In order to figure out what to do you first have to figure out what is happening. I've outlined the major events that have already begun which will have the greatest impact on people's lives. How that plays out over the next decade or so will depend on a lot of factors, but some of the likely effects of oil depletion and energy constraint are somewhat predictable. Mostly, the effects will be felt economically. The kinds of employment activities many of us will be doing will probably be the kinds of things we may do now as a hobby.
Economics is really just the system used for taking stuff from the natural world and turning it into usable things for society. What we have now is a system in which the resources and finished products get moved all over the globe and is economical only because we have cheap energy. We currently pay about $2.50 for a gallon and get ten weeks of human labor for that. The lesson we can take from the price explosion of 2008 is that things can slow down quite a bit economically when gasoline reaches about $4.25 a gallon. Things that travel long distances become less competitive even with the advantage of economies of scale. What this likely means whenever that level is reached again is that economies will relocalize. Things that travel thousands of miles to reach stores probably won't make it there when gas is $5.00 a gallon opening up new manufacturing opportunities for Americans who have grown accustomed to seeing "made in wherever" tags on their consumer products.
The relocalization of the global economy is a transition that will take decades to complete. It is at the same time a difficult thing to prepare for because it is not possible to start a business, say, or create networks of people willing to say goodbye to the old way of doing things to start their own local economy. Some of this is happening now on an experimental basis but is still very limited. The fact remains that the corporate structure is difficult for any small operation to compete against. Walmart is the representative species of corporate megalithic capacity. Whenever an operation can take a loss until the competition is squashed then there is no hope. Any small business can only function in a niche and as of now, the small boutique stores with boutique items, and I don't mean luxury items, but things like a bar of soap made in your neighborhood, has to depend on those with enough money and willingness to pay more in order to stay in business. If you want locally made underwear I would say you are simply out of luck.
I suspect that, as the number of unemployed in the U.S. remains high, the relocalization effort will gain some traction. A number of other conditions would have to come into being, though, for it to represent a more or less permanent transition. For one, the price of imported goods would have to rise considerably before someone in the U.S. could earn a living making the things we use regularly. Another factor in all of this is that, once the things we pay relatively little for now become very expensive as the globalized economy convulses and dies, we will need to have the skills to make the stuff we need. Another related condition is that capital would have to be willing to move to finance local production of goods, something it hasn't been willing to do for many decades. The effect of this will be a greater portion of people's income will be used to cover the basics like food, clothing, and transportation than is the case now. Where people decide to cut their budgetary corners is what will shape the economy of the future. Much of what people buy now may not have much of a future if people decide they don't need them or can't afford them.
Some of this has already begun. What can be observed over the past couple of years as the financial meltdown stormed over the planet is that people are buying and driving less. This is primarily true in the Western countries. Places like India and China are a seperate case, but the richest nations are undergoing a process of scaling back their consumption and losing financial credibility. I expect this process to continue for the next two decades. It may be gradual, or it may be rapid. Or it will be gradual and punctuated by crises. Who knows? It's safe to say that the decline of economic, political, and military power is in the cards for the U.S. and Europe for the foreseeable future. Given this, the likelihood of another crisis in the financial markets appears great as the source of risk and instability has not been dealt with by the leaders of men. As resources become scarce, a zero sum resource game will dominate the markets functionality and wreak havoc on distribution, something the market doesn't do so much of anyway.
Making due with less is the new trend. Eventually, people will make more with their hands, grow more of their own food, and repair things rather than throw them away. These are likely to be the leading indicators of the localization transition. There is plenty more to this story. We are heading into an accelerated phase of imperial decline. All of the arrangments of daily life will change somehow. Detaching from the sinking ship called the status quo is an important first step in adapting to the new way of life.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
A Survey of Ultimates
To think in a richer and more complex way about this series of problems that ultimately defy solutions, it is useful to consider them as dimensions of an historical web of events that follows a logic that may or may not be fully discernible. Furthermore, it would be useful to think about the future as a matter of adaptation to new conditions that will overwhelm the conditions we currently experience over time and in ways that will be at once unpredictable but not unexpected. Somehow, to think of the subject of oil depletion, say, or of climate change, as problems with solutions misses something fundamental. A solution implies fixing something that allows you to continue more or less on the path you were on. What I am talking about requires the surrender of certain foundational expectations, the willingness to give up cherished identities, and to engage in the deeper task of transforming the civilization into a project that can be maintained indefinitely.
The evidence for the need to massively scale down the activities of humanity into something much less extravagant is convincing to me. I know that ultimately fossil fuel is finite and subject to depletion. I know that ultimately the industrial economy runs on fossil fuel and that there is no viable replacement fuel to run it on. Certainly there is more to it than this and objections to even these facts will ring throughout the public discourse even as it becomes obvious (which it is not as of now). The depletion of fossil fuels will have impacts throughout the world but the place that may experience the hardest fall is the Western economies, especially the United States. As the cache of past dominance gets drained, and the ability of the United States to command the world's resources, it's wealth will be drained along with it. Ultimately, the U.S. came to it's superpower status as an oil power and everything has been constructed with the use of oil in mind. It also best represents the extravagance that must be scaled down, a subject I'll return to in a little bit.
Another ultimate that fits into the panoply of ultimates is that climate change represents the greatest ultimate threat to continued civilization as an ongoing concern. The disruptions promised by climate scientists if the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere continues unabated are certain to be too much for a civilization which has developed only in the stable climate of the holocene. This does not necessarily mean the end of all human beings. Humans evolved during other climate disruptions of greater or lesser severity and lived to tell the tale. But they didn't have the large settlements that came later with the advent of agriculture. Nor were they able to increase their numbers to more than a few million worldwide for millenia. From where I'm sitting, it is fat consolation to think that humanity will continue in the event of catastrophic global climate change while my peers are looking to upscale their SUV's.
The final ultimate, and the best definition of what I mean by extravagant, is the concept of ecological overshoot. Used, of course, in ecology, this is the best way to flesh out the remaining ultimate. Ecological overshoot is pretty basic. When bunnies, for example, outstrip the food supply through population growth, then a correcting mechanism known as die off brings the population back into equilibrium with the supply of food. The overshoot analysis is trickier when applied to people because of their capacity to enhance biological productivity through the use of reason. But that very same use of reason contends that ecological overshoot still applies to the human animal due to natural limitations of the physical world. Does photosynthesis, for example, have an upper limit? Does tinkering with the upper limit have consequences for the biosphere that we hadn't considered when we began tinkering? Humans are only as good as the food supply. It makes us no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Food isn't the only constraint in assessing ecological overshoot. Waste, what one is often disinclined to think about, can overwhelm the population. Seems quite obviuos with bunnies given their high production rates of waste material. But it equally applies to carbon dioxide, one of the waste materials of the fossil fuel economy. It raises an important issue; natural wastes in themselves are not undesirable. It is the overabundance of waste that is the concern. Nature has measurable recycling rates of waste and if that is overwhelmed the excess is called pollution. Besides food, it is another factor to consider in the population overshoot construct. We have simply overwhelmed the natural world with our presence and our lifestyle. Our task is to find the equilibrium and stick with it.
The evidence for the need to massively scale down the activities of humanity into something much less extravagant is convincing to me. I know that ultimately fossil fuel is finite and subject to depletion. I know that ultimately the industrial economy runs on fossil fuel and that there is no viable replacement fuel to run it on. Certainly there is more to it than this and objections to even these facts will ring throughout the public discourse even as it becomes obvious (which it is not as of now). The depletion of fossil fuels will have impacts throughout the world but the place that may experience the hardest fall is the Western economies, especially the United States. As the cache of past dominance gets drained, and the ability of the United States to command the world's resources, it's wealth will be drained along with it. Ultimately, the U.S. came to it's superpower status as an oil power and everything has been constructed with the use of oil in mind. It also best represents the extravagance that must be scaled down, a subject I'll return to in a little bit.
Another ultimate that fits into the panoply of ultimates is that climate change represents the greatest ultimate threat to continued civilization as an ongoing concern. The disruptions promised by climate scientists if the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere continues unabated are certain to be too much for a civilization which has developed only in the stable climate of the holocene. This does not necessarily mean the end of all human beings. Humans evolved during other climate disruptions of greater or lesser severity and lived to tell the tale. But they didn't have the large settlements that came later with the advent of agriculture. Nor were they able to increase their numbers to more than a few million worldwide for millenia. From where I'm sitting, it is fat consolation to think that humanity will continue in the event of catastrophic global climate change while my peers are looking to upscale their SUV's.
The final ultimate, and the best definition of what I mean by extravagant, is the concept of ecological overshoot. Used, of course, in ecology, this is the best way to flesh out the remaining ultimate. Ecological overshoot is pretty basic. When bunnies, for example, outstrip the food supply through population growth, then a correcting mechanism known as die off brings the population back into equilibrium with the supply of food. The overshoot analysis is trickier when applied to people because of their capacity to enhance biological productivity through the use of reason. But that very same use of reason contends that ecological overshoot still applies to the human animal due to natural limitations of the physical world. Does photosynthesis, for example, have an upper limit? Does tinkering with the upper limit have consequences for the biosphere that we hadn't considered when we began tinkering? Humans are only as good as the food supply. It makes us no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Food isn't the only constraint in assessing ecological overshoot. Waste, what one is often disinclined to think about, can overwhelm the population. Seems quite obviuos with bunnies given their high production rates of waste material. But it equally applies to carbon dioxide, one of the waste materials of the fossil fuel economy. It raises an important issue; natural wastes in themselves are not undesirable. It is the overabundance of waste that is the concern. Nature has measurable recycling rates of waste and if that is overwhelmed the excess is called pollution. Besides food, it is another factor to consider in the population overshoot construct. We have simply overwhelmed the natural world with our presence and our lifestyle. Our task is to find the equilibrium and stick with it.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Climate Change: The Mother of all Mothers
Climate Change represents the greatest single adaptation humans will hopefully not have to make over the next century. What is disturbing is that ongoing observations are exceeding worst-case scenario climate model projections made not so long ago. All roads seem to be leading to the question over how long before we reach a point at which we can no longer prevent a cascading series of feedback loops that set Earth's climate at a new equilibrium. Is it 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere? Is it 2C (3.6F) rise in global average temperature? Something else?
Currently we are at about 390 ppm CO2. In pre-industrial times, that number was 280. So we are experimenting with what happens when we add 40% more carbon and on our way to doubling it from pre-industrial levels well before the end of the century unless something is done to stop it. A doubling is certain to cause a catastrophic climate shift upwards of 5C (9F) or more, depending on where these trigger points lie. The current thinking is that a major trigger point could well be at 2C judging from the rapidity of the ice melt in the Artic and mountain glaciers with only a .8C temperature rise so far. What is feared is that, as the Artic Ocean turns to open water during the summer months, the albedo effect will cause runaway ocean water temperature rise that will in turn melt Greenland's massive ice sheet into the North Atlantic. In addition to this, because the blue ocean water absorbs more solar radiation and therefore more heat than ice does, that additional heat will contribute to further global temperature rise generally. It goes without saying that we could not stop this source of warming.
What the trigger point(s) mean is that, upon reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, a rise to 5C above pre-industrial levels would be more or less automatic. That is a probable equilibrium point for global climate. In the absence of additional major trigger points then that is likely where it would stay for thousands of years until the CO2 gets reabsorbed into natural carbon sinks like ocean water and plant life.
It is really beyond dispute among reasonable people that the temperature rise is caused by the burning of fossil fuels to power human economic activity. Those who say otherwise are saying so for economic or ideological reasons, and not for scientific ones. It is known well enough what impact increased CO2 has in the atmosphere. This particular property of CO2 (letting in solar radiation but absorbing heat radiation rising from the surface of the Earth) has been known since the 19th century. What is unknown are the particulars of how much carbon does what, or what other factors might exacerbate or mitigate the carbon effect. At some point I will write a post on the difference between skepticism and denial and demonstrate why the time for skepticism is over for climate change. Those who continue to question the veracity of anthropogenic global warming are denialists.
The widest scale on which to view the magnitude of our climate situation is to consider the following: the past 11,000 years, known as the holocene, have been the most stable climatic period in the history of the Earth. It just so happens to correspond to the period in which civilization has grown up. We cannot know how a climate shift northwards of 2C will have on every little piece of territory around the globe and how we could manage with the unpredictable weather that would come along with it. What we do know is that the hydrological cycles around the globe will be disrupted, with deserts expanding into places where food is now grown. We know that disappearing glaciers will have a devastating effect on agriculture in many of the most populated regions of the world. We know that increased CO2 concentrations in the air will increase it in the oceans, making the ocean water more acidic and harm and force into extinction a wide range of ocean species. Finally, we know that ocean levels are rising and will rise further as land ice from Greenland and Antarctica melt into the ocean, inundating coastal cities. All of the above is observable and measurable now. The rates are increasing.
As if this isn't enough, there is growing evidence that the amount of warming that should be happening from rising CO2 levels is being masked by the diminishment of sunlight striking the Earth due to the particulate matter and aerosols that come with the burning of fossil fuels. One study has estimated the amount of sunlight reflected back into space is reducing the amount of warming by 30-50%. Now, this is only one study but there are sure to be more. If true, and you couple this with the amount of carbon in the pipeline that has not yet caused warming, then we are already about 3/4 of the way to 2C.
It's clear that humanity needs to work quickly to get to zero carbon emissions if we want to have a climate that resembles that of the holocene period. If we fail to do this, then we will have ended the stable, nurturing holocene and entered a new and dangerously unpredictable anthropocene period. And I am only occasionally given to hyperbole. This is not one of those times.
Currently we are at about 390 ppm CO2. In pre-industrial times, that number was 280. So we are experimenting with what happens when we add 40% more carbon and on our way to doubling it from pre-industrial levels well before the end of the century unless something is done to stop it. A doubling is certain to cause a catastrophic climate shift upwards of 5C (9F) or more, depending on where these trigger points lie. The current thinking is that a major trigger point could well be at 2C judging from the rapidity of the ice melt in the Artic and mountain glaciers with only a .8C temperature rise so far. What is feared is that, as the Artic Ocean turns to open water during the summer months, the albedo effect will cause runaway ocean water temperature rise that will in turn melt Greenland's massive ice sheet into the North Atlantic. In addition to this, because the blue ocean water absorbs more solar radiation and therefore more heat than ice does, that additional heat will contribute to further global temperature rise generally. It goes without saying that we could not stop this source of warming.
What the trigger point(s) mean is that, upon reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, a rise to 5C above pre-industrial levels would be more or less automatic. That is a probable equilibrium point for global climate. In the absence of additional major trigger points then that is likely where it would stay for thousands of years until the CO2 gets reabsorbed into natural carbon sinks like ocean water and plant life.
It is really beyond dispute among reasonable people that the temperature rise is caused by the burning of fossil fuels to power human economic activity. Those who say otherwise are saying so for economic or ideological reasons, and not for scientific ones. It is known well enough what impact increased CO2 has in the atmosphere. This particular property of CO2 (letting in solar radiation but absorbing heat radiation rising from the surface of the Earth) has been known since the 19th century. What is unknown are the particulars of how much carbon does what, or what other factors might exacerbate or mitigate the carbon effect. At some point I will write a post on the difference between skepticism and denial and demonstrate why the time for skepticism is over for climate change. Those who continue to question the veracity of anthropogenic global warming are denialists.
The widest scale on which to view the magnitude of our climate situation is to consider the following: the past 11,000 years, known as the holocene, have been the most stable climatic period in the history of the Earth. It just so happens to correspond to the period in which civilization has grown up. We cannot know how a climate shift northwards of 2C will have on every little piece of territory around the globe and how we could manage with the unpredictable weather that would come along with it. What we do know is that the hydrological cycles around the globe will be disrupted, with deserts expanding into places where food is now grown. We know that disappearing glaciers will have a devastating effect on agriculture in many of the most populated regions of the world. We know that increased CO2 concentrations in the air will increase it in the oceans, making the ocean water more acidic and harm and force into extinction a wide range of ocean species. Finally, we know that ocean levels are rising and will rise further as land ice from Greenland and Antarctica melt into the ocean, inundating coastal cities. All of the above is observable and measurable now. The rates are increasing.
As if this isn't enough, there is growing evidence that the amount of warming that should be happening from rising CO2 levels is being masked by the diminishment of sunlight striking the Earth due to the particulate matter and aerosols that come with the burning of fossil fuels. One study has estimated the amount of sunlight reflected back into space is reducing the amount of warming by 30-50%. Now, this is only one study but there are sure to be more. If true, and you couple this with the amount of carbon in the pipeline that has not yet caused warming, then we are already about 3/4 of the way to 2C.
It's clear that humanity needs to work quickly to get to zero carbon emissions if we want to have a climate that resembles that of the holocene period. If we fail to do this, then we will have ended the stable, nurturing holocene and entered a new and dangerously unpredictable anthropocene period. And I am only occasionally given to hyperbole. This is not one of those times.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Mother of all Technological Challenges
If it could be said that if there ever was a cultural constant in Western Civilization, it could be the idea of technological progress. Certainly, progress more generally, whether it's political or scientific, is the more fundamental mythos of the West, but technology has come to the fore in many ways as we collectively consider the replacement of energy sources by which to power the civilization in the future. The rub comes at the source of energy and it's place in the technological advances which have been made over the past several centuries. It is the first time we have ever faced the problem of replacing a concentrated source, like oil or coal, with one or several which are not concentrated and the most promising of said sources produce only electricity.
The technological challenge for scientists and engineers now in replacing oil and coal is to make up for what nature had already accomplished in concentrating the energy for us. This is fundamentally a problem of thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are perhaps the biggest bummer physics has to offer as it constitutes nothing less than the ultimate heat death of the universe at some distant date. The problems humanity faces now, though much smaller in scale, are related. The first law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law, called entropy, states that whenever energy changes form, from say chemical to electrical, some amount of the total energy is lost in the transformation through heat. It's why you have to repair things, like cars and shoes, and to reshingle the house. The energy leaving the system (your shoe) means that it is able to do less work, and more work from without is required to put it to rights again by fixing it.
Nature, over millions of years, did that for us in the case of fossil fuels and what was left was a highly concentrated energy source. In the case of oil, the remainder of the entropic process was a liquid hydrocarbon. That it is liquid is very crucial as that enables easier transport and to have a more finely tuned applications that occur in a car's engine. So far, the only replacement fuel even to make it to market, with bad results, is ethanol. The reasons for the bad results are many, but primarily it is due to the energy needed to gather and distill the source material (corn, grass, sugar cane) is so great that it nearly exceeds that which is produced from distillation and leaves us with little to no net energy gain.
The technology fix to this problem then has to climb the wall of millions of years of distillation in the ground in a matter of years. And make it economical. And scale it up to 85 million barrels a day over the course of oils decline plus 2% per year growth, perhaps only in a matter of a few decades. All to keep cars running. If this does not work in a meaningful way, we still have other options. We can gradually move to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids so that Americans and the world can own cars and not feel much disruption in style of life. To date, all-electric and hybrid cars are not cost competitive until the price of oil reaches the roughly 80-90 dollar range and above, at which point the economy starts to falter and makes a recession likely.
If we decide we can live without cars, then we could still go to electric rail in and between cities which has the advantage of being more fuel efficient than cars. The problem, in the U.S. especially, is that the rail system has atrophied to the point that we have virtually no passenger rail service anywhere in America with the capacity to replace even a fraction of automobile travel. So an enormous investment would need to be made into electric rail immediately to have something usable over the next two decades as our energy supply tightens.
The viable options economically for alternative sources of energy really only produce electricity and perhaps heat in the case of geothermal energy. This is very important and we should be building the infrastructure to accommodate this new means of power generation. Ultimately, the trick may be in running our economies and societies entirely on electricity. What that would look like is hard to say. The implications are tremendous but not wholly undesirable. Much can be done with electricity and it's hard to imagine life without it.
Probably, this problem of oil depletion can be dealt with in a humane way and still enable humanity a prosperous future. If it weren't for the specter of global warming and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If we had the freedom to burn all the fossil fuels we are able to without permanent damage to the climate and our ability to live in it, then I'd say oil depletion is surmountable. But it is not an isolated problem. It is a central factor to many other problems that have to be negotiated concurrently. The thermodynamic challenges to replacing fossil fuels will guide our decisions over the coming decades about what is possible and what should be given up as impossible or not worth the trouble. Two issues that this subject leads into is climate change and ecological overshoot, which is what makes these problems so vexing. So these will be the next features in the "Mother" series of posts. Ciao.
The technological challenge for scientists and engineers now in replacing oil and coal is to make up for what nature had already accomplished in concentrating the energy for us. This is fundamentally a problem of thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are perhaps the biggest bummer physics has to offer as it constitutes nothing less than the ultimate heat death of the universe at some distant date. The problems humanity faces now, though much smaller in scale, are related. The first law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law, called entropy, states that whenever energy changes form, from say chemical to electrical, some amount of the total energy is lost in the transformation through heat. It's why you have to repair things, like cars and shoes, and to reshingle the house. The energy leaving the system (your shoe) means that it is able to do less work, and more work from without is required to put it to rights again by fixing it.
Nature, over millions of years, did that for us in the case of fossil fuels and what was left was a highly concentrated energy source. In the case of oil, the remainder of the entropic process was a liquid hydrocarbon. That it is liquid is very crucial as that enables easier transport and to have a more finely tuned applications that occur in a car's engine. So far, the only replacement fuel even to make it to market, with bad results, is ethanol. The reasons for the bad results are many, but primarily it is due to the energy needed to gather and distill the source material (corn, grass, sugar cane) is so great that it nearly exceeds that which is produced from distillation and leaves us with little to no net energy gain.
The technology fix to this problem then has to climb the wall of millions of years of distillation in the ground in a matter of years. And make it economical. And scale it up to 85 million barrels a day over the course of oils decline plus 2% per year growth, perhaps only in a matter of a few decades. All to keep cars running. If this does not work in a meaningful way, we still have other options. We can gradually move to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids so that Americans and the world can own cars and not feel much disruption in style of life. To date, all-electric and hybrid cars are not cost competitive until the price of oil reaches the roughly 80-90 dollar range and above, at which point the economy starts to falter and makes a recession likely.
If we decide we can live without cars, then we could still go to electric rail in and between cities which has the advantage of being more fuel efficient than cars. The problem, in the U.S. especially, is that the rail system has atrophied to the point that we have virtually no passenger rail service anywhere in America with the capacity to replace even a fraction of automobile travel. So an enormous investment would need to be made into electric rail immediately to have something usable over the next two decades as our energy supply tightens.
The viable options economically for alternative sources of energy really only produce electricity and perhaps heat in the case of geothermal energy. This is very important and we should be building the infrastructure to accommodate this new means of power generation. Ultimately, the trick may be in running our economies and societies entirely on electricity. What that would look like is hard to say. The implications are tremendous but not wholly undesirable. Much can be done with electricity and it's hard to imagine life without it.
Probably, this problem of oil depletion can be dealt with in a humane way and still enable humanity a prosperous future. If it weren't for the specter of global warming and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If we had the freedom to burn all the fossil fuels we are able to without permanent damage to the climate and our ability to live in it, then I'd say oil depletion is surmountable. But it is not an isolated problem. It is a central factor to many other problems that have to be negotiated concurrently. The thermodynamic challenges to replacing fossil fuels will guide our decisions over the coming decades about what is possible and what should be given up as impossible or not worth the trouble. Two issues that this subject leads into is climate change and ecological overshoot, which is what makes these problems so vexing. So these will be the next features in the "Mother" series of posts. Ciao.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Mother of All Economic Problems
A distinction people often fail to make is that between a prediction and a forecast. For someone who is, or claims to be, good at making predictions normally does so about very specific occurrences within a short time in the future. Forecasting is a different beast altogether, though it naturally pertains to the future. Forecasting is based on probabilities conditioned on whether or not something happens and it's relative effect on the forecast. For example: If the American consumer is feeling a little cocksure this holiday season, then we may avoid a post-holiday earnings slump in the market and reduce the chance of a double dip recession in 2010. If not, well.... I like to think of this in terms of shapes or forces shaping or forming the conditions under which we will likely be living under as a number of forces already underway impose themselves on human life.
I'd like to pick up where I abruptly left off in the last post on the subject of Peak Oil. Observers of this phenomenon have varied opinions about the impact declining oil production would have on the economy. The range is from a free market juggernaut into renewable energy technology that would fuel further economic growth on the one extreme to a decades-long decline into a post-industrial civilization that resembles more the pre-industrial civilization of our great-grandparents childhood. Whatever the case, nobody would dispute the importance of oil (energy) to economic activity and it's central role in industrial civilization. You could reduce these wildly divergent views to a continuum of the effects technology has on economic prosperity on one side and the role and nature of energy as a precondition for technological capacity on the other. To put it more simply, you could ask whether or not machine technology as we have today would be possible without fossil fuels. Are there replacement fuels we can harness from nature that could enable continued industrial prosperity? If indeed the peak of oil production has occurred then we shall find out sooner rather than later.
A way to peer into the madhouse of future narratives is to consider the energy side of the continuum and look at alternatives. The most developed alternative energy sources are by far wind and solar and to a lesser extent geothermal. Others, such as those used to make liquid fuels, like cellulosic ethanol or biogas, are not very close to marketable scale and quite possibly, won't ever be for reasons I'll get to in a moment. So the most promising replacements produce only electricity. This is useful to replace coal, the leading greenhouse gas emitter, but it won't do to run our cars on any time soon.
The global economy has just recently suffered the most serious downturn since the Great Depression and the prospects of a full recovery look shaky at best, especially since the de facto default of the Dubai World fund announced on Thursday. Whatever happens with this is certainly up for debate, but it brings up the relationship between energy and money. I've talked a little bit about this subject before, but I want to introduce some new observations that should be kept in mind. One immediate effect of the announcement was a significant drop in the price of oil. Probably, though I don't know for sure the most salient causes, the price fell for either or both of the following reasons. The first is that there was some need to raise money by some major party to pay off a contract that was hedged against an oil contract. The other is that, in the panic that followed Dubai's default, the perception reigned that the global economy would suffer, thus reducing demand for oil, in which case the price will drop.
I bring this up because it leads to a paper by a physicist who linked economic growth to energy consumption. The paper claims that all growth is directly and unremittingly tied to energy use by that economy. He even put a number on it: 9.97 watts of energy per 1990 constant dollar. This has yet to be peer reviewed so the question of it's accuracy or utility has to be determined, but it quantifies what many of those who believe that the peaking of oil production will be disasterous for the economy. If this idea holds up, it would be a simple matter to do pretty accurate calculations on how the economy will perform in a reduced energy scenario.
If a reduced energy scenario is an inevitable effect of reduced oil production and consumption. One of the concerns I have with a calculation like the one of this physicist is that it makes no distinction between types or sources of energy or the net energy principle. A replacement for oil must have certain shared qualities with oil before we can be certain of maintaining the kind of economic activity we in the U.S. are accustomed to enjoying(?). It must be cheap, portable, and pack an energy punch that can literally move mountains to continue the kind of mining operations and operate all the transportation needs of our economy. This is the kind of challenge the, what I will call, techno-optimists embrace. But sources of energy are at the heart of this problem, and the economic viability of these liquid fuel alternatives are where these things could get derailed.
Looking ahead, then, and to reintroduce the timeline, the declining production of oil could very well be accompanied by a commensurate decline in economic well-being. This need not be disasterous, but the possibilty that it could be disasterous cannot be ruled out. Whether the oil production peak can be definitively declared remains to be seen, but chances are, depending on whether we continue an economic recession, or a depression, we will know for sure within the next five years. To compare, the peaking of global gold production happened eleven years ago and it took until this year for there to be full acknowledgement of the fact by the gold mining industry. People in the oil industry will no doubt behave in a similar fashion, as it is psychologically difficult to admit that the means by which you earn your living has limits. I suspect that the acknowledgement will only come after the production limits are again reached, as they were in 2005-2008, and then there will be another recession.
Next week I will talk about the technology question and some of the forecasts and views of the techno-optimists, the viabilty of these as currently understood, and how the arguments of the Dark Greens foil their optimism. Cheers.
I'd like to pick up where I abruptly left off in the last post on the subject of Peak Oil. Observers of this phenomenon have varied opinions about the impact declining oil production would have on the economy. The range is from a free market juggernaut into renewable energy technology that would fuel further economic growth on the one extreme to a decades-long decline into a post-industrial civilization that resembles more the pre-industrial civilization of our great-grandparents childhood. Whatever the case, nobody would dispute the importance of oil (energy) to economic activity and it's central role in industrial civilization. You could reduce these wildly divergent views to a continuum of the effects technology has on economic prosperity on one side and the role and nature of energy as a precondition for technological capacity on the other. To put it more simply, you could ask whether or not machine technology as we have today would be possible without fossil fuels. Are there replacement fuels we can harness from nature that could enable continued industrial prosperity? If indeed the peak of oil production has occurred then we shall find out sooner rather than later.
A way to peer into the madhouse of future narratives is to consider the energy side of the continuum and look at alternatives. The most developed alternative energy sources are by far wind and solar and to a lesser extent geothermal. Others, such as those used to make liquid fuels, like cellulosic ethanol or biogas, are not very close to marketable scale and quite possibly, won't ever be for reasons I'll get to in a moment. So the most promising replacements produce only electricity. This is useful to replace coal, the leading greenhouse gas emitter, but it won't do to run our cars on any time soon.
The global economy has just recently suffered the most serious downturn since the Great Depression and the prospects of a full recovery look shaky at best, especially since the de facto default of the Dubai World fund announced on Thursday. Whatever happens with this is certainly up for debate, but it brings up the relationship between energy and money. I've talked a little bit about this subject before, but I want to introduce some new observations that should be kept in mind. One immediate effect of the announcement was a significant drop in the price of oil. Probably, though I don't know for sure the most salient causes, the price fell for either or both of the following reasons. The first is that there was some need to raise money by some major party to pay off a contract that was hedged against an oil contract. The other is that, in the panic that followed Dubai's default, the perception reigned that the global economy would suffer, thus reducing demand for oil, in which case the price will drop.
I bring this up because it leads to a paper by a physicist who linked economic growth to energy consumption. The paper claims that all growth is directly and unremittingly tied to energy use by that economy. He even put a number on it: 9.97 watts of energy per 1990 constant dollar. This has yet to be peer reviewed so the question of it's accuracy or utility has to be determined, but it quantifies what many of those who believe that the peaking of oil production will be disasterous for the economy. If this idea holds up, it would be a simple matter to do pretty accurate calculations on how the economy will perform in a reduced energy scenario.
If a reduced energy scenario is an inevitable effect of reduced oil production and consumption. One of the concerns I have with a calculation like the one of this physicist is that it makes no distinction between types or sources of energy or the net energy principle. A replacement for oil must have certain shared qualities with oil before we can be certain of maintaining the kind of economic activity we in the U.S. are accustomed to enjoying(?). It must be cheap, portable, and pack an energy punch that can literally move mountains to continue the kind of mining operations and operate all the transportation needs of our economy. This is the kind of challenge the, what I will call, techno-optimists embrace. But sources of energy are at the heart of this problem, and the economic viability of these liquid fuel alternatives are where these things could get derailed.
Looking ahead, then, and to reintroduce the timeline, the declining production of oil could very well be accompanied by a commensurate decline in economic well-being. This need not be disasterous, but the possibilty that it could be disasterous cannot be ruled out. Whether the oil production peak can be definitively declared remains to be seen, but chances are, depending on whether we continue an economic recession, or a depression, we will know for sure within the next five years. To compare, the peaking of global gold production happened eleven years ago and it took until this year for there to be full acknowledgement of the fact by the gold mining industry. People in the oil industry will no doubt behave in a similar fashion, as it is psychologically difficult to admit that the means by which you earn your living has limits. I suspect that the acknowledgement will only come after the production limits are again reached, as they were in 2005-2008, and then there will be another recession.
Next week I will talk about the technology question and some of the forecasts and views of the techno-optimists, the viabilty of these as currently understood, and how the arguments of the Dark Greens foil their optimism. Cheers.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
What is the Future?
It is fair to say, judging from the subjects and the tone of my posts, that the nature and predisposition of this blogger is one of doom and gloom. Abandon ye all hope who enters this new epoch of relentless decline and unimaginable suffering, I seem to be saying. Realizing this, and not necessarily disagreeing since I would largely be disagreeing with an imaginary arguer, I think it is time to write on what I think the probable future might hold for us as humans and as Americans. I will devote the next several posts to this.
Despite what some might say, everybody has some capacity to gage what is likely to happen in some measure of time and I believe we do this on a daily basis in some small way. It is a feature of the human mind to do this. Whether or not we get it exactly right is less important than getting it mostly right. This is why the gut feeling can work most of the time for most people since we don't usually demand or require much precision. But this more immediate intuitive sense for events or people needs information from or in addition to experience in order to have any accuracy at all. Babies, for example, don't have any intuition or sense of the future since they lack experience. Adults, on the other hand, and if we're lucky, have an ability to anticipate what someone will do, or what will happen if this or that occurs and therefore has a capacity to foresee outcomes with some degree of accuracy. It is a probability exercise and that is what I want to try to do now.
Probably the first question people ask when considering an issue like global warming, the peaking of global oil production, or economic collapse is "when will it happen?" (That is, if they haven't already decided that it's all a bunch of baloney). But this question is an excellent place to start and forging a rough timeline is a good way to provide a platform for discussion. The next question is, or should be, how do you know things will happen like this? The answer to this question is where all the heavy lifting lies. Because, in order to get at why we, or I, think or believe something is about to happen, we inevitably have to get at what we think is more or less real, and how do we know that.
Plenty of forecasts of various sorts and points of view are out there to be read regarding the impacts of all sorts of things. As I said in my third post, I consider the impacts of climate change, peak oil and other resource limits, and population growth to be the prime shapers the collective future. These are what happen to be the most predictable occurrences, though these too have a range of probability. What is not so easily predicted is the responses, reactions, and behavior of people as these phenomena bear down on them. The ways in which we will understand and experience the impact is through economics, societal shifts/disruptions, and government. People will, in turn, respond in ways that will be formed by whomever they happen to be, with whatever they carry with them, as events unfold. It may be the prime motivation of these blogs to at least inform people enough so that it doesn't come as a shock or surprise as they try to find some way to understand what is happening to the world.
Everything I've said up to now has perhaps been colored with a sense of urgency. I want to elucidate. I believe that there is time to adequately respond to these dilemmas we face. On the other hand, I am not confident we will do so adequately. We have a dual problem. One is of leadership. The other is of followership. The problem each has is the same: Neither is thinking about a future much beyond their own personal futures. Neither is positioned to consider longer term events that are increasingly intractable over time. The consequences of soil erosion, for example, rarely if ever gets mentioned in the media, let alone at the dinner table. And what does get mentioned, such as climate change, is so mired in the politics of ignorance and the election cycle, quarterly revenue reports style thinking that it is effectively kicked down the road or compromised in the meat grinder of Congress so that nothing meaningful comes from any measures taken.
The problem of oil depletion as the peak of global production is reached is the most immediate, most urgent condition we will have to contend with. Personally, I believe that the peak has been reached and we will be faced, from here on out, with declining production. This has indeed been the case since July of 2008. It is still not yet possible to tell for certain whether it has declined for geological reasons due to the mother of all recessions. Oil demand always drops during a recession so it comes as no surprise that production would decline as well. What is telling is that production hasn't grown from 2005 to the present despite increasing demand. That has never happened before. This is what gives me my sense of urgency. No one publicly behaves as though this is, or even might possibly be, the case.
The next post will address the time line of events starting with the oil situation.
Despite what some might say, everybody has some capacity to gage what is likely to happen in some measure of time and I believe we do this on a daily basis in some small way. It is a feature of the human mind to do this. Whether or not we get it exactly right is less important than getting it mostly right. This is why the gut feeling can work most of the time for most people since we don't usually demand or require much precision. But this more immediate intuitive sense for events or people needs information from or in addition to experience in order to have any accuracy at all. Babies, for example, don't have any intuition or sense of the future since they lack experience. Adults, on the other hand, and if we're lucky, have an ability to anticipate what someone will do, or what will happen if this or that occurs and therefore has a capacity to foresee outcomes with some degree of accuracy. It is a probability exercise and that is what I want to try to do now.
Probably the first question people ask when considering an issue like global warming, the peaking of global oil production, or economic collapse is "when will it happen?" (That is, if they haven't already decided that it's all a bunch of baloney). But this question is an excellent place to start and forging a rough timeline is a good way to provide a platform for discussion. The next question is, or should be, how do you know things will happen like this? The answer to this question is where all the heavy lifting lies. Because, in order to get at why we, or I, think or believe something is about to happen, we inevitably have to get at what we think is more or less real, and how do we know that.
Plenty of forecasts of various sorts and points of view are out there to be read regarding the impacts of all sorts of things. As I said in my third post, I consider the impacts of climate change, peak oil and other resource limits, and population growth to be the prime shapers the collective future. These are what happen to be the most predictable occurrences, though these too have a range of probability. What is not so easily predicted is the responses, reactions, and behavior of people as these phenomena bear down on them. The ways in which we will understand and experience the impact is through economics, societal shifts/disruptions, and government. People will, in turn, respond in ways that will be formed by whomever they happen to be, with whatever they carry with them, as events unfold. It may be the prime motivation of these blogs to at least inform people enough so that it doesn't come as a shock or surprise as they try to find some way to understand what is happening to the world.
Everything I've said up to now has perhaps been colored with a sense of urgency. I want to elucidate. I believe that there is time to adequately respond to these dilemmas we face. On the other hand, I am not confident we will do so adequately. We have a dual problem. One is of leadership. The other is of followership. The problem each has is the same: Neither is thinking about a future much beyond their own personal futures. Neither is positioned to consider longer term events that are increasingly intractable over time. The consequences of soil erosion, for example, rarely if ever gets mentioned in the media, let alone at the dinner table. And what does get mentioned, such as climate change, is so mired in the politics of ignorance and the election cycle, quarterly revenue reports style thinking that it is effectively kicked down the road or compromised in the meat grinder of Congress so that nothing meaningful comes from any measures taken.
The problem of oil depletion as the peak of global production is reached is the most immediate, most urgent condition we will have to contend with. Personally, I believe that the peak has been reached and we will be faced, from here on out, with declining production. This has indeed been the case since July of 2008. It is still not yet possible to tell for certain whether it has declined for geological reasons due to the mother of all recessions. Oil demand always drops during a recession so it comes as no surprise that production would decline as well. What is telling is that production hasn't grown from 2005 to the present despite increasing demand. That has never happened before. This is what gives me my sense of urgency. No one publicly behaves as though this is, or even might possibly be, the case.
The next post will address the time line of events starting with the oil situation.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
International Intrigue
Despite my thoroughgoing rethink of the last two posts in which I sought to conclude the argument to a single, devastating point about our condition, I then read John Michael Greer's The Archdruid Report and saw that he had made the point that eluded me. In "A Gesture from the Invisible Hand" he provides the linkage between the American debt economy, the financialized post seventies pyramid scheme economy that struggles so today, and the peaking of American oil production. And it only took one word, and two readings, to allow me to see what I wanted to write about those two posts. The word is "capital". Primarily, the behavior of capital and what it might look like as energy scarcity becomes the norm for the world economy. You can read it all here: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/gesture-from-invisible-hand.html. This is not the subject I wish to write about as such but what I want to do dovetails nicely off of what he says.
Greer describes the activity of capital in general terms over the decades after the 1972 peak of oil production in America. He is hypothesizing here, but the behavior of money generally is to find the best return on investment. At this point, a sea change occurred in U.S. investment patterns. Our old friend diminishing return on investment comes into play for reasons that capital understands but does not really acknowledge. As the amount of energy needed to acquire energy grows, the less energy there is available for use in the economy. One effect is for energy to become more expensive in monetary terms, but it also makes the financial returns diminish over time because expensive oil causes economic recession. The effect is a disinvestment in productive capacities and infrastrucure. This is a slow process but it has been occurring upwards of four decades. We are seeing now that the Wall Street banks and the financial sector generally are bigger relative to the whole economy and the oil companies, among other sectors, are shrinking, either elatively or absolutely. Capital flees from these investments and the economy as a whole becomes more paper, less production.
That is a very rough sketch, but it serves to bring up the related topic of oil production globally and what we can expect to happen when the inevitable peak is upon us, which it may already be.
And this brings me to the second aspect of my post: A story in The Guardian of London on Nov. 9 which reports on a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency making the claim that the United States is pressuring the Agency to inflate it's global oil reserves estimates and lowering the rates at which existing oil fields are depleting. Oof. Now, the statements of a whistleblower can be taken as apocryphal as their motives might not be necessarily to reveal the truth. But it just so happens to echo what outside analysts, generally known as "Peak Oilers" have been insisting to be the case within the IEA for quite some time. In addition to this, the Agency has been steadily lowering it's forecasts for global oil production, one of it's central purview's, in it's annual reports over the last couple of years, seeming to legitimaize Peak Olier claims.
The purported reason for this, the IEA's cover-up of the real supply of oil, is because of it's foreseen impact on the oil markets. According to the whistleblower, the IEA feared panic buying of oil by nations and a return to the prices we saw in 2008. And so they should be afraid, because that is surely what would happen, And the United States, by far the most dependant on cheap oil of any nation (though not by any means the only one), would suffer tremendously as it tries to reflate it's economy in the midst of the worst recession since World War II. It's no mystery what an oil price in the range of what we saw in 2008 would do to the efforts by policymakers to patch up the creaking timbers of the American banking system and consumer driven economy: It would destroy those efforts and launch us into a worse recession than the one we are attempting to emerge from currently.
What all this makes me think is that, absent particular circumstances, capitalism is a frail thing. Markets can flourish in good times, but when it's bad, they tend not to get the job done. Assuming for a moment that what this whistleblower says is true, then it speaks volumes about how desperate the U.S. must be to hush inconvenient data. Perhaps it's faith in the market to find the best solution for any and all problems is not so genuinely felt. Seen in another way, it might be that the U.S. may not like the solution the market provides. It may be that the market economy, with it's deservedly touted capacity to command resources like no other system, is not so well suited to handle a situation in which resources are no longer available to be commanded. The implications are profound. The solution may come in a devastating form.
It cannot be exaggerated how critical oil and the other fossil fuels are to industrial economies (and no, we are not in a post-industrial economy). As of this writing, there is no other viable source of energy we can turn to to run them. There is no shadow means of production powered by something other than fossil fuels. Oil is the supreme fuel. Without it, not much else can happen. If we are indeed, as a species, as a civilization, entering the terminal decline phase of oil, then our options become very limited. Gone will be the sense that the future is full of delicious possibilities for human endeavor. We will have to out of necessity think much smaller and much more realistically about what we collectively face. It will be a time to make painful decisions about what is worth preserving of the things we value. We'll have to engage in the art of the possible and dispense with the childish notion that we can do or have anything we want.
To put an historical label on it, I would describe the transition we face as the Age of Abundance meets the Age of Limits. A lot of grief will follow as people are forced to make do with less. If the actions of the U.S. serve to demonstrate the stages of grief, denial being the first, then what happened in the IEA signals where we are better than anything could.
Greer describes the activity of capital in general terms over the decades after the 1972 peak of oil production in America. He is hypothesizing here, but the behavior of money generally is to find the best return on investment. At this point, a sea change occurred in U.S. investment patterns. Our old friend diminishing return on investment comes into play for reasons that capital understands but does not really acknowledge. As the amount of energy needed to acquire energy grows, the less energy there is available for use in the economy. One effect is for energy to become more expensive in monetary terms, but it also makes the financial returns diminish over time because expensive oil causes economic recession. The effect is a disinvestment in productive capacities and infrastrucure. This is a slow process but it has been occurring upwards of four decades. We are seeing now that the Wall Street banks and the financial sector generally are bigger relative to the whole economy and the oil companies, among other sectors, are shrinking, either elatively or absolutely. Capital flees from these investments and the economy as a whole becomes more paper, less production.
That is a very rough sketch, but it serves to bring up the related topic of oil production globally and what we can expect to happen when the inevitable peak is upon us, which it may already be.
And this brings me to the second aspect of my post: A story in The Guardian of London on Nov. 9 which reports on a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency making the claim that the United States is pressuring the Agency to inflate it's global oil reserves estimates and lowering the rates at which existing oil fields are depleting. Oof. Now, the statements of a whistleblower can be taken as apocryphal as their motives might not be necessarily to reveal the truth. But it just so happens to echo what outside analysts, generally known as "Peak Oilers" have been insisting to be the case within the IEA for quite some time. In addition to this, the Agency has been steadily lowering it's forecasts for global oil production, one of it's central purview's, in it's annual reports over the last couple of years, seeming to legitimaize Peak Olier claims.
The purported reason for this, the IEA's cover-up of the real supply of oil, is because of it's foreseen impact on the oil markets. According to the whistleblower, the IEA feared panic buying of oil by nations and a return to the prices we saw in 2008. And so they should be afraid, because that is surely what would happen, And the United States, by far the most dependant on cheap oil of any nation (though not by any means the only one), would suffer tremendously as it tries to reflate it's economy in the midst of the worst recession since World War II. It's no mystery what an oil price in the range of what we saw in 2008 would do to the efforts by policymakers to patch up the creaking timbers of the American banking system and consumer driven economy: It would destroy those efforts and launch us into a worse recession than the one we are attempting to emerge from currently.
What all this makes me think is that, absent particular circumstances, capitalism is a frail thing. Markets can flourish in good times, but when it's bad, they tend not to get the job done. Assuming for a moment that what this whistleblower says is true, then it speaks volumes about how desperate the U.S. must be to hush inconvenient data. Perhaps it's faith in the market to find the best solution for any and all problems is not so genuinely felt. Seen in another way, it might be that the U.S. may not like the solution the market provides. It may be that the market economy, with it's deservedly touted capacity to command resources like no other system, is not so well suited to handle a situation in which resources are no longer available to be commanded. The implications are profound. The solution may come in a devastating form.
It cannot be exaggerated how critical oil and the other fossil fuels are to industrial economies (and no, we are not in a post-industrial economy). As of this writing, there is no other viable source of energy we can turn to to run them. There is no shadow means of production powered by something other than fossil fuels. Oil is the supreme fuel. Without it, not much else can happen. If we are indeed, as a species, as a civilization, entering the terminal decline phase of oil, then our options become very limited. Gone will be the sense that the future is full of delicious possibilities for human endeavor. We will have to out of necessity think much smaller and much more realistically about what we collectively face. It will be a time to make painful decisions about what is worth preserving of the things we value. We'll have to engage in the art of the possible and dispense with the childish notion that we can do or have anything we want.
To put an historical label on it, I would describe the transition we face as the Age of Abundance meets the Age of Limits. A lot of grief will follow as people are forced to make do with less. If the actions of the U.S. serve to demonstrate the stages of grief, denial being the first, then what happened in the IEA signals where we are better than anything could.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
More America the Delusional
The question I asked myself in the last post, and which I had to reconsider the answer, was why is all the debt in the U.S. necessary. I did not ask why do we have it. I asked why is it necessary? A fair response might be: Is it really necessary at all? And I'd say no, not much beyond eating, breathing, and procreating could truly be called necessary. But, if one is an empire looking to continue it's life as one, then eventually debt becomes necessary to meet that end.
As I was writing the original post on Sunday, I found myself falling into the same political argument that the rest of the nation is having. One reason I started writing this blog was to offer a way out of the political gridlock the country is currently experiencing. So rather than dive into the Free-market Austrian school vs. the centralized Keynesian death match, the fruitless freedom vs. socialism clusterfuck, I want to move to a different, more insightful, and critical discussion of what has faced any dominant power in world history and what faces Americans today.
Debt has been the burden that breaks the back of empire throughout history. (I use empire, though you could insert "superpower" or "dominant power" in it's place and it would mean the same thing. I choose to use empire because it has a simpler, classic dimension that puts current events into a broader historical framework.) Inflation is a natural response for debt ladened empires as they seek to cover the increasing costs of their imperial obligations. Typically, as empires are in their expansionary phases, these costs of administering, garrisoning, and legitimizing their rule can be paid for through further expansion. So it has been that the empire puts forth tremendous effort to conquer it's neighbors and the conquered are the ones made to pay for the privilege. However, once the expansionary phase has ended, then the empire has only it's inerior resources to rely on to balance the books. Over time, this becomes harder and harder to do.
A survey of some past empires provides us with examples. Rome, the Spanish Hapsburgs, and the English all underwent clear diminishment of the benefits they received from their imperial holdings as the costs of maintaining empires rose. Mainly, the costs were military, as rebellious subjects had to be suppressed or greedy rivals looked to snatch a land or two away. Military spending is especially inflationary because the money for wars is often borrowed and goes to no economically productive purpose. The debts start to build as it becomes harder to keep all the different parts of the empire in order. There are two basic strategies for dealing with imperial debt. One is to inflate the currency and the other is to tax your citizens. Usually both are employed. So the Roman peasant of 400 CE becomes the disaffected Roman subject unable to meet his own needs and the needs of the imperium. A glance at the Spanish and English colonial empires and the same trend is revealed. Eventually, the system becomes brittle and unable to withstand shocks to it, either from within or without, and collapse occurs.
This is a simple way of introducing complexity. I wrote about this in a previous post so you can refer to that for details on how this happens. I would also recommend Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" to get a fuller appreciation of how this operates. Now it's time to apply this to contemporary America in the throes of a debt deflation and ongoing recession/depression as well as in the midst of war and occupation of far away lands.
First, though, a definition of what I mean by collapse. Tainter calls collapse a reduction of a society from a higher to a lower order of complexity. You can look at it as layers of a pyramid, or ovals in a flow chart, and see that the more parts to a system the more complext it is. Simple enough, but each layer added to the pyramid requires an investment of energy by that society in order to solve problems that are unique to it's experience and requires special attention. So a collpase occurs when the highest orders of complexity cannot be maintained anymore and have to be abandoned. Centralized structures decentralize as the gains from the structures are no longer available. This all sounds innocent enough until you look at the population decline of Europe after the fall of Rome, or of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are not good times. People die in large numbers.
Now a look at the U.S. situation. What does any of this have to do with the here and now? Isn't America special that way? I will respond in this way: Show me a man living in these above mentioned empires who raised the warning flag about impending collapse and I'll show you a man who was not listened to. If anyone did take note of the diminished fortunes of his empire it was probably quite late in the game. Having said that, I think it would not be controversial to say that 21st century America, the globalized economy it sits at the center of, the administration of it's affairs overseen by countless governmental, non-governmental, or extra-governmental, the size of modern day corporations, the trade arrangements that are the heart of a globalized economy, the technology used in everything from entertainment, medicine, and the military, is the most complex society ever in the entire history of humankind. We have to ask ourselves "how does it all run?" and "how can we ever pay for it?" It seems likely to me that we cannot pay for it. It is why we borrow money from everyone from China to ourselves and from the future. I would pose this question then: Where are we at in the stages of empire? If all empires resort to borrowing at the end of there lives, what are we doing now? What should we be doing?
To finish, I'll say this: The U.S. has been accruing debt for several decades now. It is not doing so because of corruption, though that occurs. It is not doing so because of welfare for poor people. It is not doing so because of bad economic policies, though these have certainly been implemented. It is doing so not because the logic it follows is economic. It does so because it follows the logic of power.
Reality Report interview on the Maximum Power Principle.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/nate_hagens_and_the_maximum_power_principle
As I was writing the original post on Sunday, I found myself falling into the same political argument that the rest of the nation is having. One reason I started writing this blog was to offer a way out of the political gridlock the country is currently experiencing. So rather than dive into the Free-market Austrian school vs. the centralized Keynesian death match, the fruitless freedom vs. socialism clusterfuck, I want to move to a different, more insightful, and critical discussion of what has faced any dominant power in world history and what faces Americans today.
Debt has been the burden that breaks the back of empire throughout history. (I use empire, though you could insert "superpower" or "dominant power" in it's place and it would mean the same thing. I choose to use empire because it has a simpler, classic dimension that puts current events into a broader historical framework.) Inflation is a natural response for debt ladened empires as they seek to cover the increasing costs of their imperial obligations. Typically, as empires are in their expansionary phases, these costs of administering, garrisoning, and legitimizing their rule can be paid for through further expansion. So it has been that the empire puts forth tremendous effort to conquer it's neighbors and the conquered are the ones made to pay for the privilege. However, once the expansionary phase has ended, then the empire has only it's inerior resources to rely on to balance the books. Over time, this becomes harder and harder to do.
A survey of some past empires provides us with examples. Rome, the Spanish Hapsburgs, and the English all underwent clear diminishment of the benefits they received from their imperial holdings as the costs of maintaining empires rose. Mainly, the costs were military, as rebellious subjects had to be suppressed or greedy rivals looked to snatch a land or two away. Military spending is especially inflationary because the money for wars is often borrowed and goes to no economically productive purpose. The debts start to build as it becomes harder to keep all the different parts of the empire in order. There are two basic strategies for dealing with imperial debt. One is to inflate the currency and the other is to tax your citizens. Usually both are employed. So the Roman peasant of 400 CE becomes the disaffected Roman subject unable to meet his own needs and the needs of the imperium. A glance at the Spanish and English colonial empires and the same trend is revealed. Eventually, the system becomes brittle and unable to withstand shocks to it, either from within or without, and collapse occurs.
This is a simple way of introducing complexity. I wrote about this in a previous post so you can refer to that for details on how this happens. I would also recommend Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" to get a fuller appreciation of how this operates. Now it's time to apply this to contemporary America in the throes of a debt deflation and ongoing recession/depression as well as in the midst of war and occupation of far away lands.
First, though, a definition of what I mean by collapse. Tainter calls collapse a reduction of a society from a higher to a lower order of complexity. You can look at it as layers of a pyramid, or ovals in a flow chart, and see that the more parts to a system the more complext it is. Simple enough, but each layer added to the pyramid requires an investment of energy by that society in order to solve problems that are unique to it's experience and requires special attention. So a collpase occurs when the highest orders of complexity cannot be maintained anymore and have to be abandoned. Centralized structures decentralize as the gains from the structures are no longer available. This all sounds innocent enough until you look at the population decline of Europe after the fall of Rome, or of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are not good times. People die in large numbers.
Now a look at the U.S. situation. What does any of this have to do with the here and now? Isn't America special that way? I will respond in this way: Show me a man living in these above mentioned empires who raised the warning flag about impending collapse and I'll show you a man who was not listened to. If anyone did take note of the diminished fortunes of his empire it was probably quite late in the game. Having said that, I think it would not be controversial to say that 21st century America, the globalized economy it sits at the center of, the administration of it's affairs overseen by countless governmental, non-governmental, or extra-governmental, the size of modern day corporations, the trade arrangements that are the heart of a globalized economy, the technology used in everything from entertainment, medicine, and the military, is the most complex society ever in the entire history of humankind. We have to ask ourselves "how does it all run?" and "how can we ever pay for it?" It seems likely to me that we cannot pay for it. It is why we borrow money from everyone from China to ourselves and from the future. I would pose this question then: Where are we at in the stages of empire? If all empires resort to borrowing at the end of there lives, what are we doing now? What should we be doing?
To finish, I'll say this: The U.S. has been accruing debt for several decades now. It is not doing so because of corruption, though that occurs. It is not doing so because of welfare for poor people. It is not doing so because of bad economic policies, though these have certainly been implemented. It is doing so not because the logic it follows is economic. It does so because it follows the logic of power.
Reality Report interview on the Maximum Power Principle.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/nate_hagens_and_the_maximum_power_principle
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Overwhelmed by the Subject
The promised post on why debt is necessary for the U.S. economy will have to wait until later. I have run out of wakefulness and still haven't narrowed the subject down to a five paragraph post.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
America the Delusional
If nothing else, the housing market crash and the ensuing credit meltdown and debt deflation signifies the extent to which Americans had come to believe that you can get something for nothing. Believing money really is some sort of cosmic force all on it's own, obeying the metaphysical laws specific to it that had been harnessed by a bunch of people in suits living in Manhattan might have been the foundational delusion. This was widely believed. Rather, it was narrowly believed and widely believed in as so much depended on the veracity of this new dimension of money. Long ago, back in the 1980's under the Reagan Administration, it was decided that the nation's power and prestige, it's ability to fight and win the Cold War, and the expansion of the American economy would be entrusted to Wall Street. Guided by the beacon of enlightened self-interest, Wall Street would take the nation and the world to new heights of unimaginable wealth for the people of the world as economic growth would over time solve any problem that came along. Morning in America. Everything is going to be outstanding. Who has time to be miserable when you are so busily getting rich, after all? And if you just so happen to be miserable you have only yourself to blame.
Optimism turns delusional when it tries to maintain a consensus reality in the face of new conditions deleterious to that reality. Americans have been feasting on a buffet of optimism since the end of the Cold War. Certain of the superiority of our system, moral or otherwise, the nation set about aggressively exporting the American model to the rest of the world, much of which had just been freed from the dreary, dull authoritarian socialists. The lesson taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union was essentially that free societies will prevail over the non-free. More specifically, and more importantly, the free market will prevail over the centrally controlled markets. Translated into politics, it meant the free market knows best and the government knows nothing. Until recently, it was well nigh impossible to pitch an argument against this victorious ideology that could get a hearing anywhere. Now, it would seem, the fate of the American economy would largely depend on whether the American economy is the best (only?) development model.
It behooves us to wonder whether the American model is even possible anymore. For a variety of reasons, the American model faces a lot of questions about it's legitimacy as we notice the freest of the free markets require enormous and unprecedented amounts of government money just to appear solvent. This money has to be borrowed, of course, so that investment banks can cover bets they borrowed money to make. Not only that, these investment banks have sold this debt to unsuspecting investors and then bet against this debt from ever performing. This debt market, called the derivatives market, is also called a dark, or opaque, market for a simple reason; nobody really knows what anybody else is doing in this market. It seems self-evident that if a bank accumulates debt, counts it as an asset, and then issues credit based on the value of that debt that eventually there would be problems. The question Americans, whose future depends on the answer should ask, is: Why has the American system required so much debt?
Lots of people complain about the debt. Everybody knows that at some point debt is going to be a problem. What most people don't understand is the magnitude of the debt that has been taken on. What we do know is the $10-odd trillion the government owes. We know the financial obligations of the U.S. government in entitlement payments over the next fifty years is $65 trillion. We know corporate debt is about the same within a shorter time span. We know household debt is somewhere around thirty trillion. Lots and lots of debt. But what about the derivatives market? The market that underlies the credit market, what made the heyday of cheap, easy credit possible over the years is the derivatives market. The latest estimate for the total "value" of this market is $1 quadrillion dollars. That is $1,000 trillion dollars worldwide in debt derivatives that are contituted by a smorgasbord of innovative investment vehicles that believe with all it's heart and soul that one day the American and global economies will grow sufficiently to make those debts good investments. To borrow Chris Martenson phraseology: It assumes the world will be $1 quadrillion dollars bigger than it is today. The global economy is roughly $55 trillion and shrinking as of this writing. What if the assumption that the world will be 200x bigger than it is now isn't right?
Back to our question, then, of why the system needs so much debt. The debt load was not built over night and so finding the reasons behind it seems, well, reasonable. First, though, we will name the economic process that lead to the debt accumulation; financialization, which is the technical term for big economic fun. Also known as the last stage of empire. The financial sector of the U.S. economy grew from around 13% of Gross Domestic Product in 1980 to around 26% in 2008. How that breaks down on a yearly basis I don't know, but the question I have, and I don't know if anyone can truly answer it, is what would our economy look like had we not gone through the financialization process. Would our vaunted growth rates, the very growth rates we beat our European friends over the head with, have been nearly what they were had we not built up this financial sector to such a degree? It seems the answer is probably no. What does the sum of the American economy look like when you subtract the debt? That still leaves the maddening question of why all the debt was necessary?
The answer will have to wait until the next post.
Optimism turns delusional when it tries to maintain a consensus reality in the face of new conditions deleterious to that reality. Americans have been feasting on a buffet of optimism since the end of the Cold War. Certain of the superiority of our system, moral or otherwise, the nation set about aggressively exporting the American model to the rest of the world, much of which had just been freed from the dreary, dull authoritarian socialists. The lesson taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union was essentially that free societies will prevail over the non-free. More specifically, and more importantly, the free market will prevail over the centrally controlled markets. Translated into politics, it meant the free market knows best and the government knows nothing. Until recently, it was well nigh impossible to pitch an argument against this victorious ideology that could get a hearing anywhere. Now, it would seem, the fate of the American economy would largely depend on whether the American economy is the best (only?) development model.
It behooves us to wonder whether the American model is even possible anymore. For a variety of reasons, the American model faces a lot of questions about it's legitimacy as we notice the freest of the free markets require enormous and unprecedented amounts of government money just to appear solvent. This money has to be borrowed, of course, so that investment banks can cover bets they borrowed money to make. Not only that, these investment banks have sold this debt to unsuspecting investors and then bet against this debt from ever performing. This debt market, called the derivatives market, is also called a dark, or opaque, market for a simple reason; nobody really knows what anybody else is doing in this market. It seems self-evident that if a bank accumulates debt, counts it as an asset, and then issues credit based on the value of that debt that eventually there would be problems. The question Americans, whose future depends on the answer should ask, is: Why has the American system required so much debt?
Lots of people complain about the debt. Everybody knows that at some point debt is going to be a problem. What most people don't understand is the magnitude of the debt that has been taken on. What we do know is the $10-odd trillion the government owes. We know the financial obligations of the U.S. government in entitlement payments over the next fifty years is $65 trillion. We know corporate debt is about the same within a shorter time span. We know household debt is somewhere around thirty trillion. Lots and lots of debt. But what about the derivatives market? The market that underlies the credit market, what made the heyday of cheap, easy credit possible over the years is the derivatives market. The latest estimate for the total "value" of this market is $1 quadrillion dollars. That is $1,000 trillion dollars worldwide in debt derivatives that are contituted by a smorgasbord of innovative investment vehicles that believe with all it's heart and soul that one day the American and global economies will grow sufficiently to make those debts good investments. To borrow Chris Martenson phraseology: It assumes the world will be $1 quadrillion dollars bigger than it is today. The global economy is roughly $55 trillion and shrinking as of this writing. What if the assumption that the world will be 200x bigger than it is now isn't right?
Back to our question, then, of why the system needs so much debt. The debt load was not built over night and so finding the reasons behind it seems, well, reasonable. First, though, we will name the economic process that lead to the debt accumulation; financialization, which is the technical term for big economic fun. Also known as the last stage of empire. The financial sector of the U.S. economy grew from around 13% of Gross Domestic Product in 1980 to around 26% in 2008. How that breaks down on a yearly basis I don't know, but the question I have, and I don't know if anyone can truly answer it, is what would our economy look like had we not gone through the financialization process. Would our vaunted growth rates, the very growth rates we beat our European friends over the head with, have been nearly what they were had we not built up this financial sector to such a degree? It seems the answer is probably no. What does the sum of the American economy look like when you subtract the debt? That still leaves the maddening question of why all the debt was necessary?
The answer will have to wait until the next post.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Capitalism's Limited Capacity
For those who may believe in capitalism as a sort of vessel through which freedom is exercised, the notion that there may be a natural constraint to continued growth represents a particular challenge to that belief. That capitalism must grow in order to continue as a functioning system seems almost a moot point, but it may be worthwhile to revisit this feature of a system that has thrived in the western countries for the better part of two centuries. It is quite clear as we survey these past two centuries that capitalism has coincided with great advances in all aspects of society, if not been a direct agent in these advances. It has fed the idea of progress, the actuality of progress, and finally, the myth of progress as a cultural foundation, so that now it is simply axiomatic that the future will be bigger, better, and faster in ways we can only now imagine. Capitalism is indeed a profoundly powerful tool.
The success of capitalism has certainly given people a sense that the world is our oyster. And the oyster seems limitless in it's dimensions. The assumption is that whenever we run out of something, the signal to the market will dictate that more will be discovered somewhere else in the world. For the most part this has been the case. We have always found new sources of trees, metals, land, and what have you up to the present. But what if the assumption of limitless resources is not correct? What if we can't find new cheap replacements for what we have relied on to supply our needs? This is where the assumption of capitalism runs into the understanding science has of the natural world.
When pressed, most people I believe would accept intuitively the fact that the world is a finite space. Still, the space we inhabit seems vast as we experience it. As tiny individuals living for a brief time on the surface of a planet, it is easy to believe that humans couldn't hope to exhaust the natural wealth we find here. But the habitable Earth is really just a very narrow range on the surface that might be best illustrated as the mossy cover of a large boulder. But even this illustration doesn't tell the whole story. If the moss is the productive part of the land area, then it would cover perhaps ten percent of the surface of the boulder. You might wonder about the oceans. Where are the oceans? You're forgetting about those. Actually, in terms of food, the oceans provide less than five percent of human food calories. All the rest is derived from the working of the land. Of that, most of the worlds food comes from less than a third of the total land area. We are working with much smaller spaces than we might have thought.
What capitalism has enabled us to do, among other things, is to dramatically increase the rate we find, extract, and use the natural wealth of the Earth. As the capitalist industrial economies have grown, the amount of materials used each year has likewise grown almost without interruption. This is true of both renewable resources such as fresh water and arable soil and non-renewables such as oil and copper. In the case of renewables, we are using them faster than the rate at which they are naturally replenished. We might ask ourselves how a system which has been so good at procuring materials for human use in increasing amounts will function when those materials will begin to decline as they inevitably become scarce. Can a system which must grow function on a planet which cannot grow indefinitely? This is the most fundamental question we can ask about the nature of our economic activities.
One of the most dangerous myths of capitalism is that the market, using the price signal, will solve problems of resource depletion. What serves as a myth has manifested as a cultural delusion. The trust in the market has become something resembling a bad religion. The evidence of a depleted Earth unable to support the human race as it lives now, and in such numbers, for very much longer is mounting. Are we going to claim that the entitlement to accrue wealth without limit trumps the habitability of the planet? In the next post I will talk about overshooting the planet's capacity to support our present civilization and the role of oil in all of that.
The success of capitalism has certainly given people a sense that the world is our oyster. And the oyster seems limitless in it's dimensions. The assumption is that whenever we run out of something, the signal to the market will dictate that more will be discovered somewhere else in the world. For the most part this has been the case. We have always found new sources of trees, metals, land, and what have you up to the present. But what if the assumption of limitless resources is not correct? What if we can't find new cheap replacements for what we have relied on to supply our needs? This is where the assumption of capitalism runs into the understanding science has of the natural world.
When pressed, most people I believe would accept intuitively the fact that the world is a finite space. Still, the space we inhabit seems vast as we experience it. As tiny individuals living for a brief time on the surface of a planet, it is easy to believe that humans couldn't hope to exhaust the natural wealth we find here. But the habitable Earth is really just a very narrow range on the surface that might be best illustrated as the mossy cover of a large boulder. But even this illustration doesn't tell the whole story. If the moss is the productive part of the land area, then it would cover perhaps ten percent of the surface of the boulder. You might wonder about the oceans. Where are the oceans? You're forgetting about those. Actually, in terms of food, the oceans provide less than five percent of human food calories. All the rest is derived from the working of the land. Of that, most of the worlds food comes from less than a third of the total land area. We are working with much smaller spaces than we might have thought.
What capitalism has enabled us to do, among other things, is to dramatically increase the rate we find, extract, and use the natural wealth of the Earth. As the capitalist industrial economies have grown, the amount of materials used each year has likewise grown almost without interruption. This is true of both renewable resources such as fresh water and arable soil and non-renewables such as oil and copper. In the case of renewables, we are using them faster than the rate at which they are naturally replenished. We might ask ourselves how a system which has been so good at procuring materials for human use in increasing amounts will function when those materials will begin to decline as they inevitably become scarce. Can a system which must grow function on a planet which cannot grow indefinitely? This is the most fundamental question we can ask about the nature of our economic activities.
One of the most dangerous myths of capitalism is that the market, using the price signal, will solve problems of resource depletion. What serves as a myth has manifested as a cultural delusion. The trust in the market has become something resembling a bad religion. The evidence of a depleted Earth unable to support the human race as it lives now, and in such numbers, for very much longer is mounting. Are we going to claim that the entitlement to accrue wealth without limit trumps the habitability of the planet? In the next post I will talk about overshooting the planet's capacity to support our present civilization and the role of oil in all of that.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Copenhagen and Reality.
In December, the leaders of the world will congregate in Copenhagen, Denmark to fashion a new climate change treaty. Like any multi-lateral treaty, the participants will negotiate to secure their own benefit while attempting to get others to sacrifice and still make themselves look good. I don't mean to sound cynical when I say that. It is simply the way of geo-politics. There will be many in attendance who believe in the importance of reducing and ultimately eliminating carbon dioxide emissions through human economic activity and doing it quickly. Many nations citizens overwhelmingly and rightly see the current warming trend as both caused by humans and as a real threat to planetary well being. Being a citizen of the United States, there are two aspects that are starkly out of tune with the spirit of international agreement generally and in the reality of human caused climate change specifically.
It is a pity when public discourse in the U.S. centers around the question of the reality of climate change and it's cause and not on a more pertinent one; whether it is too late to stop it. Things being as they are, Americans will continue to muddle through the "debate", with "skeptics" on one side and people who know what they are talking about on the other. It should be quite a spectacle, contentious and stupid, as the right wing, funded by the entrenched interests, and propelled by their passion for ignorance for it's own sake, will poison the well of constructive and critical discourse. I think we can expect a racheting up of the rhetoric as we saw during the fight over health care legislation. They will alternately dismiss the climate change problem as imaginary, fraudulent, conspiratorial, and nothing we need to worry about. They will use arguments that have already been debunked, like the variable solar radiation hypothesis, or the cyclical climate change as a natural function we can do nothing about anyway argument. Lots of money, hundreds of millions, will be spent, have been spent, to sway public opinion to see climate change as a hoax or a sideshow. Because anybody who bothers his or her pretty little head about climate change is "hysterical", a "dupe", or is part of a socialist conspiracy to destroy capitalism and the American economy. This last should sound familiar to anyone who pays attention.
In the meantime, as we have been wasting our time thusly, the world has and will continue to get warmer due to carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere. It is expected by climate scientists that even if we stop all CO2 emissions today that the carbon released up to yesterday will raise the temperative another half degree centigrade. To put that into perspective, the temperature rise above the post-glacial norm is .8 degrees C. That is about 1.5 degrees F. The consensus view is that we must absolutely keep global temperatures from rising two degrees centigrade, just under 4 degrees F because it is believed that it is a tipping point after which warming will rise beyond our ability to control it. They fear that a 2 degree rise will initiate a positive feedback loop which will unleash carbon stored in the form of methane that is trapped in tundra and the oceans, through the burning of forests, and the further heating of the artic regions after the ice has melted and sunlight is absorbed in open water.
The alarm of scientists over the rate of change of climate zones should cause commensurate alarm in the population. For various reasons it doesn't. Perhaps the American public has "climate" fatigue. That says maybe, but given my general sense that American leadership isn't quite as alarmed either, and is not presenting to the American public the reality of climate change and the threat it poses, I think Copenhagen might underwhelm. There is reason to hope that something dramatic will happen in Copenhagen in targeting a low carbon emissions treaty with the targets coming sooner rather than later. But I'm not holding my breath. This may mean the next climate summit will be an emergency summit for reasons that will likely be evident over the next several years.
It begins with what happens when the temperature rises only .8 degrees. What we've seen is ice melting at a rate faster than scientists ever thought it would. We have lost 20% of the arctic winter ice and the Arctic Ocean will likely be ice free in summer by 2015. What happens then is anybody's guess, but is certain to happen is the blue ocean water would absorb heat energy from the sun rather than reflect the sunlight back into space. This would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt at an even faster rate, adding water to the oceans and raise sea levels. Climate patterns would change in unpredictable ways. This would certainly impact agriculture negatively and maybe disasterously. This is the form the feedback loop will take.
Glaciers are receding all over the world. Glaciers feed many of the major rivers around the world, most notably in China and India. The Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Yangtze and others have their source in the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers are receding and the amount of water that flows from them during the spring thaw is lessening. Eventually they will not flow at all. Hundreds of millions of people depend on those rivers for their water.
It is a pity when public discourse in the U.S. centers around the question of the reality of climate change and it's cause and not on a more pertinent one; whether it is too late to stop it. Things being as they are, Americans will continue to muddle through the "debate", with "skeptics" on one side and people who know what they are talking about on the other. It should be quite a spectacle, contentious and stupid, as the right wing, funded by the entrenched interests, and propelled by their passion for ignorance for it's own sake, will poison the well of constructive and critical discourse. I think we can expect a racheting up of the rhetoric as we saw during the fight over health care legislation. They will alternately dismiss the climate change problem as imaginary, fraudulent, conspiratorial, and nothing we need to worry about. They will use arguments that have already been debunked, like the variable solar radiation hypothesis, or the cyclical climate change as a natural function we can do nothing about anyway argument. Lots of money, hundreds of millions, will be spent, have been spent, to sway public opinion to see climate change as a hoax or a sideshow. Because anybody who bothers his or her pretty little head about climate change is "hysterical", a "dupe", or is part of a socialist conspiracy to destroy capitalism and the American economy. This last should sound familiar to anyone who pays attention.
In the meantime, as we have been wasting our time thusly, the world has and will continue to get warmer due to carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere. It is expected by climate scientists that even if we stop all CO2 emissions today that the carbon released up to yesterday will raise the temperative another half degree centigrade. To put that into perspective, the temperature rise above the post-glacial norm is .8 degrees C. That is about 1.5 degrees F. The consensus view is that we must absolutely keep global temperatures from rising two degrees centigrade, just under 4 degrees F because it is believed that it is a tipping point after which warming will rise beyond our ability to control it. They fear that a 2 degree rise will initiate a positive feedback loop which will unleash carbon stored in the form of methane that is trapped in tundra and the oceans, through the burning of forests, and the further heating of the artic regions after the ice has melted and sunlight is absorbed in open water.
The alarm of scientists over the rate of change of climate zones should cause commensurate alarm in the population. For various reasons it doesn't. Perhaps the American public has "climate" fatigue. That says maybe, but given my general sense that American leadership isn't quite as alarmed either, and is not presenting to the American public the reality of climate change and the threat it poses, I think Copenhagen might underwhelm. There is reason to hope that something dramatic will happen in Copenhagen in targeting a low carbon emissions treaty with the targets coming sooner rather than later. But I'm not holding my breath. This may mean the next climate summit will be an emergency summit for reasons that will likely be evident over the next several years.
It begins with what happens when the temperature rises only .8 degrees. What we've seen is ice melting at a rate faster than scientists ever thought it would. We have lost 20% of the arctic winter ice and the Arctic Ocean will likely be ice free in summer by 2015. What happens then is anybody's guess, but is certain to happen is the blue ocean water would absorb heat energy from the sun rather than reflect the sunlight back into space. This would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt at an even faster rate, adding water to the oceans and raise sea levels. Climate patterns would change in unpredictable ways. This would certainly impact agriculture negatively and maybe disasterously. This is the form the feedback loop will take.
Glaciers are receding all over the world. Glaciers feed many of the major rivers around the world, most notably in China and India. The Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Yangtze and others have their source in the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers are receding and the amount of water that flows from them during the spring thaw is lessening. Eventually they will not flow at all. Hundreds of millions of people depend on those rivers for their water.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Net Energy and Societal Complexity
Nothing is as emblematic of human self-congratulation than when a leader of government or of business waxes retrospective about human ingenuity and innovation in the realm of technology. We have come so far and just imagine how much further we can go with the next innovation, and the one after that. For them, the past and the future are linked in a seamless upward and outward expansion of human understanding, awareness, and habitation. We have come so far in so little time; from horse and buggy to space travel, from toiling in potato fields to instantaneous global capital transfers. Certainly, it can be easy to get caught up in the dream of our capacity to understand the workings of nature, alter it to fit our needs, and to defeat it's unpleasant and undesirable aspects.
It is interesting how so little of the credit for humanity's recent surge in production, distribution, and disposal of goods and services goes to the fuel which gave the impetus for all these wonders, all of which were designed for use with particular energy sources. The sources may vary, but a transfer of sources to a different technology is not such an easy feat. Currently, there is a rush for the next automobile that seeks to achieve two things: It must run on something other than gasoline, and be able to replace 980 million cars on the roads now at an affordable price. This is not simple to do. It raises a seemingly minor but fundamental question: Was industrialization the result of human ingenuity or was it because the energy source (coal) was so good, so condensed, that already existent human ingenuity would eventually come up with a use for it? This is not a chicken-and-egg question. The first coal-powered machine was used to get more coal.
What followed the invention of the coal-powered water pump was the greatest expansion of economic activity and wealth accrual in human history. The usable, exploitable Earth grew exponentially and the complexity of industrial societies grew right along with it. Humans would eventually gain access to energy and mineral wealth deep in the Earth, build ever larger machines to extract and transport it, and create increasingly complex systems of trade and governance to manage all the transfers. From this, some would become very wealthy and live comparatively easy lives.
During the past 200 years, as the process of industrialization got underway, probably the greatest single aspect that changed for most people was the means by which they earn a living. The occupations most prevalent in Europe and America changed dramatically as many disappeared and were replaced by many other, more specialized, occupations. In 1800 America, for example, there were farmers, tanners, and spinners. Life was mostly lived in rural areas and the average person didn't travel more than a few miles from where they kept house. People migrated back then, and it took weeks to get from one part of the country to another. Most got their food from within a hundred miles of where they lived. Most of the population was illiterate or had a low level of literacy. It was, as we've come to see it now, a very simple and very slow way to live.
In 2009 we live fast-paced, complex lives. It may seem cliche to put it that way, but it is the physical truth. It is useful to see it in terms of a system that is growing, and as it grows, it uses more and more stuff to input in order to sustain itself and feed more growth. The feedstock of this system is energy. Concentrated, low-cost energy that is plentiful and that is what we found in fossil fuels. Before, in the world of farm animals and foot paths, of hay bales and wood stoves, we obtained our energy primarily from food. Food powered the muscles to do the work and at the end of the day, we had very little energy left over to do other things. With the advent of fossil fuels and the machines that run on them, we have much more energy to do the work. This is the net energy. We have found in fossil fuels extra energy to run society on. This extra energy enables us to leave the farm, to take up jobs like like lawyer, teacher, technician, machinist, middle manager, dog counselor and event planner. It enables us to add layers to society, to create new positions that augment productive activities but don't really produce any new energy themselves.
The most visible example of this is government. All federal, state, and municipal governments in the United States employ more people now than lived in America at the time of it's founding. These are not elected officials there to better represent their constituents, either. It is a behemoth bureaucracy that has grown to administer the functions of society. It would be a mistake to think the growth in the complexity of government is anything but a symptom of increasing complexity everywhere else in society. All systems are more complex than they ever have been. Corporations, technology, universities, trade, food, medicine, money, and anything you can think of to administer these things use more energy to support the functioning of them than ever before.
The entire field of economics uses only two laws; the Law of Supply and Demand and the Law of Diminishing Returns. It is the second law that makes itself known in any discussion of complex organizations. The basic idea is this: As an organization grows it becomes more complex. As it becomes more complex it requires more energy. Each increment of complexity will see initial gains in, say, efficiency, but each increment means there is another part, another layer which is permanently a part of it's structure. Therefore, this new, more complex organization will use more energy resources in order to maintain itself. Inevitably, another problem arises which will be solved with another layer of complexity, but with each new adaptation, the benefit from that adaptation is less than the one before. This is called the marginal return on investment. The margin is the gain and each gain diminishes as the complexity increases, ergo, diminishing return. Eventually, the return requires more energy than you gain from complexity and that constitutes the beginning of the end for that organization. You can see this in the need for companies to grow each year. It isn't simply a matter of getting more money for shareholders each year, but a company must do so in order to survive. In fact, this can be generalized to the economy as a whole, especially capitalist economies, for reasons too complicated to go into here.
The reason industrial societies have managed to continue against this law of economics is that there has always been more energy to spend on that complexity. One last point to ponder in all of this is the fate of societies generally. It might be useful to think of why empires collapse. Countless theories have been proposed as to why this happens, why no empire has withstood the test of centuries and millennia and have ultimately fallen apart. It is for this reason, this problem of maintaining the grand structure of it's administration that has caused them to finally fall, whether it be from invasion by another, like Rome, or a dissipation from within, like the Maya. The capacity for an empire to withstand shocks as it's surplus energy gets used up in the maintenance of it's own structure is reduced until it can no longer support societal integrity, and then it's curtains for that empire on the stage of history.
It is interesting how so little of the credit for humanity's recent surge in production, distribution, and disposal of goods and services goes to the fuel which gave the impetus for all these wonders, all of which were designed for use with particular energy sources. The sources may vary, but a transfer of sources to a different technology is not such an easy feat. Currently, there is a rush for the next automobile that seeks to achieve two things: It must run on something other than gasoline, and be able to replace 980 million cars on the roads now at an affordable price. This is not simple to do. It raises a seemingly minor but fundamental question: Was industrialization the result of human ingenuity or was it because the energy source (coal) was so good, so condensed, that already existent human ingenuity would eventually come up with a use for it? This is not a chicken-and-egg question. The first coal-powered machine was used to get more coal.
What followed the invention of the coal-powered water pump was the greatest expansion of economic activity and wealth accrual in human history. The usable, exploitable Earth grew exponentially and the complexity of industrial societies grew right along with it. Humans would eventually gain access to energy and mineral wealth deep in the Earth, build ever larger machines to extract and transport it, and create increasingly complex systems of trade and governance to manage all the transfers. From this, some would become very wealthy and live comparatively easy lives.
During the past 200 years, as the process of industrialization got underway, probably the greatest single aspect that changed for most people was the means by which they earn a living. The occupations most prevalent in Europe and America changed dramatically as many disappeared and were replaced by many other, more specialized, occupations. In 1800 America, for example, there were farmers, tanners, and spinners. Life was mostly lived in rural areas and the average person didn't travel more than a few miles from where they kept house. People migrated back then, and it took weeks to get from one part of the country to another. Most got their food from within a hundred miles of where they lived. Most of the population was illiterate or had a low level of literacy. It was, as we've come to see it now, a very simple and very slow way to live.
In 2009 we live fast-paced, complex lives. It may seem cliche to put it that way, but it is the physical truth. It is useful to see it in terms of a system that is growing, and as it grows, it uses more and more stuff to input in order to sustain itself and feed more growth. The feedstock of this system is energy. Concentrated, low-cost energy that is plentiful and that is what we found in fossil fuels. Before, in the world of farm animals and foot paths, of hay bales and wood stoves, we obtained our energy primarily from food. Food powered the muscles to do the work and at the end of the day, we had very little energy left over to do other things. With the advent of fossil fuels and the machines that run on them, we have much more energy to do the work. This is the net energy. We have found in fossil fuels extra energy to run society on. This extra energy enables us to leave the farm, to take up jobs like like lawyer, teacher, technician, machinist, middle manager, dog counselor and event planner. It enables us to add layers to society, to create new positions that augment productive activities but don't really produce any new energy themselves.
The most visible example of this is government. All federal, state, and municipal governments in the United States employ more people now than lived in America at the time of it's founding. These are not elected officials there to better represent their constituents, either. It is a behemoth bureaucracy that has grown to administer the functions of society. It would be a mistake to think the growth in the complexity of government is anything but a symptom of increasing complexity everywhere else in society. All systems are more complex than they ever have been. Corporations, technology, universities, trade, food, medicine, money, and anything you can think of to administer these things use more energy to support the functioning of them than ever before.
The entire field of economics uses only two laws; the Law of Supply and Demand and the Law of Diminishing Returns. It is the second law that makes itself known in any discussion of complex organizations. The basic idea is this: As an organization grows it becomes more complex. As it becomes more complex it requires more energy. Each increment of complexity will see initial gains in, say, efficiency, but each increment means there is another part, another layer which is permanently a part of it's structure. Therefore, this new, more complex organization will use more energy resources in order to maintain itself. Inevitably, another problem arises which will be solved with another layer of complexity, but with each new adaptation, the benefit from that adaptation is less than the one before. This is called the marginal return on investment. The margin is the gain and each gain diminishes as the complexity increases, ergo, diminishing return. Eventually, the return requires more energy than you gain from complexity and that constitutes the beginning of the end for that organization. You can see this in the need for companies to grow each year. It isn't simply a matter of getting more money for shareholders each year, but a company must do so in order to survive. In fact, this can be generalized to the economy as a whole, especially capitalist economies, for reasons too complicated to go into here.
The reason industrial societies have managed to continue against this law of economics is that there has always been more energy to spend on that complexity. One last point to ponder in all of this is the fate of societies generally. It might be useful to think of why empires collapse. Countless theories have been proposed as to why this happens, why no empire has withstood the test of centuries and millennia and have ultimately fallen apart. It is for this reason, this problem of maintaining the grand structure of it's administration that has caused them to finally fall, whether it be from invasion by another, like Rome, or a dissipation from within, like the Maya. The capacity for an empire to withstand shocks as it's surplus energy gets used up in the maintenance of it's own structure is reduced until it can no longer support societal integrity, and then it's curtains for that empire on the stage of history.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Oil Producing Countries That Have Peaked
| Country | Peak Prod. | 2008 Prod. | % Off Peak | Peak Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 11297 | 7337 | -35% | 1970 |
| Venezuela | 3754 | 2566 | -32% | 1970 |
| Libya | 3357 | 1846 | -45% | 1970 |
| Other Middle East | 79 | 33 | -58% | 1970 |
| Kuwait | 3339 | 2784 | -17% | 1972 |
| Iran | 6060 | 4325 | -29% | 1974 |
| Indonesia | 1685 | 1004 | -41% | 1977 |
| Romania | 313 | 99 | -68% | 1977 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 230 | 149 | -35% | 1978 |
| Iraq | 3489 | 2423 | -31% | 1979 |
| Brunei | 261 | 175 | -33% | 1979 |
| Tunisia | 118 | 89 | -25% | 1980 |
| Peru | 196 | 120 | -39% | 1982 |
| Cameroon | 181 | 84 | -54% | 1985 |
| Other Europe & Eurasia | 762 | 427 | -44% | 1986 |
| Russian Federation | 11484 | 9886 | -14% | 1987* |
| Egypt | 941 | 722 | -23% | 1993 |
| Other Asia Pacific | 276 | 237 | -14% | 1993 |
| India | 774 | 766 | -1% | 1995* |
| Syria | 596 | 398 | -33% | 1995 |
| Gabon | 365 | 235 | -36% | 1996 |
| Argentina | 890 | 682 | -23% | 1998 |
| Colombia | 838 | 618 | -26% | 1999 |
| United Kingdom | 2909 | 1544 | -47% | 1999 |
| Rep. of Congo (Brazzaville) | 266 | 249 | -6% | 1999* |
| Uzbekistan | 191 | 111 | -42% | 1999 |
| Australia | 809 | 556 | -31% | 2000 |
| Norway | 3418 | 2455 | -28% | 2001 |
| Oman | 961 | 728 | -24% | 2001 |
| Yemen | 457 | 305 | -33% | 2002 |
| Other S. & Cent. America | 153 | 138 | -10% | 2003* |
| Mexico | 3824 | 3157 | -17% | 2004 |
| Malaysia | 793 | 754 | -5% | 2004* |
| Vietnam | 427 | 317 | -26% | 2004 |
| Denmark | 390 | 287 | -26% | 2004 |
| Other Africa | 75 | 54 | -28% | 2004* |
| Nigeria | 2580 | 2170 | -16% | 2005* |
| Chad | 173 | 127 | -27% | 2005* |
| Italy | 127 | 108 | -15% | 2005* |
| Ecuador | 545 | 514 | -6% | 2006* |
| Saudi Arabia | 11114 | 10846 | -2% | 2005 / Growing |
| Canada | 3320 | 3238 | -2% | 2007 / Growing |
| Algeria | 2016 | 1993 | -1% | 2007 / Growing |
| Equatorial Guinea | 368 | 361 | -2% | 2007 / Growing |
| China | 3795 | 3795 | - | Growing |
| United Arab Emirates | 2980 | 2980 | - | Growing |
| Brazil | 1899 | 1899 | - | Growing |
| Angola | 1875 | 1875 | - | Growing |
| Kazakhstan | 1554 | 1554 | - | Growing |
| Qatar | 1378 | 1378 | - | Growing |
| Azerbaijan | 914 | 914 | - | Growing |
| Sudan | 480 | 480 | - | Growing |
| Thailand | 325 | 325 | - | Growing |
| Turkmenistan | 205 | 205 | - | Growing |
| Peaked / Flat Countries Total | - | 49597 | - | 60.6% of world oil production |
| Growing Countries Total | - | 32223 | - | 39.4% of world oil production |
Monday, September 28, 2009
Peak Oil as the Least Talked About Mega-Issue.
Apart from Climate Change, the prospect of resource depletion is the biggest whammy nature could subject humanity to. The two are related, of course, and neither are understood well by most people. It's hard to find anybody on the street who has ever heard of Peak Oil but it's not hard to figure out why: It isn't the most glamorous liquid to own, it's kept largely hidden except when we have to smell it as we fill our tanks, and it's so basic to our lives that it's easy to forget about. It's just there, sort of like nature is there. Occasionally we have to pay attention to it, like when the price rises, but beyond that we can pretty much let others take care of it and pay them to do so.
It's the fact that it is so basic we rarely think about oil. Only when it is absent do we appreciate what it enables us to do. And the list of things that it does or provides for us is innumerable and would take a gigabyte just to list everything. But a couple of facts will illustrate the magnitude of our dependency on the stuff.
Oil is almost pure energy. Energy literally does work for us. In fact, it can be measured in human terms: A gallon of gas does the equivalent of 120 human work hours, or 3 work weeks. One can feel this whenever you have to push your car. If you were to push a car the same number of miles it gets from a single gallon, then you would know in your bones and muscles the amount of work it does. And it isn't only the cars movement that the gas is good for. Every component of the car, from the iron for the frame and the body, the copper for the electronics, the rubber for the tires, the glass for the windshield, and the petrochemical fibers to produce the new car smell has an oil energy input. Anything that comes from a mine or from far away has oil somewhere in it's economic life.
In the U.S., modern industrial agriculture uses massive amounts of oil energy to produce food. For every calorie of food energy produced, ten calories of oil energy are expended. This ratio has steadily risen since the early 20th century, when most of the work was done by animals and farmers. In the 1950's the ratio was 1:1. This has been the true driving force behind the destruction of the American family farm, which could not compete with the more labor efficient industrial processes and corporate capital funding. As the enterprise grows, the more dependent on oil it becomes, for everything from transportation to chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil and natural gas. What would happen to food prices if oil production begins to decline, as it inevitably will, if we continue on the path we're on? What would happen to crop yields if chemical pesticides and fertilizers could not be applied in the quantities needed?
There is nothing controversial about the peaking of oil production. It is a process that is observed in every oil field over it's productive life. Production begins slowly at first, rises to a peak as more wells are added, and then declines as the pressure from the ground drops. Eventually it has to be pumped in order to draw out the oil. As one oil field goes, so do collections of oil fields. A production profile of the United States exhibits the same pattern. The peak came in 1970 at around 11 million barrels a day. Now it produces over half that amount. The U.S. was once the biggest exporter of oil. Now it is the biggest importer, importing over 2/3rd of all the oil it consumes.
Eventually, total global oil production will peak. It is only a matter of time, if it hasn't occurred already.. From 2005 to 2008, global oil production was flat (see chart above), even as prices rose to levels never seen before. Exporting countries had every incentive to increase production but were unable to do so. The reason is simple: Most oil-producing countries have surpassed the peak production. Furthermore, and as a bit of an aside, annual oil consumption is 4 to 6 times greater than new discoveries. In fact, the most oil ever discovered in a single year happened in 1964. We are 45 years later and finding smaller and smaller fields each passing year. So it is only a matter of time before supply levels off and starts to decline. It would appear the leveling has begun.
It's hard to tell what is discussed in the board rooms of oil companies, or communications in the Department of Energy, or what advisors are telling the President of the United States, but it is a subject the public doesn't consider on a daily basis. Like Climate Change, it is a creeping crisis, easy to push out of your mind and ignore until directly confronted with it. But the impact of these two crises are profound and pervasive, and will reveal themselves in both subtle and dramatic ways. But probably the most obvious way peak oil will be seen is in it's impact on the economy. A less obvious way is in it's effect on social complexity. These will be considered in a later post.
Above is a list of oil producing nations relative to peak production.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Explanation of Dark, Green, and Reality
Dark Green Reality came about by fiddling around with available user names without resorting to numbers, hyphens, dashes, or any other cumbersome marks. The term "dark green" I learned about no more than a week ago and it felt descriptive enough as a label I could apply to myself that I took it and put it with all the other labels I've tried on.
It is an ideological label, a species of environmentalism with it's own characteristics and intellectual foundation. What's more, it has barely been used, no one seems to call themselves a Dark Green, and I can feel free to attach or detach whatever I want to it. Dark Green is counter distinct to Bright Green. Primarily, the difference lies in the realm of what is possible in terms of economic growth, industrial civilization, and the throughput of material resources drawn from the Earth needed to maintain our current economic lives. In a nutshell, it is in regards to the capacity of the Earth to support the kind of material comforts and standards of living we in the West (especially American standards) have grown accustomed to over the last several generations and the prospect that these standards can be replicated throughout the rest of the world. My view is that they cannot be replicated and that if we try to do so as a matter of policy, we will not just simply fail, but fail tragically.
But this isn't just some classic doom saying in the tradition of the Book of Revelations , or the end of the Mayan calender, or some other supernatural force that feels it necessary to destroy people. Instead, it is what is known, hypothesized, theorized and projected about the natural world through science and reason. This is human knowledge about the human condition. On that basis, it must be taken seriously and not treated as a variant of the above fictions purporting to foretell the end times. What a dark green understanding shares with the fictions described above is the possibility that human civilization (global, industrial) could conceivably end or be severely truncated as an ongoing concern due to the nature of the problems I will describe in this blog.
Any understanding of what we collectively face as a species must include an appreciation of certain conditions that will force a change on us in the way we inhabit the planet. There is a crossroads between Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the size of the human population living at present and it's projected growth over the coming decades. These are all deeply interrelated subjects, and all will interact in ways that are broadly predictable but difficult to set a specific time frame on. What's more, however these problems manifest themselves in reality, we will see the impact through our social systems, such as community, government, the economy, and through relations between people, classes, and countries.
These events will not be pretty. You might say that some changes could be better, must be better, but that we ourselves and future generations might well wonder what we were thinking as we got into such a fix. The fix, as I see it, is this: There are too many people using too many resources, overtaxing the planet's rate of regeneration, and too few who realize this. What this inevitably means is that the scale of human life on the planet must be and will be reduced. It means either we do it voluntarily in a managed, fair, and humane way, or it will occur involuntarily, unfairly, and inhumanely. The crucial difference between those I am calling dark and bright greens comes down to that. It is one part level of urgency and another part level of pain that is unavoidable in adapting to the condition we find ourselves entering.
I will describe what is generally understood and not understood about peak oil/resource depletion, climate change/global warming, and the population issue over the next several posts. I'll describe them separately and then move to a description of there interactions. But lastly I will now say a few words about reality. I'll just say that whenever I use the word I see imaginary quotes around it in my head. Though I believe there is a reality out there that is perceivable and comprehensible, the rub comes at the perceiving and comprehending stages. Always the big question of philosophy, it has been answered to some degree by science. It is the single most effective way we can discern what we commonly might think of as "objective reality". The reality of the material world, the world of the senses, of measurement, of testing and retesting, of reproducing the results of those testings, in order to find a statement that cannot be made false.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what is meant by the word "theory". In common parlance, what is usually meant is "hypothesis", that I hypothesize something is the case, rather than theorize because a theory is something much more elaborate, something that has withstood a measure of testing. A hypothesis is what you have without much evidence. The most well-known theories are ones that have been tested rigorously over many decades and have yet to be made false. The power of a theory is in it's ability to explain natural phenomena. Once a discovery has been made that lies outside the explanatory power of the theory, the theory is scrapped. Or it is reformed. Either way, it is no longer useful as a tool, or a framework, in which the processes of the natural world can be understood. This means that the older the theory, the longer and more frequently it has been tested, the better it represents reality.
We must accept that science is a critically important way to understand reality. There may be other ways for a person engage the world, to heighten or expand the individual experience of life, whether it is spiritual or meditative. But I don't think it is possible to overstate what a mistake it would be to ignore what we learn from science.
To close this post, I will lay out some statements I will demonstrate to be true in the weeks and months ahead. Primarily I will show why a gloomier forecast is warranted. Why green energy, new technology, old technology, and traditional economics will not be enough to spare us from some rough times ahead. However, because true skepticism requires that the skeptic be willing to be proven wrong, I will survey counter arguments and the evidence used to support those arguments that point to a happier outcome for humanity. Lastly, just to be clear about what I mean, I am not forecasting the end of the world, the destruction of all life on the planet, or anything like the aforementioned end times scenarios. I am saying that life in the twenty-first century will be inhabited by people with very different expectations, lifestyles, beliefs, and mythos than those who occupied the people of the twentieth century industrial civilizations.
It is an ideological label, a species of environmentalism with it's own characteristics and intellectual foundation. What's more, it has barely been used, no one seems to call themselves a Dark Green, and I can feel free to attach or detach whatever I want to it. Dark Green is counter distinct to Bright Green. Primarily, the difference lies in the realm of what is possible in terms of economic growth, industrial civilization, and the throughput of material resources drawn from the Earth needed to maintain our current economic lives. In a nutshell, it is in regards to the capacity of the Earth to support the kind of material comforts and standards of living we in the West (especially American standards) have grown accustomed to over the last several generations and the prospect that these standards can be replicated throughout the rest of the world. My view is that they cannot be replicated and that if we try to do so as a matter of policy, we will not just simply fail, but fail tragically.
But this isn't just some classic doom saying in the tradition of the Book of Revelations , or the end of the Mayan calender, or some other supernatural force that feels it necessary to destroy people. Instead, it is what is known, hypothesized, theorized and projected about the natural world through science and reason. This is human knowledge about the human condition. On that basis, it must be taken seriously and not treated as a variant of the above fictions purporting to foretell the end times. What a dark green understanding shares with the fictions described above is the possibility that human civilization (global, industrial) could conceivably end or be severely truncated as an ongoing concern due to the nature of the problems I will describe in this blog.
Any understanding of what we collectively face as a species must include an appreciation of certain conditions that will force a change on us in the way we inhabit the planet. There is a crossroads between Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the size of the human population living at present and it's projected growth over the coming decades. These are all deeply interrelated subjects, and all will interact in ways that are broadly predictable but difficult to set a specific time frame on. What's more, however these problems manifest themselves in reality, we will see the impact through our social systems, such as community, government, the economy, and through relations between people, classes, and countries.
These events will not be pretty. You might say that some changes could be better, must be better, but that we ourselves and future generations might well wonder what we were thinking as we got into such a fix. The fix, as I see it, is this: There are too many people using too many resources, overtaxing the planet's rate of regeneration, and too few who realize this. What this inevitably means is that the scale of human life on the planet must be and will be reduced. It means either we do it voluntarily in a managed, fair, and humane way, or it will occur involuntarily, unfairly, and inhumanely. The crucial difference between those I am calling dark and bright greens comes down to that. It is one part level of urgency and another part level of pain that is unavoidable in adapting to the condition we find ourselves entering.
I will describe what is generally understood and not understood about peak oil/resource depletion, climate change/global warming, and the population issue over the next several posts. I'll describe them separately and then move to a description of there interactions. But lastly I will now say a few words about reality. I'll just say that whenever I use the word I see imaginary quotes around it in my head. Though I believe there is a reality out there that is perceivable and comprehensible, the rub comes at the perceiving and comprehending stages. Always the big question of philosophy, it has been answered to some degree by science. It is the single most effective way we can discern what we commonly might think of as "objective reality". The reality of the material world, the world of the senses, of measurement, of testing and retesting, of reproducing the results of those testings, in order to find a statement that cannot be made false.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what is meant by the word "theory". In common parlance, what is usually meant is "hypothesis", that I hypothesize something is the case, rather than theorize because a theory is something much more elaborate, something that has withstood a measure of testing. A hypothesis is what you have without much evidence. The most well-known theories are ones that have been tested rigorously over many decades and have yet to be made false. The power of a theory is in it's ability to explain natural phenomena. Once a discovery has been made that lies outside the explanatory power of the theory, the theory is scrapped. Or it is reformed. Either way, it is no longer useful as a tool, or a framework, in which the processes of the natural world can be understood. This means that the older the theory, the longer and more frequently it has been tested, the better it represents reality.
We must accept that science is a critically important way to understand reality. There may be other ways for a person engage the world, to heighten or expand the individual experience of life, whether it is spiritual or meditative. But I don't think it is possible to overstate what a mistake it would be to ignore what we learn from science.
To close this post, I will lay out some statements I will demonstrate to be true in the weeks and months ahead. Primarily I will show why a gloomier forecast is warranted. Why green energy, new technology, old technology, and traditional economics will not be enough to spare us from some rough times ahead. However, because true skepticism requires that the skeptic be willing to be proven wrong, I will survey counter arguments and the evidence used to support those arguments that point to a happier outcome for humanity. Lastly, just to be clear about what I mean, I am not forecasting the end of the world, the destruction of all life on the planet, or anything like the aforementioned end times scenarios. I am saying that life in the twenty-first century will be inhabited by people with very different expectations, lifestyles, beliefs, and mythos than those who occupied the people of the twentieth century industrial civilizations.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thought Experiment.
Is there a period of history that you've ever been especially drawn to? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in some period of history, say Medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire? Most people would probably choose to live in a time in which people were generally thriving, and not just getting by, like the heyday of Rome itself, during the reign of Emperor Augustus in the first century A.D, let's say. But whatever period you like, pick one and then imagine how a person of that time lived on a day to day basis. What sort of job did that person have? What sort of dwelling did he/she live in? To help facilitate this process, it helps to narrow your choices. For most of recorded human history, save the last century and a half roughly, the number of choices are few. So get five or six six-sided dice and roll them. If you roll five or six ones, depending on how many dice you have, then you are one of the nobility in your chosen era. For every other result, you are a peasant.
Let's say you rolled something other than straight ones and you are a member of the peasantry. You will now be able to choose from a variety of occupations; farmer, baker, cobbler, blacksmith, or cartwright, just to name a few. Now think a little bit about your chosen field. What are some of the most important things you need in order to do your job? Say you are a baker. Where do you get the grain to make the bread? What do you use to heat the oven you bake the bread in? Where do you get that from? Where do you sell the bread? Who are your customers? How do you transport the things you need and how far do you need to go? Follow this line of thinking for a while until you have a decent sense of what it must have been like.
Once you've done that ask yourself if you would still like to live in that time and place and do the things they did to get by. Then ask yourself what are the crucial differences between then and now. Why do we have cars and trucks and they didn't? Why are there very few farmers and bakers and even fewer blacksmiths, cobblers, and cartwrights today? What makes contemporary society possible and why have the changes occurred that made this happen?
Let's say you rolled something other than straight ones and you are a member of the peasantry. You will now be able to choose from a variety of occupations; farmer, baker, cobbler, blacksmith, or cartwright, just to name a few. Now think a little bit about your chosen field. What are some of the most important things you need in order to do your job? Say you are a baker. Where do you get the grain to make the bread? What do you use to heat the oven you bake the bread in? Where do you get that from? Where do you sell the bread? Who are your customers? How do you transport the things you need and how far do you need to go? Follow this line of thinking for a while until you have a decent sense of what it must have been like.
Once you've done that ask yourself if you would still like to live in that time and place and do the things they did to get by. Then ask yourself what are the crucial differences between then and now. Why do we have cars and trucks and they didn't? Why are there very few farmers and bakers and even fewer blacksmiths, cobblers, and cartwrights today? What makes contemporary society possible and why have the changes occurred that made this happen?
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)