226 comments on DrumBeat: June 9, 2007
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226 comments on DrumBeat: June 9, 2007
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When Zimbabwe used to be Rhodesia, it was the second most prosperous nation in Africa.
Yes, it was a white ruled (racist?) nation at that time, but even the non-whites back then had a far better life style than they do today.
Even though it is definitely not "Politically Correct" to ask, I have to wonder if Zimbabwe were turned back over to white rule how would it affect it's short and long term prosperity for all the people of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe?
Ie., it it really all energy problems or are most of the problems simply really lousy (lack of ) leadership? Or, along another vein, what would it take to get good "majority rule" leadership comparable to what they had in Rhodesia?
Maybe if we can examine these types of things on an academic level without all the usual name calling, political correctness, flaming, and other counter productive comments we might be able to figure out better ways to help people all around the globe to achive better lives.
Anyone care to comment on positive things from the Rhodesian leadership that could be transfered over successfully to the current majority rule to improve living conditions for all the people in Zimbabwe? And what would be the means to transfer the positive things? How could you eliminate the leanings towards bad governments like they currently have and bring about a government that would be able to significantly improve life in Zimbabwe?
There are a LOT more problems than just high priced oil in Zimbabwe that need to be remedied. Please people, lets hear some positive things that can/could be done.
The reason Zimbabwe has collapsed is entirely because of Robert Mugabe. He confiscated land from white farmers, and gave it to political cronies, as part of a "reallocation" of land. Problem is the recipients have no desire or aptitude to farm the land, and food production has plummeted. Once productive farmland has been left to go wild. Without exports of food, they have no foreign currency, and can't import anything (including oil). The economy has effectively collapsed.
Zimbabwe provides an illustratation of what happens when an economy collapses for those who lack imagination, but none of it has anything to do with Peak Oil.
Hello BobCousins,
Thxs for responding.
Your Quote: "Zimbabwe provides an illustration of what happens when an economy collapses for those who lack imagination, but none of it has anything to do with Peak Oil."
I believe Zimbabwe provides a good example of the long term problems every country will need to solve as we all go postPeak:
1. The decline of Zim under Mugabe is a nerve-wracking parallel to a 25-year postPeak decline in fossil fuels, Olduvai Gorge Theory, and WT's Exportland Model. What will other leaders learn from this disaster? Seek the same policies of corruption and power consolidation, or pursue full-on Peakoil Outreach?
2. Mugabe's term in power is very representative of a long-term drought such as what scientists predict for the SW US and Australia. Law of Diminishing Returns, or Receding Horizons, Liebig's Law, MPP, Tainterian Collapse of carrying-capacity, and other concepts leap to my mind.
3. Mugabe's term in power is very symbolically similar to a 25 year Kunstlerian suburbia campaign. The proficient farmers were driven off the land, the new landowners were inept farmers, but at least they have not paved it over with asphalt, strip malls, and McMansions. Yet.
But it is no different in terms of the loss of productive food-growing lands. Zim can go to relocalized permaculture at a much faster speed and lower energy cost than most of the US. That greatly worries me for the future violence levels that we might see here in the USA. Compare agricultural labor force %'s between US and Zim.
4. Yes, Zim's Mugabe showed a great lack of imagination and understanding of Peakoil. Mitigation, shifting to wise social planning, and not practising Peakoil Outreach was his great failure. Has the US done any better since Pres. Carter's Sweater Speech of 1977? Recall that this was even before Mugabe took the reins of power in 1983.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Peak oil is one of this eras big hammers but not every problem is a nail.
As the saying is Africa goes:
"The worse thing that happened is when the white men came--
The second worse is when they left---"
We need to quit killing leaders like Lumumba over economic interests,
or we will end up with leaders like Robert M---
It is tough being at the very end of the exploitation line, as you get screwed the most.
A big problem has been those secret numbered bank accounts in some countries which allow corrupt politicians to raid government treasuries and take long vacations and early retirements in Switzerland or the Carribean. Too much foreign aid has been given to large projects that will turn a profit for the donating countries. Multinational corporations have relied on bribery and a supply of black market arms as the way business is done in Africa. All those dictatorships would never have happened if it wasn't profitable for 1st world business interests. When you get down to the nubs business doesn't like all the rules and regulations that democracies generate. Businesses are run like dictatorships and they prefer governments that operate like businesses.
It may be that the Westphalian nation-state template just doesn't fit for Africa. It does not necessarilly fit all that well anywhere, even in Europe (where it is in the process of being extensively modified), but it is especially ill-suited in Africa.
Absolutely spot on, the crisis in Zimbabwe has next to nothing to do with PO - it is almost exclusively down to the decisions taken by a meglomaniac despot. I might also add that pieces on ' power shortage in X country', 'diesel crisis in Y country' in reference to African countries which are immediately held up as evidence for PO induced disaster have, in all probability more to do with localised and short term mismanagement etc of the supply line. As a consequence you seldom see follow up pieces - for example a month ago or so ago all was supposidly doom and disaster in Senegal with fuel running out etc. So why hasnt Senegal collapsed in the interim? Probably because some corrupt official did the monthly import manifest correctly this time. I contend if folk are looking at Africa for their PO doomer porn they are looking too early - as I pointed out in the most recent UN/OECD survey only 4 African countries had growth rates of 1% or less, and one of them was Zimbabwe. The average growth rate was 5% plus, and even the vast majority of the non oil producing nations were showing growth rates which were higher than those seen in the 1990s. PO will no doubt eventually knock the stuffing out of Africa but there is precious little evidence of it happening yet - unless someone wants to show me African growth figures are contracting?
Remember that economic growth rates include population growth, which is still very high in Africa---and this is certainly a Peak Oil issue.
It's another reason USA GDP rates are persistently higher than Europe's. This isn't a result of some triumph of hypercapitalism over social democratic socialism---it's just more people.
It's why you can go to Old Europe and Japan which despite apparently 'anemic' growth rates in the business press, have obviously widely prosperous and widely shared living standards.
andyh,
News from Africa is very thinly covered by the MSM, and not much better by the internet. How do we know what's really happening in Senegal? We can't even get reliable news from Iran, a country with several hundred thousand of its emmigrants in the US.
Andy, you've also taken biased reports for the truth in reguards to Zimbabe. I'm not supporting their president or his economic policies, just saying we are not getting the whole story, but instead the story from ex-colonialists who are bitter because they were'nt allowed to keep their stranglehold on the gold and diamonds, sort of like Cuba and their pissed off plantation owners and mafia in Miami.They'd love you to think that things are terrible and anti-capitalist down there, but Canadian and French oil companies and hotels are doing great. A big disconnect.
Bob - there is plenty of news about Zimbabwe in the MSM - outside of the US that is. The BBC regularly cover the situation, as do many of the UK quality dailies, so I am going to have to strongly disagree with your analysis. The Zimababwean crisis didnt just emerge in the last 6 months - its been on-going for the past decade as Mugabe changed from being a relatively benign one party state leader into something rather worse. Whichever way you cut it the correlation bewteen Mugabe's 'land reforms', attack on political opponents etc and the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy is rather tight I would say. I confess to having more than a passing interest in the area having lived for a time in Zambia (next door) and having travelled reasonably extensively in the area.
Just to go back again to Africa in general - I think there is a general misapprehension about how many of these states function, both now (and in the past). Thus as I mentioned above we are now getting any number of reports in the DrumBeat about failures in power supply etc, and these are being held up as evidence for PO collapse. Well they might be - and then again what most dont seem to realise is that Africa has always been like that to some extent. Power outages happened when I was there, and back then PO wasn't even in the frame. To give an example Westexas (and dont get me wrong I think he writes brilliantly) often quotes from a WSJ piece of last year which describes the implosion of Guinea and cites this as evidence of PO induced damage.
Well as this piece from October 2004 makes clear Guinea was already encountering electrical black outs and a host of economic problems as early as 2003:
http://www.afrol.com/articles/14446
The piece elaborates on numerous problems the country was facing back then (economic mismanagement again rears its ugly head). Now back in 2003 oil prices were only starting to get motoring, so what was causing the power outages then? Answer - the same things that cause a great many outages elsewhere in Africa.
I have no doubt that PO will do untold damage to Africa (and elsewhere); I just think that so far that damage is nowhere near as obvious (yet) as some folk are trying to make out.
andyh,
I suspect you're right. Our minds, our intellect always to make connections, especially ones that support a cherished opinion. We operate in a vacuum of real information on African countries and consequently put our own interpretation on the facts, whether reasonable or not.
A good example of this is Senegal as presented on TOD. I did a little research, and the suppliers of crude are unwilling to extend them more credit for oil, they are an economic basket case. Its sort of peak related, prices would be lower and more stable if crude were more plentiful, but the fact is they can't pay their bill and everybody wants cash from a bankrupt nation.
This doen't mean I think that this isn't related to peak oil. but its going to take a couple of dozen countries having similar problems while the rest of the world struggles for crude supplies before I will be convinced their shortages are peak related.
The old saying is "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, then its a duck". But this assumes that the person making the judgement has observed the hypothetical duck quite a bit, plus several other ducks for comparison. This is the equivalent of a person following the revelation of duckhood concluding that duck must therefore sell insurance for one of Warren Buffet's companies.
Senegal is an economic basket case. With a low per capita income, around $800, how can they expect to get even, let alone ahead? Make investments? Lift themselves up by their bootstraps?
Lets try just one more thought experiment. Go put on your cowboy boots, grab the straps and lift! You'll notice that you aren't getting uplifted, at least in earth's gravity. Its impossible to do by ypurself. And thats the conumdrum that Senegal, Rhodesia, and Guinea all face.
Hello Jon Kutz,
Thxs for responding. If Mugabe had built a bicycle and wheelbarrow, along with other essential biosolar handtools, for every Zimbabwean before his economy collapsed--I think that would have been a good start. Community solar-heated baths and laundry would have been a big help tool. At a bare minimum: he should have established countrywide Humanure Recycling infrastructure to prevent sewage overflows and potable water pollution. I hope other leaders see the wisdom in early Peakoil Outreach and mitigation. Time will tell.
I am trying my best to avert a global machete' moshpit.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Do you realy mean that his failure were to not buy the right stuff before collapsing the economy?
Zimbabwes niche in a post pak oil world should be as a prosperous food and biofuel exporter plus various export goods made by the people not needed in farming. There is no reason for peak oil to make them into a basket case.
Mr Kutz
Perhaps the site should get a new masthead motto: Discussions About Our Energy and Our White Future.
If your sort of drivel, and the fact that it is unremarked, makes me not want to be here (I am by the way Swedish/German/Irish American) imagine how it plays for persons of non-white ancestry. Essentially the site is cutting itself off from the bulk of the planet. Fine.
On the other hand, your sarcastic suggestion amounts to saying that no black leadership of Zimbabwe could be as bad as the white leadership was. In other words, racism is the worst possible thing (even mass eviction and starvation of "human trash" isn't as bad as the rulers' skin tone being too white).
This is what happens when Political Correctness attempts to stamp out Inconvenient Truths. I'm sure a lot of Zimbabweans would beg to differ with you, and if it takes people with weak or no clan or tribal loyalties to supply the kind of good business administration and government leadership that keep e.g. rampant cronyism and tribal warfare from breaking out, a pale-complected government may be the lesser of evils. An evil to be replaced as soon as possible, of course, but with something better rather than worse.
My sarcastic suggestion implies no such thing. Political correctness has nothing to do with it. I do not tolerate the PC crowd. They would not be on this site 5 seconds.
If those who have some small insight into the future so far as it relates to Peak Oil are happy to simultaneously wallow in the most egregious racist crapola I wonder if there is a future.
My sarcastic suggestion implies no such thing. Political correctness has nothing to do with it. I do not tolerate the PC crowd. They would not be on this site 5 seconds.
If those who have some small insight into the future so far as it relates to Peak Oil are happy to simultaneously wallow in the most egregious racist crapola I wonder if there is a future.
I think Political Correctness has everything to do with it, though perhaps you don't recognize it as such (too well-internalized).
If someone makes a claim of fact about Zimbabwe, such as "The government, the economy and even many freedoms were better under white rule than they have become under Robert Mugabe", this can be debated on its merits. It is not racist if it is true, and recognizing its truth opens avenues for debate about ways to prevent the likes of a Robert Mugabe and his cronies from obtaining the power to reduce a country to ruin.
That's exactly what Mr. Kutz did above:
Your response was to sarcastically suggest that TOD should be subtitled "Discussions About Our Energy and Our White Future." Accusations of racism (even veiled) are one of the shibboleths of P.C.; it is a tactic to shut down debate and exile people whose questions must be banned because they cannot be answered without breaking out of the thought trap of P.C. dogma. ("Racist" in this context is actually an accusation of heresy.)
I get the heretic label from those holding to right-wing orthodoxies as well. I wear "heretic" as a badge of honor, so go ahead, devalue your orthodoxy's main slur until it's meaningless.
Forgetting all the rubbish you impute to me and cutting to the chase, yes, Kutz made that obscene remark about "lifestyles".
Know what a deathstyle is? Blacks had no right to live, no protection for their lives, nothing, under white rule. Rhodesians killed blacks for sport and Kutz wants to talk lifestyle. And you defend him. Screw off.
Does anyone outside of Mugabe's circle have that now?
Is the current 80% unemployment and starvation better than that? Further, was it legal to do so, or just hard to get justice? (US whites also killed blacks for sport, but it wasn't legally sanctioned even if some got away with it. We have made much progress in that area without someone like Mugabe rising to power—yet.)
I defend his right to raise the issue. Closing down discussion with slurs just guarantees that it will happen again, because no lessons will have been learned.
OTOH...perhaps it is unremarked because ignoring a behavior is the best way to extinguish it.
Or, as I've noticed my liberal aquaintances do, unremarked/ignored behavior/statements are the best way to not think about them.
Just liberals? Be honest.
In any case, I've thought a lot about it...and decided that for the most part, it's not really on-topic for TOD. Especially when the problem is intentionally phrased in a manner that is likely to generate heat, not light.
Anyway, I find stories like Zimbabwe and Pakistan interesting, not because they are necessarily signs of peak oil (though high fuel prices sure haven't helped), but because they give us a glimpse of how we are likely to react when energy grows scarce. That is why I post them, not because I think the problems are peak oil related.
That is why I posted the Canadian story about the area cut off by a flood. Obviously, that was an act of nature, not oil scarcity. But the effects might be a glimpse of our oil-scarce future.
just liberals and neocon clowns......bush, cheney, rummy, condi, wolffy, fieth, etal (et many), oh yeah the puppetmaster kkkarl rove.
Just liberals. They're the only ones who shout me down with tales of oil co.s conspiracies. Conservative types try to convince me benignly, "knowing" they've the upper hand.
Benign neglect as Saint Reagan called it reinforces racism.
Behavior is "extinguished" when those who display it cannot survive.
You, Leanan, are the best of us. It makes me sad that you live amongst the complacent and arrogant who happily proclaim "Me? Racist? You must be a PC liberal." They have nothing - nothing - to contribute. You do. Goodbye.
There is nothing that can be done because the guys that used to run the country are not going back.