Wishing for Armageddon to Avoid Hell

If you hang out on any of the peak oil forums or discussion groups for any length of time, you’ll run across doomers. These are the folks that believe that society is screwed, we’re too ignorant and too late to stop the tide of problems heading our way, and that it will all end in fire. Some of these folks seem to be salivating in anticipation of the societal collapse they believe is coming, and I’ve often wondered why. I myself am in the middle somewhere on the doomer/cornucopian continuum, believing that while we’ve definitely got major problems coming our way, I don’t believe that society is coming to an end in the next decade or two. Things will change radically, but the whole process will take decades to play out totally.

Low Voltage

Hello, my name is Bart, and I’m a cynic. I’ve had this streak in me for a long time. Part of it is due to my Scandinavian mindset (prepare for the worst, and be mildly surprised when it doesn’t occur), part of it is due to my study of economics and politics, and the vast majority of it is due to being a fan of Minnesotan football teams. After you’ve been let down as often as I have, you tend to take other people’s claims and promises with a grain of salt.

There’s been a lot of blog posts over at Groovy Green concering GM’s unveiling of their new Volt concept car. Steve Balogh was invited to the unveiling event, and he’s posted several balanced notes concerning the event while taking a few days to let everything settle before posting a final verdict on the car. The comments on Steve’s posts have been in support of GM and their new car. It’s a bold move technically on GM’s part, but I can’t get that enthused about it.

CERA Puts Lipstick on a Pig (again)

The peak oil theory is widely contested. It’s usual proponents include the usual slew of leftists, doomer/survivalist types, gold bugs, retired geologists and a growing group of economic writers while it’s naysayers are usually people and organizations with a vested interest in the status quo: big oil, mainstream economics writers, politicians, globalization proponents, etc. One of the most vocal critics of peak oil is Cambridge Energy Research Associates, or, as they are more commonly known, CERA.

Led by Daniel Yergin, CERA has constantly ridiculed, critiqued and otherwise denied that the world is even close to reaching it’s theoretical production limit. CERA’s forecasts have been routinely criticized for relying too heavily on very optimistic statistics from the Department of Energy and elsewhere who maintain that Saudi Arabia will be able to more or less double their production of oil by 2020 even though their production has been flat or declining since the late 1990’s, even in the face of rising oil prices.

In their latest attempt to discredit peak oil, CERA has released a new essay “Why the Peak Oil Theory Falls Down,” a 16-page paper that’s a bargain at only $1000. CERA analysts claim that the there’s plenty of oil left to be discovered and that oil production will level off, but not really decline sometime after 2030. This graph from CERA tells us all we need to know, and remember, this is the optimistic scenario, folks:

I’d love to spend some time ripping this report to shreds, but it’s being done much better elsewhere by better-educated and talented writers than myself. Looking at the graph above, it’s clear that CERA is embracing the concept of peak oil; they are just debating when it happens, and how quickly production will decline once we reach the peak. Even if something amazing happens and peak doesn’t arrive until 2030, that’s still only 23 years away. Since CERA is relying on a lot of unverified reserve numbers that are widely believed to be only slighty more accurate than Enron’s last annual report, odds are good that we’ll see the peak much sooner than that.

For more commentary you can check the following links:

Energy Bulletin

The Oil Drum

Veterans Day

I spent part of Sunday at the Vikings-Packers game at the dome. Suffering is good for the soul, and as a Minnesota Football Fan (at both college and pro levels), I get plenty of that.

Being that it was Veteran’s Day, the Vikings rolled out the red carpet for the military. The pre-game and half-time shows featured current and retired veterans from World War II on, and the cheerleaders did their part (I guess), by wearing special costumes celebrating each branch of our armed services.

This isn’t anything new. Veteran’s day celebrations at NFL games has been commonplace for sometime, and they have become much more spectacular in the years since 9/11. What was different this year was the muted response compared to even a year ago. Instead of mass cheering, hollering, and general adulation for the military, there was polite applause for all of the soldiers, and one prolonged round of applause for the older, wounded veterans that were introduced.

A lot of the appreciation that Americans feel towards their veterans comes from the fact that most of our overseas wars have been reactionary (at least in terms of outward appearances). Brave Americans answered the call to defend our country or our allies from hostile aggressors, which is seen as a very brave and noble thing to do, even if the soldiers in question were drafted as my father was in 1952 when he was sent overseas at the end of the Korean conflict. The administration’s efforts to similarly portray the “War on Terror” and the Iraq war in a similar vein have fallen flat, as the 2006 elections show. Part of the fallout from that is the surreal Veteran’s Day celebration I witnessed at the dome.

The pregame show had a bunch of current Minnesota soldiers unwrapping a huge US flag that covered much of the football field, while a military band played. The opening song was a marching band version of Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” Sentimental images of US military personnel past and present were displayed on the big screen while an earnest sergeant crooned “We’ll put a boot in your ass; it’s the American way!” A very strange song choice if you ask me. Then there was around a five-minute long commercial played for the US Army on the jumbotron. Again, this recieved little, if any applause from the crowd. Basically we got to watch a pretty boring recruiting advertisement, and the lack of enthusiasm from the crowd reflected that.

Halftime was a little better, as they presented a number of older, wounded vets from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq along with some guardsmen returning from active duty. These folks received the applause they should have. Whether you agree or disagree with the war, these folks have served and put their lives on the line in defense of all of us, and outward appreciation from the crowd is a nice start (fixing the VA would be better, but that takes work and money, which DC is loathe to spend on non-useful assets like wounded or crippled vets, apparently). The halftime show finished up with the marching band playing the obligatory Lee Greenwood song “Proud to be an American,” during which there was a flyover by fighter jets from the Air National Guard. This was a pointless gesture to a crowd inside a domed stadium, since we could only see the planes on the jumbotron again.

Both shows had the same over-produced visual montages and a lot of slick voiceovers and whatnot. The difference this year was a crowd that was either tired of hearing the same rhetoric yet again, or perhaps a new sense that things have changed. War fatigue seems to be setting in.

Ethanol and Immorality

Editor’s Note:  This is classified as a rant for a reason.  Proceed with caution.  

Politics is a dirty business, just ask Judi Dutcher. The DFL candidate for Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor admitted she didn’t know a whole lot about E-85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline motor fuel) to a reporter at the end of a long day dealing with another set of issues entirely. Immediately, the GOP and ethanol-related special interest groups savaged Dutcher, stressing that her fanning on a question about E-85 somehow made her dangerously unfit for the more-or-less unseen job of being the governor’s assistant. For what it’s worth, Governor Pawlenty’s lieutenant, Carol Molnau, makes the headlines about as often as the Minnesota Golden Gopher football team wins a match against a Big Ten opponent, which isn’t very often at all.

In all fairness, considering alternative energy’s focus in the gubernatorial race, Dutcher deserves the criticism she’s receiving for not picking up on the reporter’s question. If you willingly enter politics, you must be prepared to spend your days under a microscope, where any little slip-up can and will be exploited for political gain if at all possible. I personally find the story very interesting for what it does and does not say about ethanol, and how its false perception as the magical elixir that will wean us off of petroleum continues untarnished while the media ignores its dark side.

Ethanol is huge in Minnesota, which is no surprise considering all of the corn that’s being grown here. Corn growers are seeing dollar signs in their heads due to increasing demand for their product. Local politicians love it due to its political expediency: it’s supposedly a ‘green’ renewable fuel source and it plays very well in the rural parts of Minnesota, especially in the South. Finally, business loves it because it means growth. More flex-fuel cars can be built, more ethanol plants can be built, and the ethanol distribution system can be expanded, among other things. So, what’s not to like about it? Plenty, as it turns out…

We modern, industrial humans worship efficiency like a religion. Our population has grown to cover the earth, and pretty much all of the arable land around the world has already been put into production of one foodstuff or another. Turning a foodstuff like corn into a renewable source of motor fuel sounds great until you consider the fact that we are intensively farming most of the usable land around the world, and we’re not really keeping everyone fed right now as it is. Environmentalists decry the amount of grain spent annually to satiate the world’s demand for meat and dairy products, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to how much corn we’d need to produce to satisfy our need for fuel.

Consider this: if we put the entire United States grain harvest into making ethanol, we’d only produce about one sixth of the USA’s fuel demand, and we’d all be starving to boot.

Then, throw in the fact that worldwide drought conditions are slashing the world’s grain reserves. Australia, for example, is forecasting a grain harvest that’s 63% lower than average due to lack of water. The entire world only has around 57 days’ worth of grain reserves; the lowest amount in decades.

China, with its burgeoning population and steady loss of farmland, is importing more and more agricultural products every year. Between rising temperatures, dropping water tables and loss of agricultural land for one reason or another, China’s current annual grain shortfall is larger than the entire output of the nation of Canada. In 2003, its number one and number two trade partners for importing food were the USA and Australia, respectively. Considering the number of dollars China is holding in its FOREX reserves currently, I don’t think they would react well to the USA telling them that we cannot ship them food due to our increasing need to fuel our SUV’s. Like it or not, we are beholden to them for our short-term financial well-being, and if they demand the grain, I do not think we’re in much of a position to deny them.

Ignoring those issues for a second, we also need to consider the moral issues at stake when we are talking about diverting a large percentage of the world’s food supply in order to generate motor fuel.

Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute has stated that the amount of corn needed to generate one tank of ethanol for an 25-gallon SUV gas tank would feed one person for a whole year. Let’s use that figure to illustrate a very important point about the ethanol debate that isn’t getting much attention in the media: Just in Minnesota, let’s assume that there are around 1 million active cars, trucks, and other vehicles, with an average tank size of 25 gallons. At one fill-up per week, Minnesotans’ appetite for ethanol would mean around 52 million people would have to scramble to find something else to eat. There are around 150 million cars in the United States. If we were able to get 50% of those vehicles using ethanol that would mean almost 4 billion people would need to find other sources of food.

In a world where many people don’t have enough to eat, it is unconscionable to propose diverting large blocks of valuable farmland to produce fuel so we Americans can continue our suburban, automobile-dependent lifestyles. If we were to embrace biomass/ethanol fueling of our vehicles, we would basically be choosing to kill off some of the world’s population every year so that we can continue to live a life of ease. That is about as immoral a stand as a so-called “Christian Nation” could make.

We don’t have the land to grow enough biomass to even come close to making the US petroleum-independent. That doesn’t stop the promoters of ethanol from using every trick in the book to try and convince us to switch, though. We have been programmed well enough to understand that “freeing us from dependence on foreign oil” is really code for “we can stop dealing with Islamic extremists, despots and terrorists.” That sounds appealing to many Americans. We are being sold the dream of being able to continue our current way of life even though the statisticians on both sides of the debate know that it’s only a partial solution at best. And, it’s not even a solution to the main problem.

The real question isn’t whether ethanol can replace gasoline; it’s whether our current investment in suburban automobile culture has a future. The correct answer (to me, at least) is “no,” but that would require all of us to radically change how we live, and many of today’s “winners” would become tomorrow’s “losers” simply by virtue of where they live. Why would a politician tackle that thorny subject when it’s much easier to pimp a popular fix like ethanol? Most Americans have so much time, money and psychological happiness invested in our lifestyle that we’ll overlook small details like food shortages and misery in faraway places if it will allow us to continue driving care-free.

Big business likes it as well, for it’s definitely a ‘market solution.’ Never mind that the markets, like most of the corporations that are its major players, pay no attention to the morality of various proposals. If it makes money and keeps the current game going, it’s good, otherwise, it’s bad. Corporations are nothing more than big piles of money that their stockholders and workers pay allegiance to. To paraphrase the Bible, you cannot serve both money and the greater good.

All of the talk about ethanol is just that, talk. It may keep some people driving for longer than they otherwise would, but it will be on the backs of the poor people of the world. I personally could not fathom doing that, and therefore will never buy a ‘flex-fuel’ vehicle. Hopefully a political candidate will someday have the fortitude to tell this truth to everyone. Until then, the new aqua vitae that is ethanol continues to grow in popularity while we all try and ignore the messy details lurking in it’s shadow.

How Far Down the Rabbit Hole do You Go?

I finished G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature from Jekyll Island” over the weekend, and my head is still spinning a bit. As I’d mentioned earlier, it’s a tough read. In addition to giving the reader a history lesson regarding central banking in the United States, it also gives a short history of fiat money and fractional reserve banking, and paints several scenarios for the future. Griffin’s bias is easy to see throughout the whole text, since he’s up front about his opposition to socialism, collectivism, the new world order, or whatever you wish to call it. If you believe his writing, the whole concept of central banking is a series of long conspiracies by the wealthy to subjugate the masses and control the political destiny of the world by secretly pulling the strings of power.

The whole issue of conspiracy is problematic to those of us in the peak oil crowd. It’s very easy to be painted as a tinfoil-hat wearing nut job, especially since most people refuse to believe anything that smacks of secret societies, deep politics, and the like. It’s something that needs to be addressed head-on, though, since everything we like to talk about seems to tie back to one conspiracy or another. It’s a matter of degrees, if you ask me.

Is there a group of people who hole a vast amount of the world’s wealth? Absolutely. Are they planning a slow takeover of the world through control of the national banks? Possibly. There’s enough evidence out there to show that the heads of these banks communicate regularly, and it’s common knowledge that they meet regularly to help normalize global business and cash flow. Writers like Griffin are willing to take the next step and assert that these people have more or less held the reins of power for the last few centuries, and that they actively set nation against nation for purposes of enriching themselves. It sounds diabolical, perhaps even unthinkable. There’s enough evidence out there, though, to make you wonder about how the world really works, since there’s a large amount of evidence to indicate that it’s not the way the civics books depict.

When you start talking about the new world order and socialist plots to establish a new feudalism through monetary policy and government surveillance, you’re crossing a line from the plausible into the implausible, at least in the minds of many people out there. Many peak oilers trample across this line on a regular basis, and it’s used to attack their credibility on a wide variety of issues. This makes discussion about all sorts of weirdness dangerous.

It’s a given with most people that our government lies to us on a regular basis. We accept that we were misled about WMD’s in Iraq as a casus belli in 2003. We get nothing but happy talk about the economy and don’t bat an eye at government numbers that claim we have low inflation and a strong economy, even though most of us seem to have less and less money left over at the end of the month after we pay for gas, power, food and housing. The government claims no foreknowledge of 9/11 even after the Clarke memo has been in the public domain for years now. Going back in history, it’s becoming a more accepted fact that Franklin Roosevelt got the US into World War II by ignoring forewarning of the Pearl Harbor attack. Winston Churchill, that icon of the 20th century, seems to have pulled all the necessary strings that allowed the Lusitania to be intentionally sunk which dragged the US into World War I, with collusion from people in the US government.

We see all of these issues, realize that we have been lied to on a regular basis, yet we don’t ever do anything about it. It’s said that we get the officials we deserve, and George Bush has been regularly documented as being one of the most ‘uncurious’ elected officials ever. He seems disinterested in anything the conflicts with his worldview. In a simlar vein, Americans these days seem to have little to no interest in understanding how the world works these days. How many people understand the economy, or how gasoline makes it into our gas tanks, or where our food comes from? As long as the shelves at the boxmart are full, most people couldn’t care where the stuff comes from, who made it at dirt-cheap wages, or where we’d find the goods in question if the stores stopped selling them.

This lack of curiosity extends to our media consumption. International news is conveniently fitted into a 3 minute window during the nightly local news, and that’s about all that many people know about the world. It’s the same thing with politics, the economy and pretty much everything else other than sports & entertainment. Knowing that, why would it be hard to believe that there is a class of people in the world that takes advantage of this? Most of the major media is concentrated in the hands of a few large coporations, and the ‘hard news reporting’ they do almost never upsets a major advertiser of theirs.

With that in mind, I return to the idea of conspiracies. You need to believe in them to a certain degree just to follow peak oil. The idea that we’ll soon be reaching the point where we can’t suck oil out of the ground any faster, and that that fact is being ignored by most governments and the media, can be seen as a classic conspiracy all on it’s own. And from there, it’s easy to see others… the question is, how far do you go? What do you believe, and what don’t you believe?

Do you believe that the media controls what we see to shape public opinion?

Do you believe that the war in Iraq is all about oil?

Do you believe that the World Bank is a tool for the the major powers to more or less enslave the third world with their ‘loans?’

Do you believe Oswald acted alone? Or did the Warren Commission lie to us?

Do you believe that there’s something fishy about 9/11? That the government isn’t telling us the whole truth? This is a particularly sticky wicket for us, since many peak oilers are also heavily into the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement. While this whole line of reasoning is hard for me to accept, consider the words of a former assistant secretary of the Treasury from the Reagan years, and a former opinion editor for the Wall Street Journal.

Do you believe that the elite and our government are heavily involved in secret societies, pedophilia/ritual abuse, and/or dealings with space aliens?

Moving from one step to the next requires only a short leap of faith, but by the time you’re done, you’ve traveled quite a way out of the ordinary, and most people will think you’re totally crazy. The issue is that there’s just enough tantalizing facts floating around in the memesphere that it’s hard to totally discount everything based purely on hard evidence.

So, where do you stop? Answering this question is a something very personal, and difficult for all of us to do. If we’re going to be effective advocates for sustainability, you’ve got to figure out where you stand on a wide range of subjects, since the some of the people who’ll be attracted to the issues at hand will have strong, sometimes incoherent theories about all of these things and more.

Griffin’s book made me convinced for a while that there was a massive, sinister movement that’s been running for decades to make us all slaves of the moneyed elite. I’ve backed off that now that I’ve had some time to digest the facts a bit more, but there’s still enough evidence of something going on behind the scenes to make we wonder. To use a cliché, it’s like that scene from the Matrix… do you take the red pill, or the blue one? It’s become obvious to me that the real ways the world works are different from what we’re told on TV. The question that remains before me is in figuring out what is disinformation, and what’s not. The more I think I’ve figured things out, the more I realize that my quest for knowledge has just begun. Negotiating the minefield of secrets, half-truths, crackpot theories and disinformation will just make the journey longer and more difficult, which is probably why most people give up.

More on Government Leadership & Energy

It’s politically popular for both parties to prattle on about reducing our dependence on foreign oil right now. Both sides are seeing that our current adventures in the Middle East are bleeding the country dry, stretching our armed forces (Army & Marines, at least) to near the breaking point, and really solving nothing when it comes to our energy problem. Instead of offering any real debate on the issue, or (god forbid) actually offering solutions, they just kick out the usual techno-fix ideas about ethanol, tar sands, deepwater oil, heavy oil, oil shale, etc. Why don’t these jokers ever want to really talk about solutions? My guess is because the truth is unpalatable to both business and the average citizen.

Ending our addiction on oil means more than just buying a hybrid/flex fuel vehicle. The systems we depend on for living all are based around oil. You like fresh produce from Chile in the middle of winter? It’s flown or trucked in from the far side of the planet. We’ve outsourced most of our manufacturing jobs, so the stuff we buy is shipped from overseas. We burn tremendous amounts of oil in the growing and processing of our foodstuffs. Our houses are designed to be heated and cooled by fossil fuels, either directly (natural gas/heating oil/propane) or indirectly (electricity from coal, natural gas, etc). Without it, most houses would be unlivable for parts of the year.

Our dependence on car culture is also bankrupting us. The average highway in the USA costs between $1 million and $5 million per mile to construct. A single traffic signal can cost between $100,000 and $150,000 to install. This doesn’t even include maintenance costs for repaving, fixing potholes, bridge work, etc. Yet politicians are quite happy to tout their ability to bring in federal highway dollars and other such projects while rail transport and other forms of public transportation usually are neglected. How is this ending our dependence on oil?

We’re now reaching the point where our road networks are so far-flung that we’re having trouble paying for their upkeep. Repair projects keep getting pushed out due to lack of funding, yet we continue to build residential communities farther and farther away from the business centers of our region. How is this ending our dependence on oil?

The real solutions will involve admitting that our allocation of massive amounts of money on suburban and exurban infrastructure have been misguided, and that we will need to re-engineer our basic patterns of living. Here’s the speech on energy I’d love to see a real candidate make:

My fellow citizens, there has been much discussion of energy and how our growing dependence on all forms of energy, but especially petroleum, is hobbling our great nation. Are we running out of oil? No, but the oil that is left will be more expensive to produce, and we are facing increased competition for oil from the developing nations of the world. While there is plenty of oil left, we seem to be reaching the maximum threshold for the amount we can produce at any one time, and it’s not enough to keep all of the consumers of the world happy. This leaves us with two choices.

The first choice is to continue living our life the way we have been and face the consequences: We’ll keep paying more and more for gasoline, natural gas, food, goods, and pretty much everything else. In order to keep the flow of oil coming in, we will need to continue to meddle in those areas of the world where the oil reserves are, and that will mean lasting military commitments and conflicts for the duration of our lifetime, as well as far into the lifetime of our children. It also means the continued risk of terrorism, and world conflict, and it will likely require true sacrifice on our part. Whether that sacrifice details compulsory military service for our children, higher taxation, rationing of essential commodities like gasoline, I don’t know. I do know, though, that we cannot continue to operate like we do now, running up huge debts for our oil dependence that we will force our children and grandchildren to pay off. This form of generational debt slavery cannot last indefinitely, and likely will not be tolerated by upcoming generations.

The benefit is that we will be able to live where we want and drive where we choose for a while longer. How much longer, I don’t know. Five years, perhaps? Maybe ten at the outset. After that, all bets are off.

We do have a second choice, though. We can take a serious look at how we have chosen to organize our society, identify the waste in it, and fix it. This too will require sacrifice, but it is of a different sort. While we cannot drop our dependence on oil immediately, we can start taking concrete steps to mitigate the problem.
We’ll need to live in smaller, more energy-efficient houses.

We’ll need to live closer to our workplace, we will need to build communities that promote pedestrian traffic, with local shopping areas, markets, restaurants and other services.

We will need to rethink our agricultural industry, for the massive amounts of petrochemicals we use as fertilizer and pesticide are both increasingly expensive and harmful to the soil.

We’ll need to eat more food that’s grown locally and in season.

We will need to address the one topic that no-one wants to discuss: population. Our world’s population has grown to the size that it has due to the ‘miracle’ of artificial fertilizers boosting crop yields, even in marginal farmland. With the price of this product increasing and possibly becoming much scarcer, crop yields will drop, and the population will decline accordingly. Whether that happens by conscious choice or by bloodshed is up to us. It is time for us to behave like the mature adults we claim to be and start discussing this difficult subject before it solves itself.

We have two paths ahead of us. Both contain sacrifice, but only one shows us a way forward. I hope that all of you will take these words to heart and vote accordingly this fall.”

I don’t have a future as a speechwriter, I know. Still, I’d really enjoy seeing a candidate show the intestinal fortitude needed to start seriously talking about the issues that are awaiting us a decade or two down the line. It’s not just about peak oil. That’s just one piece of the puzzle.