The Corporate Control Of Society And Human Life
By Stephen Lendman
25 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Large transnational corporations are clearly the dominant institution of our time. They're preeminent throughout the world but especially in the Global North and its epicenter in the US. They control or greatly influence what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, how we get most of our essential services like health care and even what we're taught in schools up to the highest levels. They create and control our sources of information and greatly influence how we think and our view of the world and them. They even now own patents on our genetic code, the most basic elements of human life, and are likely planning to manipulate and control them as just another commodity to exploit for profit in their brave new world that should concern everyone. They also carefully craft their image and use catchy slogans to convince us of their benefit to society and the world, like: "better things for better living through chemistry" (if you don't mind toxic air, water and soil), "we bring good things to life" for them, not us), and "all the news that's fit to print" (only if you love state and corporate friendly disinformation and propaganda). The slogans are clever, but the truth is ugly.
Corporations also decide who will govern and how. We may think we do, but it's not so and never was. Those national elections, especially the last two, only looked legitimate to most people, but not to those who know and understand how the system works. Here's how it really works. The "power elite" or privileged class C. Wright Mills wrote about 50 years ago in his classic book by that title are the real king and decision makers. He wrote how corporate, government and military elites formed a trinity of power after WW II and that the "power elite" were those "who decide whatever is decided" of importance. The holy trinity Mills wrote about still exists but today in the shape of a triangle with the transnational giants clearly on top and government, the military and all other institutions of importance there to serve their interests. These corporations have become so large and dominant they run our lives and the world, and in a zero sum world and the chips that count most in their stack, they do it fortheir continuing gain and at our increasing expense. Something is way out of whack, and in this essay I'll try to explain what it is and why we better understand it.
The Power of Transnational Corporations and the Harm They Cause
As corporations have grown in size they've gained in power and influence. And so has the harm they cause - to communities, nations, the great majority of the public and the planet. Today corporate giants decide who governs and how, who serves on our courts, what laws are enacted and even whether and when wars are fought, against whom and for what purpose or gain. It's for their gain, who else's, certainly not ours. Once we start one, they can even make profit projections from it like on any other business venture. For them, that's all it is - another way to make a buck, lots of them.
The central thesis of this essay is that giant transnational corporations today have become so dominant they now control our lives and the world, and they exploit both fully and ruthlessly. While they claim to be serving us and bringing us the fruits of the so-called "free market," in fact, they just use us for their gain. They've deceived us and highjacked the government to serve them as subservient proxies in their unending pursuit to dominate the world's markets, resources, cheap labor abroad and our own right here. And they've done it much like what happens in the marketplace when a predator company attempts to take control of another one that prefers to remain independent. They launch a hostile takeover, going around or over the heads of the target's management, their employees and the communities they operate in. They go right to the target's shareholders and promise them a better deal, meaning a premium price on the stock they hold.
They do this, as in a friendly merger, for a variety of financial and strategic reasons, but essentially it's to achieve any possible immediate gain as well as over the longer term greater market dominance that will build future profits. But what happens in the wake of a takeover. Assets get stripped, spun-off and/or sold-off. Plants are closed. Jobs are lost. And all this is done for the primary bottom line goal - "the bottom line," higher profits, whatever the cost to people, communities or society.
Think of it this way. Large corporations today everywhere, but especially the largest ones in the Global North, are a destructive force, hostile to people, societies and the environment. They're nothing less than legal private tyrannies operating freely with virtually no restraint. Everything for them, animal, vegetable or mineral, is viewed as a production input to be commodified and consumed for profit and then discarded when no longer of use. And to achieve maximum profits, costs must be rigidly controlled. That means the lowest prices paid for goods and services, the lowest wages paid to workers (below privileged higher management who reward themselves richly), as little as possible spent on essential benefits like health care and pensions, and increasingly little or no concern about the long-term cost of exploiting, plundering or even destroying the natural environment and the future ability of the planet to sustain life. These issues, however recognized and grave, are for someone else to deal wih later.
For now all that matters is today, the next quarter's earnings and keeping the stockholders and Wall Street happy. They only understand numbers on financial statements and are blind, unconcerned and even hostile to human and societal welfare or a safe environment that will protect and sustain all life forms. They call it "free market capitalism." It's really the law of the jungle. They're the predators, we're the prey, and every day they eat us alive.
Does all this make sense? And do corporate chieftains who live in a community, love their wives and children, contribute to charities, attend church and believe in its teachings really go to work every day and think - "who and what can I exploit today?" They sure do because they have no other choice. No more so than breathing in and breathing out.
How the Law Affects Corporate Behavior
Publicly owned corporations are mandated by law to serve only the interests of their shareholders and do it by working to maximize the value of their equity holdings by increasing profits. That's it. Case closed. Think of these businesses as gated communities of owners (large and small), the welfare of whom is all that matters and the world outside the gates is to be used and exploited for that one purpose only. Forget about any social responsibility or safeguarding the environment. The idea is to grow sales, keep costs low, increase profits, and if you do it well, shareholder value will rise, the owners and Wall Street will be happy, and you as a CEO or senior executive will probably get a raise, good bonus and keep your job. Try being worker-friendly, a nice guy, a good citizen or a friend of the earth and fail to achieve the above objectives and you'll likely face dismissal and even possible shareholder lawsuit for not pursuing your fiduciary responsibility. Anyone choosing this line of work has n other choice. To do the job well, you have to think only of the care and feeding of your shareholders and the investment community, ignore the law if that's what it takes to do it, and obey the only law that counts - the one that helps you grow the "bottom line."
There's nothing in the Constitution, which is public law, that gives corporations the rights they've gotten. It never mattered to them. They just crafted their own private law, piece by piece, over many years with the help of corporate-friendly lawyers, legislators and the courts. And today it's easier than ever with both major parties strongly pro-business and the courts stacked with business-friendly judges ready to do their bidding. The result is big business is now the paymaster, or puppetmaster, with government and the halls of justice their faithful servants. There's no government of, for and by the people, no public sovereignty, no democratic rights or any choices but to accept their authority and bow to their will. It's a democracy for the few alone - the privileged elite. Our only choice is to go along to get along or get out of their way.
A Profile of the World's Largest 200 Transnational Corporations
In December, 2000 The Institute for Policy Studies released a report called "The Rise of Corporate Global Power." It was a profile of the 200 largest transnationals that showed just how dominant they are. A summary of their findings is listed below.
1. Of the world's 100 largest economies, 51 are corporations.
2. The combined sales of these 200 corporations (called "The Group" below) in 1999 equalled 27.5% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and are growing faster than overall global economic activity.
3. The Group's combined sales exceed the total combined economies of all nations in the world except the largest 10.
4. The Group's combined sales are 18 times the income of the bottom one fourth of the world's population (1.2 billion people) living in "severe" poverty.
5. Despite their combined size and percentage of world economic activity, The Group employs only 0.78% of the world's workforce.
6. From 1983 to 1999 The Group's workforce grew only 14.4% while their profits increased by 362.4% or about 25 times as much.
7. The largest employer in the world, Walmart, employed 1,140,000 in 1999 (1.6 million in 2005) or 5% of The Group's total employment. It's also a model (and increasingly a target) for corporate union-busting, widespread use of part-time workers and a practice of avoiding giving its workers needed benefits like health insurance.
8. 82 US corporations are in The Group, twice as many as Japan with 41, the next highest contributing country.
9. 44 of the US corporations in The Group didn't pay the full 35% federal tax rate from 1996 - 1998. 7 of them paid no tax in 1998 and also got tax rebates, including Enron and Worldcom now exposed as corporate criminals.
10. The percent of The Group's sales from the service sector (not manufacturing) grew from 33.8% in 1983 to 46.7% in 1999. In the US, the service sector comprised 79% of the total economy in 2004.
How Corporate Behavior Affects the Public Interest
Big corporations have almost always thrived in the US. But a crucial, defining moment happened in 1886 when the Supreme Court granted corporations the legal status of personhood in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway - a simple tax dispute case unrelated to the issue of corporate personhood. Incredibly it wasn't the Justices who decided corporations are persons, but the Court's reporter (J.C. Bancroft Davis) who after the decision was rendered wrote it in his "headnotes." The Court did nothing to refute them, likely by intent, and the result was corporations got what they had long coveted.
That decision granted corporations the same constitutional rights as people, but because of their limited liability status, protected shareholders from the obligations of their debts, other obligations, and many of the responsibilities individuals legally have. Armed with this new legal status corporations were able to win many additional favorable court decisions up to the present. They also gained much regulatory relief and favorable legislation while, at the same time, being protected by their limited liability status. As a result, corporations have been able to increase their power and grow to their present size and dominance.
Although corporations aren't human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places simultaneously in many countries, can't be imprisoned for wrongdoing and can change themselves into new persons at will for any reason. They have the same rights and protections as people under the Bill of Rights but not the responsibilities. From that right, corporations became unbound, free to grow and gain immense power and be able to become the dominant institution that now runs the country, the world and all our lives. Most important, they got an unwritten license from all three branches of the government to operate freely for their own benefit and others of their privileged class and do it at the public expense everywhere. They've exploited it fully as they're grown in size and dominance, and the result has been lives destroyed, the environment harmed and needless wars fought on their behalf because they open markets and grow profits. It's no exaggeration to say these institutions today are rea "weapons of mass destruction."
In the early days of the republic it all might have been different had Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prevailed over Federalists John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson and Madison believed the Bill of Rights should include "freedom from monopolies in commerce" (what are now giant corporations) and "freedom from a permanent military" or standing armies. Adams and Hamilton felt otherwise, and the final compromise was the first 10 Bill of Rights amendments that are now the law but not the other two Jefferson and Madison wanted included. Try to imagine what this country might be like today had we gotten them all.
We didn't, of course, so the result, as they say, is history. It allowed small corporations to grow into giants and so-called "free market capitalism" to become the dominant state religion of this country and the West. We may say it's free, but it only is for those own and control it, and notice we never hear the system called "fair." That's because in most key industries a handful of corporate giants dominate and now work in cartel-like alliance with their "friendly" competitors here and abroad to control (read: exploit) the markets they serve. They're also able to co-opt the leaders and business elites of countries in the developing world, or work in partnership with them in the larger ones like China, India and Brazil, to allow them market entry. As an inducement, they offer to invest their capital and offer their technology in return for a business-friendly climate and access to the host country's cheap labor. It's an alliance based on pure exploitation for profit at the expense of people who are sed, abused and discarded when they have no further value.
This essay is mainly about how these same corporate giants dominate and exploit here in the US. They can't get away with the flagrant abuses commonplace in sweatshop labor countries, but they're moving in that direction. It's no longer like the past in this country when I was young and beginning my working life (a distant memory of better times) when manufacturing was strong, jobs paid well and had good benefits, and workers were protected by strong unions that served their interests even while partnering with management and willing to do the bidding of government.
I still remember well an incident early in my working life when as a newly minted MBA I worked as a marketing research analyst for several large corporations prior to joining a small family business. At one of those companies in the early 60s, my boss called me into his office on my first day on the job. He jokingly told me he was so happy with my work he was giving me a raise. We both chuckled, and he then explained on that day everyone in the company got an inflation-based increase. It was automatic from the lowliest worker to top management because the unions (then strong) got it written into their labor contract. In that company, everyone got the same benefits as union members. Try finding anything like that today even for union members alone. It's almost unheard of.
Today, the country is primarily dominated by service industries many of which require little formal education, only pay low wages and few if any benefits, and offer few chances for advancement. The US Department of Labor projects that job categories with the greatest expected future growth are cashiers, waiters and waitresses, janitors and retail clerks. These and other low wage, low benefit jobs are what many young people entering the workforce can look forward to today. You don't need a Harvard degree for them or even one from a junior college - and for the ones listed above, no degree is needed, not even a high school one.
The continuing decline of good job opportunities is a key reason why the quality of education in urban schools has deteriorated so much in recent years and school dropout rates are so high. In my city of Chicago, half of all students entering high school never graduate and of those who do 74% of them must take remedial English and 94% remedial math at the Chicago City Colleges according to a report published in the Chicago Sun Times. The situation isn't much better in inner cities throughout the country, nor is the level of racial segregation that's grown to levels last seen in the 1960s according to Jonathan Kozol in his new book The Shame of the Nation. Again in Chicago, a shocking 87% of public school enrollment was black or Hispanic, and the situation is about as bad or even worse in most other big cities.
The lack of good job opportunities for a growing population of ill-prepared young people is also a major reason for the growth of our prison population that now exceeds 2.1 million, is the largest in the world even ahead of China with over four times our population, and is incarcerating about 900 new prisoners every week. I wrote a recent heavily documented article about this called The US Gulag Prison System.
The US Has Always Been the Unthinkable and Unmentionable - A Rigid Class Society
The US has always been what the "power elite" never admit or discuss - a rigid class society. But once there was a thriving middle class along with a small minority of rich and well-off and a large segment of low paid workers and the poor. That majority in the middle could afford their own homes, send their kids to college and afford many amenities like new cars, some travel, convenience appliances and decent health care. I can still remember buying a health insurance plan while finishing my graduate work in 1959 that cost about $100 and change total for respectable coverage for a full year. Honest, I'm not kidding.
Fewer people each year can afford these "luxuries" now, including decent health care coverage, because of the hollowing out of the economy, stagnant wage growth (to be discussed below) and skyrocketing costs of essentials like health insurance, prescription drugs and college tuition for those wanting a higher education. Services now account for nearly 80% of all business while manufacturing has declined to about 14%, and total manufacturing employment is half the percentage of total employment it was 40 years ago and falling. Also, financial services of all types now comprise the largest single sector of the economy at 21% of it. But most of it involves investment and speculation running into the hundreds of trillions of dollars annually worldwide (and the US is the epicenter of it all) just for transactions involving currencies and so-called over-the-counter and exchange-traded financial derivatives. It's not the purpose of this essay to explain the nuts and bolts of this kind of trading except to say hey produce nothing anyone can go in a store and buy or that enhance the well-being of the majority public that doesn't even know, let alone understand, that this kind of activity goes on or what the inherent dangers from it may be.
The dismantling of our manufacturing base, however, is a subject that should make daily headlines but is seldom discussed in the mainstream. It's crucially important because one has to wonder how any nation can avoid eventual decline when it allows its manufacturing to be done abroad, reduces its need for a highly trained work force and ends up destroying its middle class that made it prosper in the first place. There are distinguished thinkers who believe as I do that the US has seen its better days and is now in a downward trajectory economically. Unless a way is found to reverse this destructive trend, the US will be Number One only in military spending and waging wars. And no nation in history based on militarism and conquest has ever not failed ultimately to destroy itself.
I'd like to quote two distinguished thinkers who've addressed the issue of growing inequality in the US. On most social matters they'd likely disagree, but not on this one. One was former liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis who explained: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." The other was distinguished "free market" economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. In his view: "The greatest problem facing our country is the breaking down into two classes, those who have and those who have not. The growing differences between the incomes of the skilled and the less skilled, the educated and the uneducated, pose a very real danger. If that widening rift continues, we're going to be in terrible trouble.....We cannot remain a democratic, open society that is divided into two classes."
The Downward Trajectory of American Workers
Over the past generation working people have seen an unprecedented fall in their standard of living. In the past (except for periods of economic downturn), workers saw their wages and benefits grow each year and their living standards improve. Today it's just the opposite. Adjusted for inflation, the average working person in the US earns less than 30 years ago, and even with modest annual increases is not keeping up with inflation. In addition, the federal minimum wage is a paltry $5.15 an hour and was last increased in 1997. That rate is now at the lowest point it's been relative to average wages since 1949. It's incentivized individual states to raise their own which they have the right to do, and, as of mid-year 2005, 17 of them and the District of Columbia have done it covering nearly half the US population. That helps, but not enough.
Some of the world data is especially shocking, appalling and indicative of the economic trend in the US. According to the UN 2002 Human Development Report, the richest 1% in 1999-2000 received as much income as the bottom 57% combined, over 45% of the world's population lived then on less than $2 a day, about 40% had no sanitation services and about 840 million people were malnourished. In addition, 1 in 6 grade school children were not in school, and half the global nonagricultural labor force was either unemployed or underemployed. Most shocking and disturbing of all is that many millions (likely tens of millions) of people in the less developed world die each year from starvation and treatable diseases because of abuse and/or neglect by rich nations that could prevent it. And these numbers reflect the state of things at the end of a decade of overall impressive economic growth. But it shows how those gains went mainly to a privileged upper class who got them at the expense of the majority below them especially the most desperate and needy.
The same trend is evident in the US although not as stark as in the less developed world. Except for the mild recession in 2001-2002, overall US economic growth for the past 15 years has been strong and worker productivity high. But the gains from it went to the privileged at the top and were gotten at the expense of working people who saw their wages fail to keep up with inflation and their essential benefits decline. In 2004 the average CEO earned 431 times the income of the average working person. That was up from 85 times in 1990 and 42 times in 1980. It's hard to believe and even harder with the real life example below.
I'd like to nominate a "poster executive" who for me symbolizes classic gross corporate excess and greed. He's the chairman and CEO of Capital One Financial, the giant credit card company that's awaiting the finalizing of its acquisition of North Fork Bancorp. At completion of this deal, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 24 this lucky fellow will realize a gain of $249.3 million from stock options he exercised last year. That's in addition to the $56 million he earned in 2004. What on earth will he spend it on, and how many less fortunate ones will have to ante up to pay for this in the de rigueur job cuts that always follow big acquisitions.
And what will all those other lucky CEOs and top executives spend theirs on as well. If you're not already gagging, let me make you choke. According to a study just released by two Ivy League academics based on interviews with CEOs and top managers of the largest 1,500 public US companies, the top five executives collectively at those companies pocketed $122 billion in compensation from 1999-2003 plus at least $60 billion more in supplemental benefits from SERPs (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans). Also, other data show average annual CEO pay rose from about $1 million a year in 1980 to an estimated $14.4 million in 2001 and rising - plus all those juicy benefits. I repeat - what on earth can they spend it on. They could never even count it.
Reasons for This Unabated Downward Trajectory
The reasons for this decline were as follows:
The shift away from manufacturing to services.
The growth of so-called "globalization" sending many jobs abroad including high-paying ones.
The decline of unions to levels last seen before the mass unionization struggles of the 1930s because of government and corporate antipathy toward them and corporations using the threat to close plants and move jobs offshore to force workers to take pay cuts and accept lower benefits. And then they still move jobs abroad.
Deregulation of key industries including transportation, communications and finance, which opened these industries to low cost competition that put pressure on unions and forced workers to accept lower pay and benefits to keep their jobs.
The growth of high technology allowing machines (mainly computers) to do the work of people, thus reducing the need for them.
The effects of racism and sexism (in a society with deep-rooted racism, sexism and classism) as seen in the data showing 30% of black workers and 40% of Latino workers earning poverty wages with women in both categories most affected. And the average black family owns only 14% as much as the average white family.
The unabated downward trajectory of workers' real income already discussed. The only family income gains have come from two income households, in many cases because wives were forced to enter the workforce out of necessity.
Statistics Documenting the Decline
Hot off the press from the latest US Federal Reserve triennial survey (and most comprehensive one of all) of household wealth published in late February, 2006:
--Median American family income grew a paltry 1.5% after inflation between 2001 and 2004, but there was a widening gap between upper and lower income households.
--While the richest 10% rose an inflation adjusted 6.5%, the bottom 25% fell 1.5%.
--Stephen Brobeck, Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of America, explained - "While the typical American household basically ran in place, less affluent households actually lost ground."
Even hotter off the press, the US Department of Labor and Congressional Budget Office reported in late March that in the last 5 years ending year-end 2005, inflation adjusted GDP per person rose 8.4% but the average weekly wage fell 0.3%. Following a long-term trend since the 1970s, those in the upper income percentiles gained the most while those in the lower half of them lost the most. And the income gap between rich and poor continued to widen.
--The racial disparity was especially dramatic. The median white family's net worth in 2004 was $140,700 compared with $24,800 for the typical nonwhite family.
According to the 2005 Federal Poverty Guidelines, 12.7%, or 37 million people, lived in poverty in 2004. However, because of an acknowledged flawed model to measure poverty, the true number is far higher - at least many millions more and increasing even in times of prosperity.
In December, 2004 the New York Times reported the US ranked 49th in world literacy, and the US Department of Labor estimates over 20% of the population is functionally illiterate (compared to about 1% in Venezuela and Cuba, two of the countries we demonize the most). It's also true, as discussed above briefly, that the quality of public education has been in decline in urban schools for many years. In addition (also mentioned), the extent of racial segregation is now as great as in the 1960s, despite supposed but unrealized gains from the civil rights legislation of that time. Further, state and local education budgets aren't keeping up with a growing need or are being cut. It's also no better for those needing college aid as federal Pell grants have been frozen or cut for three straight years, and it was just reported in late March by public college finance officials that state higher education funding has fallen sharply from $7,121 per student in 2001 to $5,833 in 2005. It means a growing number of lwer income students are now deprived of a chance for higher education - and it's getting steadily worse.
The World Health Organization ranked the US 37th in the world in "overall health performance" and 54th in the fairness of health care. And in 2004 about 46 million people had no health insurance and millions more were underinsured. These appalling numbers are in spite of the fact that the US spends far more on health care per capita than any other country. And all developed countries in the world, except the US and South Africa, provide free health care for all its citizens paid for through taxes.
The European Dream reported US childhood poverty ranked 22nd or second to last among developed nations.
The US ranked last among the world's 20 most developed nations in its worker compensation growth rate in the 1980s with conditions only slightly better in the 1990s.
The New York Times reported 12 million American families, over 10% of all households, struggle to feed themselves.
The NYT also reported the US ranks 41st in world infant mortality.
All this and many more depressing statistics are happening in the richest country in the world with a 2005 Gross Domestic Product of $12.5 trillion.
The dramatic effects of social inequality in the US are seen in the Economic Policy Institute's 2004 report on the State of Working America." It shows the top 1% controls more than one-third of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% have 16%. Even worse, the top 20% holds 84% of all wealth while the poorest 20% are in debt and owe more than they own.
Corporate Gain Has Come at the Cost of Worker Loss
Not coincidentally, as workers have seen their living standards decline, transnational corporations have experienced unprecedented growth and dominance. And that trend continues unabated. How and why is this happening? Begin with the most business-friendly governments the country has had over the last 25 years since the "roaring" 1920s when President Calvin Coolidge explained that "the business of America is business." He, and two other Republican presidents then did everything they could to help their business friends. But they were small-timers compared to today, and the size, dominance and global reach of big business then was a small fraction of what it is now. And back then, job "outsourcing", GATT and WTO type trade agreements, and the concept of globalization weren't in the vocabulary. Now they're central to the problem as they've put working people in corporate straightjackets and created a severe class divide in the country (not to mention the developing world where it's far worse) that keep widening.
How World Trade Agreements Destroy Good Jobs and the American Dream
World trade between nations is nothing new, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has been around since it was formed in Havana, Cuba in 1948. But with the signing of NAFTA that went into effect on January 1, 1994, the notion of so-called globalization emerged big time. NAFTA brought Mexico into the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement as part of a radical experiment to merge three disparate economies into a binding one-size-fits-all set of rules all three had to abide by regardless of the effect on their people. To sell it to each country's legislators and people, NAFTA's backers made lofty pie-in-the-sky predictions of new jobs that "free trade" would create. They never were nor was this a plan to do it. It was a scam to outsource jobs and thus eliminate many others, enrich the transnationals and make working people pick up the tab and take the pain.
NAFTA was just the beginning. It was planned as a stalking horse and template for the World Trade Organization (WTO), that replaced the GATT one year after NAFTA went into effect. The WTO along with an alphabet soup of trade agreements (passed and wished for) like GATS (covering all kinds of services), TRIPS (for intellectual property), MAI (on investments and most all-encompassisng and dangerous one of all if it ever passes even in separate pieces) and all the regional agreements like CAFTA and FTAA are intended to establish a supranational economic "constitution." It's to be based on the rules of trade the Global North nations want to craft that would override the sovereignty of all WTO member nations. In other words, the plan was and still is for the US primarily, along with the EU, Japan and other dominant Global North countries to establish a binding set of trade rules (a global constitution) they would write for their benefit for an integrated world economy and then force all other nations to abideby them. NAFTA, and what was to follow, were and are not intended to create jobs and raise living standards in the participating countries, despite all the hype saying they would and will. These agreements are solely plans to benefit big corporations, legally allowing them the right to dominate world markets, override national sovereignty to do it, and exploit people everywhere for their gain. Bottom line - these "agreements" mean big corporations win and people everywhere lose.
So far the jury is very much out on whether the grand plan will succeed as key countries in the Global South have caught on to the scam and aren't buying it - Brazil, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and others. And China is big enough to be a club member, agree to the rules, and then bend them at times to protect its own interests.
But if NAFTA was a template to disguise a WTO attempted world "hostile takeover," look at all the carnage it's created so far. Instead of creating jobs in all three countries, it destroyed hundreds of thousands of them. In the US alone it's responsible for the loss each year of many thousands of high paying, good benefit manufacturing jobs now exported to low wage countries like Mexico, China, India and many others. And most of the workers losing them only are able to find lower paying ones with fewer or no benefits if they can find any job at all. This is an ongoing problem in good as well as poor economic times and gets worse every year. It's also led many older workers, who wish to work but can't find jobs, to drop out of the work force or take lower paying part-time ones when they can find full-time ones.
The result has been a huge shift upward in income, wealth and power in the US (and in Canada, Mexico and all other WTO member countries) benefitting the business elites and corrupted politicians. And it's cost working people billions of dollars, many thousands of good jobs and a permanent drop in the average American worker's standard of living. It's also created an enormous migration problem all over the world comprised of desperate people looking for work because there's none at home. I wrote at length about this in the US in my recent article called The War on Immigrants. The problem gets worse every year including in the US. And here a low unemployment rate hides the fact that many workers have dropped out of the work force or must take whatever part-time jobs they can find because they can't get full-time ones as mentioned above.
I'm now working on a new article in which I discuss the view of some US economists who explain that if the unemployment rate today was calculated the same way it was during The Great Depression when it rose to a peak of 25% of the working population, the true current figure would be about 12% instead of the reported 4.7%. The current calculation method includes part-time workers who work as little as one hour during the reporting period. It also excludes discouraged workers who wish to work but who've stopped looking because they can't find jobs.
One might logically wonder why big US corporations run by smart people wouldn't be trying to ameliorate this problem to build rather than weaken the purchasing power of people in their home country - the ones they need to buy their products and services. It's not just for their obvious need to control or reduce costs to enhance profits. It's because these companies are only nominally US ones. They may be headquartered here, but they could as easily be home based anywhere. The US may be their biggest market and most important source of revenue and profit, but their operations and markets span the globe. If they desired, they could pick up and leave and set up shop in Timbuktu or Kathmandu. That's why they're called "transnationals."
Once Our Government Protected Working People
At one time US governments had a social contract with its citizens, imperfect as it was. Most governments in Western Europe still do, although they're being weakened. But since the 1980s and especially after the election of George W. Bush, that contract here is being dissmantled, program by program, year after year with the ultimate goal of making every one self-sufficient with little or no safety net for protection. The most vulnerable poor are hurt most and their numbers grow each year, but the middle class is suffering too as those in it are declining as a percent of the total population. And the very definition of a middle class is changing as the wealth gap keeps widening between top and bottom along with the hollowing out of the middle.
Bush and his cabal of acolytes are so intent on destroying the US social contract with its citizens that their motto might as well be: you can have anything you want - as long as you can afford to pay for it. If not, you're on your own.
The Balance Sheet Documenting Corporate Gains
Worker loss has been corporations' gain - big time. In 2004 the world's largest 500 corporations posted their highest ever revenues and profits - an astonishing $14.9 trillion in revenue and $731.2 billion in profits. And top corporate officials, mainly in the US, are raking it in, rewarding themselves with obscene amounts of salaries, bonuses in the multi-millions and lucrative stock options worth even more for many of them. That level of largesse is only possible at the expense of working people here and everywhere. Oliver Stone may have been thinking of them when he made his 1980s film, Wall Street. In it was the memorable line spoken by the character portraying the manipulative investor/deal-maker when he explained that "greed is good."
Except for two brief and mild recessions, corporations in the US have prospered since the 1980s in a very business-friendly environment under both Democrats and Republicans. The result has been rising profits to record levels, enhanced even more by generous corporate tax cuts (and personal ones as well mostly for the rich), especially after the election of George Bush. Under this president, one of their own in the White House, US corporations have never had it better. It's been so good that 82 of the largest 275 companies paid no federal income tax in at least one year from 2001-2003 or got a refund; 28 of them got tax rebates in all 3 of those years even though their combined profits totaled $44.9 billion; 46 of them, earning $42.6 billion in profits, paid no tax in 2003 and got $4.9 billion back in tax rebates. And the average CEO pay for these 46 companies in 2004 was $12.6 million.
Along with big tax cuts and generous rebates, big corporations are on the government dole big time in the form of subsidies, otherwise known as "corporate welfare." It's also known as socialism for the rich (and capitalism for the rest of us). In 1997 the Fortune 500 companies got $75 billion in "public aid" even though they earned record profits of $325 billion. They got it in many forms - grants, contracts, loans and loan guarantees and lots more. Today there are about 125 business subsidy programs in the federal budget benefitting all major areas of business.
Some examples of this government largesse include:
Selling the rights to billions of dollars of oil, gas, coal and other mineral reserves at a small fraction of their market value.
The giveaway of the entire broadcast spectrum to the corporate media, valued at $37 billion in 1989 dollars.
Charging mostly corporate ranchers (including big oil and insurance companies) dirt cheap grazing rates on over 20 million acres of public land.
Spending many billions of dollars on R & D and handing over the results to corporations free of charge. "Big Pharma" is notorious for letting government do their expensive research and then cashing in on the results by soaking us with sky-high prices and rigging the game with through WTO rules that get them exclusive patent rights for 20 years or longer when they're able to extend them through the courts.
Giving the nuclear industry over $100 billion in handouts since its inception and guaranteeing government protection to pick up the cost in case of any serious accidents that otherwise might cost the company affected billions and possibly bankrupt it.
Giving corporate agribusiness producers many billions in annual subsidies.
You and I, the individual taxpayers, pay the bill for this generosity. But we actually pay these corporations twice - first through our taxes and then for the cost of their products and services. And they don't even thank us.
The Biggest Recipient of Government Handouts
In the old game of "guns vs. butter", guess who wins? Clue - they have shareholders, and their chiefs are called CEOs. Guess who loses? You know that answer chapter and verse by now.
The Wall Street film character who explained that greed is good might have added war is even better. Call it greed made easy or without even trying. Since WW II the Pentagon and military-industrial complex have always been at the head of the handout queue to get their king-sized pound of flesh in appropriations. The amounts gotten varied in times of war and peace or with the whims or chutzpah of a sitting president, but they're always big. The Pentagon, defense contractors and all the other many and varied thousands of parasitical corporations servicing the defense industry are umbilically linked. All these corporations profit handsomely in our military-industrialized society that takes our tax dollars and hands them over to them by the hundreds of billions annually. Their gain is the public's loss. If the process were audible we'd be able to hear a "giant sucking sound" of public resources wooshing from our pockets to theirs. It's also the sound of our lifeblood being sucked away as we have to pic up the tab and give up our social benefits as well.
Once the cold war ended after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union became 15 independent republics, there was some hope for a peace dividend - meaning less for the military and more social spending. That wasn't what the first Bush administration and Pentagon had in mind as they frantically searched for and easily found new potential enemies as a way to make the case for continued militarized state capitalism. Our language manipulation experts came up with and sold to the Congress and public the threat of "growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts" which "will place serious demands on our forces" and "continue to threaten US interests," even without "the backdrop of superpower competition." Our defense strategy would thus be based on maintaining global "stability" (more code language meaning assuring obedience to US dominance).
In the 1990 National Security Strategy, the Pentagon presented its defense budget to the Congress using the above stated pretext to justify what they wanted. It called for strengthening "the defense industrial base" (code language for the high-tech industry in all its forms) through generous subsidies as incentives "to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development." They got what they wanted, and it set off the high tech stock market boom that lasted until the speculative bubble burst in March, 2000 when the economy slowed and slipped into recession. Three years later in a post 9/11 environment, the economy was again growing as was annual defense spending, and the stock market began another ascent that's so far continuing.
The many corporations now benefitting from Pentagon largesse are so addicted to it that they become the main promoters of and cheerleaders for conflicts or preparations for them because they guarantee bigger handouts that are so good for business. It's a dirty business, but isn't that the fundamental predatory nature of large-scale capitalism that relies on a state policy of imperialism to thrive and prosper. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge explained it in 1895, in an unguarded moment, when he said "commerce follows the flag." He might have added that the flag also follows commerce. The great political economist Harry Magdoff, who died this year on New Year's day, also explained it well in his 1969 book The Age of Imperialism when he wrote: "Imperialism is not a matter of choice for a capitalist society; it is the way of life of such a society." And historian Henry Steele Commager wrote about how a national security police state and its bureaucracy lends its great talents and resources "not to devising ways f reducing tensions and avoiding war, but to ways of exacerbating tensions and preparing for war." I guess the conclusion is that in a capitalist society dominated by big business this "bad seed" must be in our DNA and we can't help ourselves as a result. In another article I'm working on I refer to our addiction to war. So far we haven't found an effective antidote.
The reason, of course, is because war is so good for business. In the last 6 years alone, and especially since 9/11, along with all their other largesse and waste, the Pentagon outsourced on average $150 billion a year in work to corporations. Almost half of it was in no-bid contracts and three fourths of that was to the five largest defense contractors headed by Lockheed Martin and Boing. L-M is the undisputed king of contractors. They literally run the enterprise of empire from the inside and out. They're not only its biggest beneficiary, they also help shape the policy guaranteeing it - to the tune of $65 million every day (from our pockets into theirs). And they collect their loot even when their killing machines don't work right.
Then, of course, there's Halliburton and Bechtel. They're always big time winners in the handout sweepstakes. These two well-connected companies have been at the head of the queue in the looting of Iraq and the US Treasury. They've gotten huge no-bid contracts worth many billions which they then freely supplemented with gross (read: criminal) overcharges and gotten away with most of it. And we can't ignore the notorious Carlyle Group, the nation's largest privately held defense contractor with the tightest of ties right to the Oval Office. They practically sit in the traditional Kittinger chair there, or whatever other brand George Bush may prefer. His father, and former president, of course, is on their team (and payroll), and they use him as needed as their main "door-opener" and "wheel-greaser" (especially in the lucrative Middle East). And the old man reportedly earns a hefty half million dollars for every speech he makes on behalf of his generous employer. At that pay scale he must be hard-presed to keep his mouth shut.
Guess How Big Funding National Defense Really Is?
The Center for Defense Information reported that since 1945 over $21 trillion in constant dollars has been spent on the military. And it's been done largely to benefit US corporations even though the country had no real enemies all through those years - except for the ones we attacked with no provocation or invented to scare the public so they'd buy into the scam that we needed industrial strength military spending for national security. Ronald Reagan was very adept at scare tactics and duping the public. He fathered the Contra wars in the 80s in Nicaragua and scared half the public into believing the ruling Sandinista government was a threat to invade Texas and threaten the whole country. He tried and failed to get Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid to go along with him. The Mexican president said if he did 70 million Mexicans would die laughing. It's hard to believe the US public could ever fall for a threat about as great as I'd be (all 120 lbs. of me) in the ring against Mike Tyson in his prime But although there was none and the nation was at peace during his tenure, Reagan expanded the military budget by 43% over what it was at the height of the Vietnam war (and ran up huge budget deficits doing it). The public suffered for it with the loss of social benefits, but business loved it and him, and the stock market took off on an 18 year bull run.
But after the 9/11 attack, the floodgates really opened wide. In fiscal year 2000 the military budget was $289 billion, but up it went steadily after that reaching $442 billion in 2006 and currently is requested to increase to $463 or higher in 2007. Add to that over $41 billion for Homeland Security in 2006 (another public rip-off as part of a move toward a full-blown national security police state) and annual multi-billions in funding off the books for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that in fiscal 2006 alone amounts to about $120 billion now and may increase. Add it up and the current budget for the military, 2 wars off the books and Homeland Security, and it comes to over $600 billion this year. That kind of spending, with billions more available at the drop of an add-on presidential emergency request gives a whole new meaning to the term "war profiteer." And while the big defense contractors reap the biggest benefits, many thousands of US corporations are in on the take as the Pentagon is a big buyerof everything from expensive R & D and high tech weapons to breakfast cereals and toilet paper. Using the false Bush slogan about leaving no child behind for his failed education program, the Pentagon for sure leaves no corporation behind in its generosity. Corporations wanting a piece of the action need only remember and abide by the scriptural message from John 16:24: "ask and you shall receive." And probably a lot as the Pentagon is notorious about being sloppy, "spilling" more than many good sized corporations earn.
Here's the 2 key questions to ask. Does anyone feel safer, and who'll pick up the tab? If you hadn't noticed, you, the average worker, didn't share in those big tax cuts, your income is losing the war to inflation, your benefits are eroding, and someone some day has to pay that $8.275 trillion national debt that keeps rising $2.2 billion every day. And along with that burden, we've never been less safe, and we, the public, have to pay the bill because corporate America never does. They're in another queue for more tax cuts, and we'll see more social benefits cut to pay for them too. In the political game of musical chairs, corporations get them all every time, and John Q. Public is always left standing (out in the cold).
How Did We Get Into this Mess, and How Can We Get Out of It
I've already explained what happened. As to how, it's because we let them. They delivered the message, and we bought it like lambs led to the slaughter or believing the "foxes" were really "guarding" us. Back in school we all learned and sang those lovely lyrics that began "Oh beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain." We believed it and most of us in our stupor still do. It's long past time we realized it was just a song intended to lull us into complacency to accept the message and go along with it. It was a false message, although there is an America the Beautiful, but only for the privileged few and no one else. And every year it gets worse - a race to the bottom with no end in sight until we either get there or wake up in time and do something about it. Unless we act to cauterize our collective wounds we'll never begin the healing process; in fact, we'll bleed to death. We have to find a way to reclaim the democracy we're always being reminded we have, but don't. If we reall had it, they'd never have to remind us about it.
People Power Is How We Get Out of It
It's not too late to turn it around - yet. And it's simple to know what we need to do but always hard knowing how to go about it - take to the streets, throw the bums out (we've tried that one before and only put in new bums). Anyone have some good suggestions? I don't have sure-fire ones, but I've got a piece of good wisdom based on the past and the present. History shows that when things get bad enough people first stir and then react. If nothing changes and the pain gets bad enough, then at some point down go the barricades, and people power steps into the breach. The many always win out over the few when they're fully committed to do it. I"ve quoted famed Chicago community activist Sol Linowitz before who understood it and once said "the way to beat organized money is with organized people." Three recent and current examples make the point and show us how.
All over France for two months up until April, millions of angry young people and union members mainly engaged in strikes, sit-ins and mass street protests to demand the revocation of the new First Employment Contract (CPE) for workers under 26 years of age. French youth refused to become what they called "a Kleenex generation" - to be used and thrown away at the whim of employers who want the "flexibility" to do it. The law was based on the insane notion that indiscriminate firing was a way to create more jobs and reduce unemployment. If it had gone into affect, it would have given employers the right to hire young workers on a two year trial basis and fire them at will at any time during that period. The protesters understood the sham and how it would hurt them and stayed out long enough to get the Chirac government to back down and effectively cancel this outrageous law.
A second example is now happening on the streets in Nepal as many thousands of people from all walks of life including professionals have been protesting since early April in a mass civil uprising against King Gyanendra demanding an end to autocratic monarchal rule and the restoration of democracy. At this writing they still don't have it, but the king was forced to go on national television and promise to meet their demands. At this writing the protests are continuing, and the people so far are unsatisfied with what their king has told them.
The third example has been happening here in the US as millions of immigrants and working people of all races have taken to the streets in cities all over the country. They've seen their rights denied or threatened, their jobs exported, unions weakened or destroyed, wages stagnated and essential benefits reduced, lost or never gotten. Their protests are continuing, and they demand equity and justice. Congress has already taken note and softened some of their hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric. But it remains to be seen how this will turn out. The Congress will resume its immigration legislation debate in its post Easter break session with a final resolution now unclear. What is clear is that if a final bill emerges it will be less harsh than the original House version that passed and the Senate one still being debated prior to and during the mass protests.
The lesson is clear. Mass people actions, if large and strong enough, get results. Lots of great thinkers through the years knew this and said it many different ways. I quote some of them often for inspiration, and I'll end by doing it again - 2 jewels from one of my favorites - the Mahatma. Ghandi wisely observed that "even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled." He proved it. He also famously said - "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." He proved that too.
Anyone ready for a fight? I hope you are, and if so, you and we too can win. And just in case I need to remind you what you're fighting for, it's for your future, the kind your parents hopefully had, the kind you want for your children, the kind where you know you live in a country with a real democratically elected government that works for all the people and one where there's equity and justice for everyone, not just for the privileged the way it is today. It's also to save the republic and reverse the present course we're now on that may destroy it. Think about it, and start fighting for it. Your future depends on it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog address at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
A Planetary Experiment
Suppose you were approached with the idea of performing an incredible experiment, to study population growth? Suppose the experiment went like this...
1. Take a large stadium and place in it a dozen children.
2. Seal the exits, never let them leave.
3. Drop in food an water daily. As much as is needed to keep them healthy.
4. Watch the population build over the years.
5. When the stadium is full, cut back on the food and water per one ration daily.
6. When there is a dozen people left, the experiment is done.
Would you participate in such an experiment?
Would you donate your own children or grandchildren as subjects for the experiment?
What if the experiment were done on a larger scale and you knew that your children would live out their lives before the experiment went stale, only your grandchildren would suffer, would that be better? How about your great grand children?
How about doing on a planetary scale? Let's say you do the same thing for a planet. You open up vast but finite resources to a stable population, and watch them swell in numbers and then run out of resources and drop back to a small population again from famine, pestilence and disease. Would you participate in this experiment?
Would you like your children to participate?
Would you feel better, if the bad stuff only happens to your descendants after you've passed on?
What if the those in the experiment knew about the experiment, and continued to outbreed their resource base? Would they be more or less culpable for continuing the experiment than you for setting it up?
Well the experiment is real. We're in it. We've been given a bounty of 100 million years worth of fossil energy. We've used it to build a vast civilization and to feed billions of people in an ever growing population. We still work to increase our population even as we watch our resource base disappear. We still work to increase our consumption of finite resources as fossil fuels, fresh water, clean air, fish an oceans and our ecosystems on land are exhausted and run out.
And there's nothing left that can replace these things. We can argue and discuss subsidy driven alternatives, but even the energy positive ones are like shaking out sofas for lose change compared to the bounty we've enjoyed in fossil fuels.
We're running low on so many resources that now our world grain stocks are running periously low. We're approaching the exciting part of the experiment now. We now produce less food than we eat. Over the coming years, we'll produce less and less food.
Long ago, we were told what would happen. Malthus worked it out and described population crashes. The Club of Rome was remarkably accurate in their timing, even with incomplete data. As they argued, the models were the real key. They showed that the timing of the crash was only loosely effected by the quality of the data.
So all along, we knew what was coming, and we denied it. Now, it's our generation that will pay the piper. Do our ancestors bear any responsibility? Do we? Are we responsible for our children, grand children and maybe great grand children as this grand planetary experiment winds down.
I say we do, if we truely believe we are more than animals. We are the first creatures on this planet that we know of, that can consciously shape our own destinies, and we used it to be as unknowing animals, and propagate into overshoot.
And perhaps, that's our only excuse. We've just come out of the jungle. We've made our first faltering steps toward higher noble goals, yet we brought the jungles and plains with us, expressed in our subconcious and our instincts. Our brains are still tuned to watching for tigers and leopards, while our glands tells us we must outbreed the predators. No one ever told our genes that the predators are banished. We never evolved, past the point where our animal drives stand on equal footing with our intellect.
Perhaps, we're due to go back to nature and take another spin along the evolutionary roller coaster.
And we are on a roller coaster, going over the top. It's a little late to get off, so hang on and enjoy the ride!
But isn't it exciting, to be here? To be where we are now? To sit at the very apex of the greatest civilization mankind will likely ever know? We are the stuff of dreams and of future legends.
Enjoy the ride!
Take your place on the Great Mandela!
This our time to live, to shine! Revel in it!
Someone had to be here, it may as well be us!
posted by Weaseldog @ 10:22 PM http://weaseldog.blogspot.com
Monday, June 26, 2006
5 Comments
JungleWoods said...
Weasedog writes:
"But isn't it exciting, to be here? To be where we are now? To sit at the very apex of the greatest civilization mankind will likely ever know? We are the stuff of dreams and of future legends."
WTSHTF and things get hard, if I'm still around, I'm going to remember this quote.
Thought provoking post Wease.
8:59 AM
BrunotheBear said...
Weasledog,
I enjoy your posts over at Kuntsler's. I especially like your notes on Malthus and population overshoot. Donella Meadows was one of my favorite columnists. Have you ever read Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons"? The original from 1968, published in Science? Lots of profound stuff in there. You are edging into the same territory- problems with no technical solutions that must still be solved.
Good job here, I'll check back regularly.
8:18 PM
donna said...
Tell it, brother.
9:30 AM
Weaseldog said...
Yes, I've read those works.
It's amazing how simple and logical the overshoot arguments are. Yet because they carry a negative message, we are ill equipped to trust the logic behind them. We want to believe they are wrong, and so we do. And we live as if they are false and there are no limits.
Essentially, the argument for growth and sprawl and the destruction of nature is that, "We have to build, because we breed without constraint." the question of 'why do we breed without constraint?' is off limits in polite company.
We believe we have an inalianable right to have as many children as we want. We find it difficult to examine this in a moral context. I believe it's clear that having too many children is fundamentally immoral, as each child becomes diminished by the quantity of humans competing with that child for time, attention and resources.
But the notion that there should be self imposed limits to our growth, is reprehensible to most. As is the thought that there are consequences to unconstrained breeding. But nature has always been ready to demonstrate that there are consequences to everything. We just choose to ignore these lessons.
On the other side of the crash, I have small hopes that our descendants can learn to do better. I hope that the faith that God is going to clean up after us, once we've trashed the planet will fade away. Sometime after the crash, it should be obvious that the new golden age following the rapture hasn't come, and won't. But that belief will probably just morph into soemthing else.
A part of me wants to know how it will all work out. Another knows I'll see enough to fill anyone's life.
1:14 PM
BrunotheBear said...
Weasledog
It's obvious Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons has influenced you. And you express your interpretations of his essay very clearly, which is much appreciated because so many garble them up and make such a hash of them. They are not easy concepts to grasp. There is no technical solution...that took me awhile to get.
The "negative message" you mention is that we are not gods and goddesses, but animals, mammals specifically. And still the only animal that knows its going to die. As soon as another animal picks up a branch set fire by lightning and uses it to scare other animals, they're in business.
I never thought I would see anything tougher than seeing my parents die of old age. Now we seem to be staring down the barrel of our own extinction! Life is sure interesting.
You said something on the Kunstler blog that resonated with me. On dealing with what we're facing, something about being informed then dodging or deflecting whatever is thrown at you, planning to survive is not depressing but interesting. I'm passing that sentiment on and it's resonating. I told a friend tonight that I would do anything I could to help her because "we have to cooperate and help each other- we need friends...that's the only way we are going to survive!" I saw by her expression that a light went on. Of course she's doing what I think is essential, which is to work for the environment and habitat restoration, but nevertheless we are hard-wired to cooperate. That's what's brought our species this far. I'm counting on it.
1:06 AM
Suppose you were approached with the idea of performing an incredible experiment, to study population growth? Suppose the experiment went like this...
1. Take a large stadium and place in it a dozen children.
2. Seal the exits, never let them leave.
3. Drop in food an water daily. As much as is needed to keep them healthy.
4. Watch the population build over the years.
5. When the stadium is full, cut back on the food and water per one ration daily.
6. When there is a dozen people left, the experiment is done.
Would you participate in such an experiment?
Would you donate your own children or grandchildren as subjects for the experiment?
What if the experiment were done on a larger scale and you knew that your children would live out their lives before the experiment went stale, only your grandchildren would suffer, would that be better? How about your great grand children?
How about doing on a planetary scale? Let's say you do the same thing for a planet. You open up vast but finite resources to a stable population, and watch them swell in numbers and then run out of resources and drop back to a small population again from famine, pestilence and disease. Would you participate in this experiment?
Would you like your children to participate?
Would you feel better, if the bad stuff only happens to your descendants after you've passed on?
What if the those in the experiment knew about the experiment, and continued to outbreed their resource base? Would they be more or less culpable for continuing the experiment than you for setting it up?
Well the experiment is real. We're in it. We've been given a bounty of 100 million years worth of fossil energy. We've used it to build a vast civilization and to feed billions of people in an ever growing population. We still work to increase our population even as we watch our resource base disappear. We still work to increase our consumption of finite resources as fossil fuels, fresh water, clean air, fish an oceans and our ecosystems on land are exhausted and run out.
And there's nothing left that can replace these things. We can argue and discuss subsidy driven alternatives, but even the energy positive ones are like shaking out sofas for lose change compared to the bounty we've enjoyed in fossil fuels.
We're running low on so many resources that now our world grain stocks are running periously low. We're approaching the exciting part of the experiment now. We now produce less food than we eat. Over the coming years, we'll produce less and less food.
Long ago, we were told what would happen. Malthus worked it out and described population crashes. The Club of Rome was remarkably accurate in their timing, even with incomplete data. As they argued, the models were the real key. They showed that the timing of the crash was only loosely effected by the quality of the data.
So all along, we knew what was coming, and we denied it. Now, it's our generation that will pay the piper. Do our ancestors bear any responsibility? Do we? Are we responsible for our children, grand children and maybe great grand children as this grand planetary experiment winds down.
I say we do, if we truely believe we are more than animals. We are the first creatures on this planet that we know of, that can consciously shape our own destinies, and we used it to be as unknowing animals, and propagate into overshoot.
And perhaps, that's our only excuse. We've just come out of the jungle. We've made our first faltering steps toward higher noble goals, yet we brought the jungles and plains with us, expressed in our subconcious and our instincts. Our brains are still tuned to watching for tigers and leopards, while our glands tells us we must outbreed the predators. No one ever told our genes that the predators are banished. We never evolved, past the point where our animal drives stand on equal footing with our intellect.
Perhaps, we're due to go back to nature and take another spin along the evolutionary roller coaster.
And we are on a roller coaster, going over the top. It's a little late to get off, so hang on and enjoy the ride!
But isn't it exciting, to be here? To be where we are now? To sit at the very apex of the greatest civilization mankind will likely ever know? We are the stuff of dreams and of future legends.
Enjoy the ride!
Take your place on the Great Mandela!
This our time to live, to shine! Revel in it!
Someone had to be here, it may as well be us!
posted by Weaseldog @ 10:22 PM http://weaseldog.blogspot.com
Monday, June 26, 2006
5 Comments
JungleWoods said...
Weasedog writes:
"But isn't it exciting, to be here? To be where we are now? To sit at the very apex of the greatest civilization mankind will likely ever know? We are the stuff of dreams and of future legends."
WTSHTF and things get hard, if I'm still around, I'm going to remember this quote.
Thought provoking post Wease.
8:59 AM
BrunotheBear said...
Weasledog,
I enjoy your posts over at Kuntsler's. I especially like your notes on Malthus and population overshoot. Donella Meadows was one of my favorite columnists. Have you ever read Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons"? The original from 1968, published in Science? Lots of profound stuff in there. You are edging into the same territory- problems with no technical solutions that must still be solved.
Good job here, I'll check back regularly.
8:18 PM
donna said...
Tell it, brother.
9:30 AM
Weaseldog said...
Yes, I've read those works.
It's amazing how simple and logical the overshoot arguments are. Yet because they carry a negative message, we are ill equipped to trust the logic behind them. We want to believe they are wrong, and so we do. And we live as if they are false and there are no limits.
Essentially, the argument for growth and sprawl and the destruction of nature is that, "We have to build, because we breed without constraint." the question of 'why do we breed without constraint?' is off limits in polite company.
We believe we have an inalianable right to have as many children as we want. We find it difficult to examine this in a moral context. I believe it's clear that having too many children is fundamentally immoral, as each child becomes diminished by the quantity of humans competing with that child for time, attention and resources.
But the notion that there should be self imposed limits to our growth, is reprehensible to most. As is the thought that there are consequences to unconstrained breeding. But nature has always been ready to demonstrate that there are consequences to everything. We just choose to ignore these lessons.
On the other side of the crash, I have small hopes that our descendants can learn to do better. I hope that the faith that God is going to clean up after us, once we've trashed the planet will fade away. Sometime after the crash, it should be obvious that the new golden age following the rapture hasn't come, and won't. But that belief will probably just morph into soemthing else.
A part of me wants to know how it will all work out. Another knows I'll see enough to fill anyone's life.
1:14 PM
BrunotheBear said...
Weasledog
It's obvious Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons has influenced you. And you express your interpretations of his essay very clearly, which is much appreciated because so many garble them up and make such a hash of them. They are not easy concepts to grasp. There is no technical solution...that took me awhile to get.
The "negative message" you mention is that we are not gods and goddesses, but animals, mammals specifically. And still the only animal that knows its going to die. As soon as another animal picks up a branch set fire by lightning and uses it to scare other animals, they're in business.
I never thought I would see anything tougher than seeing my parents die of old age. Now we seem to be staring down the barrel of our own extinction! Life is sure interesting.
You said something on the Kunstler blog that resonated with me. On dealing with what we're facing, something about being informed then dodging or deflecting whatever is thrown at you, planning to survive is not depressing but interesting. I'm passing that sentiment on and it's resonating. I told a friend tonight that I would do anything I could to help her because "we have to cooperate and help each other- we need friends...that's the only way we are going to survive!" I saw by her expression that a light went on. Of course she's doing what I think is essential, which is to work for the environment and habitat restoration, but nevertheless we are hard-wired to cooperate. That's what's brought our species this far. I'm counting on it.
1:06 AM
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Exploding the myth of the hydrogen economy
Posted by Dan Welch under Peakist , Energy , Gas
Source: The Peakist
Tim Flannery debunks the idea that hydrogen is going to provide us with the fuel of the post-oil energy regime:
“TO PEOPLE IN THE PETROCHEMICAL and motor vehicle businesses, the solution to the climate change problem lies in ascending a metaphorical staircase of fuels, which, at each step, contains an ever diminishing amount of carbon.
Yesterday, the argument goes, it was coal, today it’s oil, and tomorrow it will be natural gas, with Nirvana being reached when the global economy makes the transition to hydrogen—a fuel that contains no carbon at all.
Although the transition from oil to gas is now well under way, it’s been some time coming. For many years the oil companies regarded natural gas as a volatile waste product, to be either burned off or pumped back underground to increase oil pressure at the well head. Because of its greater hydrogen content, gas burns hotter and cleaner than oil, so it was always valuable stuff; but the technology needed to transport it safely and cheaply did not exist.
One of gas’s greatest drawbacks is its low density, which makes it bulky and prone to leaking. It takes a house-sized volume of gas to yield the same energy as a barrel of oil, so barrels—and even tankers—were never an option for its transport. Pipelines were the obvious solution, but suitable pipelines cost around a million dollars for each mile laid, which meant that until recently, investing a dollar in oil returned twice the profits of one invested in gas.
Technological advances in handling gas, high oil prices, a looming lack of oil, and the demand for a cleaner fuel to replace coal have all combined to change the economics of gas, and today it is big business. The most important technical advance involved the refrigeration of gas so that it becomes a supercooled liquid, which permits cost-effective transport, in purpose-built ships, over large distances. With an international trade in shipping developed, and with the larger corporations willing to invest the billions required for gas pipelines, gas appears to be the fuel of choice for the twenty-first century.
Although gas is a more expensive fuel than coal, it has many benefits that make it ideal for producing electricity. Gas-fired power plants cost half as much to build as coal-fired models, and they come in a variety of sizes. Instead of having one massive, distant generator of electricity, as with coal, a series of small gas-fired generators can be dotted about, saving on transmission losses. They can also be fired up and shut down quickly, which makes them ideal for complementing intermittent sources of energy generation such as wind and solar. Furthermore, combined-cycle plants, which burn gas to turn a turbine then capture the ultra-hot exhaust emissions to generate more electricity, are extremely efficient at converting fuel to power. If coupled to a heat-using industrial process (called cogeneration), they can achieve efficiencies of 80 percent. All of this has led Lord Browne, CEO of BP, to comment that “one dollar invested today in gas-fired generation capacity produces three to four times the amount of electricity [as] the same dollar invested in coal-fired generation capacity.”
Over 90 percent of new power generation in the United States today is gas-fired, and around the world it is fast becoming the favored fuel. Despite this, gas is not without its problems, including safety issues and the possibility of terrorist attacks on large plants or pipelines. And because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, its potential to leak must be addressed: Parts of the gas infrastructure—such as the old iron pipes used for reticulating gas throughout cities—are decidedly leaky.
GAS IS THE THIRD STEP on the stairway to climate-change heaven; but even if all the coal-fired power stations on Earth were replaced with gas-fired ones, global carbon emissions would be cut by only 30 percent. So despite these savings, if we were to stall on this step of the energy staircase, we would still face massive climate change. In this scenario, a transition to hydrogen is thus imperative; but how likely is it?
In the 1970s the Australian electrochemist John Bockris coined the phrase “hydrogen economy,” and ever since, for many people, hydrogen appears to be the silver-bullet solution to the world’s global warming ills. “Boiled down to its minimalist description,” Bockris wrote, “the ‘Hydrogen Economy’ means that hydrogen would be used to transport energy from renewables (at nuclear or solar sources) over large distances; and to store it (for supply to cities) in large amounts.” As with so many silver-bullet solutions, however, there’s a lot of devil in the detail.
The power source of the hydrogen economy is the hydrogen fuel cell, which is basically a box with no moving parts that takes in hydrogen and oxygen and puts out water and electricity. While a wondrous-sounding device, it is hardly new technology: The first hydrogen fuel cell, known as a “gaseous voltaic battery,” was built by Sir William Grove in the 1830s. His cell resembled a standard lead-acid battery, in that it used sulphuric acid as an electrolyte, but instead of employing lead electrodes it used platinum, which hastens the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen that generates the electricity. The use of such an expensive catalyst was a drawback in developing the technology, but today there are several kinds of fuel cells that use other materials. Whatever their composition, from an economic perspective, hydrogen fuel cells can be divided into two types: stationary cells used to produce electricity, and those used in transport.
The most promising cells for the stationary production of electricity are known as molten carbonate fuel cells, which use molten potassium carbonate instead of sulphuric acid, and nickel in place of platinum. They operate at a temperature of around 1202°F, and although highly efficient (possessing an electric efficiency of around 50 percent), they take a long time to reach working temperature. They are also very large—a 250-kilowatt model is the size of a railway carriage—making them unsuitable for use in motor vehicles.
Several demonstration projects based on this technology already exist, and a commercial stationary hydrogen cell (using an earlier technology) has been in operation in the United States since 1999. It is predicted that a decrease in cost resulting from economies of scale will soon lead to more widespread use of the cells. Although this represents a tremendous technological advance, it does nothing immediate to abate CO2 emissions, for the hydrogen used today comes from reforming natural gas. Because some of the energy in the gas is used in this process, and all of the CO2 it produces is released into the atmosphere, from a climate perspective the world would be better off burning the gas directly to create electricity.
But let’s consider hydrogen as a transport fuel. A number of motor vehicle manufacturers, including Ford and BMW, are planning to introduce hydrogen-fueled, internal combustion engine cars to the marketplace; and the Bush administration plans to invest $1.7 billion to build the hydrogen-powered FreedomCAR. Even so, the use of hydrogen as a transport fuel is at a far more rudimentary stage of development than the technology using stationary cells.
The fuel cell type best suited for transport purposes is known as a proton-exchange membrane fuel cell. It is much smaller than the molten carbonate cell and operates at around 150°F, thus being ready for action soon after turning the ignition. These cells, however, require very pure hydrogen. In current prototypes this is supplied from a built-in “reformer” that converts natural gas or gasoline to hydrogen, which again means that, from a climate perspective, we would be better off burning these fuels directly to drive the engine. The best energy efficiency obtained by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells is 35 to 40 percent—about the same as a standard internal combustion engine.
Vehicle manufacturers hope to do away with the on-board reformer required by the prototypes and envisage fueling the vehicles from hydrogen “pumps” at fuel stations. There are several ways that this could be done. The one most closely resembling the current system of fueling vehicles involves producing the hydrogen at a remote central point and distributing it to fueling stations; and it’s here that the difficulties involved in moving such low-density fuel become evident.
The ideal way to transport it is in tanker-trucks carrying liquefied hydrogen, but, because liquefaction occurs at -423°F, refrigerating the gas sufficiently to achieve this is an economic nightmare. Using hydrogen energy to liquefy a gallon of hydrogen consumes 40 percent of the value of the fuel. Using the U.S. power grid to do so takes 12-15 kilowatt hours of electricity, and this would release almost twenty-two pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. Around a gallon of gasoline holds the equivalent energy of one kilogram of hydrogen. Burning it releases around the same amount of CO2 as using the grid to liquefy the hydrogen, so the climate change consequences of using liquefied hydrogen are as bad as driving a standard car.
One solution may be to pressurize the hydrogen only partially, which reduces the fuel value consumed to 15 percent, and the canisters used for transport can be less specialized. But even using improved, high-pressure canisters, a 40-ton truck could deliver only 100 gallons of compressed hydrogen, meaning that it would take fifteen such trucks to deliver the same fuel energy value as is now delivered by a 26-ton gasoline tanker. And if these 40-ton trucks carried the hydrogen 300 miles, the energy cost of the transport would consume around 40 percent of the fuel carried.
Further problems arise when you store the fuel in your car. A special fuel tank carrying hydrogen at 5,000 psi (near the current upper limit for pressurized vessels) would need to be constructed and be ten times the size of a gas tank. Even with the best tanks, around 4 percent of fuel is likely to be lost to boil-off every day. A good example of the rate of evaporative loss of hydrogen occurs whenever NASA fuels the space shuttle. Its main tank takes 26,500 gallons of hydrogen, but an extra 12,000 gallons must be delivered at each refueling just to account for the evaporation rate.
Pipelines are another option for transporting hydrogen, but as with gas, they are expensive—they must be large and built from materials resistant to hydrogen (it makes steel, for example, very brittle). They must also be of high integrity, because hydrogen leaks so easily. Even if the preexisting gas pipeline network could be reconfigured to transport hydrogen, the cost of providing a network running from central producing units to the world’s fueling stations would be astronomical.
Perhaps hydrogen could be produced from natural gas at the gas station. This would do away with the difficulties of transporting it, but this process would produce 50 percent more CO2 than using the gas to fuel the vehicle in the first place. Hydrogen could also theoretically be generated at home using power from the electricity grid, but the price of electricity for domestic use, and the high cost of hydrogen generation and purification units, would make it prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the electricity in the grid in places such as the United States is largely derived from burning fossil fuels, so home generation of hydrogen under current circumstances would result in a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
And there is another danger with home-brewing hydrogen. The gas is odorless, leak prone, and highly combustible, and it burns with an invisible flame. Firemen are trained to use straw brooms to detect a hydrogen fire; when the straw bursts into flames, you have found your conflagration.
Let’s imagine for a moment, however, that all of the delivery problems relating to hydrogen are overcome, and you find yourself at the wheel of your new hydrogen-powered four-wheel-drive. Your fuel tank is large and spherical, because at room temperature hydrogen takes up around three thousand times as much space as gasoline. Now consider that a call on your mobile phone, the static electricity generated by sliding over a car seat, or even an electrical storm a mile away all carry a sufficient charge to ignite your hydrogen fuel. When viewed in this light, the thought of a hydrogen car accident hardly bears thinking about. Even garaging your new vehicle means trouble. Current codes for hydrogen storage in the United States are onerous, requiring—among other things—expensive ventilation and explosion-proof equipment. This means that unless codes are relaxed, a plethora of infrastructure from garages to road tunnels will require modification.
Even if hydrogen is made safe to use, we are still left with a colossal CO2 pollution issue, which was exactly the opposite of what we set out to do. The only way that the hydrogen economy can help combat climate change is if the electricity grid is powered entirely from carbon-free sources. And this means acceptance of and investment in a series of technologies ranging from solar to nuclear. Strangely, neither the U.S. government nor the vehicle manufacturers have shown much interest in laying the groundwork for this essential prerequisite for transition to the hydrogen economy.
Posted by Dan Welch under Peakist , Energy , Gas
Source: The Peakist
Tim Flannery debunks the idea that hydrogen is going to provide us with the fuel of the post-oil energy regime:
“TO PEOPLE IN THE PETROCHEMICAL and motor vehicle businesses, the solution to the climate change problem lies in ascending a metaphorical staircase of fuels, which, at each step, contains an ever diminishing amount of carbon.
Yesterday, the argument goes, it was coal, today it’s oil, and tomorrow it will be natural gas, with Nirvana being reached when the global economy makes the transition to hydrogen—a fuel that contains no carbon at all.
Although the transition from oil to gas is now well under way, it’s been some time coming. For many years the oil companies regarded natural gas as a volatile waste product, to be either burned off or pumped back underground to increase oil pressure at the well head. Because of its greater hydrogen content, gas burns hotter and cleaner than oil, so it was always valuable stuff; but the technology needed to transport it safely and cheaply did not exist.
One of gas’s greatest drawbacks is its low density, which makes it bulky and prone to leaking. It takes a house-sized volume of gas to yield the same energy as a barrel of oil, so barrels—and even tankers—were never an option for its transport. Pipelines were the obvious solution, but suitable pipelines cost around a million dollars for each mile laid, which meant that until recently, investing a dollar in oil returned twice the profits of one invested in gas.
Technological advances in handling gas, high oil prices, a looming lack of oil, and the demand for a cleaner fuel to replace coal have all combined to change the economics of gas, and today it is big business. The most important technical advance involved the refrigeration of gas so that it becomes a supercooled liquid, which permits cost-effective transport, in purpose-built ships, over large distances. With an international trade in shipping developed, and with the larger corporations willing to invest the billions required for gas pipelines, gas appears to be the fuel of choice for the twenty-first century.
Although gas is a more expensive fuel than coal, it has many benefits that make it ideal for producing electricity. Gas-fired power plants cost half as much to build as coal-fired models, and they come in a variety of sizes. Instead of having one massive, distant generator of electricity, as with coal, a series of small gas-fired generators can be dotted about, saving on transmission losses. They can also be fired up and shut down quickly, which makes them ideal for complementing intermittent sources of energy generation such as wind and solar. Furthermore, combined-cycle plants, which burn gas to turn a turbine then capture the ultra-hot exhaust emissions to generate more electricity, are extremely efficient at converting fuel to power. If coupled to a heat-using industrial process (called cogeneration), they can achieve efficiencies of 80 percent. All of this has led Lord Browne, CEO of BP, to comment that “one dollar invested today in gas-fired generation capacity produces three to four times the amount of electricity [as] the same dollar invested in coal-fired generation capacity.”
Over 90 percent of new power generation in the United States today is gas-fired, and around the world it is fast becoming the favored fuel. Despite this, gas is not without its problems, including safety issues and the possibility of terrorist attacks on large plants or pipelines. And because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, its potential to leak must be addressed: Parts of the gas infrastructure—such as the old iron pipes used for reticulating gas throughout cities—are decidedly leaky.
GAS IS THE THIRD STEP on the stairway to climate-change heaven; but even if all the coal-fired power stations on Earth were replaced with gas-fired ones, global carbon emissions would be cut by only 30 percent. So despite these savings, if we were to stall on this step of the energy staircase, we would still face massive climate change. In this scenario, a transition to hydrogen is thus imperative; but how likely is it?
In the 1970s the Australian electrochemist John Bockris coined the phrase “hydrogen economy,” and ever since, for many people, hydrogen appears to be the silver-bullet solution to the world’s global warming ills. “Boiled down to its minimalist description,” Bockris wrote, “the ‘Hydrogen Economy’ means that hydrogen would be used to transport energy from renewables (at nuclear or solar sources) over large distances; and to store it (for supply to cities) in large amounts.” As with so many silver-bullet solutions, however, there’s a lot of devil in the detail.
The power source of the hydrogen economy is the hydrogen fuel cell, which is basically a box with no moving parts that takes in hydrogen and oxygen and puts out water and electricity. While a wondrous-sounding device, it is hardly new technology: The first hydrogen fuel cell, known as a “gaseous voltaic battery,” was built by Sir William Grove in the 1830s. His cell resembled a standard lead-acid battery, in that it used sulphuric acid as an electrolyte, but instead of employing lead electrodes it used platinum, which hastens the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen that generates the electricity. The use of such an expensive catalyst was a drawback in developing the technology, but today there are several kinds of fuel cells that use other materials. Whatever their composition, from an economic perspective, hydrogen fuel cells can be divided into two types: stationary cells used to produce electricity, and those used in transport.
The most promising cells for the stationary production of electricity are known as molten carbonate fuel cells, which use molten potassium carbonate instead of sulphuric acid, and nickel in place of platinum. They operate at a temperature of around 1202°F, and although highly efficient (possessing an electric efficiency of around 50 percent), they take a long time to reach working temperature. They are also very large—a 250-kilowatt model is the size of a railway carriage—making them unsuitable for use in motor vehicles.
Several demonstration projects based on this technology already exist, and a commercial stationary hydrogen cell (using an earlier technology) has been in operation in the United States since 1999. It is predicted that a decrease in cost resulting from economies of scale will soon lead to more widespread use of the cells. Although this represents a tremendous technological advance, it does nothing immediate to abate CO2 emissions, for the hydrogen used today comes from reforming natural gas. Because some of the energy in the gas is used in this process, and all of the CO2 it produces is released into the atmosphere, from a climate perspective the world would be better off burning the gas directly to create electricity.
But let’s consider hydrogen as a transport fuel. A number of motor vehicle manufacturers, including Ford and BMW, are planning to introduce hydrogen-fueled, internal combustion engine cars to the marketplace; and the Bush administration plans to invest $1.7 billion to build the hydrogen-powered FreedomCAR. Even so, the use of hydrogen as a transport fuel is at a far more rudimentary stage of development than the technology using stationary cells.
The fuel cell type best suited for transport purposes is known as a proton-exchange membrane fuel cell. It is much smaller than the molten carbonate cell and operates at around 150°F, thus being ready for action soon after turning the ignition. These cells, however, require very pure hydrogen. In current prototypes this is supplied from a built-in “reformer” that converts natural gas or gasoline to hydrogen, which again means that, from a climate perspective, we would be better off burning these fuels directly to drive the engine. The best energy efficiency obtained by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells is 35 to 40 percent—about the same as a standard internal combustion engine.
Vehicle manufacturers hope to do away with the on-board reformer required by the prototypes and envisage fueling the vehicles from hydrogen “pumps” at fuel stations. There are several ways that this could be done. The one most closely resembling the current system of fueling vehicles involves producing the hydrogen at a remote central point and distributing it to fueling stations; and it’s here that the difficulties involved in moving such low-density fuel become evident.
The ideal way to transport it is in tanker-trucks carrying liquefied hydrogen, but, because liquefaction occurs at -423°F, refrigerating the gas sufficiently to achieve this is an economic nightmare. Using hydrogen energy to liquefy a gallon of hydrogen consumes 40 percent of the value of the fuel. Using the U.S. power grid to do so takes 12-15 kilowatt hours of electricity, and this would release almost twenty-two pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. Around a gallon of gasoline holds the equivalent energy of one kilogram of hydrogen. Burning it releases around the same amount of CO2 as using the grid to liquefy the hydrogen, so the climate change consequences of using liquefied hydrogen are as bad as driving a standard car.
One solution may be to pressurize the hydrogen only partially, which reduces the fuel value consumed to 15 percent, and the canisters used for transport can be less specialized. But even using improved, high-pressure canisters, a 40-ton truck could deliver only 100 gallons of compressed hydrogen, meaning that it would take fifteen such trucks to deliver the same fuel energy value as is now delivered by a 26-ton gasoline tanker. And if these 40-ton trucks carried the hydrogen 300 miles, the energy cost of the transport would consume around 40 percent of the fuel carried.
Further problems arise when you store the fuel in your car. A special fuel tank carrying hydrogen at 5,000 psi (near the current upper limit for pressurized vessels) would need to be constructed and be ten times the size of a gas tank. Even with the best tanks, around 4 percent of fuel is likely to be lost to boil-off every day. A good example of the rate of evaporative loss of hydrogen occurs whenever NASA fuels the space shuttle. Its main tank takes 26,500 gallons of hydrogen, but an extra 12,000 gallons must be delivered at each refueling just to account for the evaporation rate.
Pipelines are another option for transporting hydrogen, but as with gas, they are expensive—they must be large and built from materials resistant to hydrogen (it makes steel, for example, very brittle). They must also be of high integrity, because hydrogen leaks so easily. Even if the preexisting gas pipeline network could be reconfigured to transport hydrogen, the cost of providing a network running from central producing units to the world’s fueling stations would be astronomical.
Perhaps hydrogen could be produced from natural gas at the gas station. This would do away with the difficulties of transporting it, but this process would produce 50 percent more CO2 than using the gas to fuel the vehicle in the first place. Hydrogen could also theoretically be generated at home using power from the electricity grid, but the price of electricity for domestic use, and the high cost of hydrogen generation and purification units, would make it prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the electricity in the grid in places such as the United States is largely derived from burning fossil fuels, so home generation of hydrogen under current circumstances would result in a massive increase in CO2 emissions.
And there is another danger with home-brewing hydrogen. The gas is odorless, leak prone, and highly combustible, and it burns with an invisible flame. Firemen are trained to use straw brooms to detect a hydrogen fire; when the straw bursts into flames, you have found your conflagration.
Let’s imagine for a moment, however, that all of the delivery problems relating to hydrogen are overcome, and you find yourself at the wheel of your new hydrogen-powered four-wheel-drive. Your fuel tank is large and spherical, because at room temperature hydrogen takes up around three thousand times as much space as gasoline. Now consider that a call on your mobile phone, the static electricity generated by sliding over a car seat, or even an electrical storm a mile away all carry a sufficient charge to ignite your hydrogen fuel. When viewed in this light, the thought of a hydrogen car accident hardly bears thinking about. Even garaging your new vehicle means trouble. Current codes for hydrogen storage in the United States are onerous, requiring—among other things—expensive ventilation and explosion-proof equipment. This means that unless codes are relaxed, a plethora of infrastructure from garages to road tunnels will require modification.
Even if hydrogen is made safe to use, we are still left with a colossal CO2 pollution issue, which was exactly the opposite of what we set out to do. The only way that the hydrogen economy can help combat climate change is if the electricity grid is powered entirely from carbon-free sources. And this means acceptance of and investment in a series of technologies ranging from solar to nuclear. Strangely, neither the U.S. government nor the vehicle manufacturers have shown much interest in laying the groundwork for this essential prerequisite for transition to the hydrogen economy.
Delayed, but there is a day of reckoning
Knock-on effects of slower US growth will be felt in every corner of the globe
Larry Elliott, economics editor
Monday June 26, 2006
The Guardian
No prizes for guessing what's going to be the focus of attention in the financial markets this week. At around 2.15pm Washington time on Thursday, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest decision on interest rates. The almost universal belief is that the US central bank will increase interest rates for the 17th successive time to 5.25%. But of greater interest will be the hints dropped by the Fed about its future intentions.
Will 5.25% be it? Or is Barclays Capital right when it says the figure could go as high as 6%? At the same time as the Fed announces its decision, trade ministers from 40 countries will be gathering in Geneva for the latest make-or-break meeting to save the Doha round of negotiations from collapse. This will be a much lengthier affair; the World Trade Organisation thinks the haggling could go on into the weekend and even beyond.
Both meetings are important. The optimistic scenario is that the Fed finesses a soft landing for the US economy, calibrating the level of interest rates so that growth eases enough to temper inflationary pressure, but without causing a recession. A strong US economy helps tug the rest of the world along, keeping demand high in Asia and Europe.
Meanwhile, a successful conclusion to the trade talks removes protective barriers and helps extend the longest period of sustained growth seen in the global economy since the early 1970s. As Peter Mandelson said last Friday, the multilateral trading system is the "engine room of the global economy".
It is not going to be easy on either front. In Washington, the Fed now has the task of clearing up the mistakes made in Alan Greenspan's last years. The fact that inflation is picking up even as the economy is slowing down, is testimony to an over-lax monetary policy two or three years ago.
Interest rates were left too low for too long, and when Greenspan did start to tighten the screw it was too little, too late. The US needed to work off the excesses of its debt binge in the 1990s but never had the chance to do so because the Fed pumped the economy full of cheap money. In previous eras, the speculation, and over-investment seen at the end of the 1990s, would have led to a recession as the excess capacity was worked off. Greenspan ensured that even the bursting of one of the biggest stock market bubbles in history did not have much of an impact on growth by fuelling a colossal boom in housing.
What is becoming clear is that the day of reckoning has been delayed, rather than avoided altogether.
A period of slower growth in the US is now inevitable. Interest rates at their current level are more than sufficient to kill off the housing bubble; indeed, the signs are that the property market is cooling rapidly. The Fed, though, is unlikely to stop raising rates yet, given that inflation is still rising.
Unless there is some exceptionally weak data over the coming month, the Fed is likely to push rates up to 5.5% in August and leave them there for some time. That will represent monetary overkill, increasing the risk of a hard landing and making deflation more of a threat than inflation. Bond prices are likely to soar, and equity prices are likely to suffer as the 2002-04 stock market recovery is seen as a cyclical bull phase in a secular bear market. The knock-on effects of slower US growth will be felt in every other corner of the globe and, no doubt, lead to redoubled calls for the trade talks to be completed quickly and successfully. That will be easier said than done, despite the more positive noises coming out of Brussels and Washington last week, since history shows that countries tend to be even more risk averse when growth is slow than when everything is ticking along nicely.
Governments tend to pay lip-service to the doctrine of free trade at the best of times; protectionism starts to look far more attractive as the unemployment lines lengthen. That's especially so when there are elections in the offing: there are mid-term elections in the US in November and a presidential election in France next year.
It is, then, conceivable that we could be in for a period in which a synchronised upswing in the global economy turns into a synchronised downturn, as weaker demand from the US ripples out to the export-driven economies of Asia and the Eurozone. Protectionism will then exacerbate the recession. To which the response might be: a good thing, too. If, as Al Gore was arguing during his visit to London last week, the world is on the brink of ecological catastrophe, we ought to lose our fixation with growth and concentrate on self-sufficiency and sustainability instead. The dystopian vision presented by the former vice-president is certainly alarming; the thawing of the Siberian permafrost, the irrevocable changes to marine life, the icequakes caused by the breaking up of the Greenland ice fields all point to the need for a root-and-branch rethink of the way we live our lives. From this standpoint, anything that throws sand in the wheels of the globalisation juggernaut is welcome. What we need is a full-scale cathartic crisis that will enable a new and better world to emerge.
It might not be that easy. True, a collapse of the Doha round, and a sharp contraction in global growth, could provide two of the elements that brought about change in the mid-20th century. But in the 1930s, the progression of events did not go stock market crash, recession, new world order. It went stock market crash, financial collapse, beggar-my-neighbour devaluation, protectionism, fascism, world war, new world order.
Clearly, the solution to Gore's looming environmental Armageddon has to be collective, rather than unilateral. There is no way that the US, for example, is going to take action to cut carbon emissions unless it is sure every other country is doing likewise.
Yet the chances of multilateral action will be diminished in a climate of fear generated by economic weakness. The report on the economics of climate change currently being undertaken by Nick Stern at the UK Treasury is likely to conclude that the costs associated with a reduction in the emissions to the levels deemed safe by scientists are relatively modest. Gore himself believes that tackling climate change will be good for business, opening up plenty of new opportunities to make money.
That's as may be. Multilateralism is a delicate plant; it does not thrive in harsh climates and the same impulses that drive countries to put up trade barriers when times get tough will persuade policymakers to listen to the special interest groups arguing that the price of tackling climate change is too high. The growth-at-all-costs lobby will be strengthened.
So it's potentially a bleak outlook. The Gore thesis suggests the current economic paradigm is leading us up an environmental blind alley, but if, and when, there is a crisis in globalisation it will set off a train of political events that will make the prospects for salvation far more difficult to achieve.
Gordon Brown says that it is no longer enough for progressives to marry economic growth with social justice; the challenge now is to add a third element - care for the environment. He's right: it is a challenge. As John Lennon once said, we'd all love to see the plan.
Source: The Guardian
Knock-on effects of slower US growth will be felt in every corner of the globe
Larry Elliott, economics editor
Monday June 26, 2006
The Guardian
No prizes for guessing what's going to be the focus of attention in the financial markets this week. At around 2.15pm Washington time on Thursday, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest decision on interest rates. The almost universal belief is that the US central bank will increase interest rates for the 17th successive time to 5.25%. But of greater interest will be the hints dropped by the Fed about its future intentions.
Will 5.25% be it? Or is Barclays Capital right when it says the figure could go as high as 6%? At the same time as the Fed announces its decision, trade ministers from 40 countries will be gathering in Geneva for the latest make-or-break meeting to save the Doha round of negotiations from collapse. This will be a much lengthier affair; the World Trade Organisation thinks the haggling could go on into the weekend and even beyond.
Both meetings are important. The optimistic scenario is that the Fed finesses a soft landing for the US economy, calibrating the level of interest rates so that growth eases enough to temper inflationary pressure, but without causing a recession. A strong US economy helps tug the rest of the world along, keeping demand high in Asia and Europe.
Meanwhile, a successful conclusion to the trade talks removes protective barriers and helps extend the longest period of sustained growth seen in the global economy since the early 1970s. As Peter Mandelson said last Friday, the multilateral trading system is the "engine room of the global economy".
It is not going to be easy on either front. In Washington, the Fed now has the task of clearing up the mistakes made in Alan Greenspan's last years. The fact that inflation is picking up even as the economy is slowing down, is testimony to an over-lax monetary policy two or three years ago.
Interest rates were left too low for too long, and when Greenspan did start to tighten the screw it was too little, too late. The US needed to work off the excesses of its debt binge in the 1990s but never had the chance to do so because the Fed pumped the economy full of cheap money. In previous eras, the speculation, and over-investment seen at the end of the 1990s, would have led to a recession as the excess capacity was worked off. Greenspan ensured that even the bursting of one of the biggest stock market bubbles in history did not have much of an impact on growth by fuelling a colossal boom in housing.
What is becoming clear is that the day of reckoning has been delayed, rather than avoided altogether.
A period of slower growth in the US is now inevitable. Interest rates at their current level are more than sufficient to kill off the housing bubble; indeed, the signs are that the property market is cooling rapidly. The Fed, though, is unlikely to stop raising rates yet, given that inflation is still rising.
Unless there is some exceptionally weak data over the coming month, the Fed is likely to push rates up to 5.5% in August and leave them there for some time. That will represent monetary overkill, increasing the risk of a hard landing and making deflation more of a threat than inflation. Bond prices are likely to soar, and equity prices are likely to suffer as the 2002-04 stock market recovery is seen as a cyclical bull phase in a secular bear market. The knock-on effects of slower US growth will be felt in every other corner of the globe and, no doubt, lead to redoubled calls for the trade talks to be completed quickly and successfully. That will be easier said than done, despite the more positive noises coming out of Brussels and Washington last week, since history shows that countries tend to be even more risk averse when growth is slow than when everything is ticking along nicely.
Governments tend to pay lip-service to the doctrine of free trade at the best of times; protectionism starts to look far more attractive as the unemployment lines lengthen. That's especially so when there are elections in the offing: there are mid-term elections in the US in November and a presidential election in France next year.
It is, then, conceivable that we could be in for a period in which a synchronised upswing in the global economy turns into a synchronised downturn, as weaker demand from the US ripples out to the export-driven economies of Asia and the Eurozone. Protectionism will then exacerbate the recession. To which the response might be: a good thing, too. If, as Al Gore was arguing during his visit to London last week, the world is on the brink of ecological catastrophe, we ought to lose our fixation with growth and concentrate on self-sufficiency and sustainability instead. The dystopian vision presented by the former vice-president is certainly alarming; the thawing of the Siberian permafrost, the irrevocable changes to marine life, the icequakes caused by the breaking up of the Greenland ice fields all point to the need for a root-and-branch rethink of the way we live our lives. From this standpoint, anything that throws sand in the wheels of the globalisation juggernaut is welcome. What we need is a full-scale cathartic crisis that will enable a new and better world to emerge.
It might not be that easy. True, a collapse of the Doha round, and a sharp contraction in global growth, could provide two of the elements that brought about change in the mid-20th century. But in the 1930s, the progression of events did not go stock market crash, recession, new world order. It went stock market crash, financial collapse, beggar-my-neighbour devaluation, protectionism, fascism, world war, new world order.
Clearly, the solution to Gore's looming environmental Armageddon has to be collective, rather than unilateral. There is no way that the US, for example, is going to take action to cut carbon emissions unless it is sure every other country is doing likewise.
Yet the chances of multilateral action will be diminished in a climate of fear generated by economic weakness. The report on the economics of climate change currently being undertaken by Nick Stern at the UK Treasury is likely to conclude that the costs associated with a reduction in the emissions to the levels deemed safe by scientists are relatively modest. Gore himself believes that tackling climate change will be good for business, opening up plenty of new opportunities to make money.
That's as may be. Multilateralism is a delicate plant; it does not thrive in harsh climates and the same impulses that drive countries to put up trade barriers when times get tough will persuade policymakers to listen to the special interest groups arguing that the price of tackling climate change is too high. The growth-at-all-costs lobby will be strengthened.
So it's potentially a bleak outlook. The Gore thesis suggests the current economic paradigm is leading us up an environmental blind alley, but if, and when, there is a crisis in globalisation it will set off a train of political events that will make the prospects for salvation far more difficult to achieve.
Gordon Brown says that it is no longer enough for progressives to marry economic growth with social justice; the challenge now is to add a third element - care for the environment. He's right: it is a challenge. As John Lennon once said, we'd all love to see the plan.
Source: The Guardian
Friday, July 07, 2006
Oil destined for $100, expert says
Bull market for commodities has another 15 years, with bird flu only hope of break.
July 6 2006: 9:46 AM EDT
LONDON (Reuters) -- Oil prices will soar to well over $100 a barrel and stay high as part of a sustained commodities bull run that has another 15 years of life, billionaire U.S. investor Jim Rogers told Reuters in an interview.
One factor that could bring down the price would be a bird flu epidemic, which would send all asset classes plummeting, he said, although oil would probably fall less than other markets.
"We're going to have high oil prices for a very long time. The surprise is going to be how high it goes," Rogers said.
Reiterating earlier comments that oil prices would hit at least $100 a barrel, he said: "It will be much more than $100 before the bull market is over."
U.S. light sweet crude hit a new record of $75.40 a barrel Wednesday and was trading at close to $75 Thursday.
Rogers, a former investment partner of billionaire fund manager George Soros, has predicted the commodities bull run has at least 15 years to run.
"It's a major long-term bull market as far as I'm concerned," he said.
Aside from the bullish impact of tensions, described by Rogers as temporary, over Iran's nuclear ambitions and North Korea's missile tests, he said oil was drawing long-term support from the lack of large-scale finds.
He did not know whether the Peak Oil theory that oil supplies are either at or very near their peak was correct.
But said: "If there is oil out there, you had better find it soon."
Bird flu would lower prices
Apart from new supplies, a factor that could lower prices would be a widespread epidemic of bird flu spread between humans.
"If bird flu should break out, everything will go down and oil would go down to $40, but I would still urge people to buy oil. It would go down less than other things and it would be the first to go back up," said Rogers.
Rogers has set up the Rogers International Commodity Index (RICI) for gaining access to the commodity markets.
In the first half of this year it outperformed its much bigger rivals the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) and the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index (DJ-AIGCI).
While the RICI gained 9.7 percent in the first six months of this year, according to Reuters data, the GSCI rose 5.3 percent and the DJ-AIG gained 3.6 percent.
Rogers said he could not say exactly how much money was in the RICI, but it was at least $4 billion.
The commodity indexes, which analysts have estimated bring together a total of well over $80 billion, each comprise different combinations of commodities.
The GSCI and DJ-AIGIC adjust the weightings of various components depending on market performance, while the Rogers index maintains steady weightings, Rogers said.
"You need the same weightings every month," he argued.
Among those using the indexes are the mutual funds, which invest in groups of assets on behalf of individuals and institutions.
As an indication of how much room the commodities market, long regarded as a very risky, alternative investment, has to grow, Rogers said there were around 70,000 mutual funds for investing in stocks and bonds and less than 10 to invest in commodities.
"People have started to invest in commodities. It's a bull market and bull markets pick people up as they go higher and higher," he said.
Bull market for commodities has another 15 years, with bird flu only hope of break.
July 6 2006: 9:46 AM EDT
LONDON (Reuters) -- Oil prices will soar to well over $100 a barrel and stay high as part of a sustained commodities bull run that has another 15 years of life, billionaire U.S. investor Jim Rogers told Reuters in an interview.
One factor that could bring down the price would be a bird flu epidemic, which would send all asset classes plummeting, he said, although oil would probably fall less than other markets.
"We're going to have high oil prices for a very long time. The surprise is going to be how high it goes," Rogers said.
Reiterating earlier comments that oil prices would hit at least $100 a barrel, he said: "It will be much more than $100 before the bull market is over."
U.S. light sweet crude hit a new record of $75.40 a barrel Wednesday and was trading at close to $75 Thursday.
Rogers, a former investment partner of billionaire fund manager George Soros, has predicted the commodities bull run has at least 15 years to run.
"It's a major long-term bull market as far as I'm concerned," he said.
Aside from the bullish impact of tensions, described by Rogers as temporary, over Iran's nuclear ambitions and North Korea's missile tests, he said oil was drawing long-term support from the lack of large-scale finds.
He did not know whether the Peak Oil theory that oil supplies are either at or very near their peak was correct.
But said: "If there is oil out there, you had better find it soon."
Bird flu would lower prices
Apart from new supplies, a factor that could lower prices would be a widespread epidemic of bird flu spread between humans.
"If bird flu should break out, everything will go down and oil would go down to $40, but I would still urge people to buy oil. It would go down less than other things and it would be the first to go back up," said Rogers.
Rogers has set up the Rogers International Commodity Index (RICI) for gaining access to the commodity markets.
In the first half of this year it outperformed its much bigger rivals the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) and the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index (DJ-AIGCI).
While the RICI gained 9.7 percent in the first six months of this year, according to Reuters data, the GSCI rose 5.3 percent and the DJ-AIG gained 3.6 percent.
Rogers said he could not say exactly how much money was in the RICI, but it was at least $4 billion.
The commodity indexes, which analysts have estimated bring together a total of well over $80 billion, each comprise different combinations of commodities.
The GSCI and DJ-AIGIC adjust the weightings of various components depending on market performance, while the Rogers index maintains steady weightings, Rogers said.
"You need the same weightings every month," he argued.
Among those using the indexes are the mutual funds, which invest in groups of assets on behalf of individuals and institutions.
As an indication of how much room the commodities market, long regarded as a very risky, alternative investment, has to grow, Rogers said there were around 70,000 mutual funds for investing in stocks and bonds and less than 10 to invest in commodities.
"People have started to invest in commodities. It's a bull market and bull markets pick people up as they go higher and higher," he said.
Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century
(PART ONE OF THREE)
By
Dmitry Orlov
Special to From the Wilderness
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.
Introduction
June 1, 2005 0900 PST (FTW) A decade and a half ago the world went from bipolar to unipolar, because one of the poles fell apart: The S.U. is no more. The other pole – symmetrically named the U.S. – has not fallen apart – yet, but there are ominous rumblings on the horizon. The collapse of the United States seems about as unlikely now as the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed in 1985. The experience of the first collapse may be instructive to those who wish to survive the second.
Reasonable people would never argue that that the two poles were exactly symmetrical; along with significant similarities, there were equally significant differences, both of which are valuable in predicting how the second half of the clay-footed superpower giant that once bestrode the planet will fare once it too falls apart.
I have wanted to write this article for almost a decade now. Until recently, however, few people would have taken it seriously. After all, who could have doubted that the world economic powerhouse that is the United States, having recently won the Cold War and the Gulf War, would continue, triumphantly, into the bright future of superhighways, supersonic jets, and interplanetary colonies?
But more recently the number of doubters has started to climb steadily. The U.S. is desperately dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas, and addicted to economic growth. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop, and the U.S. economy will collapse.
Many may still scoff at this cheerless prognosis, but this article should find a few readers anyway. In October 2004, when I started working on it, an Internet search for "peak oil" and "economic collapse" yielded about 16,300 documents; by April of 2005 that number climbed to 4,220,000. This is a dramatic change in public opinion only, because what is known on the subject now is more or less what was known a decade or so ago, when there was exactly one Web site devoted to the subject: Jay Hanson's Dieoff.org. This sea change in public opinion is not restricted to the Internet, but is visible in the mainstream and the specialist press as well. Thus, the lack of attention paid to the subject over the decades resulted not from ignorance, but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resource depletion has been well understood since the 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial.
Denial
Although this is a bit off the subject of Soviet collapse and what it may teach us about our own, I can't resist saying a few words about denial, for it is such an interesting subject. I also hope that it will help some of you to go beyond denial, this being a helpful step towards understanding what I am going to say here.
Now that a lot of the predictions are coming true more or less on schedule, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the steady climb of energy prices and the dire warnings from energy experts of every stripe, outright denial is being gradually replaced with subtler forms of denial, which center around avoiding any serious, down-to-earth discussion of the likely actual consequences of peak oil, and of the ways one might cope with them.
Instead, there is much discussion of policy: what "we" should do. The "we" in question is presumably some embodiment of the great American Can-Do Spirit: a brilliantly organized consortium of government agencies, leading universities and research centers, and major corporations, all working together toward the goal of providing plentiful, clean, environmentally safe energy, to fuel another century of economic expansion. Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe!
One often hears that "We could get this done, if only we wanted to." Most often one hears this from non-specialists, sometimes from economists, and hardly ever from scientists or engineers. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations are generally enough to suggest otherwise, but here logic runs up against faith in the Goddess of Technology: that she will provide. On her altar are assembled various ritualistic objects used to summon the Can-Do Spirit: a photovoltaic cell, a fuel cell, a vial of ethanol, and a vial of bio-diesel. Off to the side of the altar is a Pandora's box packed with coal, tar sand, oceanic hydrates, and plutonium: if the Goddess gets angry, it's curtains for life on Earth.
But let us look beyond mere faith, and focus on something slightly more rational instead. This "we," this highly organized, high-powered problem-solving entity, is quickly running out of energy, and once it does, it will not be so high-powered any more. I would like to humbly suggest that any long-term plan it attempts to undertake is doomed, simply because crisis conditions will make long-term planning, along with large, ambitious projects, impossible. Thus, I would suggest against waiting around for some miracle device to put under the hood of every SUV and in the basement of every McMansion, so that all can live happily ever after in this suburban dream, which is looking more and more like a nightmare in any case.
The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably come to pass if the Goddess of Technology were to fail us: a series of wars over ever more scarce resources. Paul Roberts, who is very well informed on the subject of peak oil, has this to say: "what desperate states have always done when resources turn scarce… [is] fight for them." [ MotherJones.com, 11/12 2004] Let us not argue that this has never happened, but did it ever amount to anything more than a futile gesture of desperation? Wars take resources, and, when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat. I would also like to suggest that these conflicts would be self-limiting: modern warfare uses up prodigious amounts of energy, and if the conflicts are over oil and gas installations, then they will get blown up, as has happened repeatedly in Iraq. This will result in less energy being available and, consequently, less warfare.
Take, for example, the last two US involvements in Iraq. In each case, as a result of US actions, Iraqi oil production decreased. It now appears that the whole strategy is a failure. Supporting Saddam, then fighting Saddam, then imposing sanctions on Saddam, then finally overthrowing him, has left Iraqi oil fields so badly damaged that the "ultimate recoverable" estimate for Iraqi oil is now down to 10-12% of what was once thought to be underground (according to the New York Times).
Some people are even suggesting a war over resources with a nuclear endgame. On this point, I am optimistic. As Robert McNamara once thought, nuclear weapons are too difficult to use. And although he has done a great deal of work to make them easier to use, with the introduction of small, tactical, battlefield nukes and the like, and despite recently renewed interest in nuclear "bunker busters," they still make a bit of a mess, and are hard to work into any sort of a sensible strategy that would reliably lead to an increased supply of energy. Noting that conventional weapons have not been effective in this area, it is unclear why nuclear weapons would produce better results.
But these are all details; the point I really want to make is that proposing resource wars, even as a worst-case scenario, is still a form of denial. The implicit assumption is this: if all else fails, we will go to war; we will win; the oil will flow again, and we will be back to business as usual in no time. Again, I would suggest against waiting around for the success of a global police action to redirect the lion's share of the dwindling world oil supplies toward the United States.
Outside this last circle of denial lies a vast wilderness called the Collapse of Western Civilization, roamed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or so some people will have you believe. Here we find not denial but escapism: a hankering for a grand finale, a heroic final chapter. Civilizations do collapse – this is one of the best-known facts about them – but as anyone who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will tell you, the process can take many centuries.
What tends to collapse rather suddenly is the economy. Economies, too, are known to collapse, and do so with far greater regularity than civilizations. An economy does not collapse into a black hole from which no light can escape. Instead, something else happens: society begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself, establish new relationships, and evolve new rules, in order to find a point of equilibrium at a lower rate of resource expenditure.
Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die, sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a "die-off." There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old, and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.
Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That pattern has been repeated many times, so we can reason inductively about similarities and differences between a collapse that has already occurred and one that is about to occur. Unlike astrophysicists, who can confidently predict whether a given star will collapse into a neutron star or a black hole based on measurements and calculations, we have to work with general observations and anecdotal evidence. However, I hope that my thought experiment will allow me to guess correctly at the general shape of the new economy, and arrive at survival strategies that may be of use to individuals and small communities.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union – an Overview
What happens when a modern economy collapses, and the complex society it supports disintegrates? A look at a country that has recently undergone such an experience can be most educational. We are lucky enough to have such an example in the Soviet Union. I spent about six months living, traveling, and doing business in Russia during the perestroika period and immediately afterward, and was fascinated by the transformation I witnessed.
The specifics are different, of course. The Soviet problems seem to have been largely organizational rather than physical in nature, although the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed just 3 years after reaching peak oil production is hardly a coincidence. The ultimate cause of Soviet Union's spontaneous collapse remains shrouded in mystery. Was it Ronald Reagan's Star Wars? Or was it Raisa Gorbachev's American Express card? It is possible to fake a missile defense shield; but it is not so easy to fake a Herod's department store. The arguments go back and forth. One contemporary theory would have it that the Soviet elite scuttled the whole program when they decided that Soviet Socialism was not going to make them rich. (It remains unclear why it should have taken the Soviet elite 70 years to come to this startlingly obvious conclusion).
A slightly more commonsense explanation is this: during the pre-perestroika "stagnation" period, due to the chronic underperformance of the economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit, and foreign debt, it became increasingly difficult for the average Russian middle-class family of three, with both parents working, to make ends meet. (Now, isn't that beginning to sound familiar?) Of course, the government bureaucrats were not too concerned about the plight of the people. But the people found ways to survive by circumventing government controls in a myriad of ways, preventing the government from getting the results it needed to keep the system going. Therefore, the system had to be reformed. When this became the consensus view, reformers lined up to try and reform the system. Alas, the system could not be reformed. Instead of adapting, it fell apart.
Russia was able to bounce back economically because it remains fairly rich in oil and very rich in natural gas, and will probably continue in relative prosperity for at least a few more decades. In North America, on the other hand, oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has been in decline ever since, while natural gas production is now set to fall off a production cliff. Yet energy demand continues to rise far above what the continent can supply, making such a spontaneous recovery unlikely. When I say that Russia bounced back, I am not trying to understate the human cost of the Soviet collapse, or the lopsidedness and the economic disparities of the re-born Russian economy. But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent, and less capable of bouncing back.
But such "big picture" differences are not so interesting. It is the micro-scale similarities that offer interesting practical lessons on how small groups of individuals can successfully cope with economic and social collapse. And that is where the post-Soviet experience offers a multitude of useful lessons.
Returning to Russia
I first flew back to Leningrad, which was soon to be rechristened St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1989, about a year after Gorbachev freed the last batch of political prisoners, my uncle among them, who had been locked up by General Secretary Andropov's final, senile attempt at clenching an iron fist. For the first time it became possible for Soviet escapees to go back and visit. More than a decade had passed since I left, but the place was much as I remembered it: bustling streets full of Volgas and Ladas, Communist slogans on the roofs of towering buildings lit up in neon, long lines in shops.
About the only thing new was a bustle of activity around a newly organized Cooperative movement. A newly hatched entrepreneurial class was busy complaining that their cooperatives were only allowed to sell to the government, at government prices, while hatching ingenuous schemes to skim something off the top through barter arrangements. Most were going bankrupt. It did not turn out to be a successful business model for them or for the government, which was, as it turned out, also on its last legs.
I went back a year later, and found a place I did not quite recognize. First of all, it smelled different: the smog was gone. The factories had largely shut down, there was very little traffic, and the fresh air smelled wonderful! The stores were largely empty and often closed. There were very few gas stations open, and the ones that were open had lines that stretched for many blocks. There was a ten-liter limit on gasoline purchases.
Since there was nothing better for us to do, my friends and I decided to take a road trip, to visit the ancient Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod, taking in the surrounding countryside along the way. For this, we had to obtain fuel. It was hard to come by. It was available on the black market, but no one felt particularly inclined to let go of something so valuable in exchange for something so useless as money. Soviet money ceased to have value, since there was so little that could be bought with it, and people still felt skittish around foreign currency.
Luckily, there was a limited supply of another sort of currency available to us. It was close to the end of Gorbachev's ill-fated anti-alcoholism campaign, during which vodka was rationed. There was a death in my family, for which we received a funeral's worth of vodka coupons, which we of course redeemed right away. What was left of the vodka was placed in the trunk of the trusty old Lada, and off we went. Each half-liter bottle of vodka was exchanged for ten liters of gasoline, giving vodka far greater effective energy density than rocket fuel.
There is a lesson here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.
***
Two years later, I was back again, this time in the dead of winter. I was traveling on business through Minsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow. My mission was to see whether any of the former Soviet defense industry could be converted to civilian use. The business part of the trip was a total fiasco and a complete waste of time, just as one would expect. In other ways, it was quite educational.
Minsk seemed like a city rudely awakened from hibernation. During the short daylight hours, the streets were full of people, who just stood around, as if wondering what to do next. The same feeling pervaded the executive offices, where people I used to think of as the representatives of the "evil empire" sat around under dusty portraits of Lenin bemoaning their fate. No one had any answers.
The only beam of sunshine came from a smarmy New York lawyer who hung around the place trying to organize a state lottery. He was almost the only man with a plan. (The director of a research institute which was formerly charged with explosion-welding parts for nuclear fusion reactor vessels, or some such thing, also had a plan: he wanted to build summer cottages.) I wrapped up my business early and caught a night train to St. Petersburg. On the train, a comfortable old sleeper car, I shared a compartment with a young, newly retired army doctor, who showed me his fat roll of hundred-dollar bills and told me all about the local diamond trade. We split a bottle of cognac and snoozed off. It was a pleasant trip.
St. Petersburg was a shock. There was a sense of despair that hung in the winter air. There were old women standing around in spontaneous open-air flea markets trying to sell toys that probably belonged to their grandchildren, to buy something to eat. Middle-class people could be seen digging around in the trash. Everyone's savings were wiped out by hyperinflation. I arrived with a large stack of one-dollar bills. Everything was one dollar, or a thousand rubles, which was about five times the average monthly salary. I handed out lots of these silly thousand-ruble notes: "Here, I just want to make sure you have enough." People would recoil in shock: "That's a lot of money!" "No, it isn't. Be sure to spend it right away." However, all the lights were on, there was heat in many of the homes, and the trains ran on time.
My business itinerary involved a trip to the countryside to tour and to have meetings at some scientific facility. The phone lines to the place were down, and so I decided to just jump on a train and go there. The only train left at 7 am. I showed up around 6, thinking I could find breakfast at the station. The station was dark and locked. Across the street, there was a store selling coffee, with a line that wrapped around the block. There was also an old woman in front of the store, selling buns from a tray. I offered her a thousand-ruble note. "Don't throw your money around!" she said. I offered to buy her entire tray. "What are the other people going to eat?" she asked. I went and stood in line for the cashier, presented my thousand-ruble note, got a pile of useless change and a receipt, presented the receipt at the counter, collected a glass of warm brown liquid, drank it, returned the glass, paid the old woman, got my sweet bun, and thanked her very much. It was a lesson in civility.
***
Three years later, I was back again, and the economy had clearly started to recover, at least to the extent that goods were available to those who had money, but enterprises were continuing to shut down, and most people were still clearly suffering. There were new, private stores, which had tight security, and which sold imported goods for foreign currency. Very few people could afford to shop at these stores. There were also open air markets in many city squares, at which most of the shopping was done. Many kinds of goods were dispensed from locked metal booths, quite a few of which belonged to the Chechen mafia: one shoved a large pile of paper money through a hole and was handed back the item.
There were sporadic difficulties with the money supply. I recall standing around waiting for banks to open in order to cash my traveler's checks. The banks were closed because they were fresh out of money; they were all waiting for cash to be delivered. Once in a while, a bank manager would come out and make an announcement: the money is on its way, no need to worry.
There was a great divide between those who were unemployed, underemployed, or working in the old economy, and the new merchant class. For those working for the old state-owned enterprises – schools, hospitals, the railways, the telephone exchanges, and what remained of the rest of the Soviet economy - it was lean times. Salaries were paid sporadically, or not at all. Even when people got their money, it was barely enough to subsist on.
But the worst of it was clearly over. A new economic reality had taken hold. A large segment of the population saw its standard of living reduced, sometimes permanently. It took the economy ten years to get back to its pre-collapse level, and the recovery was uneven. Alongside the nouveau riche, there were many whose income would never recover. Those who could not become part of the new economy, especially the pensioners, but also many others, who had benefited from the now defunct socialist state, could barely eke out a living.
This thumbnail sketch of my experiences in Russia is intended to convey a general sense of what I had witnessed. But it is the details of what I have observed that I hope will be of value to those who see an economic collapse looming ahead, and want to plan, in order to survive it.
Similarities between the Superpowers
Some would find a direct comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union incongruous, if not downright insulting. After all, what grounds are there to compare a failed Communist empire to the world's largest economy? Others might find it humorous that the loser might have advice for the winner in what they might see as an ideological conflict. Since the differences between the two appear glaring to most, let me just indicate some similarities, which I hope you will find are no less obvious.
The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the first runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race, and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records even after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology, and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.
They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality, and a guaranteed - albeit lower - standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn't realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don't know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.
Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology, and to thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails ( South Africa was a contender at one point). In this last category, the U.S. is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex (a great source of near-slave wage labor).
While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden, the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. Nobody likes a loser, but especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union; and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either .
The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating a financial crisis. Russia's finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices, along with rising oil exports. At this point, Russia is eager to wipe out the remaining Soviet debt as quickly as possible, and over the past few years the Russian rouble has done just a bit better than the U.S. dollar.
The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency, and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world's largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt, and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets, and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.
There are many other similarities as well. Women received the right to education and a career in Russia earlier than in the U.S. Russian and American families are in similarly sad shape, with high divorce rates and many out-of-wedlock births, although the chronic shortage of housing in Russia did force many families to stick it out, with mixed results. Both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the U.S., a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.
The similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization.
(PART ONE OF THREE)
By
Dmitry Orlov
Special to From the Wilderness
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.
Introduction
June 1, 2005 0900 PST (FTW) A decade and a half ago the world went from bipolar to unipolar, because one of the poles fell apart: The S.U. is no more. The other pole – symmetrically named the U.S. – has not fallen apart – yet, but there are ominous rumblings on the horizon. The collapse of the United States seems about as unlikely now as the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed in 1985. The experience of the first collapse may be instructive to those who wish to survive the second.
Reasonable people would never argue that that the two poles were exactly symmetrical; along with significant similarities, there were equally significant differences, both of which are valuable in predicting how the second half of the clay-footed superpower giant that once bestrode the planet will fare once it too falls apart.
I have wanted to write this article for almost a decade now. Until recently, however, few people would have taken it seriously. After all, who could have doubted that the world economic powerhouse that is the United States, having recently won the Cold War and the Gulf War, would continue, triumphantly, into the bright future of superhighways, supersonic jets, and interplanetary colonies?
But more recently the number of doubters has started to climb steadily. The U.S. is desperately dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas, and addicted to economic growth. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop, and the U.S. economy will collapse.
Many may still scoff at this cheerless prognosis, but this article should find a few readers anyway. In October 2004, when I started working on it, an Internet search for "peak oil" and "economic collapse" yielded about 16,300 documents; by April of 2005 that number climbed to 4,220,000. This is a dramatic change in public opinion only, because what is known on the subject now is more or less what was known a decade or so ago, when there was exactly one Web site devoted to the subject: Jay Hanson's Dieoff.org. This sea change in public opinion is not restricted to the Internet, but is visible in the mainstream and the specialist press as well. Thus, the lack of attention paid to the subject over the decades resulted not from ignorance, but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resource depletion has been well understood since the 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial.
Denial
Although this is a bit off the subject of Soviet collapse and what it may teach us about our own, I can't resist saying a few words about denial, for it is such an interesting subject. I also hope that it will help some of you to go beyond denial, this being a helpful step towards understanding what I am going to say here.
Now that a lot of the predictions are coming true more or less on schedule, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the steady climb of energy prices and the dire warnings from energy experts of every stripe, outright denial is being gradually replaced with subtler forms of denial, which center around avoiding any serious, down-to-earth discussion of the likely actual consequences of peak oil, and of the ways one might cope with them.
Instead, there is much discussion of policy: what "we" should do. The "we" in question is presumably some embodiment of the great American Can-Do Spirit: a brilliantly organized consortium of government agencies, leading universities and research centers, and major corporations, all working together toward the goal of providing plentiful, clean, environmentally safe energy, to fuel another century of economic expansion. Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe!
One often hears that "We could get this done, if only we wanted to." Most often one hears this from non-specialists, sometimes from economists, and hardly ever from scientists or engineers. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations are generally enough to suggest otherwise, but here logic runs up against faith in the Goddess of Technology: that she will provide. On her altar are assembled various ritualistic objects used to summon the Can-Do Spirit: a photovoltaic cell, a fuel cell, a vial of ethanol, and a vial of bio-diesel. Off to the side of the altar is a Pandora's box packed with coal, tar sand, oceanic hydrates, and plutonium: if the Goddess gets angry, it's curtains for life on Earth.
But let us look beyond mere faith, and focus on something slightly more rational instead. This "we," this highly organized, high-powered problem-solving entity, is quickly running out of energy, and once it does, it will not be so high-powered any more. I would like to humbly suggest that any long-term plan it attempts to undertake is doomed, simply because crisis conditions will make long-term planning, along with large, ambitious projects, impossible. Thus, I would suggest against waiting around for some miracle device to put under the hood of every SUV and in the basement of every McMansion, so that all can live happily ever after in this suburban dream, which is looking more and more like a nightmare in any case.
The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably come to pass if the Goddess of Technology were to fail us: a series of wars over ever more scarce resources. Paul Roberts, who is very well informed on the subject of peak oil, has this to say: "what desperate states have always done when resources turn scarce… [is] fight for them." [ MotherJones.com, 11/12 2004] Let us not argue that this has never happened, but did it ever amount to anything more than a futile gesture of desperation? Wars take resources, and, when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat. I would also like to suggest that these conflicts would be self-limiting: modern warfare uses up prodigious amounts of energy, and if the conflicts are over oil and gas installations, then they will get blown up, as has happened repeatedly in Iraq. This will result in less energy being available and, consequently, less warfare.
Take, for example, the last two US involvements in Iraq. In each case, as a result of US actions, Iraqi oil production decreased. It now appears that the whole strategy is a failure. Supporting Saddam, then fighting Saddam, then imposing sanctions on Saddam, then finally overthrowing him, has left Iraqi oil fields so badly damaged that the "ultimate recoverable" estimate for Iraqi oil is now down to 10-12% of what was once thought to be underground (according to the New York Times).
Some people are even suggesting a war over resources with a nuclear endgame. On this point, I am optimistic. As Robert McNamara once thought, nuclear weapons are too difficult to use. And although he has done a great deal of work to make them easier to use, with the introduction of small, tactical, battlefield nukes and the like, and despite recently renewed interest in nuclear "bunker busters," they still make a bit of a mess, and are hard to work into any sort of a sensible strategy that would reliably lead to an increased supply of energy. Noting that conventional weapons have not been effective in this area, it is unclear why nuclear weapons would produce better results.
But these are all details; the point I really want to make is that proposing resource wars, even as a worst-case scenario, is still a form of denial. The implicit assumption is this: if all else fails, we will go to war; we will win; the oil will flow again, and we will be back to business as usual in no time. Again, I would suggest against waiting around for the success of a global police action to redirect the lion's share of the dwindling world oil supplies toward the United States.
Outside this last circle of denial lies a vast wilderness called the Collapse of Western Civilization, roamed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or so some people will have you believe. Here we find not denial but escapism: a hankering for a grand finale, a heroic final chapter. Civilizations do collapse – this is one of the best-known facts about them – but as anyone who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will tell you, the process can take many centuries.
What tends to collapse rather suddenly is the economy. Economies, too, are known to collapse, and do so with far greater regularity than civilizations. An economy does not collapse into a black hole from which no light can escape. Instead, something else happens: society begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself, establish new relationships, and evolve new rules, in order to find a point of equilibrium at a lower rate of resource expenditure.
Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die, sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a "die-off." There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old, and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.
Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That pattern has been repeated many times, so we can reason inductively about similarities and differences between a collapse that has already occurred and one that is about to occur. Unlike astrophysicists, who can confidently predict whether a given star will collapse into a neutron star or a black hole based on measurements and calculations, we have to work with general observations and anecdotal evidence. However, I hope that my thought experiment will allow me to guess correctly at the general shape of the new economy, and arrive at survival strategies that may be of use to individuals and small communities.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union – an Overview
What happens when a modern economy collapses, and the complex society it supports disintegrates? A look at a country that has recently undergone such an experience can be most educational. We are lucky enough to have such an example in the Soviet Union. I spent about six months living, traveling, and doing business in Russia during the perestroika period and immediately afterward, and was fascinated by the transformation I witnessed.
The specifics are different, of course. The Soviet problems seem to have been largely organizational rather than physical in nature, although the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed just 3 years after reaching peak oil production is hardly a coincidence. The ultimate cause of Soviet Union's spontaneous collapse remains shrouded in mystery. Was it Ronald Reagan's Star Wars? Or was it Raisa Gorbachev's American Express card? It is possible to fake a missile defense shield; but it is not so easy to fake a Herod's department store. The arguments go back and forth. One contemporary theory would have it that the Soviet elite scuttled the whole program when they decided that Soviet Socialism was not going to make them rich. (It remains unclear why it should have taken the Soviet elite 70 years to come to this startlingly obvious conclusion).
A slightly more commonsense explanation is this: during the pre-perestroika "stagnation" period, due to the chronic underperformance of the economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit, and foreign debt, it became increasingly difficult for the average Russian middle-class family of three, with both parents working, to make ends meet. (Now, isn't that beginning to sound familiar?) Of course, the government bureaucrats were not too concerned about the plight of the people. But the people found ways to survive by circumventing government controls in a myriad of ways, preventing the government from getting the results it needed to keep the system going. Therefore, the system had to be reformed. When this became the consensus view, reformers lined up to try and reform the system. Alas, the system could not be reformed. Instead of adapting, it fell apart.
Russia was able to bounce back economically because it remains fairly rich in oil and very rich in natural gas, and will probably continue in relative prosperity for at least a few more decades. In North America, on the other hand, oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has been in decline ever since, while natural gas production is now set to fall off a production cliff. Yet energy demand continues to rise far above what the continent can supply, making such a spontaneous recovery unlikely. When I say that Russia bounced back, I am not trying to understate the human cost of the Soviet collapse, or the lopsidedness and the economic disparities of the re-born Russian economy. But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent, and less capable of bouncing back.
But such "big picture" differences are not so interesting. It is the micro-scale similarities that offer interesting practical lessons on how small groups of individuals can successfully cope with economic and social collapse. And that is where the post-Soviet experience offers a multitude of useful lessons.
Returning to Russia
I first flew back to Leningrad, which was soon to be rechristened St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1989, about a year after Gorbachev freed the last batch of political prisoners, my uncle among them, who had been locked up by General Secretary Andropov's final, senile attempt at clenching an iron fist. For the first time it became possible for Soviet escapees to go back and visit. More than a decade had passed since I left, but the place was much as I remembered it: bustling streets full of Volgas and Ladas, Communist slogans on the roofs of towering buildings lit up in neon, long lines in shops.
About the only thing new was a bustle of activity around a newly organized Cooperative movement. A newly hatched entrepreneurial class was busy complaining that their cooperatives were only allowed to sell to the government, at government prices, while hatching ingenuous schemes to skim something off the top through barter arrangements. Most were going bankrupt. It did not turn out to be a successful business model for them or for the government, which was, as it turned out, also on its last legs.
I went back a year later, and found a place I did not quite recognize. First of all, it smelled different: the smog was gone. The factories had largely shut down, there was very little traffic, and the fresh air smelled wonderful! The stores were largely empty and often closed. There were very few gas stations open, and the ones that were open had lines that stretched for many blocks. There was a ten-liter limit on gasoline purchases.
Since there was nothing better for us to do, my friends and I decided to take a road trip, to visit the ancient Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod, taking in the surrounding countryside along the way. For this, we had to obtain fuel. It was hard to come by. It was available on the black market, but no one felt particularly inclined to let go of something so valuable in exchange for something so useless as money. Soviet money ceased to have value, since there was so little that could be bought with it, and people still felt skittish around foreign currency.
Luckily, there was a limited supply of another sort of currency available to us. It was close to the end of Gorbachev's ill-fated anti-alcoholism campaign, during which vodka was rationed. There was a death in my family, for which we received a funeral's worth of vodka coupons, which we of course redeemed right away. What was left of the vodka was placed in the trunk of the trusty old Lada, and off we went. Each half-liter bottle of vodka was exchanged for ten liters of gasoline, giving vodka far greater effective energy density than rocket fuel.
There is a lesson here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.
***
Two years later, I was back again, this time in the dead of winter. I was traveling on business through Minsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow. My mission was to see whether any of the former Soviet defense industry could be converted to civilian use. The business part of the trip was a total fiasco and a complete waste of time, just as one would expect. In other ways, it was quite educational.
Minsk seemed like a city rudely awakened from hibernation. During the short daylight hours, the streets were full of people, who just stood around, as if wondering what to do next. The same feeling pervaded the executive offices, where people I used to think of as the representatives of the "evil empire" sat around under dusty portraits of Lenin bemoaning their fate. No one had any answers.
The only beam of sunshine came from a smarmy New York lawyer who hung around the place trying to organize a state lottery. He was almost the only man with a plan. (The director of a research institute which was formerly charged with explosion-welding parts for nuclear fusion reactor vessels, or some such thing, also had a plan: he wanted to build summer cottages.) I wrapped up my business early and caught a night train to St. Petersburg. On the train, a comfortable old sleeper car, I shared a compartment with a young, newly retired army doctor, who showed me his fat roll of hundred-dollar bills and told me all about the local diamond trade. We split a bottle of cognac and snoozed off. It was a pleasant trip.
St. Petersburg was a shock. There was a sense of despair that hung in the winter air. There were old women standing around in spontaneous open-air flea markets trying to sell toys that probably belonged to their grandchildren, to buy something to eat. Middle-class people could be seen digging around in the trash. Everyone's savings were wiped out by hyperinflation. I arrived with a large stack of one-dollar bills. Everything was one dollar, or a thousand rubles, which was about five times the average monthly salary. I handed out lots of these silly thousand-ruble notes: "Here, I just want to make sure you have enough." People would recoil in shock: "That's a lot of money!" "No, it isn't. Be sure to spend it right away." However, all the lights were on, there was heat in many of the homes, and the trains ran on time.
My business itinerary involved a trip to the countryside to tour and to have meetings at some scientific facility. The phone lines to the place were down, and so I decided to just jump on a train and go there. The only train left at 7 am. I showed up around 6, thinking I could find breakfast at the station. The station was dark and locked. Across the street, there was a store selling coffee, with a line that wrapped around the block. There was also an old woman in front of the store, selling buns from a tray. I offered her a thousand-ruble note. "Don't throw your money around!" she said. I offered to buy her entire tray. "What are the other people going to eat?" she asked. I went and stood in line for the cashier, presented my thousand-ruble note, got a pile of useless change and a receipt, presented the receipt at the counter, collected a glass of warm brown liquid, drank it, returned the glass, paid the old woman, got my sweet bun, and thanked her very much. It was a lesson in civility.
***
Three years later, I was back again, and the economy had clearly started to recover, at least to the extent that goods were available to those who had money, but enterprises were continuing to shut down, and most people were still clearly suffering. There were new, private stores, which had tight security, and which sold imported goods for foreign currency. Very few people could afford to shop at these stores. There were also open air markets in many city squares, at which most of the shopping was done. Many kinds of goods were dispensed from locked metal booths, quite a few of which belonged to the Chechen mafia: one shoved a large pile of paper money through a hole and was handed back the item.
There were sporadic difficulties with the money supply. I recall standing around waiting for banks to open in order to cash my traveler's checks. The banks were closed because they were fresh out of money; they were all waiting for cash to be delivered. Once in a while, a bank manager would come out and make an announcement: the money is on its way, no need to worry.
There was a great divide between those who were unemployed, underemployed, or working in the old economy, and the new merchant class. For those working for the old state-owned enterprises – schools, hospitals, the railways, the telephone exchanges, and what remained of the rest of the Soviet economy - it was lean times. Salaries were paid sporadically, or not at all. Even when people got their money, it was barely enough to subsist on.
But the worst of it was clearly over. A new economic reality had taken hold. A large segment of the population saw its standard of living reduced, sometimes permanently. It took the economy ten years to get back to its pre-collapse level, and the recovery was uneven. Alongside the nouveau riche, there were many whose income would never recover. Those who could not become part of the new economy, especially the pensioners, but also many others, who had benefited from the now defunct socialist state, could barely eke out a living.
This thumbnail sketch of my experiences in Russia is intended to convey a general sense of what I had witnessed. But it is the details of what I have observed that I hope will be of value to those who see an economic collapse looming ahead, and want to plan, in order to survive it.
Similarities between the Superpowers
Some would find a direct comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union incongruous, if not downright insulting. After all, what grounds are there to compare a failed Communist empire to the world's largest economy? Others might find it humorous that the loser might have advice for the winner in what they might see as an ideological conflict. Since the differences between the two appear glaring to most, let me just indicate some similarities, which I hope you will find are no less obvious.
The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the first runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race, and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records even after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology, and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.
They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality, and a guaranteed - albeit lower - standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn't realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don't know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.
Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology, and to thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails ( South Africa was a contender at one point). In this last category, the U.S. is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex (a great source of near-slave wage labor).
While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden, the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. Nobody likes a loser, but especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union; and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either .
The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating a financial crisis. Russia's finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices, along with rising oil exports. At this point, Russia is eager to wipe out the remaining Soviet debt as quickly as possible, and over the past few years the Russian rouble has done just a bit better than the U.S. dollar.
The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency, and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world's largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt, and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets, and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.
There are many other similarities as well. Women received the right to education and a career in Russia earlier than in the U.S. Russian and American families are in similarly sad shape, with high divorce rates and many out-of-wedlock births, although the chronic shortage of housing in Russia did force many families to stick it out, with mixed results. Both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the U.S., a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.
The similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Earth is too crowded for Utopia
VIEWPOINT
Chris Rapley
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4584572.stm
The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says.
The welfare and quality of life of future generations will be the ineluctable casualty
Ten thousand delegates attended the recent Montreal Summit on the control of carbon emissions "beyond Kyoto".
That's a lot of people! The conference organisation must have been daunting; and just imagine arranging the hotel accommodation and restaurant facilities and dealing with the additional human-generated waste.
Imagine the carbon and nitrogen emissions from the associated air travel!
The 40 or more decisions made were announced as an historic success.
Supposing this proves to be so, will it be sufficient to secure an acceptable quality of life for the generations to come?
What about the myriad other planetary-scale human impacts - for example on land cover, the water cycle, the health of ecosystems, and biodiversity?
What about our release of other chemicals into the environment?
What about our massive transport and mixing of biological material worldwide, and our unsustainable consumption of resources?
Big foot
All of these effects interconnect and add up to the collective "footprint" of humankind on our planet's life support systems.
The consequences extend to the ends of the Earth (recall the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic) and each is as difficult to predict and as challenging to deal with as the link between carbon emissions and climate.
It would surely be impractical and almost certainly ineffective to assemble 10,000 delegates to address each one of these issues, and especially to do so in the necessary "joined up" way?
And in particular, what about the net 76 million annual rise in the world's population, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion - more than twice what it was in 1960 - and which is heading towards eight billion or so by mid-century)?
That's an annual increase 7,500 times the number of delegates in Montreal.
Imagine organising the accommodation, feeding arrangements, schooling, employment, medical care, cultural activities and general infrastructure - transport, power, water, communications, waste disposal - for a number of people slightly larger than the population of the UK, and doing it each year, year on year for the foreseeable future.
Combined with ongoing economic growth, what will be the effect on our collective human "footprint"? Will the planet cope?
Steps to Utopia
Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero.
Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing.
The Montreal climate talks: Did they have the issue right?
So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.
Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term.
A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).
With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia" from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination.
Cinderella subject
In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability.
As found in China, practicability and acceptability can be particularly elusive.
So controversial is the subject that it has become the "Cinderella" of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private.
In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.
Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the "global public" to debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done.
Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty.
Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK
The Green Room is a new series of environmental opinion articles running weekly on the BBC News website
VIEWPOINT
Chris Rapley
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4584572.stm
The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says.
The welfare and quality of life of future generations will be the ineluctable casualty
Ten thousand delegates attended the recent Montreal Summit on the control of carbon emissions "beyond Kyoto".
That's a lot of people! The conference organisation must have been daunting; and just imagine arranging the hotel accommodation and restaurant facilities and dealing with the additional human-generated waste.
Imagine the carbon and nitrogen emissions from the associated air travel!
The 40 or more decisions made were announced as an historic success.
Supposing this proves to be so, will it be sufficient to secure an acceptable quality of life for the generations to come?
What about the myriad other planetary-scale human impacts - for example on land cover, the water cycle, the health of ecosystems, and biodiversity?
What about our release of other chemicals into the environment?
What about our massive transport and mixing of biological material worldwide, and our unsustainable consumption of resources?
Big foot
All of these effects interconnect and add up to the collective "footprint" of humankind on our planet's life support systems.
The consequences extend to the ends of the Earth (recall the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic) and each is as difficult to predict and as challenging to deal with as the link between carbon emissions and climate.
It would surely be impractical and almost certainly ineffective to assemble 10,000 delegates to address each one of these issues, and especially to do so in the necessary "joined up" way?
And in particular, what about the net 76 million annual rise in the world's population, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion - more than twice what it was in 1960 - and which is heading towards eight billion or so by mid-century)?
That's an annual increase 7,500 times the number of delegates in Montreal.
Imagine organising the accommodation, feeding arrangements, schooling, employment, medical care, cultural activities and general infrastructure - transport, power, water, communications, waste disposal - for a number of people slightly larger than the population of the UK, and doing it each year, year on year for the foreseeable future.
Combined with ongoing economic growth, what will be the effect on our collective human "footprint"? Will the planet cope?
Steps to Utopia
Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero.
Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing.
The Montreal climate talks: Did they have the issue right?
So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.
Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term.
A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).
With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia" from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination.
Cinderella subject
In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability.
As found in China, practicability and acceptability can be particularly elusive.
So controversial is the subject that it has become the "Cinderella" of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private.
In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.
Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the "global public" to debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done.
Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty.
Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK
The Green Room is a new series of environmental opinion articles running weekly on the BBC News website
Lost connection to animate Earth
VIEWPOINT
Stephan Harding
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5120868.stm
Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding in this week's Green Room. Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.
We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction more fatal than any other in our Earth's history
There is now little doubt that our culture is unleashing a vast and accelerating crisis upon the world.
We have set in train changes to our climate that seem certain to become very dangerous indeed during the next 50 years or so.
We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction faster and possibly more fatal than any other in our Earth's long history.
Our social fabric is also unravelling, and as it does so crime and massive psychological problems increase apace.
As the Earth gears up to pay us back for waging our unwitting war against her, it is critically important that we discover what has made our culture so uniquely destructive.
Some believe that our inherently "sinful" human nature is to blame, that any culture with our technological might and prowess would have done the same thing; but I subscribe to a different understanding.
I believe that we are suffering from a world view so dangerously pathological that it is leading our civilisation to the brink of suicide.
'Dead machine'
The fatal flaw is this: that for us, the entire cosmos, including the Earth and all her living beings, her rocks and air and atmosphere is no more than a dead machine that we are free to exploit without limit in the furtherance of our own interests.
Gaian philosophy questions our current economic models
This notion of a mechanistic universe comes in part from the great thinkers of scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries, from men such as Descartes, Bacon and Galileo.
There is no doubt that their creation, modern science, is a brilliant and fabulously powerful intellectual achievement that has given us many significant benefits; but it has also deluded us into believing that only pure analytical reasoning can give us reliable knowledge about the world.
No wonder then that we have ended up in a "dead" cosmos, for science has taught us to be deeply suspicious of our sensual, intuitive and ethical sensibilities.
I believe that we must quickly develop an expanded science that recognises the validity of all four ways of knowing in equal measure if we are to avert the looming disaster.
When we do this, we enter the ambit of a different, more wholesome perspective in which our spontaneous, sensual experiences of the world, our deepest intuitions, our sense of what is right, and our reasoning work together to inform us, in the words of "geologian" Father Thomas Berry, that the world is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
This is no new idea. Plato spoke of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and many of the great philosophers, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and more recently AN Whitehead, considered matter itself to be sentient in its deepest roots.
Could it be that anima mundi, banished from our consciousness for 400 years, now cries out to be heard in this time of deep crisis?
Gaze at the sea, or lay on the ground feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
Within science, she manifests in quantum theory, systems thinking, complexity theory, and, more concretely, in James Lovelock's Gaia theory.
Here we learn that far from being a dead machine, the Earth is more like a living organism in which the tightly coupled interactions between the sum of all life and the rocks, atmosphere and oceans give rise to the stunning emergent ability of the Earth as a whole to maintain habitable conditions on her ancient crumpled surface despite an ever brightening Sun and the vagaries of tectonic events.
When approached simultaneously through our four ways of knowing, Gaia theory teaches us that we live symbiotically within a vast evolving sentient creature of planetary proportions - that we are just plain members of the Gaia community, not its masters or stewards.
What would society look like if we lived according to this more animistic understanding?
We would recognise that other species, and indeed the Earth herself, have intrinsic value irrespective of their value to us.
We would deeply question our mainstream economic model, for the great wild sentient personality of our planet calls out to us to reject the endless and ever-increasing plundering of her material substrate.
Is Galileo's scientific tradition divorcing people from nature?
Instead we would develop a "steady state" economy in which the things that grow are love, spirituality, creativity, depth of community, simple living, and the healing of the Earth, but in which our use of her "resources" is kept at levels that she can cope with.
We will never know enough about the complex dynamics of our planet to justify a solid pessimism about the future. Fear is a good motivator, but love is best of all.
So the most important task for us all now is to re-discover our sense of belonging to our animate Earth. Only then will we feel our sense of self expanding outwards to embrace the vast more-than human-world that enfolds us.
Just try it. Spend time outdoors - gazing at the sea, or laying on the ground and feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
I guarantee that you'll find an unexpected wealth of happiness and connection in that simple act. Only then will you encounter the most durable motivation for engaging in genuinely sustainable actions.
Dr Stephan Harding is resident ecologist and coordinator of the MSc in holistic science at Schumacher College in Devon, UK. His book Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia is published by Green Books
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website
In the week beginning 3 July the BBC News website will be featuring an expert discussion on James Lovelock's recent book The Revenge of Gaia
VIEWPOINT
Stephan Harding
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5120868.stm
Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding in this week's Green Room. Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.
We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction more fatal than any other in our Earth's history
There is now little doubt that our culture is unleashing a vast and accelerating crisis upon the world.
We have set in train changes to our climate that seem certain to become very dangerous indeed during the next 50 years or so.
We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction faster and possibly more fatal than any other in our Earth's long history.
Our social fabric is also unravelling, and as it does so crime and massive psychological problems increase apace.
As the Earth gears up to pay us back for waging our unwitting war against her, it is critically important that we discover what has made our culture so uniquely destructive.
Some believe that our inherently "sinful" human nature is to blame, that any culture with our technological might and prowess would have done the same thing; but I subscribe to a different understanding.
I believe that we are suffering from a world view so dangerously pathological that it is leading our civilisation to the brink of suicide.
'Dead machine'
The fatal flaw is this: that for us, the entire cosmos, including the Earth and all her living beings, her rocks and air and atmosphere is no more than a dead machine that we are free to exploit without limit in the furtherance of our own interests.
Gaian philosophy questions our current economic models
This notion of a mechanistic universe comes in part from the great thinkers of scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries, from men such as Descartes, Bacon and Galileo.
There is no doubt that their creation, modern science, is a brilliant and fabulously powerful intellectual achievement that has given us many significant benefits; but it has also deluded us into believing that only pure analytical reasoning can give us reliable knowledge about the world.
No wonder then that we have ended up in a "dead" cosmos, for science has taught us to be deeply suspicious of our sensual, intuitive and ethical sensibilities.
I believe that we must quickly develop an expanded science that recognises the validity of all four ways of knowing in equal measure if we are to avert the looming disaster.
When we do this, we enter the ambit of a different, more wholesome perspective in which our spontaneous, sensual experiences of the world, our deepest intuitions, our sense of what is right, and our reasoning work together to inform us, in the words of "geologian" Father Thomas Berry, that the world is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
This is no new idea. Plato spoke of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and many of the great philosophers, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and more recently AN Whitehead, considered matter itself to be sentient in its deepest roots.
Could it be that anima mundi, banished from our consciousness for 400 years, now cries out to be heard in this time of deep crisis?
Gaze at the sea, or lay on the ground feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
Within science, she manifests in quantum theory, systems thinking, complexity theory, and, more concretely, in James Lovelock's Gaia theory.
Here we learn that far from being a dead machine, the Earth is more like a living organism in which the tightly coupled interactions between the sum of all life and the rocks, atmosphere and oceans give rise to the stunning emergent ability of the Earth as a whole to maintain habitable conditions on her ancient crumpled surface despite an ever brightening Sun and the vagaries of tectonic events.
When approached simultaneously through our four ways of knowing, Gaia theory teaches us that we live symbiotically within a vast evolving sentient creature of planetary proportions - that we are just plain members of the Gaia community, not its masters or stewards.
What would society look like if we lived according to this more animistic understanding?
We would recognise that other species, and indeed the Earth herself, have intrinsic value irrespective of their value to us.
We would deeply question our mainstream economic model, for the great wild sentient personality of our planet calls out to us to reject the endless and ever-increasing plundering of her material substrate.
Is Galileo's scientific tradition divorcing people from nature?
Instead we would develop a "steady state" economy in which the things that grow are love, spirituality, creativity, depth of community, simple living, and the healing of the Earth, but in which our use of her "resources" is kept at levels that she can cope with.
We will never know enough about the complex dynamics of our planet to justify a solid pessimism about the future. Fear is a good motivator, but love is best of all.
So the most important task for us all now is to re-discover our sense of belonging to our animate Earth. Only then will we feel our sense of self expanding outwards to embrace the vast more-than human-world that enfolds us.
Just try it. Spend time outdoors - gazing at the sea, or laying on the ground and feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
I guarantee that you'll find an unexpected wealth of happiness and connection in that simple act. Only then will you encounter the most durable motivation for engaging in genuinely sustainable actions.
Dr Stephan Harding is resident ecologist and coordinator of the MSc in holistic science at Schumacher College in Devon, UK. His book Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia is published by Green Books
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website
In the week beginning 3 July the BBC News website will be featuring an expert discussion on James Lovelock's recent book The Revenge of Gaia
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