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.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
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
Friday, June 09, 2006
Beyond Hope
by Derrick Jensen
http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html
THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We're fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one tree.
Here's how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: "As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they're gone in twenty, they'll be gone forever."
But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We're losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don't care.
Frankly, I don't have much hope. But I think that's a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women's shelters in the '50s and '60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.
Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they're getting worse. Rapidly.
But it isn't only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?
We've all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I'm sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one's misfortune.
The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.
I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.
I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn't drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don't like how they're being treated—and who could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.
When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, "If things are so bad, why don't you just kill yourself?" The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.
Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
Another question people sometimes ask me is, "If things are so bad, why don't you just party?" Well, the first answer is that I don't really like to party. The second is that I'm already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.
I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I've learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction—the use of any excuse to justify inaction—reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to love.
At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn't matter, he said, and it's egotistical to think it does.
I told him I disagreed.
Doesn't activism make you feel good? he asked.
Of course, I said, but that's not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.
Why?
Because I'm in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don't determine whether or not you make the effort. You don't simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn't cause me to protect those I love, it's not love.
A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you. It didn't even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase—not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.
When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?
But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.
And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.
In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.
by Derrick Jensen
http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html
THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We're fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one tree.
Here's how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: "As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they're gone in twenty, they'll be gone forever."
But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We're losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don't care.
Frankly, I don't have much hope. But I think that's a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women's shelters in the '50s and '60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.
Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they're getting worse. Rapidly.
But it isn't only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?
We've all been taught that hope in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I'm sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one's misfortune.
The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe—or maybe you would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.
I'm not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.
I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn't drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don't like how they're being treated—and who could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.
When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, "If things are so bad, why don't you just kill yourself?" The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.
Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
Another question people sometimes ask me is, "If things are so bad, why don't you just party?" Well, the first answer is that I don't really like to party. The second is that I'm already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.
I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I've learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction—the use of any excuse to justify inaction—reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to love.
At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn't matter, he said, and it's egotistical to think it does.
I told him I disagreed.
Doesn't activism make you feel good? he asked.
Of course, I said, but that's not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.
Why?
Because I'm in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don't determine whether or not you make the effort. You don't simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn't cause me to protect those I love, it's not love.
A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you. It didn't even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase—not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.
When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?
But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.
And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.
In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.
Big Brother, Fascism and Bankruptcy
There is so much news and such exciting things going on, I can’t always be sure what I want to spend time blogging about.
President george bush is going to meet with select (hand picked) lawmakers and explain his illegal program to spy on Americans without probable cause, or a search warrant. The records they collect, including phone calling records and recordings of actual phone calls are property of the US Public. They are being kept safe for the government, by private corporations. We can be sure that records will be leaked and sold. Eventually I believe it’s certain that these records will make their way into financial databases, and will be a part of the credit reporting service. Local police departments will likely gain access to this system, and your neighbors working in local government will be able to snoop through these records to find gossip on you and anyone else they find interesting.
Over time, the government will find it necessary to release these recordings and records to the public under the FISA act. This will occur after administration changes when a new set of politicians sees the value in using these records to embarrass their opponents.
On the National Animal Identification System front, I’ve become recently aware of this marvelous Short Film by Chris Oakley. I’ve read industry articles that describe how using Radio Frequency Identifiers in the livestock industry, is a way to develop the technology, the tools and prove the safety of the system, for use with humans.
The idea being, that people will no longer need identification or carry credit cards to make purchases. When you walk into a store, your entry time will be recorded. As you wander about the store, your motions will be tracked and analyzed by marketing software that will help the store own better place products they want you to buy, to help you spend more. When you cash out, the register software will know you by your RFID, and the purchase will happen electronically, without the need for cash, credit cards or a wallet. Eventually, if you don’t have an RFID, you won’t be able to buy things. You won’t be sold food.
They plan to put this technology into cars, so that the car can recognize everyone in it and record the time spent in the car. The car won’t need keys, because it will know who is allowed to use it. With built in digital cell phone technology and GPS, your movements can be recorded all through your lifetime. Your home appliances will also recognize you and will customize their settings to your liking. When you walk in and out of the house your movements will be tracked so that the house can configure itself to your needs, readjusting thermostats and setting answering systems automatically.
But I’m too worried about these advances over the long term. These things require a wealthy society and continued technological and energy growth. I don’t think we’re going to make it that far.
Financially, our monetary system run amok and I believe this train is running out of track. It is so screwed up, it will take decades to fix, if Congress, the Senate, Presidency and the Supreme Court all agreed it needed to be fixed.
Right now, world oil production and by extension world energy production is quivering on a plateau. Is this the peak? I think so. And I think it is, because I believe that there are no super giant fields that can stand up to higher rates of sustained depletion.
If we are not at peak, we're certainly on a shoulder near the peak. And that means no significant production increases. No more growth.
No energy growth means, no industry growth. So now we're in an industry reshuffling phase.
And how does the finance industry deal with no growth? Well, they panic and create lots of money. Raw numbers mean profits, right? Print more money, and obviously you have more money.
The US government is dealing with the same price inflation the rest of us are. And inflation in simple terms is an increase in the money supply. To put it in perspective though, think of it as an increase in the supply of money as compared to goods and services. If the money supply rises at the rate that goods and services increase in volume, we see no price changes. If the money supply grows faster, then we have more money per goods or service and thus rising prices.
So the US government is dealing with inflation, by borrowing and thus creating more money. This leads to rises in prices, which leads to the need of the government to create more money to buy stuff with. This puts the US government in direct competition with private industry.
And the US government can’t stop. First, the corporations feeding off of it have powerful lobbies that own both political parties. They will not allow their hand puppets to change these policies. Secondly, the US government would have to stop increasing spending. A new way of looking at budget reductions would have to take hold. Right now, a budget reduction is a reduction in the rate that the budget is increased. We need to go the other direction; we need to have a budget that is smaller every year.
This would reduce the government’s competition with private industry. It would reduce the need for the government to be an economy unto itself. It would reduce price inflation so that people do see their monetary value diluted, month by month. People could save in safe financial instruments and not worry that inflation will make their savings worthless.
But this won’t happen. We will stay on course, stoking the boiler, going ever faster until the US Economy can no longer compete with the US government and the dollar becomes worthless.
So though the RFID, NSA spying and all the rest is really scary fascist stuff, being implemented right now, in the long run, these policies are taking the US on the same course the USSR took. And that’s right into bankruptcy.
Hang on! You can put a bag over your head if you like, but it won’t help.
There is so much news and such exciting things going on, I can’t always be sure what I want to spend time blogging about.
President george bush is going to meet with select (hand picked) lawmakers and explain his illegal program to spy on Americans without probable cause, or a search warrant. The records they collect, including phone calling records and recordings of actual phone calls are property of the US Public. They are being kept safe for the government, by private corporations. We can be sure that records will be leaked and sold. Eventually I believe it’s certain that these records will make their way into financial databases, and will be a part of the credit reporting service. Local police departments will likely gain access to this system, and your neighbors working in local government will be able to snoop through these records to find gossip on you and anyone else they find interesting.
Over time, the government will find it necessary to release these recordings and records to the public under the FISA act. This will occur after administration changes when a new set of politicians sees the value in using these records to embarrass their opponents.
On the National Animal Identification System front, I’ve become recently aware of this marvelous Short Film by Chris Oakley. I’ve read industry articles that describe how using Radio Frequency Identifiers in the livestock industry, is a way to develop the technology, the tools and prove the safety of the system, for use with humans.
The idea being, that people will no longer need identification or carry credit cards to make purchases. When you walk into a store, your entry time will be recorded. As you wander about the store, your motions will be tracked and analyzed by marketing software that will help the store own better place products they want you to buy, to help you spend more. When you cash out, the register software will know you by your RFID, and the purchase will happen electronically, without the need for cash, credit cards or a wallet. Eventually, if you don’t have an RFID, you won’t be able to buy things. You won’t be sold food.
They plan to put this technology into cars, so that the car can recognize everyone in it and record the time spent in the car. The car won’t need keys, because it will know who is allowed to use it. With built in digital cell phone technology and GPS, your movements can be recorded all through your lifetime. Your home appliances will also recognize you and will customize their settings to your liking. When you walk in and out of the house your movements will be tracked so that the house can configure itself to your needs, readjusting thermostats and setting answering systems automatically.
But I’m too worried about these advances over the long term. These things require a wealthy society and continued technological and energy growth. I don’t think we’re going to make it that far.
Financially, our monetary system run amok and I believe this train is running out of track. It is so screwed up, it will take decades to fix, if Congress, the Senate, Presidency and the Supreme Court all agreed it needed to be fixed.
Right now, world oil production and by extension world energy production is quivering on a plateau. Is this the peak? I think so. And I think it is, because I believe that there are no super giant fields that can stand up to higher rates of sustained depletion.
If we are not at peak, we're certainly on a shoulder near the peak. And that means no significant production increases. No more growth.
No energy growth means, no industry growth. So now we're in an industry reshuffling phase.
And how does the finance industry deal with no growth? Well, they panic and create lots of money. Raw numbers mean profits, right? Print more money, and obviously you have more money.
The US government is dealing with the same price inflation the rest of us are. And inflation in simple terms is an increase in the money supply. To put it in perspective though, think of it as an increase in the supply of money as compared to goods and services. If the money supply rises at the rate that goods and services increase in volume, we see no price changes. If the money supply grows faster, then we have more money per goods or service and thus rising prices.
So the US government is dealing with inflation, by borrowing and thus creating more money. This leads to rises in prices, which leads to the need of the government to create more money to buy stuff with. This puts the US government in direct competition with private industry.
And the US government can’t stop. First, the corporations feeding off of it have powerful lobbies that own both political parties. They will not allow their hand puppets to change these policies. Secondly, the US government would have to stop increasing spending. A new way of looking at budget reductions would have to take hold. Right now, a budget reduction is a reduction in the rate that the budget is increased. We need to go the other direction; we need to have a budget that is smaller every year.
This would reduce the government’s competition with private industry. It would reduce the need for the government to be an economy unto itself. It would reduce price inflation so that people do see their monetary value diluted, month by month. People could save in safe financial instruments and not worry that inflation will make their savings worthless.
But this won’t happen. We will stay on course, stoking the boiler, going ever faster until the US Economy can no longer compete with the US government and the dollar becomes worthless.
So though the RFID, NSA spying and all the rest is really scary fascist stuff, being implemented right now, in the long run, these policies are taking the US on the same course the USSR took. And that’s right into bankruptcy.
Hang on! You can put a bag over your head if you like, but it won’t help.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Greenspan sounds alarm on oil supply
Published: June 7, 2006
WASHINGTON Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, offered a grim view on Wednesday of the world's rising vulnerability to high crude oil prices, saying he was skeptical that oil producers could pump enough crude to meet future demand.
Since the 1940s, U.S. consumers have shown an uncanny ability to shoulder rising energy prices, but consumers' immunity to oil price shocks was running out, Greenspan said.
"The United States, especially, has been able to absorb the huge implicit tax of rising oil prices so far," Greenspan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his first congressional testimony since leaving the U.S. central bank earlier this year. "However, recent data indicate we may finally be experiencing some impact."
Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and served until Jan. 31 of this year.
Lawmakers would occasionally call on Greenspan to speak on energy issues when he was chairman, but his views were still highly sought on Capitol Hill.
Since 2004, crude oil prices have doubled. Since the start of 2002, the cost of a barrel of oil has soared by $50.
Crude oil prices have stubbornly stayed above $70 a barrel despite OPEC and other world producers pumping to capacity. Prices are still within striking distance of the $75.35 a barrel record set in U.S. futures in April.
Greenspan warned that a big oil price increase could spur "a significant contraction in the economy."
Greenspan said that few of the world's dominant producers, aside from Saudi Arabia, see the danger that rising crude oil prices pose to the economy, and to their sustained ability to sell oil.
Saudi Arabia is the only country with enough untapped reserves to meet future short-term energy crunches, and has unveiled a $50 billion plan to lift output capacity by 1.5 million barrels per day by 2009.
Greenspan said while U.S. businesses had so far been able to improve productivity to compensate for costly energy, households were suffering from higher gasoline prices.
"Current oil prices over time should lower to some extent our worrisome dependence on petroleum," said Greenspan, who now runs a private consultancy. "Still higher oil prices will inevitably move vehicle transportation to hybrids, and despite the inconvenience, plug-in hybrids."
Greenspan warned that the buffer between supply and demand was extraordinarily thin and that price spikes were a risk.
"The balance of world oil supply and demand has become so precarious that even small acts of sabotage or local insurrection have a significant impact on oil prices," he said, adding that global refining capacity was still too limited.
Strong euro causes concern
Finance ministers from France, Spain and Luxembourg said Wednesday that they were growing more concerned that the euro's appreciation might sap the European economic expansion, Bloomberg News reported from Luxembourg.
"It is not a type of level we would like, but we have been living with a strong euro for a while," the Spanish economy minister, Pedro Solbes, said at a meeting of European Union finance chiefs.
The euro's 8 percent advance against the U.S. dollar this year risks removing a prop from the $10 trillion economy by making exports more expensive, just as the European Central Bank prepares a possible interest rate increase on Thursday for a third time in six months.
Earlier this week, the euro reached a 13-month high point of $1.2979. It was trading at $1.2799 late in New York on Wednesday. About 40 percent of the euro region's gross domestic product stems from shipments abroad.
Thermodynamics and Money
Peter Huber, 10.31.05, 12:00 AM ET
In his day M. King Hubbert was a great geologist who spent his life studying the planet's deposits of oil and gas. But as he got older, he simply lost it. His "peak oil" theory--which many people are citing these days--is a case study in junk economics.
Hubbert was born in 1903. By 1949 he had concluded that the fossil-fuel era was going to end, and quite soon. Global production would peak around 2000, he predicted, and would decline inexorably thereafter. By 1980 the aging Hubbert was certain that the impending crisis "was unique to both human and geologic history.... You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered." Indeed we would soon be forced to abandon our entire "monetary culture," replacing it with an accounting tied to "matter-energy" constraints. An editor of Geophysics magazine summarized Hubbert's views in 1983: "The science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance are incompatible."
Today this same nonsense is often dressed up with numbers in an analysis that's dubbed "energy return on energy invested" (Eroei). According to this theory it can never make sense to burn two units of energy in order to extract one unit of energy. The Eroei crowd concedes, for example, that the world has centuries' worth of junk oil in shale and tar sands--but they can also prove it's irrelevant. It takes more energy to cook this kind of oil out of the dirt, they argue, than you end up with in the recovered oil. And a negative Eroei can only mean energy bankruptcy. The more such energy investments we make, the faster things will grind to a halt.
Eroei calculations now litter the energy policy debate. Time and again they're wheeled out to explain why one form of energy just can't win--tar sands, shale, corn, wood, wind, you name it. Even quite serious journals--Science, for example--have published pieces along these lines. Energy-based books of account have just got to show a profit. In the real world, however, investors don't care a fig whether they earn positive Eroei. What they care about is dollar return on dollar invested. And the two aren't the same--nowhere close--because different forms of energy command wildly different prices. Invest ten units of 10-cent energy to capture one unit of $10 energy and you lose energy but gain dollars, and Wall Street will fund you from here to Alberta.
As it happens, the people extracting oil out of tar sands today use gas from the fields themselves to power their refineries. There's gas, too, under what has been called Alberta's "trillion- barrel tar pit," but it's cheap because there's no pipeline to deliver it to where it would be worth more. As an alternative to gas, Total S.A., the French oil giant, is thinking about building a nuclear power plant to supply heat to melt and crack the tar. But nuclear reactors extract only a minuscule fraction of the energy locked up in the nuclei of uranium atoms; all the rest gets discarded as "waste." On Eroei logic, uranium would never be used to generate either electricity or heat. But per unit of raw stored energy, uranium is a thousand times cheaper than oil.
Greens touting the virtues of biomass as a source of energy rarely note that almost all of it is used by lumber mills burning branches and sawdust on site. No one cares how much energy the sun "invested" to grow all that waste wood. And every electric power plant, whatever it's fueled with, runs a huge Eroei deficit, transforming five units of cheap, raw heat into two units of electrical energy. But it all works out because the market values the energy in electricity at about 30 times the energy in coal.
The economic value of energy just doesn't depend very strongly on raw energy content as conventionally measured in British thermal units. Instead it's determined mainly by the distance between the BTUs and where you need them, and how densely the BTUs are packed into pounds of stuff you've got to move, and by the quality of the technology at hand to move, concentrate, refine and burn those BTUs, and by how your neighbors feel about carbon, uranium and windmills. In this entropic universe we occupy, the production of one unit of high-grade energy always requires more than one unit of low-grade energy at the outset. There are no exceptions. Put another way, Eroei--a sophomoric form of thermodynamic accounting--is always negative and always irrelevant. "Matter-energy" constraints count for nothing. The "monetary culture" still rules. Thermodynamics And Money
Peter Huber is executive vice president of ICx Technologies, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, January 2005). Visit his home page at www.forbes.com/huber.
Published: June 7, 2006
WASHINGTON Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, offered a grim view on Wednesday of the world's rising vulnerability to high crude oil prices, saying he was skeptical that oil producers could pump enough crude to meet future demand.
Since the 1940s, U.S. consumers have shown an uncanny ability to shoulder rising energy prices, but consumers' immunity to oil price shocks was running out, Greenspan said.
"The United States, especially, has been able to absorb the huge implicit tax of rising oil prices so far," Greenspan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his first congressional testimony since leaving the U.S. central bank earlier this year. "However, recent data indicate we may finally be experiencing some impact."
Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and served until Jan. 31 of this year.
Lawmakers would occasionally call on Greenspan to speak on energy issues when he was chairman, but his views were still highly sought on Capitol Hill.
Since 2004, crude oil prices have doubled. Since the start of 2002, the cost of a barrel of oil has soared by $50.
Crude oil prices have stubbornly stayed above $70 a barrel despite OPEC and other world producers pumping to capacity. Prices are still within striking distance of the $75.35 a barrel record set in U.S. futures in April.
Greenspan warned that a big oil price increase could spur "a significant contraction in the economy."
Greenspan said that few of the world's dominant producers, aside from Saudi Arabia, see the danger that rising crude oil prices pose to the economy, and to their sustained ability to sell oil.
Saudi Arabia is the only country with enough untapped reserves to meet future short-term energy crunches, and has unveiled a $50 billion plan to lift output capacity by 1.5 million barrels per day by 2009.
Greenspan said while U.S. businesses had so far been able to improve productivity to compensate for costly energy, households were suffering from higher gasoline prices.
"Current oil prices over time should lower to some extent our worrisome dependence on petroleum," said Greenspan, who now runs a private consultancy. "Still higher oil prices will inevitably move vehicle transportation to hybrids, and despite the inconvenience, plug-in hybrids."
Greenspan warned that the buffer between supply and demand was extraordinarily thin and that price spikes were a risk.
"The balance of world oil supply and demand has become so precarious that even small acts of sabotage or local insurrection have a significant impact on oil prices," he said, adding that global refining capacity was still too limited.
Strong euro causes concern
Finance ministers from France, Spain and Luxembourg said Wednesday that they were growing more concerned that the euro's appreciation might sap the European economic expansion, Bloomberg News reported from Luxembourg.
"It is not a type of level we would like, but we have been living with a strong euro for a while," the Spanish economy minister, Pedro Solbes, said at a meeting of European Union finance chiefs.
The euro's 8 percent advance against the U.S. dollar this year risks removing a prop from the $10 trillion economy by making exports more expensive, just as the European Central Bank prepares a possible interest rate increase on Thursday for a third time in six months.
Earlier this week, the euro reached a 13-month high point of $1.2979. It was trading at $1.2799 late in New York on Wednesday. About 40 percent of the euro region's gross domestic product stems from shipments abroad.
Thermodynamics and Money
Peter Huber, 10.31.05, 12:00 AM ET
In his day M. King Hubbert was a great geologist who spent his life studying the planet's deposits of oil and gas. But as he got older, he simply lost it. His "peak oil" theory--which many people are citing these days--is a case study in junk economics.
Hubbert was born in 1903. By 1949 he had concluded that the fossil-fuel era was going to end, and quite soon. Global production would peak around 2000, he predicted, and would decline inexorably thereafter. By 1980 the aging Hubbert was certain that the impending crisis "was unique to both human and geologic history.... You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered." Indeed we would soon be forced to abandon our entire "monetary culture," replacing it with an accounting tied to "matter-energy" constraints. An editor of Geophysics magazine summarized Hubbert's views in 1983: "The science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance are incompatible."
Today this same nonsense is often dressed up with numbers in an analysis that's dubbed "energy return on energy invested" (Eroei). According to this theory it can never make sense to burn two units of energy in order to extract one unit of energy. The Eroei crowd concedes, for example, that the world has centuries' worth of junk oil in shale and tar sands--but they can also prove it's irrelevant. It takes more energy to cook this kind of oil out of the dirt, they argue, than you end up with in the recovered oil. And a negative Eroei can only mean energy bankruptcy. The more such energy investments we make, the faster things will grind to a halt.
Eroei calculations now litter the energy policy debate. Time and again they're wheeled out to explain why one form of energy just can't win--tar sands, shale, corn, wood, wind, you name it. Even quite serious journals--Science, for example--have published pieces along these lines. Energy-based books of account have just got to show a profit. In the real world, however, investors don't care a fig whether they earn positive Eroei. What they care about is dollar return on dollar invested. And the two aren't the same--nowhere close--because different forms of energy command wildly different prices. Invest ten units of 10-cent energy to capture one unit of $10 energy and you lose energy but gain dollars, and Wall Street will fund you from here to Alberta.
As it happens, the people extracting oil out of tar sands today use gas from the fields themselves to power their refineries. There's gas, too, under what has been called Alberta's "trillion- barrel tar pit," but it's cheap because there's no pipeline to deliver it to where it would be worth more. As an alternative to gas, Total S.A., the French oil giant, is thinking about building a nuclear power plant to supply heat to melt and crack the tar. But nuclear reactors extract only a minuscule fraction of the energy locked up in the nuclei of uranium atoms; all the rest gets discarded as "waste." On Eroei logic, uranium would never be used to generate either electricity or heat. But per unit of raw stored energy, uranium is a thousand times cheaper than oil.
Greens touting the virtues of biomass as a source of energy rarely note that almost all of it is used by lumber mills burning branches and sawdust on site. No one cares how much energy the sun "invested" to grow all that waste wood. And every electric power plant, whatever it's fueled with, runs a huge Eroei deficit, transforming five units of cheap, raw heat into two units of electrical energy. But it all works out because the market values the energy in electricity at about 30 times the energy in coal.
The economic value of energy just doesn't depend very strongly on raw energy content as conventionally measured in British thermal units. Instead it's determined mainly by the distance between the BTUs and where you need them, and how densely the BTUs are packed into pounds of stuff you've got to move, and by the quality of the technology at hand to move, concentrate, refine and burn those BTUs, and by how your neighbors feel about carbon, uranium and windmills. In this entropic universe we occupy, the production of one unit of high-grade energy always requires more than one unit of low-grade energy at the outset. There are no exceptions. Put another way, Eroei--a sophomoric form of thermodynamic accounting--is always negative and always irrelevant. "Matter-energy" constraints count for nothing. The "monetary culture" still rules. Thermodynamics And Money
Peter Huber is executive vice president of ICx Technologies, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, January 2005). Visit his home page at www.forbes.com/huber.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Published on Monday, June 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
The Bushite Regime and the Collapse of Civilizations
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Collapse Happens
From Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, Americans of today should learn one main thing: that a civilization whose leadership chooses a wrong-headed course on the basis of defective ways of thinking can destroy itself.
America’s present leadership has sought to cultivate our fears-- and indeed we should be afraid. But our fear should be directed much less toward the terrorists against whom our leaders have made their much-heralded war than toward the possible disasters toward which these leaders themselves are taking us.
We should not delude ourselves, in our complacency, that history can give us nothing worse than gasoline at $5 a gallon, or too many people in our midst who do not speak our language.
No, we should recognize that our civilization, mighty as it now is, is not immune from the kind of catastrophe that, as Collapse shows, obliterated the societies of the Norse on Greenland and of the inhabitants of Easter Island.
Indeed, with today’s America –as the dominant nation in this much more shrunken and interdependent world—the catastrophes with which we should be most concerned could entail the collapse not only of our own society but of the entire civilized system of humankind.
For there are two great threats that now endanger the human species at our point in history: 1) environmental catastrophe as the result of reckless human activity in the biosphere; and 2) the perpetuation of the system of war –of might makes right rather than law—in the intersocietal system in an era when weapons of mass destruction are spreading among nations.
And with respect to both of these threats, the present American regime has been driving our civilization toward the abyss.
The Environmental Threat
Human beings have become so much bigger a bull in the ecological china shop –so many more people, within an industrial civilization with so much larger an impact, wielding new technology whose repercussions are so uncertain—that it is unclear whether civilization can adjust its ways of dealing with the earth in time to avoid environmental catastrophe.
For all our technological development, human life still entirely depends on the health of the larger biosphere. But America’s present rulers act as if they either do not understand, or do not care about, this basic reality.
This Bushite regime has not only failed to advance the already troublingly slow human adaptation to this new challenge. It has actively worked to turn back what progress this nation, and the wider global society, have made toward meeting that challenge.
At home, it has turned environmental policy over to the corporate industrial giants whose ecological impact is most urgently in need of regulation. It has actively abetted those vested interests that seek to sow confusion in the public mind with the promulgation of pseudo-science, so that the people will not be able to see clearly the true nature of the choices we face. And they ridicule as inconsequential and un-American the ethic of resource conservation.
And meanwhile, on the global level, the Bushites have scuttled the agreement the international community had managed to put together as a collective response to our mounting collective problem of climate change, and have offered nothing in its stead.
In recent decades, a much deeper understanding has emerged concerning the synergies by which all the various elements of the biosphere work together to maintain the viability of the earth’s living systems. But the Bushites either care more about short-term profit than about long-term viability, or they lack the flexibility of mind to understand that ways of thinking that served adequately in earlier eras will likely prove disastrous under our present, changed conditions.
These rulers, and the greedy forces whom they serve, persist in seeing the relationship with nature not in terms of synergy and sustainability but in terms of dominance and exploitation. It seems as though the only games they know are “win-lose” games.
But as Gregory Bateson wrote years ago, “No animal can win against its environment for long.”
Whether out of ignorance or indifference, like those who guided many of those societies that failed to avert collapse in earlier times, these Bushites persist stubbornly on their short-sighted course while the signs of impending disaster grow steadily more visible. They choose simply not to deal with that “inconvenient truth” to which the melting of the arctic ice and the growing severity of hurricanes are pointing.
And precious time for humankind to adapt and to change directions is being squandered.
The Threat of War in an Age of WMDs
The second major challenge to humankind has been visible since the invention of nuclear weapons more than sixty years ago.
War had always been a nightmarish part of the history of civilization, one of the Four Horeseman of the Apocalypse. But with the emergence of weapons of such vast destructiveness, war began to become unthinkable.
After millennia during which civilized societies –in the absence of any just order in the international system-- have habitually resorted to war to resolve their conflicts, the leaders of the most powerful nations were challenged to change long-established ways of thinking and acting.
For two generations, the possibility that the Cold War might become a hot one threatened the continuation of human life as we know it. But humankind managed to navigate successfully that unprecedentedly dangerous historical passage. Yet great dangers remain.
In the generations since World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age, the nations of the world have attempted to supplant the anarchy of the international system with forms of order that provide non-violent means to resolve conflict and that supplant the age-old disorder of “might makes right.” The United Nations Charter and the system of international law and of treaties are components of this effort to create an international system where law and justice, rather than raw power, can govern.
While the Cold War –with its imposition onto the whole world of the dynamic of conflict—greatly retarded progress toward the rule of law, the end of the Cold War created a historic opportunity. And the first two post-cold-war American administrations (the first Bush, and Clinton), albeit to a very limited degree, did help the world move in the direction of greater international order.
The Bushites, however, saw the post-cold-war era as an opportunity of an altogether different sort.
With their lust for power, their infatuation with dominance, their concept of life in terms of win-lose games, the Bushites saw America’s having emerged as the world’s only superpower as an opportunity to lead humankind not forward toward an international order but rather backward deeper into the old disorder where raw power rules.
If you’ve got the might, they seem to figure, why shouldn’t might make right?
Coming into office with a doctrine of extending American hegemony over the entire planet, the Bushites have proceeded to shred many of the most constructive elements of the international order their predecessors had helped to create.
In the early months of this administration, it rejected and abrogated treaties. It treated its traditional friends around the world with careless disdain and disregard. It used the attacks of 9/11 as an opportunity to advance a doctrine of preventive war, in which the United States entitled itself to attack any nation that it judged might in the future constitute a threat to the United States.
And then, of course, it used that same traumatic 9/11 experience as an excuse to employ that doctrine in invading Iraq –contrary to the expressed will of the international community, on the basis of assertions that quickly proved false, and without any serious attempt to provide legal justifications for what may reasonably be regarded as an imperialist war of aggression.
The results of such conduct on the part of the world’s leading nation have been the increased barbarization and splintering of the world system.
The degree of tension and animosity between Islam and the West has been exacerbated. The bonds of alliance and allegiance among the world’s industrial democracies have attenuated. The other nations of the world, seeing America less as a leader to be trusted and more as a threat to their security, have begun banding together as an anti-American counter-weight.
The festering mess in Iraq provides a continual reminder of how brute force and violence are the historic means by which great powers have imposed their will on lesser powers.
Whatever vision may have been arising of a better era for humankind, for a displacement of the system of war, has now been blown away by the winds unleashed by the Bushite regime in its ambition to extend its power.
How able humankind may be to revive its aspirations and dreams for progress toward a world in which justice trumps power, rather than vice versa, remains to be seen.
Choices and Destiny in the Future of Our Civilization
One of the most vivid images in Diamond’s book, Collapse, involves the island of Hispanola. This is the island whose eastern half consists of the Dominican Republic while the western half is the nation of Haiti.
From the air, one can see the border, the Dominican side being largely forested and the Haiti side being practically stripped bare. Same island, but the historical difference in the governance of the two halves shows how nations choose their fates. And the divergent fates of the forests mirrors the fates of the peoples.
The poor, afflicted people of Haiti can just look at the other side of their island to behold a palpable image of a better course things might have taken had the powers in their society made different choices.
Now in America, under the Bushite regime, our history has taken a Haiti-like turn toward disaster. But for us, when it comes to envisioning how much better our course might have been, there is no equivalent of the Dominican Republic to give us a palpable embodiment of “it might have been” had the tally of votes in Florida in 2000 gone the other way.
Envision it we must, however. For perhaps this better, alternative future is not just an “it might have been” but remains an “it still might be.”
This regime has greased the skids of our civilization’s plunge into environmental upheaval, but the extent of the disorder and our readiness to cope with it are not yet beyond our capacity to effect.
The Bushites have inflicted profound damage on the international order, as well as on the standing of the United States to lead in its mending, but here too the possibilities for choosing a more constructive course and working to repair the damage remain open.
The first step in repairing all this damage, however, is for the American people to recognize how profoundly wrong –how deeply destructive—have been the choices of the current ruling regime in America on those two vital challenges on which the future of human civilization depends.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website, NoneSoBlind.org, is devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Email to: andythebard@comcast.net
The Bushite Regime and the Collapse of Civilizations
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Collapse Happens
From Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, Americans of today should learn one main thing: that a civilization whose leadership chooses a wrong-headed course on the basis of defective ways of thinking can destroy itself.
America’s present leadership has sought to cultivate our fears-- and indeed we should be afraid. But our fear should be directed much less toward the terrorists against whom our leaders have made their much-heralded war than toward the possible disasters toward which these leaders themselves are taking us.
We should not delude ourselves, in our complacency, that history can give us nothing worse than gasoline at $5 a gallon, or too many people in our midst who do not speak our language.
No, we should recognize that our civilization, mighty as it now is, is not immune from the kind of catastrophe that, as Collapse shows, obliterated the societies of the Norse on Greenland and of the inhabitants of Easter Island.
Indeed, with today’s America –as the dominant nation in this much more shrunken and interdependent world—the catastrophes with which we should be most concerned could entail the collapse not only of our own society but of the entire civilized system of humankind.
For there are two great threats that now endanger the human species at our point in history: 1) environmental catastrophe as the result of reckless human activity in the biosphere; and 2) the perpetuation of the system of war –of might makes right rather than law—in the intersocietal system in an era when weapons of mass destruction are spreading among nations.
And with respect to both of these threats, the present American regime has been driving our civilization toward the abyss.
The Environmental Threat
Human beings have become so much bigger a bull in the ecological china shop –so many more people, within an industrial civilization with so much larger an impact, wielding new technology whose repercussions are so uncertain—that it is unclear whether civilization can adjust its ways of dealing with the earth in time to avoid environmental catastrophe.
For all our technological development, human life still entirely depends on the health of the larger biosphere. But America’s present rulers act as if they either do not understand, or do not care about, this basic reality.
This Bushite regime has not only failed to advance the already troublingly slow human adaptation to this new challenge. It has actively worked to turn back what progress this nation, and the wider global society, have made toward meeting that challenge.
At home, it has turned environmental policy over to the corporate industrial giants whose ecological impact is most urgently in need of regulation. It has actively abetted those vested interests that seek to sow confusion in the public mind with the promulgation of pseudo-science, so that the people will not be able to see clearly the true nature of the choices we face. And they ridicule as inconsequential and un-American the ethic of resource conservation.
And meanwhile, on the global level, the Bushites have scuttled the agreement the international community had managed to put together as a collective response to our mounting collective problem of climate change, and have offered nothing in its stead.
In recent decades, a much deeper understanding has emerged concerning the synergies by which all the various elements of the biosphere work together to maintain the viability of the earth’s living systems. But the Bushites either care more about short-term profit than about long-term viability, or they lack the flexibility of mind to understand that ways of thinking that served adequately in earlier eras will likely prove disastrous under our present, changed conditions.
These rulers, and the greedy forces whom they serve, persist in seeing the relationship with nature not in terms of synergy and sustainability but in terms of dominance and exploitation. It seems as though the only games they know are “win-lose” games.
But as Gregory Bateson wrote years ago, “No animal can win against its environment for long.”
Whether out of ignorance or indifference, like those who guided many of those societies that failed to avert collapse in earlier times, these Bushites persist stubbornly on their short-sighted course while the signs of impending disaster grow steadily more visible. They choose simply not to deal with that “inconvenient truth” to which the melting of the arctic ice and the growing severity of hurricanes are pointing.
And precious time for humankind to adapt and to change directions is being squandered.
The Threat of War in an Age of WMDs
The second major challenge to humankind has been visible since the invention of nuclear weapons more than sixty years ago.
War had always been a nightmarish part of the history of civilization, one of the Four Horeseman of the Apocalypse. But with the emergence of weapons of such vast destructiveness, war began to become unthinkable.
After millennia during which civilized societies –in the absence of any just order in the international system-- have habitually resorted to war to resolve their conflicts, the leaders of the most powerful nations were challenged to change long-established ways of thinking and acting.
For two generations, the possibility that the Cold War might become a hot one threatened the continuation of human life as we know it. But humankind managed to navigate successfully that unprecedentedly dangerous historical passage. Yet great dangers remain.
In the generations since World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age, the nations of the world have attempted to supplant the anarchy of the international system with forms of order that provide non-violent means to resolve conflict and that supplant the age-old disorder of “might makes right.” The United Nations Charter and the system of international law and of treaties are components of this effort to create an international system where law and justice, rather than raw power, can govern.
While the Cold War –with its imposition onto the whole world of the dynamic of conflict—greatly retarded progress toward the rule of law, the end of the Cold War created a historic opportunity. And the first two post-cold-war American administrations (the first Bush, and Clinton), albeit to a very limited degree, did help the world move in the direction of greater international order.
The Bushites, however, saw the post-cold-war era as an opportunity of an altogether different sort.
With their lust for power, their infatuation with dominance, their concept of life in terms of win-lose games, the Bushites saw America’s having emerged as the world’s only superpower as an opportunity to lead humankind not forward toward an international order but rather backward deeper into the old disorder where raw power rules.
If you’ve got the might, they seem to figure, why shouldn’t might make right?
Coming into office with a doctrine of extending American hegemony over the entire planet, the Bushites have proceeded to shred many of the most constructive elements of the international order their predecessors had helped to create.
In the early months of this administration, it rejected and abrogated treaties. It treated its traditional friends around the world with careless disdain and disregard. It used the attacks of 9/11 as an opportunity to advance a doctrine of preventive war, in which the United States entitled itself to attack any nation that it judged might in the future constitute a threat to the United States.
And then, of course, it used that same traumatic 9/11 experience as an excuse to employ that doctrine in invading Iraq –contrary to the expressed will of the international community, on the basis of assertions that quickly proved false, and without any serious attempt to provide legal justifications for what may reasonably be regarded as an imperialist war of aggression.
The results of such conduct on the part of the world’s leading nation have been the increased barbarization and splintering of the world system.
The degree of tension and animosity between Islam and the West has been exacerbated. The bonds of alliance and allegiance among the world’s industrial democracies have attenuated. The other nations of the world, seeing America less as a leader to be trusted and more as a threat to their security, have begun banding together as an anti-American counter-weight.
The festering mess in Iraq provides a continual reminder of how brute force and violence are the historic means by which great powers have imposed their will on lesser powers.
Whatever vision may have been arising of a better era for humankind, for a displacement of the system of war, has now been blown away by the winds unleashed by the Bushite regime in its ambition to extend its power.
How able humankind may be to revive its aspirations and dreams for progress toward a world in which justice trumps power, rather than vice versa, remains to be seen.
Choices and Destiny in the Future of Our Civilization
One of the most vivid images in Diamond’s book, Collapse, involves the island of Hispanola. This is the island whose eastern half consists of the Dominican Republic while the western half is the nation of Haiti.
From the air, one can see the border, the Dominican side being largely forested and the Haiti side being practically stripped bare. Same island, but the historical difference in the governance of the two halves shows how nations choose their fates. And the divergent fates of the forests mirrors the fates of the peoples.
The poor, afflicted people of Haiti can just look at the other side of their island to behold a palpable image of a better course things might have taken had the powers in their society made different choices.
Now in America, under the Bushite regime, our history has taken a Haiti-like turn toward disaster. But for us, when it comes to envisioning how much better our course might have been, there is no equivalent of the Dominican Republic to give us a palpable embodiment of “it might have been” had the tally of votes in Florida in 2000 gone the other way.
Envision it we must, however. For perhaps this better, alternative future is not just an “it might have been” but remains an “it still might be.”
This regime has greased the skids of our civilization’s plunge into environmental upheaval, but the extent of the disorder and our readiness to cope with it are not yet beyond our capacity to effect.
The Bushites have inflicted profound damage on the international order, as well as on the standing of the United States to lead in its mending, but here too the possibilities for choosing a more constructive course and working to repair the damage remain open.
The first step in repairing all this damage, however, is for the American people to recognize how profoundly wrong –how deeply destructive—have been the choices of the current ruling regime in America on those two vital challenges on which the future of human civilization depends.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website, NoneSoBlind.org, is devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Email to: andythebard@comcast.net
Published on Tuesday, June 6, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
The Essence of Marriage
by Bill C. Davis
The regurgitated offensive on June 5, 2006 against same-sex marriage misses the essence of the word and the reality that it claims to be defending.
If marriage itself is to be defended in the Constitution then there must be an amendment against pre-nuptial agreements. A pre-nuptial agreement is a clear and direct assault against the essence of marriage - which by real definition is a lifelong union between two human-beings. The vow which defines the union in a universally recognized moment of commitment contains - must contain - the phrase, "til death do us part."
If anything offends the sanctity of marriage it is the oft used and legal practice of pre-nuptials which more than hints at the outset that there is a chance this vow will not be honored. If today's charge of the light brigade wants to defend the essence and honor of marriage, then they must criminalize pre-nuptials.
And should we even discuss divorce on a day like today? If today's cavalry coming to the rescue of marriage were serious they would not only propose a constitutional amendment against divorce but they would institute a kind of homeland security force headed up by Tony Perkins that would fight the national epidemic of divorce. If they're serious about marriage that's what they would be busy doing today. But they aren't serious.
Marriage is being treated like a country club - a place that will be soiled by the entry of certain kinds of people. The argument frames gay people as people with an inherent aberration they refuse to acknowledge as such and one they refuse to fix.
In fact it is a human reality - a real human reality. The desire for union is a common and transcendent urge and one that government and society are compelled to satisfy for all citizens.
Marriage is a poetic, legal and social construct which in recent human history in most Western societies has been the logical conclusion of intense romantic love. They aren't arranged - they are not a structure for eugenics - they are not, in its intent, motivated by property or money. When it's observed that someone married another person for his or her money, the implication is clear that it is not a marriage of heart and soul, which by the observation itself is saying that heart and soul are the reasons people should get married. To want to be joined in every way - in the eyes of all people and systems is a sane, responsible and human pursuit.
This initiative today is not a defense of marriage. It's an absurd and unnecessary defense of heterosexuality which no one is attacking. These kinds of battles are often external manifestations of inner conflicts. The thought that homosexuality could be fully sanctioned on a legal and constitutional level doesn't put the fear of God in today's light brigade. It puts a different kind and perhaps personal fear into them. Fred Phelps who protests the funerals of soldiers based on America's tolerance for homosexuality is not a social architect. He is clearly acting out an internal demon the way J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohen exorcised theirs.
One has to wonder about today's marriage "defenders." It satisfies something deep and dark in this light brigade to keep marriage off limits to gay people and to keep gay, if not evil and dirty, constitutionally second class at best. But as with most of this regime the limp lather of today has little to do with the essence of what it claims to be defending.
Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com
Published on Monday, June 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Preserving the Sanctity of Marriage
by Missy Comley Beattie
Pandering to his faithful, core, conservative base, George Bush is again talking sanctity of marriage. Sanctity, of course, means holy. Thus, sanctity of marriage translates to holiness of matrimony. It sounds perfectly wonderful—as perfectly wonderful as sanctity of life. And we all remember Bush’s rush from Crawford to DC in an attempt to save Terri Schiavo because he values all life—believes in its holiness. Except, of course, when that ethic involves the lives of Iraqi men, women, and children. Better add Iranian and Afghan to the column of expendables.
The president does like the word sanctity though. It puts him in touch with his moral certitude and further ingratiates him with those who believe that he is ordained by God to lead us through the minefields of global terrorism—and that other hot potato he loves to mash and trash, same-sex marriage.
In his weekly radio address, George W. called upon Congress to pass a constitutional amendment, banning gay marriage. The president said that marriage “cannot be cut off from it cultural, religious, and natural roots.” Further, Bush opined that marriage is “the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith.”
Yet, according to David Popenoe, co-author of an annual report, The State of Our Unions, by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, “Nearly 50 percent of all marriages are projected to end in divorce or permanent separation.”
Seems the “human institution” which Bush assigns superlatives isn’t really the most enduring at all.
In fact, Popenoe informs us that the “United States has the weakest families in the Western world because we have the highest divorce rate.” And co-author of the report, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, explains that there’s more acceptance “of alternatives to marriage such as unwed parenthood and cohabitation.” This revelation won’t go down well with those in the president’s circle of friends.
If George Bush believes it’s necessary to safeguard the sanctity of marriage by denying gay couples the opportunity and right to legal wedlock, then, he, first, should preserve heterosexual marriage by any means possible to ensure its very endurance. In other words, the president must call upon Congress to ban divorce itself to protect, once and for all, this most “important human institution.”
If the president really doesn’t want to cut off marriage from its “cultural, religious, and natural roots (what does he mean by natural roots?), he’d better make certain that divorce is not an option.
The Essence of Marriage
by Bill C. Davis
The regurgitated offensive on June 5, 2006 against same-sex marriage misses the essence of the word and the reality that it claims to be defending.
If marriage itself is to be defended in the Constitution then there must be an amendment against pre-nuptial agreements. A pre-nuptial agreement is a clear and direct assault against the essence of marriage - which by real definition is a lifelong union between two human-beings. The vow which defines the union in a universally recognized moment of commitment contains - must contain - the phrase, "til death do us part."
If anything offends the sanctity of marriage it is the oft used and legal practice of pre-nuptials which more than hints at the outset that there is a chance this vow will not be honored. If today's charge of the light brigade wants to defend the essence and honor of marriage, then they must criminalize pre-nuptials.
And should we even discuss divorce on a day like today? If today's cavalry coming to the rescue of marriage were serious they would not only propose a constitutional amendment against divorce but they would institute a kind of homeland security force headed up by Tony Perkins that would fight the national epidemic of divorce. If they're serious about marriage that's what they would be busy doing today. But they aren't serious.
Marriage is being treated like a country club - a place that will be soiled by the entry of certain kinds of people. The argument frames gay people as people with an inherent aberration they refuse to acknowledge as such and one they refuse to fix.
In fact it is a human reality - a real human reality. The desire for union is a common and transcendent urge and one that government and society are compelled to satisfy for all citizens.
Marriage is a poetic, legal and social construct which in recent human history in most Western societies has been the logical conclusion of intense romantic love. They aren't arranged - they are not a structure for eugenics - they are not, in its intent, motivated by property or money. When it's observed that someone married another person for his or her money, the implication is clear that it is not a marriage of heart and soul, which by the observation itself is saying that heart and soul are the reasons people should get married. To want to be joined in every way - in the eyes of all people and systems is a sane, responsible and human pursuit.
This initiative today is not a defense of marriage. It's an absurd and unnecessary defense of heterosexuality which no one is attacking. These kinds of battles are often external manifestations of inner conflicts. The thought that homosexuality could be fully sanctioned on a legal and constitutional level doesn't put the fear of God in today's light brigade. It puts a different kind and perhaps personal fear into them. Fred Phelps who protests the funerals of soldiers based on America's tolerance for homosexuality is not a social architect. He is clearly acting out an internal demon the way J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohen exorcised theirs.
One has to wonder about today's marriage "defenders." It satisfies something deep and dark in this light brigade to keep marriage off limits to gay people and to keep gay, if not evil and dirty, constitutionally second class at best. But as with most of this regime the limp lather of today has little to do with the essence of what it claims to be defending.
Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com
Published on Monday, June 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Preserving the Sanctity of Marriage
by Missy Comley Beattie
Pandering to his faithful, core, conservative base, George Bush is again talking sanctity of marriage. Sanctity, of course, means holy. Thus, sanctity of marriage translates to holiness of matrimony. It sounds perfectly wonderful—as perfectly wonderful as sanctity of life. And we all remember Bush’s rush from Crawford to DC in an attempt to save Terri Schiavo because he values all life—believes in its holiness. Except, of course, when that ethic involves the lives of Iraqi men, women, and children. Better add Iranian and Afghan to the column of expendables.
The president does like the word sanctity though. It puts him in touch with his moral certitude and further ingratiates him with those who believe that he is ordained by God to lead us through the minefields of global terrorism—and that other hot potato he loves to mash and trash, same-sex marriage.
In his weekly radio address, George W. called upon Congress to pass a constitutional amendment, banning gay marriage. The president said that marriage “cannot be cut off from it cultural, religious, and natural roots.” Further, Bush opined that marriage is “the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith.”
Yet, according to David Popenoe, co-author of an annual report, The State of Our Unions, by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, “Nearly 50 percent of all marriages are projected to end in divorce or permanent separation.”
Seems the “human institution” which Bush assigns superlatives isn’t really the most enduring at all.
In fact, Popenoe informs us that the “United States has the weakest families in the Western world because we have the highest divorce rate.” And co-author of the report, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, explains that there’s more acceptance “of alternatives to marriage such as unwed parenthood and cohabitation.” This revelation won’t go down well with those in the president’s circle of friends.
If George Bush believes it’s necessary to safeguard the sanctity of marriage by denying gay couples the opportunity and right to legal wedlock, then, he, first, should preserve heterosexual marriage by any means possible to ensure its very endurance. In other words, the president must call upon Congress to ban divorce itself to protect, once and for all, this most “important human institution.”
If the president really doesn’t want to cut off marriage from its “cultural, religious, and natural roots (what does he mean by natural roots?), he’d better make certain that divorce is not an option.
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