrupt behavior.  Hopefully by restricting elected office from being an engine for politicians to promote their personal political platforms and build relationships with special interests for future profit, the motivation for corrupt people with ill intent to seek elected office will be significantly reduced, and the tendency toward corruption for those who originally had purer motives will be decreased significantly, giving us a more democratic government that is more concerned with the will of the people than with their own personal profit.

Sustainability

Sustainability is all the rage now days.  We have sustainable farming, sustainable energy, and even sustainable fashion.  Sustainable in this context means that the activity or product does not harm the environment or permanently consume any natural resources.  This might be farming strategies that restore as much nutrition to the soil as they consume, either by limiting the rate of consumption to what the environment can naturally restore through the water cycle and natural decay or by actively replacing those nutrients.  It might be energy production strategies that rely on processes that will continue to produce energy indefinitely.  The benefit of sustainability is that sustainable activities can be continued indefinitely, without ever running out of raw materials or causing so much harm that it is impossible to continue them.

Sustainability is also a myth.  There is no such thing as true sustainability.  All sustainable practices come back to sustainable energy, and energy is not sustainable, as far as modern science has been able to determine.  And let's be clear, thousands if not millions of people have tried to invent truly sustainable energy, and not a single one has been successful.  The First Law of Thermodynamics, which again, has never been broken, states that the amount of energy within a system cannot change, which means energy output of a generator cannot exceed the energy input.  Another way of saying this is that no source of energy can last forever.  Nearly all of our "sustainable" energy comes from the Sun.  The Sun depletes hydrogen gas and other heavier elements to produce energy.  This process cannot be reversed efficiently, and that means solar energy is not sustainable.  Wind energy is also a form of solar energy, as wind is created by atmospheric temperature gradients caused by solar radiation warming the air.  Hydroelectric power is also yet another form of solar energy, provided by the water cycle, which is powered by solar radiation evaporating ocean water.  Not all of our supposedly sustainable energy comes from solar power though.  Geothermal energy does not come from the Sun.  It comes from the compressive forces of about 6 × 10^24 kilograms (6.6 × 10^21 tons) of iron, rock, water, and soil, super heating most of its own volume.  More importantly, all of that thermal energy will eventually bleed out into space, leaving the Earth a cold lump of rock, metal, and ice, without any geothermal energy left for us to harvest.  Just like the Sun, the Earth's reserve of energy will not last forever.  Even geothermal power is not sustainable.  Every other form of energy we can harvest is widely known to be unsustainable.  We have already calculated an approximate date for when petroleum products will run out.  We have sufficient uranium to produce nuclear power for significantly longer than that, but even that is a very limited resource.  The same is true of other potential nuclear fuels.  Even our oceans are not big enough to produce enough fusible hydrogen for a sustainable source of fusion power fuel, though if our technology was sufficiently more efficient, fusion power could be the most sustainable power source, since its fuel is produced by cosmic radiation hitting hydrogen atoms in water.  Eventually though, the entire universe is going to equalize in energy, making it literally impossible to ever harvest energy again.  There is no sustainable power source, because even the longest lasting sources are consuming fuel in a process that is irreversible and will eventually run out.  And every other sustainable practice relies critically on sustainable energy.  Nutrients do not magically appear in the soil.  Bacterial, fungal, and animal actions produce the nutrients, in processes that consume energy ultimately provided by sunlight.  Even sustainable farming and sustainable fashion are not actually sustainable.

If nothing is sustainable, are we just stupid to be pursuing "sustainable" practices, or is it still worth doing?  We are not stupid, but we are misguided.  The concept of sustainability comes from the very wise idea of self sufficiency.  The fundamental idea is that we should protect and conserve our resources, so that we do not have to rely on outside entities beyond our control for our survival.  How many businesses have failed, because an external company supplying some raw material or fundamental ingredient went under?  How many people have ended up unable to sustain their desired lifestyle, because their employer laid them off or went out of business?  Sustainability is about self sufficiency, and self sufficiency is about having access to the resources you need, for as long as you need, without having to depend on something unpredictable for them.

If we acknowledge that the traditional definition of "sustainable" describes a property that is literally impossible, we can adjust that definition a little bit to fit the intent of our meaning and the purpose of sustainability.  This will give us a glimpse into our ideal future and how we might get there.  Let's say sustainability is not fundamentally about whether a process would deplete resources if continued indefinitely, and instead put a practical limit on the time span.  Thus, any process which would take so long to deplete the resources required for it to continue that humanity would no longer exist is a de facto sustainable process.  Similarly, any process which will not deplete its resources before we find another source to replace our current sources is also sustainable.  And of course, any process that causes so little damage that other sources of harm will cause significantly more damage before the given process causes enough damage to be a problem is sustainable.  This means, if we can find a natural resource that can be used to generate sufficient power for our needs, which will not be depleted before either, the Sun expands and destroys all life on Earth, or we find some other source of that resource that will extend our supply sufficiently to continue using it, that form of power generation is sustainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically deplete all of its fuel if allowed to continue indefinitely.  It also means that processes, like farming practices, that damage the soil are still sustainable, so long as that damage will not cause any lasting problems in the time frame from now till our Sun destroys all life on Earth.

This opens up a lot of options.  For example, we have discovered uranium on Venus.  Perhaps Venus has sufficient uranium to fuel our power needs till the Sun expands and swallows the Earth.  If this is the case, then if we can figure out how to mine uranium from Venus, before we deplete our own reserves, then uranium fission power is a sustainable source of energy, so long as we can also avoid serious harm.  Modern fission power is much safer than early fission power and all of the associated accidents, and it can be made even safer.  The biggest real concern with uranium fission power at this point is the role it can play in nuclear weapon production.  Nuclear weapons are a very unsustainable use though, because they cause very serious harm.  This is rather a tangent, but it is worth consideration, if we look at it as a side effect of uranium fission power.  For power though, uranium is not the only fission option.  To be clear, the numbers strongly suggest uranium fission power is a sustainable energy source, given our revised, practical definition.  Earth's reserves of reasonably available uranium [1] is roughly estimated to be sufficient to last us around 2.5 million years [2], if we scale the usage of every person in the world and then some (10 billion total) up to energy usage levels of those living in the most developed nations.  Estimates schedule the Sun to destroy the Earth in around 7.6 billion years, so 2.5 million is not inherently sustainable, but if we cannot find a more sustainable source of energy 2.5 million years, maybe we deserve to run out.   This is not the end though.  We are also starting to (finally) pursue thorium fission power generation.  This would approximately double our fuel reserves, giving us a total of 5 million years worth of power.  In addition, Japan is working on extracting uranium from seawater, currently costing $240 per kg.  This is a somewhat renewable process too, because as uranium is extracted, more will dissolve into the sea, essentially giving us access to massive reserves of uranium underwater.  Since 71% of the surface of the Earth is water, if we assume that sea water can dissolve as much uranium as we can extract from land [3], that increases our time before we run out to 17 million years.  And then there is Venus.  Obviously Venus would be a much more expensive source of uranium and thorium, but it does have at least comparable concentrations of uranium and thorium.  Further, current prices for these minerals are around $80 per ton, so odd are really good that we could be mining these minerals from Venus for under $3,000/kg within the next century.  This would far more than double our reserves, because Venus is uninhabited and permanently uninhabitable, meaning that we could mine far more of its surface area.  Without cities, farms, national parks, reserves, stripmining regulations, and just plain land that the owners do not want to sell to mining companies, Venus could be mined for uranium and thorium far more extensively [4].  As a rough estimate though, let's say we get just over double what we can get from Earth, from Venus.  That would give us around 40 million years worth of nuclear fuel.  There may also be uranium and thorium on Mars, and we will probably find significant quantities of these minerals in asteroids.  In short, nuclear power is incredibly sustainable.  The amounts available on Earth and Venus combined still do not even get close to competing with solar energy for how long they will last, but 40 million years gives us way more than enough time to find more sources or to find entirely alternative energy sources.  In that time, we might be able to build something like a Dyson sphere to more efficiently and directly collect solar energy.

What about solar, wind, and hydroelectric power though?  How do those fare against our revised definition of sustainability, and how do they compare with nuclear?  If you are not well educated in these sources of supposedly sustainable energy, the answer will probably surprise you.  They actually do not fare terribly well.  Hydroelectric power has been known to be harmful to the environment since shortly after the first dams were built.  Some of this can be mitigate, for instance, hydroelectric dams can prevent fish populations, notably salmon, from returning to their breeding grounds, after swimming out to the ocean.  Fish ladders were invented to mitigate this problem, but they have been shown to do a poor job of maintaining sustainable populations of fish, and they do not help all species of wildlife that are negatively affected by dams.  Many old hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are actually being decommissioned and torn down, when they become due for major maintenance, in a large part because the ecological harm they cause is not worth the benefit.  Wind generators cause similar problems with bird populations, killing both migratory birds and some larger species.  While reports are sometimes blown out of proportion, protected species, like bald and golden eagles, are at risk of being killed in wind farms built near their natural feeding grounds, like lakes and rivers.  And reports are starting to show that bird safe radar systems that turn off the turbines when birds are flying though have a very poor success rate.  At least half a million birds are killed each year by wind generators.  This may not sound like much, given that Earth is home to hundreds of billions of birds, but as wind farms become more common, those numbers will rise, and experts estimate the world bird population has declined by 1% to 2% over the last 50 years.  With the bird population already in decline, wind farms are poised to make what may currently be a fairly minor problem into a much more serious one.  In addition, wind farms reduce wind speed, and we do not know what other side effects that may have.  Scientists recently discovered that geothermal power can cause earth quakes, because it cools deeper parts of the crust, shrinking the rock and soil and potentially cooling magma that may be lubricating tectonic motion.  The only reason we do not see problems from this is that geothermal power is quite uncommon.  As wind farms become more common though, we will very likely see more dramatic affects from slowing wind speeds.  Solar power is also not blameless.  To start with, it is so inefficient that we need massive solar farms, covering vast areas of land, just to get the same power a coal plant would produce.  In our attempts to be environmentally conscious, we have built many of these in desert areas.  Not only do these areas have very little wildlife, they also tend to get far more sunlight.  Except, it is not true that they have very little wildlife.  Deserts are actually full of wildlife.  Pretty much any place on Earth that is not straight up toxic to cellular biology has some kind of wildlife living there.  This includes deep ocean thermal vents with water temperatures well above boiling.  While warm blooded life cannot survive well in deserts, cold blooded life that has adapted to the high daytime temperatures can and does.  Assuming deserts are barren of life has turned out to be a major mistake, which construction workers have discovered while building these solar farms.  The most obvious desert life that has been harmed by solar farms is turtles that use their shells for shelter during the day.  A great many of these turtles have been relocated as their habitats were destroyed to make way for solar farms.  Most desert life, however, does not live on the surface during the day, and some does not live in the surface at all.  Construction workers, who mostly worked during the day, have not relocated this vast majority of desert life, because they could not see it.  This life is either killed, when concrete foundation is poured over the sand, suffocating anything beneath, or when the shadows of the solar panels prevent the sand beneath from being warmed during the day, causing the burrowed animals to die from the cold of the nighttime desert at night.  In addition, more efficient solar power plant designs are known to sometimes burn birds alive.  Nuclear power, on the other hand, has a very small foot print, limiting its impact on ecosystems.  It does not have spinning blades, nor does it interfere in migration.  It generates far more power, meaning we need far fewer plants.  It is also safer for humans to maintain.  The only by products are heat and nuclear waste.  The nuclear waste is not terribly difficult to contain, especially for thorium plants, and the waste heat would easily be mitigated by the dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions a switch from coal to nuclear power would result in.  In short, by our revised practical definition of sustainability, nuclear is actually significantly more sustainable than solar, wind, or hydroelectric.

It turns out that nuclear power is the most sustainable energy we have the technology for.  Maybe, eventually, we will figure out how to harness solar power that is not pointed at the Earth, so that it does not affect Earth's ecosystems, but the numbers strongly suggest we have at least 17 million years just to figure out how to get nuclear fuel from places other than Earth, and well over 40 million years to find an alternative to nuclear energy.  If humanity manages to survive that long and has not managed to accidentally discover some new source of energy, then perhaps humanity does not deserve to survive.  That is not a problem for us though.  The best thing we can do right now is switch as much as possible to nuclear power, so the next generations will have access to the massive amounts of energy they will need to find the next source of energy.





[1] This includes all uranium that would cost $3,000 per kg (0.04¢ per kWh) or less to extract, not counting uranium contained in sea water.

[2] The uranium in the U.S. alone is sufficient for 50,000 years, and the landmass of the Earth is 51 times that of the U.S..

[3] The $3k per kg value takes into account the fact that we cannot just dig up 100% of the Earth's surface, because people live on some of it, and we want to maintain very large quantities for future development.  As such, sea water probably actually has access to far more available uranium per unit of surface area than land does.  This means this estimate is probably a massive underestimate.

[4] Venus actually has a bit less land surface area than Earth does, but on Earth, we would not be able to mine more than a small percentage of our land area, because any more would disrupt our own ecosystems as well as other ecosystems on Earth.  The damage done by more extensive mining than that would make nuclear power clearly unsustainable, even by our revised definition.


This is the source of the numbers on nuclear fuel cost and availability:

www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-will-our-supplies-of-uranium-and-thorium-last/