Lubricating Our Megamachines
The Denial of Actualities
by Gilles d'Aymery

Spinoza once said that the perfection of things must be measured according to their own nature and things are not more or less perfect because they flatter (please) our senses or hurt them.

"Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves."
—US Senator William A. Clark, 1907

(Swans - February 12, 2007) So long as respected voices like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and other "leaders" of the antiwar movement keep their heads in the deep sands of denial in regard to the real reasons why we are at war in the Middle East, there is absolutely no chance to help the general population of the United States wake up to the evidence. We consume too much energy and the world is running out of it faster than it can be replaced with alternative sources that are at most a placebo and at worst further digging the hole into which we are mudded with seemingly oblivious concerns. People must get real, look at the actualities, and embark on an incredibly difficult change in thinking and behaviors.

Last Thursday evening, around 18:30, the light in my office began flickering; the computers' UPS started wailing. I saved my work in a hurry and powered down the machines. I called Jan in San Francisco to let her know the flickering was becoming more intense. Calling PG&E emergency line is of no use to me. The voice on the other side is a robotic one -- friendly, female, and all, but not real. The voice asks for my phone number. I say, "123-4567." "You said," the voice says, "123-4474." "Is this correct?" the voice asks. "It is not correct," I answer. "Sorry, I did not get your answer," says the voice. "You said 123-4474. Is this correct?" "No, it is not correct, it is incorrect. I said 123-4567." "Sorry, I did not get your answer. You said 123-4474. Is this correct?" Argh, must be my French accent, I thought as I hung up. Meantime the lights kept flickering ever more intensely. I walked to the closet where I keep an old ATT manual phone, unhooked the digital cordless one that only works with electric power, just as the lights stopped flickering altogether. Power down. What does one do when lost in the middle of nowhere without any power? I went to bed.

The next morning, 06:00, it's pitch dark around. Power's still off. Well, no coffee this morning, I thought. Yep, the coffee machine runs on electricity too. Can I heat some water, by any chance? Nope, the propane burners are ignited through a starter that...runs on electricity. Darn, where are the matches? And on, and on. 07:30: Jan calls. PG&E is aware of the situation. They sent a one-man crew last night but the atmospheric conditions were so bad -- it was raining cats and dogs -- that he had to cancel his efforts. They are sending more crews this morning, Jan assures me. I hear the assurance but do not feel particularly reassured! It's a pretty eerie sensation to be all alone in a house perched in the hills in the country with no power at all. What worth is a "modern" house without the energy that is needed to run it? Needs wood, of which we have ample supply, for the woodstove; needs propane, which is a petroleum derivative for cooking and water heating; and needs electricity for practically everything else (lighting, washing machine, drier, oven, microwave, toaster, refrigerator, phone, computers, TV, stereo, satellite, and on and on and on). Of course, we need coal and natural gas to generate the electricity, and all fossil fuels, which we use with abandon (at least in the U.S.) as the main sources, especially petroleum, are rapidly getting depleted -- and that does not account for the effects of our consumption on the environment (global warming).

A two-man crew eventually showed up mid-morning. Good workers overstretched as always due to the cuts in maintenance personnel that utility companies have gone through to increase profits. Armed with binoculars they checked the lines over the hills. They were unfamiliar with the terrain. I helped as much as I could to tell them where the houses, hidden in the woods, were and how to reach them through various dirt roads. They kept hunting for a fallen line somewhere, anywhere, under raging rain, so that my and others' houses affected by the blackout could get back to normal life. They eventually found the culprit on the other side of the canyon. I could hear a chainsaw clearing branches, and their voices echoing up the hill. By mid-afternoon, thanks to their strenuous efforts in hapless conditions, the power was restored. Thank you, good people. Our way of life was back on.

We do own a small Honda generator, which, if the blackout had lasted longer, I would have fired up to cool the fridge down, turn on the computers to save this edition of Swans on a portable hard drive, thus if worse came to worse, I could jump into my car and drive to San Francisco (fossil fuel, CO2, etc., notwithstanding) in order to load the issue on the Web. I can run the generator for about four or five hours on a full tank of gas -- yes, more fossil fuel -- and I have a small reserve of gasoline, enough to fill the generator's tank three times. Then, I'd need to drive down to town and fill a few containers with gasoline. Imagine this repeated by the number of households affected by the power outage. Imagine this in the entire valley -- how long would it take for the gas station to run out of gas? A few hours? One day? Two days at most. What about an entire city?

When shall we face reality? There's this raging debate about the war in Iraq, but practically no politician talks about the real reasons for our disastrous military adventure: Access to and control of oil fields and military bases to keep control of and access to these oil fields. Nothing new. The Brits acted similarly in the 1930s; the U.S., from 1945 onward with an increased urgency. People, many good people, talk about morality, war profits, terrorism, Israel, legalities (or illegalities), hubris of the elites, to explain the war... But remember Ockham's razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ("entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity")... In other words, "all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

Elites' arrogance is a constant of history as are war profits for the few, but the let's-start-a-war-to-make-a-bundle thought process ignores the old saying that "war is simply the continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means" (Clausewitz, On War, 605). First there's a policy put in place and then the choice to implement the policy through a military strategy. Keep the eyes on the policy. If it's incorrect, chances are the military strategy will fail. It's not about terrorism because you certainly do not need a full-fledged, multi-pronged military strategy with huge naval assets in the Persian Gulf to defeat a bunch of people in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, help Madrassas instill knowledge and not hate in their pupils' minds, and work on the political conditions that may have fostered terrorism in the first place. Morality (freedom and democracy, civilizing forces, etc.) is the good old Calvinist messianic attitude used for the past 400 years to sell expansion and foreign adventures. It's always been a basic marketing technique with a white man's syndrome of superiority to conquer land, subjugate people (the lesser races), and plunder resources.

When you refuse to look at the evidence you then need to create new explanations and find convenient scapegoats. From the Left (James Petras) to the Right (Paul Craig Roberts) and many in between, there must be some cabal controlled by powerful interests who brought this war upon us unwillingly. For them, Israel is the culprit. Israel (read the Israeli government/military/elite) actually rules the US government with the help of the Jewish lobby and a bunch of neocons who, they keep reminding, are in large majority Jewish themselves. In other words, without Israel and the "Jews" the U.S. would not have engaged into such a dramatic disaster. They duped us into waging war on their behalf. That these so-called "respected" analysts can be taken seriously is truly befuddling and not worthy of further comment. There's no cabal; only a policy based on energy realities that was poorly conceived and hence botched with results still unforeseen, potentially with catastrophic consequences for the U.S. and the entire world.

Four and one-half percent of the world population consumes 25 percent of global energy resources as the world is creeping away toward energy scarcity. That strategic resource is getting depleted and consumed faster that it can be replaced, assuming it can. By the same token, other economies worldwide are increasing their dependence on and use of that resource. Furthermore, to control and have access to that resource you need local governments amenable to your objectives. Saddam was not. The Iranian Mullahs are not. In typical fashion the American elites -- on both sides of the aisle -- decided that regime change was becoming a matter of urgency, and chose to act through a military strategy. That the members of the elite would enrich themselves in the making is certainly correct, but it was not the motivation behind the decision process. The military strategy, while largely opposed by the military itself, was the only logical or known-of strategy that could be used. The US Armed Forces have always been the favorite diplomatic tool of US movers and shakers. That Israel is used as a patsy can be a useful tool to deflect the attention of the dissenting populace. That the Establishment is deeply reluctant to call it as it is -- "people, we/you need the oil" -- is not surprising. Panic would ensue; the stock market would dive; the streets would be filled with masses of very unhappy customers (remember the pitchforks?). But listen carefully, well beyond the guard dogs of the Citadel, the MSM and all think tanks. Listen to the elites very carefully. They know the stakes, and they are tremendous. Listen for example to the February 1, 2007 Senate Intelligence Committee's Confirmation Hearing of Vice Admiral Mike McConnell (Ret.), the former (1992-1996) National Security Agency Director during the Clinton administration...yes, the Clinton administration... You can listen to the entire hearing on C-SPAN. About one hour and fifteen minutes into the hearing, Senator Richard Burr (R. - North Carolina), after lauding the nominee for his business acumen, asked:

SEN. BURR: I want to take a different tack from the standpoint of questions. We've all got questions that will deal with the threats du jour, regardless of where they are. Let me ask you about two specific areas if I can. You referred, in your questions and answers, to energy as a national security issue. Can you expand on that slightly?

MR. McCONNELL: Sir, what I mean by that is our dependence on foreign oil sources. And what I worry about is something like Venezuela now, where energy can be used as a weapon. So understanding it and how it might be controlled is something, I think, that not only the others in the federal government but also the intelligence community, needs to understand and get ahead of, think about it.

So much of intelligence is forecasting what might happen. "Alternative futures" is how we like to describe it. So when I look at problems facing the nation in the future, I think our demand -- almost insatiable appetite for energy, particularly with the growth of India and China, it's going to put increasing pressure on the nation to compete for energy resources. So that's what I mean by that.

SEN. BURR: Do you see our role at trying to predict what the energy future looks like, and how that may or may not affect our national security, the role of the intelligence community, or is there another area of government that should have that charge to be the one in charge?

MR. McCONNELL: What I see the role of the intelligence community to be is to look at hard problems and talk about them. I go back to Senator Mikulski's question about speaking truth to power. Many of these problems are not very pleasant to deal with, to think about. So for me, it is to spend some time and energy looking at the problem and attempting to come up with a forecast of at least options on what we might have to deal with, and then serving that information up to the policymakers that have to deal with it.

SEN. BURR: On another subject, have we lost sight of Russia as a strategic threat to the United States?

MR. McCONNELL: Senator, you probably have heard about mission managers in the community (now to be?) focused on problems of concern. And I've talked to some of the mission managers and I'm very impressed. They look at the problem from the analytical standpoint, collection, and they integrate across the community. They challenge assumptions and conclusions, do a little red-teaming, that sort of thing.

And where I am in my thinking at the moment is to take a look at Russia, because there isn't a mission manager for Russia. I think we need to understand it. We need to know where it's going. And having someone focused on it as a mission manager at the national level would serve us well to stay focused and continue to review it.

SEN. BURR: The last question, Mr. Chairman. Does the fact that oil is now $57 a barrel, I think, today, $56 and some change, increase the likelihood that we should look at Russia as a strategic threat?

MR. McCONNELL: Sir, as you know, Russia because of that increase in oil prices is significantly advantaged in terms of resources right now, in terms of what they get for their oil. I've been troubled by some of the trends in Russia over the last year or so. So that's a scenario that needs attention and focus and, again, producing those forecasts on where it might be taking us.

SEN. BURR. Thank you, Admiral.

(Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_hr/020107dni.pdf)
Is this clear enough? No need to duplicate Michael Doliner's work in this space.

On January 27, 2007, you would have been hard-pressed to learn that there was a big antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., going on, except if you watched C-SPAN or were attending the demo yourself (as well as smaller ones in other cities around the country. The event(s) simply did not make the news. The TV networks did not report much of anything. The local news were at best sparse in their comments. The next morning, The New York Times buried the story on page 20. They reported that "Tens of thousands of protesters converged on the National Mall on Saturday to oppose Bush's plan for a troop increase in Iraq..." The White House issued a statement: "The president believes that the right to free speech is one of the greatest freedoms in our country." End of story. On Monday morning, the ever-affable Amy Goodman ran with the story for the entire Democracy Now! newscast. We could see Rep. Maxine Waters leading the crowd with a series of slogans ([Bush] is not the decider. We are the decider. He is not the decider, he is a LIAR). The usual motley mix of antiwar activists like Sean Penn and Dennis Kucinich and many genteel speakers walked up to the podium to rouse the crowd with passionate speeches. It was an all bon-enfant gathering. No one heard them. They were talking to themselves, in a bubble. None addressed the energy challenges that the world and most severely this nation face. I'm not even sure that they ever considered the irony of how much energy -- fossil fuels energy -- they expended to have their essentially ignored little celebration in D.C.

A week later, Super Bowl day watched by hundreds of millions, British Petroleum ran an ad in The New York Times Magazine (p. 33). In bold characters, the title was in the form of a question: Energy. From the ground, the sun, or both? It continued in two short paragraphs:

OIL: Responding to today's energy needs means doing so responsibly. BP's Advanced Seismic Imaging allows us to see hidden energy reserves buried below rocks, deep beneath the ocean floor. Most importantly, we now drill fewer offshore wells, reducing the impact on the environment.

SOLAR: We're also bringing the U.S. closer to the sun. Recently we invested over $25 million in the expansion of our solar facility in Maryland, doubling its manufacturing capacity. And BP Solar Home Solutions (TM) is helping homeowners reduce or eliminate monthly electric bills.
It's a start.
What start is this? Twenty-five million dollars to double a manufacturing facility...and how many billions of dollars spent to bring oil to markets and refine it? How many? And they try to make us believe that BP stands for Beyond Petroleum... What a sad, terrible joke. Worse, ask Kucinich and other prophets of the antiwar movement, and they'll tell you all about their indomitable faith in the market. They too are undoubtedly sincere; but they are deeply misguided.

We must face the dance with clarity of mind and purpose. Once again, sanity deserves better from the commons.

United States' Gargantuan Energy Appetite
by Gilles d'Aymery

In 1999, the world energy consumption was 382 quadrillion (Quads) British thermal units (Btu). (1) Out of 382 Quads the USA consumed 97, or 25.39 percent of the worldwide consumption.

The USA, with a population of about 281 million inhabitants -- just about four percent of the world population -- consumes 25 percent of all the world energy and accounts for about 25 percent of the pollution of the earth's ecosystem. (2)

In other words, the USA has a gargantuan energy appetite. This is well known though not particularly brought to the attention of the public.

Let's illustrate the extent of this appetite with the help of an energy flow chart, the U.S. Energy Flow Trends for the year 2000 during which the USA consumed 98.5 Quads. (3) This chart was created by Gina V. Kaiper, Technical Writer-Editor, Energy and Environment Directorate, for the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, and is reproduced here by permission.

Not surprisingly fossil fuels are the overwhelming source of the energy consumption, 85 percent over all (even more if one adds the wood element of biomass). Petroleum is the biggest component with 38.5 percent, followed by natural gas (23.7%), and coal (22.8%). The net petroleum import in 2000 was 57%. This again is relatively well known.

However, the most startling information provided by this flow chart is the extent of waste in the U.S. energy system; what Ms. Kaiper delicately labels Rejected energy.

Take the time to review this chart carefully. Indeed, please do.

Look at the electricity generation of 40.4 Quads and check out the amount of the electrical system energy losses of 28.1 Quads. What the chart shows is that 69.55 percent of all generated electricity is wasted. (4) So, every time one switches on the 100-watt light in the kitchen or in the bathroom, the system needs to generate some 170 watts to light it... Think about your computer or your air conditioning... (5)

Even worse, 80.07 percent of all energy used for transportation is wasted. What it means is that to get our favorite vehicle, SUV included, all the way to the store, 80 percent of a barrel of oil is required and wasted to bring 20 percent to the power train that make the wheels turn. (6)

The more energy we use the bigger the generation of waste.

For example, in 1999, the USA consumed 97 Quads and the ratios of waste for electricity and transportation were 68 and 79.92 percent respectively. In 1997, 94 quads of consumption brought a respective percentage of waste of 67.38 and 79.92 (note that the transportation waste is pretty constant due to the engineering limitations of the combustion engine -- though the bigger the engine...)

Simply put, the more we consume the more we waste. The more we consume the more we need energy resources. The more we waste and depend on non-renewable sources of energy, namely fossil fuels, the more we must find, develop, grab sources, especially in a time of dwindling resources.

Meantime, we want -- at least in rhetoric -- the entire world to adopt the American way. To put a perspective on this American way, take China as an example: were China to consume the same amount of energy per capita as the United States, the Chinese Net Primary Resource Consumption in 2000 would have been 450.8 Quads! (7) Should the polluting consequences be mentioned?

According to the International Energy Outlook 2002, world energy consumption is projected to increase by 60 percent over a 21-year forecast horizon, from 382 Quads in 1999 to 612 Quads in 2020. Renewable energy use, presently about 9 percent of total worldwide energy consumption, is projected to actually decrease to 8 percent by 2020. (8)

While it simply does not compute it certainly does illuminate the ongoing U.S. policies.

· · · · · ·

References and Notes

1. A quad is 1015 and a Btu is the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by 1° F. at or near 39.2° F. (back)

2. "The United States, with the world's largest economy, is also the world's largest single source of anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gas emissions. Quantitatively, the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission is carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels (i.e., oil, coal, natural gas) are burned. Current projections indicate that U.S. emissions of carbon (mainly in the form of carbon dioxide) will reach 1,694 million metric tons in 2005, an increase of 357 million metric tons from the 1,337 million metric tons emitted in 1990, and around one-fourth of total world energy-related carbon emissions." Source: EIA-DOE; United States Country Analysis Brief; http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html (back)

3. Permission to reproduce a slightly smaller version of this flow chart was kindly granted by Ms. Deborah Brown-Harris, Authorized Reprint, Copyright & Permissions Agent, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Technical Information Department. Credit is given to the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy under whose auspices the work was performed. We acknowledge the U.S. Government's right to retain non-exclusive, royalty-free license in and to any copyright covering this material. Energy flow charts for the United States can be accessed on the Web site of LLNL at http://en-env.llnl.gov/flow/. The full size energy flow chart for 2000 can be viewed at http://en-env.llnl.gov/flow/00flow.html.

In addition, Gina Kaiper recommended that we include a link to the Energy Flow web page "to provide access to the accompanying report that documents and explains the data sources and the terms and categories. For example, as the report explains, the proportion of 'useful' to 'rejected' shown on our chart derives from the conversion efficiencies (page 5 of our report) of the technologies involved." This is a must-read report for anyone wanting to fully understand the flow chart. The report, in Adobe Acrobat format (pdf file, size: 177 kb) can be accessed at http://en-env.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/USEnFlow00-quads.pdf.

Finally, the permission granted by LLNL should not be construed as an endorsement of this Swans dossier. (back)

4. My thanks go to Richard Merk and Steve Mader for leading me in the right direction. I also wish to express my gratitude to Ian Woofenden and the folks at Home Power Magazine for their invaluable help. Home Power, "The Hands-On Journal of Home-Made Power," is based in Ashland, Oregon, and focuses on alternative and renewable energies. The magazine published an article by Randy Udall, "U.S. Energy Flow: In the Belly of the Beast," in its February/March 2002 issue. It can be read online in Adobe Acrobat format (pdf) at http://www.homepower.com/files/bonus.pdf (back)

5. "According to AER2000 (p. 248, Note 1), 'Electrical system energy losses are estimated as the difference between total energy consumed to generate electricity and the total energy content of electricity consumed by end users. Most of these losses occur at steam-electric power plants (conventional and nuclear) in the conversion of heat energy into mechanical energy to turn electric generators' . . . . Transmission and distribution losses....are estimated to be about 9% of the gross generation of electricity." Source: Gina V. Kaiper, U.S. Energy Flow—2000, February 2002, University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, http://en-env.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/USEnFlow00-quads.pdf; page 5. (back)

6. "For transportation, we continue to assume a generous 20% efficiency, which corresponds to the approximate average efficiency of internal combustion engines as measured on Federal Driving Schedules (i.e., the amount of energy that actually reaches the drive train of a vehicle, compared to the amount of energy consumed. Note that the peak efficiencies of 33-35% for spark-ignited engines and 41-45% for diesel engines are not representative of conversion efficiencies over the Federal Driving Schedules.)" Source: Gina V. Kaiper, U.S. Energy Flow—2000, February 2002, University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, http://en-env.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/USEnFlow00-quads.pdf; page 5. (back)

7. According to the CIA - World Factbook 2002, the US population is 280,562,489 (July 2002 est.) and the Chinese population 1,284,303,705 (July 2002 est.). While I am using 2002 population figures and applying them to energy consumption in 2000, the result is slightly inexact but one can easily get the gist of the correlation. In 2000 the Chinese consumption of electricity was 1.206 trillion kWh; that of the United States, 3.613 trillion kWh. Source: CIA - The World Factbook 2002; http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html. (back)

8. Source: EIA-DOE; International Energy Outlook 2002 - Highlights; http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html. (back)

Oil and War
by Michael Doliner

(Swans - February 12, 2007) People who oppose the war in Iraq have the habit of pointing out that the excuses the administration gave for going to war were lies. True enough, but in concentrating on their lies we have learned how to not talk about the real reasons for the war. Men do fight for God and Country, but the rich and powerful fight for wealth and power. This does not prevent them from sincerely professing higher motives. American elite education is in large part the study of a rhetoric of elite, high-minded self-delusion. The writings of George Kennan and Milton Friedman are good textbooks. But we all know that sincerity of belief in one's own goodness does not make it so. Nor is it worth our time to burrow into the statements politicians make in order to find some inkling of a deeper motive. Men fight for many things, but that the rich and powerful fight for wealth and power, no matter what they say and even believe, should be taken as a given. It is the rich and powerful who get us into wars.

Those in power treat us like children. They offer us excuses for the war they hope we will accept, but hide from us the real reason for it. They know Americans will not support a war for oil. They also know that Americans are quite happy to use the oil we import and are not particularly worried about what we did to get it. Americans want the oil but not the war, and even those against the war drive to soccer practice and the mall. Americans will not tolerate even the thought that the era of happy motoring will end soon. They would certainly complain if they ran out of gas. The oil shortages of the seventies and Carter's loss of the presidency to Reagan have also taught the powerful, if they didn't know already, that Americans will punish whoever is in power when an oil crisis comes. Indeed, just what will happen when energy really runs short must worry them considerably. Disillusionment with government is already extreme and economic distress will breed social turmoil. For this reason they know that above all else they cannot lose their grip on the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. American opposition to the war cannot become serious until there is public recognition of the coming energy shortage and an open determination of just what is to be done about it. The problems a serious oil shortage will bring will shrink most of what we now think of as problems to insignificance.

The Bush administration fought the war in Iraq and will fight the war in Iran because of looming worldwide oil shortages and China's growing demand for a larger share. Since well before the 1970s and the Carter Doctrine in 1980, the United States has considered control of the Persian Gulf and the oil fields a primary foreign policy objective.

"The Middle East isn't a region to be dominated by Iran. The Gulf isn't a body of water to be controlled by Iran. That's why we've seen the United States station two carrier battle groups in the region," Burns said in an address to the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, an influential think tank.

In 1953, when British control of Iran slipped and Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized the oil, the United States helped engineer a coup that restored the power of the America-friendly Shah. However, the détente of the cold war allowed the various Middle-Eastern kingdoms and sheikdoms to gain more control of their oil than American elites would have liked. Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq's oil in 1972, and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 further loosened the American grip on Iranian oil and, more importantly, oil revenues. Kuwait took over 100% of KOC, Kuwaiti Oil Company, in 1974 and even Saudi Arabia was able to purchase 100% of ARAMCO, the American Arabian Oil Company, in 1980, leaving American and British Companies with lucrative arrangements, but far less than what they might have had.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, George H. W. Bush hoped to restore the status quo ante. The sudden disappearance of America's great enemy inspired delusions of grandeur. We're number one and there is no number two! Why not take it all back? Nothing seemed to stand in the way. Saddam Hussein had been extremely cooperative with the United States up until the invasion of Kuwait. Even then he carefully inquired of April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Iraq, if the United States would object to that invasion. Her comment was, in part, "but we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts." Kuwait had been drilling horizontally under Iraq and selling more than its OPEC quota of oil, which depressed prices right after the Iran-Iraq war when Iraq especially needed the oil revenue. When Iraq complained, Kuwait gave a peculiarly dismissive response that was far more arrogant than its puny status warranted. So Saddam invaded Kuwait. By the time we attacked him, Saddam was retreating from Kuwait as fast as he could. We did not attack Iraq to drive Saddam from Kuwait. Iraq was lured into its invasion of Kuwait to justify a large American military presence in the Persian Gulf. Saddam's real crimes, in the eyes of the American elites, were that he nationalized oil and spent oil revenues on Iraqi infrastructure rather than on American high tech military gadgets as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait obediently did. But American sights were always on the entire Persian Gulf oil region and, more recently, the oil rich Caspian Basin.

Clinton continued to pressure Saddam Hussein with the cruel sanctions and periodic bombing, but he knew, as did George H. W. Bush, that Iraq needed a tyrant to hold it together. They were smart enough to know that a strong man has to be strong, and that an Ahmad Chalabi, with no base in the country, just wouldn't do. They hoped a military coup in Iraq would install someone more ready to spend the oil revenues on war toys rather than electricity. However, the long-term plan was still for a permanent American military presence in the Persian Gulf that would keep those governments from giving too much preference to Chinese oil interests. Regime change in Iran, hostile to American interests since the revolution in 1979, was always on the agenda, but Iraq had to be taken first. With a large American military presence and no other counterbalancing force, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, already extremely compliant, could be persuaded to spend even more of their revenue on weapons. There was no need to invade them -- they welcomed American armies with flowers.

After the first Gulf War we stationed forces in new bases in Saudi Arabia, but the presence of American military bases in Saudi Arabia violated the sanctity of the holy places there. Not only Osama bin Laden, but other Saudis found it objectionable, and the Saudi princes could hardly disagree. Also, Saudi Arabia with the weight of many expensive useless princes, one of the fastest growing populations in the world, and an economy dependent on oil revenues, saw its per capita income plunge. The oil income per person fell from $22,589 in 1980 to $4,564 in 2004. The natives were growing restless. The United States did not want to undermine the compliant Saudi government so it thought to move the bases to an Iraq with a newly installed puppet regime. Saddam could put up no resistance. It would be a cakewalk. With control of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran would be next. 9/11 was a perfect pretext. It didn't turn out that way.

In the early nineties few saw the coming peak in world oil production, but that peak must now weigh upon policymakers' minds. Soon demand will exceed supply and prices will rise rapidly. Although oil is now sold on the open market, the United States will have a hard time competing with China for it. China has over one trillion US dollars of reserves. It would almost certainly spend this to keep its economy growing and its energy needs met. Were oil prices to rise even faster than they have been the American economy would almost certainly fall into recession or worse. Given the economy's present condition this recession would likely be long and deep. There is no doubt that the social turmoil following deep economic trouble would dwarf the present antiwar protests. These likely consequences give new urgency to American elites' need to control the oil fields of the world and particularly those of the Persian Gulf.

As anyone who has been paying attention knows, the war in Iraq is lost. But departure from Iraq will definitely cause the United States to lose control of the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi government will collapse overnight leaving the country in chaos. The United States will no longer present a credible military presence in the neighborhood, and the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other oil-producing Gulf states, who have been loyal retainers until now, will have no reason to favor the United States over anyone else who will pay a higher price for their oil. China already has oil projects in Saudi Arabia and Iran. With population exploding and per capita income shrinking, Saudi Arabia will be in the most trouble. The Princes' control and Saudi Arabia's economy is shaky. To appease their citizens they will have to keep their own domestic oil prices low. With their exploding population their own consumption will be a larger and larger drain on their production, and they will continue to subsidize this domestic consumption or face social turmoil. What oil they do sell they will want to sell for as much as they can get.

To leave Iraq is to leave the Persian Gulf oil fields. Since Americans will have a tough time obtaining oil at anywhere near the rate they have been in an open market, the American economy will suffer a trauma from this loss. And since those in power know that Americans will not tolerate an end of the era of happy motoring, they plan to attack Iran in the hope of retaining control of the Gulf.

But this can be no ordinary attack. Everything indicates that any conventional attack on Iran will have devastating repercussions for the United States, and will produce an immediate oil drought. Iran has too many ways to retaliate, and too many of them will affect the United States directly. For this reason the United States and Israel are contemplating a nuclear attack to obliterate Iranian power. Anything less would certainly allow Iran to cut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow bottleneck at the bottom of the Gulf through which much of the oil from the Persian Gulf passes.

If the United States attacks Iran with nuclear weapons it is unlikely that its oil will flow soon. All that messy left over radiation. Highly trained geologists with many options might not want to bathe in it. If there are people left walking around in Iran they might not be too friendly. The consequences of such an attack are completely unpredictable, and oil companies need political stability to make the mammoth investments needed to extract oil. Judging from the Iraqi opposition the only way the United States might make Iran safe for American oil companies is to wipe out the population entirely. But then Iran would be radioactive for centuries.

So here's the situation as I think they see it. Controlling the Persian Gulf is a prime directive, but we have lost in Iraq. That loss will end American control. One consequence of this loss is that Iran is stronger and the U.S. weaker. Without a US military presence in the Gulf, Iran will dominate it, the United States will not be able to obtain the oil it now uses at prices it can afford, and the American way of life will have to change. Those in power desperately hope to hang on to the Gulf by causing regime change in Iran, or breaking Iran up into statelets and failed states. But war with Iran will leave most of Persian Gulf oil unavailable because we cannot attack Iran without nuclear weapons. Iran's ability to retaliate is too great. But if we attack with nuclear weapons oil flow from the Gulf will drop off drastically or stop and prices will increase sharply, plunging us and the world into oil shortage, recession, and wider war. So to attack Iran might retain American control of the Persian Gulf at the expense of the oil. All we can do is destroy what we can't have, like a spoiled child.

Even if the United States manages, through the use of force, to obtain its oil requirements from what is left, someone else will have to go without. Who will it be? How will the United States prevent China from obtaining oil while continuing the flow to Japan? Or will we jettison Japan in the emergency? What about India? Where will it stop? Social turmoil, desperate measures, and likely wider war will follow oil shortages.

The rich and powerful fight for wealth and power, but it is just possible that they do not fight for the democratic political structure of the United States. Leo Strauss, the godfather of neoconservatism did not favor liberal democracy. It is possible to fight a war with no intention of winning, 1984 style. The goal would be to fight and keep fighting forever. That would allow the transformation of the United States into an oligarchic dictatorship and distract the American public from the loss of the era of happy motoring. All hardship would be borne for the sake of fighting the endless war. And since resource scarcity is partially a population problem, massacre might just be part of the solution.

It is convenient to blame our leaders. George W. Bush is an easy target, but when we aim at him we overlook our own responsibility. Politicians know Americans will punish anyone who presides over a fall into hard times. Our somnambulism and our way of life dictate our need to consume one quarter of the world's oil, and a disproportionate share of most other resources. But we don't want to look at what is required to get all that stuff. The United States is living in a ferocious active ignorance, and that ignorance is as much a cause of the present apocalyptic danger as anything. We cannot have both happy motoring and no war, but that is precisely what we want. Instead we have happy motoring and no real awareness of the war. We have to publicly accept our willingness to use less if we expect our politicians to admit to and act upon the need to power down.

As things stand now Americans seem quite willing to accept massacre over there and totalitarian repression over here just so long as they can pull up to the pump and fill 'er up. Yes, our elites fight for wealth and power, but why shouldn't they? The untrammeled capitalism we have embraced offers wealth and power as rewards. Our elites are the winners in this game. Since we offer no real objections to the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power, but in fact openly admire it, why shouldn't they pursue it? It was their very success that made them the elites in the first place. To object that the Bush administration didn't do a good job on the war, which is, after all, what the polls really tell us, is to tacitly admit that the war, if only swiftly won, would have been a fine thing. Americans are obviously unperturbed by atrocities and the loss of their liberties as long as no one takes away their toys or tells them what is really happening. Cushy oblivion, so we can feel good about ourselves, is the true goal of American life. We don't really object to being lied to, we insist on it.

But that won't work any more. The era of happy motoring will soon end no matter how deeply we stick our heads in the sand. We cannot continue to use oil as we have been. Everything points to a peak within the decade. The only question is how it will end. One way is to decimate the human population in the hope that the remaining elites might be able to live it up on what's left. Given that those in power are obviously sanguine and sanguinary murderers, this might be their plan. If they can massacre them they can massacre us. But the elites are in for a surprise. Warlords, not capitalists, will rule after such carnage. On the other hand, if there is to be a peaceful solution it will have to be a conscious worldwide plan to power down. The whole idea is completely alien to the American way of life, and therefore is extremely unlikely. Indeed, it is unprecedented in human existence. But that is what it will take if we are to have even a remote chance of escaping widespread war, totalitarian repression, and massacre. Athens, the model for our democracy, had to abandon the city to save it during the Persian War. We need to take as bold a step.

"Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply"-Richard Heinberg transcript

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17 August 2005


Richard Heinberg: I'm actually gonna cover some of the same territory as Richard has already explored here, hopefully from a little different perspective, add a few helpful facts and figures along the way.

Food is energy and it takes energy to get food. These two facts, when we take them together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and they will always continue to do so. The same is and has been true for every other species as well. Food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results. For the species in general the outcome is extinction.

We humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing our share of energy captured from the environment. Harnessing of fire, domestication of plants and animals, adoption of ards***[1:14] and plows, the deployment of irrigation schemes and the harnessing of traction animals. Developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years all served this end. The process was gradual and time-consuming. Over centuries small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools from ***[1:38] to horse-collars enabled human and animal muscle-power to be leveraged ever more slightly more effectively. This exercise took place within a network of natural limits. The yearly capture of solar radiation by the green biosphere was immense relative to human needs, but finite nevertheless and the vast majority of that solar radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence. Giving rise to air-currents by warming the surface of the planet and maintaining life in the oceans and on land. The amount of human muscle-power was limited by the number of humans, who of course had to be fed by draft-animals who also entailed energy costs as they likewise needed to eat, also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crop development and animal breeding, it was clear that we humans would inevitably reach a point of diminishing returns in our ability to continue increasing our energy harvest and therefore our population.

By the 19th century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger, as we have already heard, had always been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But migration to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a nitrogen source in order to continue feeding their burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano (bird excrement) imported from the cliffs of islands off Chile and Argentina. One can only imagine what it must have been like working on those ships. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades those guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890's, the worlds population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the 19th century. A crisis was again in view, but again crisis was narrowly averted due to fossil fuels.

In 1909 two german chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process, the Haber-Bosch process, initially used coal as a feed-stock though later it was adapted to use natural gas which is currently the feed-stock of choice. After the end of the great war nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants. Today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen produced from all natural sources combined. I think this is a very important point to keep in mind. The Haber-Bosch process has effectively doubled the amount of available nitrogen in the biosphere and concentrated it specifically for the purpose of growing crops for human beings. Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet. Early steam driven tractors came in to limited use in the 19'th century but after WWI the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically and the scale of use of farm machinery exploded, especially in North America, Europe and Australia during the 1920's, 30's, 40's and 50's.

In the 1890's one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses, most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horse-power of course and also increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans. Chemical pesticides and herbicides developed mostly after WWII used knowledge pioneered in the laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop-yields in, again, Europe, North America and Australia but also reduced the prevalence of insect-born deceases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of better living through chemistry. Though the environmental costs in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species would only later become widely apparent.

In the 1960's industrial chemical agricultural practices began to be exported, as we've heard, to what by that time was being called the third world. This was glowingly dubbed The Green Revolution and it enabled a tripling of food-production during the past half century. At the same time the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way. The trading of food items goes back to paleolithic times but with advances in transport the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the slow pace of growth. First by rail and steam ship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever larger quantities of meats, vegetables and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region and from continent to continent. William Catton in his classic book Overshoot terms the trade of essential life-support commodities as "scope expansion". Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century and a half ago. If one region has water but no good topsoil it's carrying capacity is limited by the lack of topsoil. Another region may have good soil but insufficient rainfall. There the carrying capacity is limited by water. If a way can be found of making up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance as by diverting water from region A to water crops in region B the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this in the form of a formula, carrying capacity of A+B > carrying capacity of A + carrying capacity of B. >From the ecological point of view this is why people trade but trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be supplied or applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels have temporarily erased that limit. The end result of chemical fertilizers plus powered farm machinery plus the increased scope of transportation and trade was not just a threefold leap in crop-yields but a similar explosion of human population which has grown fivefold since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable. But if it proves not to be then a temporary exuberance of the human species would have been purchased by an enormous unprecedented human tragedy. Well, where are we now in this?

Arable crop land until recently was increasing because of clearing of forests, putting new lands into production and through irrigation. Now the arable cropland globally is decreasing because of salinization of soil, because of urban growth, erosion. Topsoil created over tens of thousands and millions of years is decreasing. In the US great plains about half of the original topsoil is gone, much of it washed down the Mississippi river into the gulf of Mexico. The nutritional quality of our food is actually decreasing on a yearly basis due to the gradual demineralization of the soil and this has been actually documented through measurements taken by the US department of agriculture since the 1940's. The number of farmers as a percentage of the population is of course decreasing. In the US at the turn of the last century something like 70% of the population were directly involved in food production. Today that number is more like 1-2% of the population. The number of domesticated crop-varieties is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Not that many years ago in Bali there were 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate of that small island. Now there are only four rice varieties being grown in Bali. Of course the global population, as we've seen, is still growing. We're adding about 80 million people per year currently. We reached 6 billion just back in 1998 and since 1998 we've added another nearly half billion, roughly the total size of the population of North America just since 1998 or 1999 . As we've already seen again, grain production per capita globally decreasing now. A total of 2,000 million tons produced in 2004 which was a record in absolute numbers but for the past decade and a half population growth has outstripped grain production so there's actually less available on a per-head basis. And according to World Watch Institute we may be within sight of a decline in total production figures, in other words absolute production figures in food and especially grain.

Meanwhile the global climate is of course increasingly destabilized resulting in relatively minor problems for farmers now but these are problems that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions just within the next decade or two.

Meanwhile available fresh water is decreasing. In the US 85% of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water and of course those pumps require ever more energy usage. By 2020 according to World Watch Institute and the UN virtually every country in the world will face shortages of fresh water.

The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides is also decreasing. In the US over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold yet each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests which are evolving immunities to pesticides faster than chemists can invent new poisons. And then of course oil production is peaking as we talked about it in some length last night. That of course makes machinery more expensive to operate as oil prices goes up. It makes fertilizers more expensive to produce and it also makes transportation of food more expensive. And this, I believe, may be the single factor that brings all of these other problems that are like simmering crises to a full boil. The state of dependency on fossil fuels has become enormous. In the US agriculture is responsible for well over 10% of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production. About 20% to operate farm machinery, about 16% for transportation of food, 13% for irrigation, 8% for livestock raising not including the livestock feed and about 5% for pesticide production. Now this doesn't even include the energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers or cooking. Trucks move most of the worlds food although trucking is ten times more energy intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets moves a small but growing proportion of food almost entirely, of course, to wealthy industrial nations at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport. Processed foods make up three quarters of global food sales by price though not by quantity. This adds dramatically to energy costs. For example a one pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kcal of energy while the cereal itself provide only 1,100 kcal of food energy. All of this is fairly apparent to anyone who bothers to study the modern food system with an eye to it's sustainability. There is therefore already widespread concern over this subject and debate over the problem of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have emerged. The first advocates further intensification of industrial food production primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in it's various forms: organic; bio-dynamic; permaculture; bio-intensive and other methods. Critiques of the latter course contends that traditional chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John Emsley of University of Cambridge from his review of Vaclav Smils book "Enriching the earth, Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food".

Here is the passage: "If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed ten people provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with artificial nitrogen. This can easily support forty people and on a varied diet."

Okay. But given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, limited in extent, it will be increasingly difficult to continue supplying chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water with solar or wind-power as a source of electricity but currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up that process would require many years and considerable capital investment. The bio-engineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. It is possible to fantasize about mays or other crops modified to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile the genetic engineering of complex life-forms appears to pose unprecedented environmental and human health hazards as has been amply documented by Dr Mae-Wan Ho among many others. The bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemical production and so on. That's one side of the argument. Those arguing in favor of small scale ecological agriculture tend to be very optimistic about it's ability to support large populations. For example the 2002 Greenpeace study "The Real Green Revolution, organic and agro-ecological farming in the south", while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject nevertheless states: "In general it's thought that organic and agro-ecological farming can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to green revolution farming systems OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields although it brings other benefits such as reducing the need for external inputs. Eco-agricultural advocates contend that there is plenty of food in the world. Existing instances of hunger are due nearly to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and better distribution all could easily be fed well into the future. Thus given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming the choice should be simple. Some eco-agricultural proponents are even more sanguine and suggest that permaculture, bio-intensive or bio-dynamic methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized chemical-based agriculture and experiments have indeed shown that small scale bio-diverse gardening can be more productive on a per-hectare basis than mono-crop megafarms and in some cases by far. However, some of these studies tend to ignore the energy and land productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the studied plots. In any case, and there's no controversy on this point, permaculture and bio-intensive forms of agriculture are dramatically more labor and knowledge intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies. Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources there may be a carrying capacity bottleneck ahead in any case simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits no matter which course we pursue. According to widely accepted calculations humans are presently appropriating about 40% of earths primary biological productivity. It seems unlikely that we, as a single species after all, can do much more than that. Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we're already in view of the global oil production peak the debate over the potential productivity of chemical genetically engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agro-ecological farming maybe relatively pointless.

We must return to a food-system that is less fossil fuel reliant even if it does prove to be less productive. How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best resent historical example of a society in a fossil fuel famine. Here I want to talk a little bit about the instance of Cuba in recent years and I know there's gonna be a presentation on this subject later on but I hope to just set the stage for that. I'm looking forward to seeing it myself.

Of course Cuba, back in the 1980's, was more reliant on fossil fuels for agricultural production than even the United States. Cuban farmers were using more fossil fuels per acre than American farmers. So the collapse of the Soviet union at the end of the 1980's was a catastrophe for Cuba. Their oil use was reduced by over 50%. At that time the Soviet union, which was the worlds first or second foremost oil producing nation at that time, was exporting oil to Cuba at such a discount that the Cubans was actually re-exporting some of that oil for a profit to earn foreign-exchange income. So that simply went away at the end of the 1980's. Oil use was reduced by over 50%. Per capita energy use in Cuba fell to 1/15'th to 1/20'th of US usage. Since that time Cuba has been in the process of changing from an industrial society to an agrarian society and they have emphasized biological solutions to their various energy and social challenges. They found that their focus is to build human resources through education and of course Cuba produces more doctors per capita than virtually any other nation in the world.

Here's what happened. In 1991 Soviet personnel left Cuba and economic subsidies which had amounted to something like 6 billion dollars a year vanished. The GDP collapsed by 85% in the first two years. As a result of all of this the Cuban people suffered. They lost weight, on average 20 pounds per person. A 30% per capita decline in calorie consumption from food. There were some recorded cases of blindness from malnutrition but probably the full scope of the effects of malnutrition in that society will not be known. A whole generation of Cuban children grew up malnourished. There was of course a major decrease in the material standard of living. So what did Cuba do during what they came to call the Special Period? Well, at that time there had been already some Cuban organic agronomists who had been advocating for the adoption of more organic agricultural methods within Cuba and for the most part their advice had been falling on deaf ears. But once the fossil fuels became much more expensive, weren't available, these agronomists were called in and basically given free reign to redesign Cuba's agricultural system. They abandoned the Soviet industrial model of agriculture. They broke up the large state-owned farms into smaller private plots and co-op farms. They basically went organic because they had to, because they didn't have the chemical fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides. Meanwhile they maintained their free decentralized medical system and used their limited oil resources to generate electricity because to them electricity was actually more important. That was providing the absolute necessities of their minimally industrialized way of life. So they had to save fossil fuels wherever they could so they deemphasized the private automobile and they began moving people around by ox-cart and these giant vehicles that they call a camel which is basically a tractor trailer-rig in which they cram about 300 people in the trailer. They also found a new use for traffic-cops. Traffic-cops now would stop any car on the road that had empty seats and make it wait until enough hitchhikers showed up to fill up the car. As a result of all of this the Cuban society did survive. The economy, as of 2005, is growing again steadily but at a very slow rate. Food production is up to about 90% of the pre-crises period but at nowhere near the pre-crises level of energy inputs. There's been very little new housing, mostly remodeling of existing housing structures. That fact is mostly due to the high energy cost of cement which is very short supply. Transportation is still very much an ad hoc improvised basis. Everybody shares every vehicle on the road. Cubans adopted a mostly vegetarian diet but they did so involuntarily. This wasn't for any sort of ethical reasons, it's just that there wasn't much meat to go around because meat production required more energy. Meat eating went from twice a day to twice a week. Of course therefore they needed to supplement their diets with more vegetable sources of protein. They decreased their consumption of wheat and rice because they simply weren't appropriate to food production on the island. With less transportation they had to move producers and consumers closer together, so this meant more urban gardening. Encouraging the growth of gardens all throughout the cities like Havana. Any kind of empty land was immediately put into agricultural production and rooftop gardening was adopted. Rural areas improved their education for farmers. Many people moved from Havana to the country. In order for this to happen they had to raise salaries for farmers above the salaries being offered for office workers in the cities. So this encouraged people to move from the cities to the countryside to participate in agricultural production. As a result of all of this of course their is very little obesity now in Cuba due to the healthier diet and more physical work. So let's look at some pictures.

Much of this information or all of these pictures are from my colleagues Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan of the organization Community Service in Yellow Springs Ohio who've made a number of trips to Cuba specifically to study the Cuban response to energy famine and how this may offer us lessons for how to deal with the coming energy famine in the rest of the industrialized world.

They found usefulness for raised-beds which help with hand labor.
These raised-beds can be built over existing pavement as on parking lots and even city streets.
The modernized agrarian; this man earns more than an engineer.
Immediately they began breeding more oxen in Cuba because they realized that oxen would be necessary and of course horses tend to compete with people for grain because horses need to eat grain, oxen don't.
So they decided oxen would be a better way to go than horses and they immediately began breeding oxen for traction animals.
I mentioned rooftop gardening.
Very widespread throughout Havana and the other cities but also rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, hamsters and rabbits.
This is a picture of downtown Havana and you can see a really considerable amount of food production right there within the city.
The transition to a non-fossil fuel system will take time.
The Cubans took fifteen years to arrive at where they are now.

We have to emphasize here that we are discussing a systemic transition. We can't just remove oil in the forms of agro-chemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves has to be rethought. Given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace backed by the full resources of national governments. Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs and make necessary transportation much more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions that are capable of supporting only small populations on the regional resource base.

Think of places like Las Vegas, Nevada or even Los Angeles, California. How much food can be grown in those places? We will need to grow more food in and around cities certainly. Currently Oakland, California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate the growing of 40% of the vegetables consumed in the city within 50 miles of city center by 2015. If the example of Cuba were followed rooftop gardens would result as well as rooftop raising of food animals as we saw. Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together but it also means relying on the local manufacturing and regeneration of all the elements of the production process from seeds to tools and farm machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bio-engineering which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers. Clearly we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture both direct and indirect such as those introduced in processing of foods. We will need to introduce draft animals in agricultural production and as the Cubans found, oxen may in many instances be preferable to horses because of the need of horses for grain their tendency therefore to compete for humans for carrying capacity. Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. I think it would be a mistake simply to think in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work-force. Traditional agriculture requires social networks; intergenerational trust and bonding and knowledge sharing. We need not just more workers but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding. Farming requires knowledge and experience so we will need education for a new generation of farmers but only some of this education can be generic. Much of it must be of necessity locally appropriate. It would be necessary as well to break up the corporate megafarms that produce so much of todays cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that is utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land-reform will be required in order to enable small holders and farming co-ops to own their own plots. In order for all of this to happen governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in it's tracks and doing nothing else would itself be advantageous. But given the fact that rapid transition is essential, the offering of subsidies for education, low-interest loans for land purchase and support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential. Finally, given the carrying capacity limits that we've been discussing, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and we must improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries around the world. All of this sounds like a very tall order but the alternatives: doing nothing or attempting to solve the problem simply by applying more technological intensification will certainly result in dire consequences. In that case existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worries of existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of earth would be degraded significantly and perhaps to a very large degree permanently. In some, the transition to a fossil fuel free food system doesn't constitute a utopian proposal; it is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society but in the end it is the only rational option for averting human tragedy on a scale never before seen. Thank you very much.

Presenter: Thank you very much Richard. If you have any ***[36:15] of comments ***[36:16] will take them.

Spectator #1: ***[36:17] Cuban example, what's happened to population in the last fifteen years?

RH: Cuba's population is growing but quite a slow pace. It's the slowest growing population in the Latin-American region. So they have recognized the need to keep population growth low but the population is still growing and it's a bit of a problem because there simply isn't enough housing for everyone in Cuba.

Spectator #2: It seems to me ***[36:43]-***[36:48] transformation ***[36:50] start to work on the perception that it's okay to have ***[36:52] family, it's okay for some couples not to have kids. It's okay to have maybe an only child. It's a perception of time maybe that we measure cities and distances in terms of how far ***[37:04] travel is. 60 minutes away, ***[37:08] by what? Perception of physical work, the change in our perception of what it means to be a physical worker. It's sort of a ***[37:15] theme amongst societies now. I don't garden and I don't get my fingernails dirty, I'm an office worker now. I've worked my way up.

RH: Could I just say something about that? This is I think a very important consideration for the poorer countries because there you have millions of people who are aspiring to the industrialized urban way of life. For example the townships in South Africa. You don't see gardens there in the townships. Here are people living in extreme poverty and they could certainly benefit by growing a few tomatoes or potatoes or something, but they don't do that because they associate growing your own food with poverty. That's where they came from and they want to move into the urban existence of Cape Town and Johannesburg and be like the folks who own cars and so on. I think that perception has to change, just as you said.

Spectator #3: Can you ***[38:10] share with us your experience about what's happened when you go on television ***[38:15] there is no way of avoiding a population crash ***[38:19] realize that ***[38:20]-***[38:21]. How do you handle this and what's happened to you and you come out in one piece.

RH: Well, I think for people who don't even understand the problem of peak oil for instance, just bringing them that information is about as much as their brains can contain at one moment and it's really only after one has absorbed that and a few other worrisome facts about the un-sustainability of our modern industrial society that one can begin to really talk about the full consequences. It's more than the average person can absorb all at once. But for policy makers, these people have to understand this because even if it's very difficult just from a human standpoint to absorb the news these people are responsible after all for making the kinds of decisions that will determine life and death for perhaps millions of people. They have to be made to understand it.

Spectator #4: I think you need to emphasize the de-urbanization does not necessarily mean de-industrialization because the kind of industrial set of values can be done in local dispersed communities that are self-sustaining in food can be quite as ***[39:34] in sense of small scale. ***[39:37] your talking to ***[39:39]-***[39:40] because it suggests we ought to go backwards. In fact we want to make more intelligent use of the knowledge that we have in a dispersed network of self-sustaining populations.

RH: Yes I partly agree with what you say because I think there's a great deal we've learned during the industrial period about things that can be produced and ways of producing them. We will be able to adapt but we're simply going to have a lot less energy with which to pursue the productive process and that's going to mean, if you look at what industrialization has been and what it has meant, we will have less of it. So you can call it anything you want but it's going to be coming down off that peak of mechanization of the human experience and the human relationship with nature. De-mechanization if you will.

Spectator #5: The ***[40:34]-***[40:36] economy of ***[40:36] living ***[40:38] is the critical term that we've got to get across when we're talking about the future rather than going back. I think there's a whole education process. ***[40:45]-***[40:46] agriculture. Regularly and every time I promote organic farming or ***[40:54] what you're talking about it comes back that she has a view that it's too expensive. People won't pay that money for what? A good food but ***[41:08]-***[41:08]. I'm just wondering whether maybe ***[41:11]-***[41:12] on this as well. On the web I noticed there's an International Kitchen Garden Association, it seems to be a sort of a celebration of growing some of your own food. I'm just wondering whether you've come across that or whether there is anything you can suggest that would help get over this mind-set thing by making it an attractive or popular or interesting change.

RH: I'm not sure I can think of a way to make it seem like an overwhelmingly attractive idea to people who are already overwhelmingly invested in a very elaborate, well-funded, inexpensive in terms of food production per minutes worked to be able to by a tomato or whatever. It's an overwhelmingly attractive system as it's set up, what we desperately need to understand is that we can't continue that. I think your minister of agriculture needs to understand the problem of peak oil. It would be nice if we could advertise the transition to a fossil fuel free agriculture as being easier and cheaper and so on and it is more rewarding in many respects and there are advantages but purely on that basis I don't think the transition will occur. If it were going to it would have by now because there have been plenty of organic advocates around for the last 20 years talking about the advantages of organic versus so called conventional agriculture. What we really have to understand is the chemical based industrial agriculture simply cannot be continued because of the problem of peak oil. The longer we wait to address that problem the more likely it is that we will face this carrying capacity bottleneck in it's direst form. We have a responsibility to anticipate this problem because even the US department of energy or at least a report prepared for the US department of energy is acknowledging that this problem is inevitable. There should be no controversy about that. There may be a little controversy about when it's going to occur but there should be no controversy that the event will occur. We have to prepare for it. If we wait until the event itself there will be very dire consequences. That message has to get across.

Exerpt from "Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization." by Michael P. Byron

PROLOGUE
http://www.michaelpbyron.com/PROLOGUE.htm

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.
The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance and one chance only.

— Fred Hoyle 1

We live at the decisive moment in all of human history — decisive not only for one culture or another, not only for the “developed world,” but for all of humanity.

In a vivid metaphoric sense, civilization is now in a condition analogous to that of the astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere on the morning of February 1, 2003. An eerie videotape of those last moments was found amid Columbia’s debris afterwards. Onboard Columbia, the lights are on, the air is circulating, and all seems well.2

The four astronauts, seen on the flight deck of shuttle, marvel together at the sight of the white-hot plasma flowing outside around them. They are unaware that this plasma is patiently eating away at the damaged left wing of their spaceship. There is only one hint of the slowly unfolding catastrophe: the ship’s guidance thruster begins firing ever more frequently and thunderously, as the computers that are actually flying the vehicle sense the asymmetric drag caused by the eroding left wing and vainly try to compensate for it.

The sights and sounds of these repeated thruster firings are clearly evident in the videotape. The laws of physics, those immutable and cold equations of nature, have decreed that in just moments all seven astronauts aboard the Columbia will die catastrophically. No sensor sounds the alarm because the sensors had already burned up. Although the disaster is unfolding in slow motion around them, the astronauts have no direct way to detect it. All still appears reasonably normal as the tape abruptly ends.

Civilization at this very moment is in nearly the same situation. The world-spanning industrial civilization now seems doomed to certain catastrophe.

With this book I hope to provide you, the readers, with an understanding of the problems and with strategies for the future, and a look toward the renewal of civilization itself.

The linked crises which are bearing down upon humanity are not caused by external disturbances. There are no cruel gods who have determined to torment us for their amusement. Rather, these crises are self-caused and originate within civilization. They have sprung from our deepest values, beliefs, and unquestioning assumptions about reality itself. As Cassius observes in the Shakespeare play Julius Caesar: “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves.”3

Anatomically modern humans have existed upon the earth for perhaps 200,000 years. Civilization has only emerged in the past ten millennia; it is characterized by dense, settled populations centered in cities that do not produce their own food, and with people differentiated by occupation and social class.

Civilization used to depend upon human and animal muscle power. Only the industrialization of the past 200 years has substituted muscle power with
concentrated sources of energy, primarily hydrocarbon fuel, energy in the forms of coal, oil, and natural gas.

As industrialization based primarily upon these fossil fuels has spread across the planet, a globalized economy has emerged. We seem to be standing at the very summit of human achievement with power over nature, and with wealth and opportunity for all. A closer look reveals that we have arrived not only at the summit, but also at the edge of a precipice — a yawning chasm in human history. Civilization’s foundation is fatally insecure.

All of civilization is predicated upon one mostly unspoken assumption: that limitless supplies of cheap hydrocarbon energy will always be available.

Corollaries to this core assumption include the assumptions that, if hydrocarbon
energy ever does become scarce, markets will instigate the development of substitute sources of energy; and that science and technology will be able to rapidly develop these substitute sources of energy. A third assumption is that human actions have little or no effect upon the weather, and on Earth’s ability to maintain the conditions necessary for human life to flourish. Finally, it is presumed that the political leadership will respond quickly and adequately to problems which affect mankind’s very existence.

Unfortunately, ALL of the above are false. The global hydrocarbon reserves which we are so recklessly squandering took several hundred million years to accumulate. Once they’re gone, they are gone forever. The current high-energy industrial civilization can only occur once in the lifetime of the planet. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but the adjustment period, at least, is likely to be disastrous and if no adequate adjustment can be made, then the initial disaster must lead to a dismal end for mankind.

Hydrocarbon energy powers industries, automobiles, and aircraft. It heats homes. It makes possible industrial-scale agriculture. Indeed, fertilizers are made from natural gas, and pesticides from petroleum. So hydrocarbon-intensive is modern agriculture that for every one calorie of food produced, about ten calories of irreplaceable hydrocarbon energy is expended. We are eating hydrocarbon energy!

Simultaneously, the heat-trapping greenhouse gases are disrupting the planet’s thin and finite atmosphere, leading to the ever more rapid warming of the planet and destabilizing the weather patterns.

At this very moment, we are about to begin to run out of these irreplaceable hydrocarbon energy sources. Estimates indicate that we are just about reaching the midpoint of world petroleum production — the point at which one half of all the oil that can ever be produced will have been produced. In the near future there will be ever less oil, less gasoline, less kerosene, less jet fuel, etc., produced each year than was produced the previous year.

This peaking of oil production — commonly referred to as “peak oil” — is occurring at a time when demand for hydrocarbon energy is increasing at a rate of over two percent per year, compounded, as large and populous nations such as China and India rapidly industrialize. In fact, the rate of increase in demand is increasing rapidly. Obviously, this has dire political consequences for the peace and stability of the planet.

Natural gas production in North America is also about to peak. Globally, the natural gas peak is only about a decade away. In any event, even if there was gas to buy, it would take at least a decade to build the immense tankers, specialized ports and refineries required to import natural gas to North America.

The option of importing natural gas in order to stave off impending oil depletion is impractical.

It is true that coal exists in large quantities around the globe. Indeed, the United States possesses the planet’s largest reserves. However, coal cannot substitute for all uses of petroleum, and would itself be totally depleted by several decades of intensive usage. More significantly, it is by far the “dirtiest” of the hydrocarbon fuels. Its widespread use would kick global warming further into overdrive.

Also, the political system in the United States has been decisively captured by multinational corporations which profit immensely from keeping the global political economy based on hydrocarbon energy. The influence of these corporations upon the world’s governments cannot be overstated; and it is an influence that operates to maximize profits, not to maximize what is in the best interests of humanity. As a consequence, government itself has become a major part of the problem to addressing these mounting and imminent crises. It is not part of the solution.

And so here in the early 21st century we find ourselves standing at a turning point in human history. The choices we make will irrevocably determine the fates of all future humans living in all future ages. There is no second chance. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocations of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the west back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.4

Crisis is coming. However, it is very important to understand that it is not something that is being done to us; rather it is something that we are doing to ourselves. We, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are the culprit, and not some invisible, cruel gods.

To understand the causes and consequences of our actions, we must first understand ourselves. We must understand how we create our realities, and how this affects the ways that we respond to crisis. Additionally, we must understand systems theory because what we do affects everything around us.

This book is intended to give you, the reader, insight into how and why these crises are bearing down upon us, and what their effects will be. It is further intended to empower you to participate in the creation of a new approach that will support sustainable practices and provide a decent quality of life without destroying the world’s resources.

Early 21st century civilization is a human-created, human-centered, worldspanning,
complex adaptive system, containing within it nested political, social, and economic systems organized at multiple levels from the individual to the world system.

This civilization is itself nested within the earth’s four-billion years old biological system — the biosphere. This gradually-evolved and finely-tuned system has made the planet habitable for eons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we take it for granted and assume that it will always be there to provide for us.

The biosphere is in turn nested within the natural, non-living, physical systems of the earth itself. These natural systems include the planet’s plate tectonic and volcanic cycles and its hydrological cycles. These in turn — especially the earth’s hydrological cycle — are heavily dependent upon the amount of sunlight reaching the planet. Ultimately, the earth, sun, and solar system are nested within the subtle energy fields of the entire surrounding universe.

My focus is on the crises caused or exacerbated by humans, and that are bearing down upon civilization. For this book’s purposes, humans are at the very center of this concentric set of nested systems. This central position of humans means that understanding the manner in which our minds, or more precisely, our brains, process, store and organize information into ordered patterns is crucially important. This is because these structured patterns of information determine the very nature of large-scale human social and societal organization — our beliefs, dogmas and cultures — from the individual level all of the way up to the level of our global civilization itself.

These belief structures in turn determine what we do — and what we don’t do. Furthermore, the nature of these cognitive building blocks determines what types of belief structures can be built in the future. As we shall see, the methods by which we create our ordered patterns of understanding the world around us determine how we respond to fundamental crises, both as individuals and as civilizations.

This book is divided into three sections.

Part I, “Conceptual Foundations,” explains two vital topics: how our brains process and organize information, and systems theory. It is a bit more technical than the remaining several chapters of the book.

Part II, “The Crises,” investigates the linked crises which threaten the collapse
of civilization. Our high-energy, world-girdling civilization runs mainly on hydrocarbon energy sources: Coal, oil, and natural gas. These irreplaceable energy sources are being consumed at an accelerating rate. They are about to go into permanent and irreversible decline.

Part III, “Survival & Renewal,” addresses the possible impending catastrophe and ponders the essential qualities of a better civilization we might wish to build.

Humanity stands facing a historical chasm. A great discontinuity is about to separate the future from the past. Ahead lie decades and perhaps centuries of turmoil and tumult.

Those who control the global corporations, with their eyes only on the bottom line, bear the ultimate responsibility for the impending collapse of civilization.

Even now, citizens are increasingly reduced to politically-disempowered consumers. The now near-total control over the consolidated and corporatized media gives them control over the public’s understanding of reality, and ensures that most citizens are sleepwalking towards doom.

By understanding the crises that are by now perhaps unavoidable, and by preparing ourselves, we can hope to minimize the suffering of the adjustment when the irresponsible practices of the present become absolutely unsustainable and force us to change our ways, radically reducing consumption of resources we still treat as infinite even today.

With prudent planning and action, by acting methodically and with purpose in coordination with many others, we can plant the seeds of a future that will offer a much greater quality of life for our descendents than that offered by today’s soulless, materialistic, global corporate oligarchy.

Viewed from this context, the opportunity to correct the errors of the present age and of our social and political order, and to bequeath this new order to future ages, is an exciting challenge. It is time we got things right and designed a more mature civilization.

To begin to develop a picture of how and why these interrelated crises have been allowed to develop, and to understand what we can do, we next need to take a careful look at three related concepts as they apply to human beings: cognition, crisis and systems theory. All deal intimately with the very nature of reality as it operates for humans organized into large scale entities such as nations, economies, and ultimately, globalized civilization taken as a whole.

Then we shall investigate the crises bearing down upon us, and what we can do to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. Finally we will investigate
how our actions can bring about a better tomorrow for our descendents.

Beyond our personal survival and the survival of those closest to us, we can begin to plan for the rebirth of civilization — of a better, far more humane and fulfilling civilization than the tragically flawed one around us which is now racing towards its utter doom in the years just ahead. This topic shall form the final portion of the book. We can act to create the seeds, the nodes, of a democratic and humane civilization, based upon a stable foundation of renewable energy sources, sustainable agriculture, smaller, closer, more caring communities, which is predicated upon a social foundation of individual and human rights.

Ultimately, by changing the way that we think about our external reality, we can change how we interact with one another and with nature. Such a change may yet give a more humane human civilization a new lease on life and eventually still lead us to the stars in ages to come. Surely such a world is not to be feared but rather, it is to be embraced.

The alternatives are nightmarish! We must make the effort!

1. Hoyle, Fred, Of Men and Galaxies. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 1964, pp. 73. Infinity’s Rainbow.

2. Washington Post.com, Feb. 28, 2003, Recovered Video Fragment Shows Crew During
Reentry, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/nation/022803-4v.htm ,
NASA has the video online at: http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ramgen/sts107.rm
and also at:
http://vstream1.ksc.nasa.gov/ramgen/odv/ksc_direct/sts107/jsc_022803_crew.rm
and finally at: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/rrg2.pl?video/shuttle/missions/sts-107/sts107a.rm

Note: The actual video can be watched online. A reconstruction of Columbia’s final seven minutes which synchronizes ground video with Mission Control dialogue is available at:
http://www.chrisvalentines.com/sts107/realtime_play.html .

3. Enotes.com, Julius Caesar, http://www.allshakespeare.com/jc/270

4. Ward-Perkins, Brian, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2005, pp. 182

[Conclusion to Chapter 11 (the book’s last chapter)]

This work began with the assertion that we live at the decisive moment in all of human history — decisive not only for one culture or another, not only for the “developed world” but for all of humanity. This may have appeared to be an
extravagant claim, but the information in this book shows it to be a factual one.

Humanity is faced with immense challenges. However, the chance to create a long-term ecologically sustainable and humane future also represents a correspondingly immense opportunity.

In the coming years we must all act and think flexibly and creatively if these challenges are to be surmounted. If we can rise to this occasion we will bequeath an open-ended future to civilization and to the biosphere. This book has focused upon analysis and description of the inter-linked crises facing our civilization. In a subsequent work, I will focus upon prescription — specifically upon strategies for dealing effectively with these crises and thereby creating a positive future.

The promise of this hopeful future is what, consistent with the ancient legend of a
new world following a global deluge, I refer to as “Infinity's Rainbow.” I’d like to end this work where I began it, with this quote:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing
intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary
physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone,
high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If
we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance and
one chance only.335

This is our one and only chance. Let’s not blow it!

335. Ibid., Of Men and Galaxies, Prologue, #1.

EPILOGUE

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

— Omar Khayyam336

Two apparently unrelated changes (each one improbable enough on its own) set the trajectory of human civilization in its present disastrous direction: we discovered how to exploit the energy locked up in hydrocarbon deposits; and the legal enfranchisement of corporate personhood led to ordinary humans losing control over their political economy.

These corporate entities represent a type of complex adaptive system, which organizes the individual abilities of numerous humans towards a collective goal. Since these entities exist only to produce short-term profits for their investors, that goal has been the creation of wealth as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible. This means that externalities such as the effects of wealth extraction upon the earth’s biosphere are disregarded to the maximum extent legally possible.

Since governmental regulation is the only check upon what is legal for these corporate entities, it follows that corporate profit maximization requires the subordination of this other human system — government. Human laws that stood in the way of corporate profit maximization have been subverted, as corporations gained power over governments.

In pursuit of corporate goals, it looks as though we have far exceeded the planet’s natural carrying capacity. Only hydrocarbon energy allows, for the moment, for humanity’s billions to continue multiplying. And if the supply of hydrocarbon energy is about to enter into permanent decline, the ramifications are beyond prediction.

336. Rubiayat of Omar Kayyam, Fitzgerald translation, http://www.okonlife.com/poems/