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58 comments on ASPO VII - final thoughts
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58 comments on ASPO VII - final thoughts
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I was in Spain for the month of October, mostly driving: Madrid, Alicante, Granada, Cordoba, Sevilla, Merida, Barcelona, Madrid, Aranjuez, Segovia, Madrid. I talked with taxi drivers, hotel workers and owners, shop workers and owners, tourists from all over the world, and a business owner relative who knows the economy of Spain, Europe, and the world well. I learned much as I traveled, including much reading of the "International Herald Tribune," "El Pais," "Times of London," "Finacial Times," and the "Wall Street Journal," as well as viewing CNBC, CNN, and the local TV news.
Building construction in Spain has almost ceased and construction cranes stand idle. Capital is scarce. No amount of government priming will change that. Few new solar panels and wind turbines will be added to the thousands in use. Commercial centers, factories, and offices are all slowing down and many will close in the months ahead. Spain will soon have spare electric power. The large number of tourists on the streets is a hold over from the pre-recession economy. Tourism is declining rapidly. This is like much of Europe and the U.S.
Global oil production has been plateaued since early 2005. So, the oil flow rate has been much the same, but now more oil is consumed by China, India, and the oil producing nations. Europe, the U.S., Japan, Australia, etc. are consuming less. Peak Oil is here, regardless of the most recent U.S. Energy Information Agency data which show some possible recent minor increase. When oil production is the same after 4 years of trying hard to increase it, we are at Peak Oil.
Very soon oil production will begin to decline, probably about right now (2012 at the latest, according to independent studies). Unless they are transported to the Middle East, China, or India, those idled construction cranes in the U.S. and Europe will remain idle.
Despite a media clamor in Spain for more wind and solar investment, it won't happen. Soon all of the capital will go to subsidizing unemployment (currently at about 15% and rising rapidly) and to public works in order to employ people. The manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines produces few jobs. As soon as oil production begins to decline, global recession with devastate the global economy and capital and government revenues will evaporate.
Luis de Sousa is right, we need to examine solar and wind power. No one has a real plan on how solar/wind will move tractors and combines, transport food and goods, or fertilize crops. Showing a photo of an electric powered tractor, truck, or train or saying we can do it is not a plan. What would the infrastructure for the electric economy look like? Where would the trillions of Euros in capital come from? How can governments pay for it when people are out of work and governments have little revenue? Where will the oil come from to manufacture, transport, and maintain the electric economy? Where will people get the money to buy electric vehicles when they are out of work and have little trade in value on their gasoline/diesel powered cars?
How can we maintain the power grid without oil? When the highways fail from a lack of maintenance, there won't be replacement parts for the power grid, wind turbines, solar panels. As I cruised the highways I saw some huge transformers and gigantic wind turbine blades being transported by trucks. Everything depends on trucks moving on the highways. Most food, goods, and people in Europe move by trucks, not trains. But like the construction cranes, those trucks will one day be idle -- and there goes food distribution, the power grid and everything. Without electric power, almost nothing mechanical or modern functions -- lights, sanitation, water purification and distribution, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, pumping of diesel and gasoline, building systems, elevators, communications, emergency services, etc.
Shall we plan and prepare for the real future: a world without oil and without electric power. Or, shall we continue to avoid reality, dream about what will never happen, and waste time, effort, and capital on illusions?
well, yes... avoiding reality...
the reality is, global power resides in people who think they have power to create their own reality, and that reality of theirs just happens to include a project to grab control of the world's remaining oil at gunpoint, the better to achieve their "benevolent global hegemony".
nevermind how many millions of lives, how much talent, how many trillions of dollars and how many natural resources will be wasted in this project... and all those things ---the wasted lives, talent, money, and natural resources--- should have been spent on transitioning, as best we can, to a sustainable way of life...
.
the first step in regaining some control of our future resides in our facing the truth, and telling each other the truth.
too bad both are politically impossible, isnt it? ...but as decent human beings, we must try.
for example...
none of this is my fault.
Thanks for that flickervertigo.
but I wouldn't worry as I'm sure they will all come clean and start telling the truth any day now.
In case you didn't notice my tanker truck of sarcanol just arrived.
Cheers
you must have tapped into one of those abiotic sarcanol wells...
the url in the post above about kristol taking $100,000 from enron is obsolete. try this instead..
This isn't meant to be a political comment. However, I think we need to accept that we live in a society where the 'market' is sovereign and effectively rules and controls the direction and allocation of resources.
I don't believe we have a 'free market' system at all. The state and the market have effectively merged. The 'bailout' to save financial capitalism from total collapse, leading to a Great Depression, illustrates this forcefully.
What is the market for exactly? The market is there to control and channel profits/power from the majority to a minority who disproportionally benefit from this misallocation of societies resources. The very essence of the market is not to respond to the needs and interests of society, but to exploit society for the benefit of the minority, those at the apex of the market pyramid.
The mechanisms, flows, signals and dispositions of the market, now more than ever, not only don't reflect the desire or interests of society as a whole, they actually work in oppostion and are contradictory to the interests of society.
Before this goes completely off the edge into esoterica and philosophy, I'll put the breaks on, as this is really only stractching the surface of large and very complex issues.
Simply put, I believe we need to find a way to 'reform' the market fundamentally, to 'democratize' it, so that it functions for the benefit of the majority of citizens over the long term - let's call it 'neo-merchantilism' shall we?
It's not as if the 'free market' really exists, or existed. It's over. That period is over. Today the state has become part of the market system for everyone to see. But is this intervention for the benefit of ordinary people or for the 'financial aristocracy? We are putting the financial elite on taxpayer welfare for billions, but what about the poor and those who are losing their homes and jobs?
The current 'financial crisis' is analogous to the peak oil crisis and the environmental crisis, in many ways, they are both part of the economic/civilizational crisis we face. Attending to these challenges, put simply, requires us to confront and control the 'dictatorship of the market' and, unfortunately, its servant/protector/enabler, the State. Obviously forcing through real democratic control of these institions isn't going to be as easy task. I suppose I'm taking about a form of social revolution here, given our limited timescale, as the challenges we face as a society grow bigger with each passing day.
Good point Writerman.
All of what we face in this crisis will be exaggerated by the financial system we have organized ourselves under. To have to ask, where will the money come from? at a time such as this strikes me as ludicrous to the extreme.
We understand resource constraints yet we allow single individuals accumulate and consume enough to support a small nation.
Its time for economics to earn its way by evenly allocating scarce resources. Kind of a tough love economics that does away with the fallacy of “stored wealth”.
If we can not change this childish system, if we insist on using monetary means to decide who lives and who dies then nobody wins and it WILL lead to mushroom clouds.
Trouble is anyone of us, even most here with any amount of stored wealth will go to great lengths, even automatic weapons, to protect it.
Me I have spent all my money on community and local production, on living wages for all involved and fair price for local produced goods and services even though it means twice the price or higher than somewhere else. So yes I’ll go first.
Hi soup,
re: "So yes I’ll go first."
My guess is for a better outcome as a result of your decisions.
Localization, higher wages, "bargaining" up...practical results for resiliency, physically and socially.
I would ask anyone to read the final couple of paragraphs of cjwirth's post above, and tell me if you think you can sell that message to the business leaders, the politicians, the intellectuals (the real ones) or the public of any developed or developing nation, the message of a return to a Gothic world "lit only by fire". A message of complete surrender, a messege of the end of all modernity, all development, all technical science, a message of the abandonment of any advance. Tell me if the "peak aware" community can be taken as anyting but an apocalyptic cult if you try to carry that message to the world.
Perhaps true catastrophists would be best to join primitive monastic orders and live a life of "contemplation" to the end of their days, because no modern human will accept the world, the "reality" as described by CJ without fighting it to the death, because for almost all of us, death is what it would mean anyway. So in fighting for a modern, humane world, we have nothing to lose.
CJ warns us against the "waste {of} time, effort, and capital on illusions?" As opposed to what? Wasting our time dreaming of living in a hovel as a serf to overlords who have some level of ambition and industriousness and will rule those who surrender with an iron hand?
Dreaming the neo-primitive green anarchist dream? The horror that cjwirth describes would be acceptable to perhaps a handful of ascetics, and even they would curse the day they made such a choice soon enough. Given that they would live a life short and brutish, they would not have much time to curse themselves for throwing in the garbage the gains made over 5 centuries, the gains made by the sacrifice of years of thought and effort of REAL humans as opposed to upright walking animals. The real MEN and WOMEN of history the real HUMANITY of of the human type have preceeded us. They seem not to be present today.
What you call a "waste", CJ, we call life.
RC
Roger, you are still obsessed with primitivism... and every time you fall in the straw man fallacy, characterising all who criticise the actual growth paradigm as "neo-primitive green anarchists".
There are many things in this world worth preserving: science and its practical applications (medicine, for instance), education, the welfare state, etc. But also there are many superfluous and stupid things, like traffic jams (something I don't think private owned electric cars are going to solve...), programmed obsolescence, "there is no tomorrow consumerism", etc, etc.
Food, shelter, energy, all of those things that make the life of a minority in the planet comfortable are in danger. I, for one, don't want to go back to the Gothic world, but I know that trying to stay in the same course without acknowledging our structural problems can lead us to this very future you are objecting.
So please do us and do yourself a favour and stop characterising proponents of a new societal and economic paradigm as primitivist extremists.
Hey Peaknik,
Yep, taking good technology to the other side is what I advise. It is easy to make penicillin, if you know how. It is easy to make an IUD, if you know how. IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW........
Here are some books to order now, because in the first emergency and they could all be gone and you can't get em later. It is called contingency planning, risk management, a stitch in 9, or Be Prepared (the Boy Scout motto).
# Antibiotic Alernative: Natural Guide to Fighting Infection and Maintaining a Healthy Immune System, Cindy L. A. Jones
# Composting Toilet System: A Practical Guide, David Del Porto
# Crisis Preparedness Handbook: Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival, Jack A. Spigarelli
# Doctors Book of Home Remedies, Series, Eds. of Prevention Mag.
# Donde no hay Dentista, Murray Dickson
# Donde no hay Doctor Para Mujeres, A. August Burns
# Donde no hay Doctor, David Werner
# Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook, Peggy Layton
# Encyclopedia of Country Living, Carla Emery
# Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, 2nd ed. Michael Murray
# Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, Steve Solomon
# Green Pharmacy, James A. Duke
# Herbal Antibiotitcs: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug Resistant Bacteria, Stephen Harrod Buhner
# Human Manure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Joseph Jenkins
# Natural Alternatives to Antibiotics, Dr. John McKenna
# New Organic Grower, Eliot Coleman
# Organic Gardner's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control, Ed. Barbara W. Ellis
# Oxford Handook of Tropical Medicine, 2nd ed., Michael Eddleston
# Practical Encyclopedia of Natural Healing, Mark Bricklin
# Rainwater Catchment Systems for Domestic Supply, John Gould
# Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardenting, Robert Rodale
# Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing, Suzanne Ashworth
# Storey's Basic Country Skills, John and Martha Storey
# The Herbal Medicine Maker's Handbook: A Home Manual, James Green
# Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers and Ponds, Art Ludwig
# Where there is No Dentist, Murray Dickson
# Where there is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook, David Werner
# Where Women have No Doctor: A Health Guide for Women, A. August Burns
# Wilderness Medicine: Beyond First Aid, William W. Fogey, MD
Anyone got any other suggestions along these lines???
Cheers,
Cliff Wirth
Public health, the internet - the great library.
It seems to me we're past peak. The time of questions about "if" is way past. I'm finding myself much more interested in what kind of solutions can be put in place. Others in the thread write about all the impediments. They are innumerable and cannot be overcome. But they will be overcome. I've recently done some back-casting exercises - starting from 50 years ahead and working back. The impediments were overcome; it was a matter of rationalizing them away in some form. An exercise in fiction. At first.
Plans need to go on the table. Those plans require vision. The analysis of where we are is important, but so is the analysis of where we need to be at some point ahead in time. It's a discontinuity - so we can't take what is and project to anything useful. Those who refuse to recognize the discontinuity are wasting precious resources.
Try this exercise: it's 50 years from now and you are talking to your teenage grand*child. What do you see around you? Tell her what you did to make the transition happen, what was your role and what were the obstacles.
cfm in Gray, ME
Scroll down to Electrification of Transportation and click on the MP3 file for a one hour interview with Alan Drake and a VP of DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit):
http://www.kera.org/audio/think.php
Hi Westexas,
I listened to the stuff on electric transport for North Texas.
I am a proponent of mass transit. I wrote an article on transportation in the Mexico City metro area:
http://uar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/2/155
The article is still required reading for a number of university courses on urban planning and transportation policy.
Conclusion: mass transit is the way to go.
But, there are difficult problems facing mass transit in the U.S., as indicated in STUCK IN TRAFFIC by Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution. The U.S. suburbs did not grow up around mass transit lines, but rather around auto use. As a consequence, U.S. metro areas are large and dispersed, and transportation is usually from many places in the metro area to many other places without any pattern, such as radial lines from the suburbs to the downtown. Also, the number of passengers using mass transit even in cities like New York or Chicago is just a few percent. The infrastructure investment to provide coverage would be enormous. And in most U.S. metro areas expanding mass transit means cutting through existing housing, which means political and financial obstacles to building more lines.
Cheers,
Cliff Wirth
I think it would be a mistake for people to depend on having on-demand access to the Internet. I don't believe the Internet will go down, but if the company that provides the last mile to your home goes bankrupt, it will have gone down for you.
Physical books are much better for the long term.
The following book is highly recommend by Dr. Jim Barson of ASPO Australia:
Rational Phytotherapy: A Physician's Guide to Herbal Medicine, Fifth Edition
As for Luis' comment regarding the future of ASPO (and ultimately Dennis Meadows' comment), there will be a continued need for researchers to understand how much oil is left, where it is and how to deploy it effectively. Although the initial purpose of ASPO will disappear (pinpoint the peak and educate), it could easily find a slightly different purpose that naturally follows the expertise that has been gathered thus far.
So true. When Amazon.com shuts down because they unable to access credit, or because shipping of non-essential items ceases, it will likely be too late.
It's apparent from the Amazon reader reviews that most people consider this stuff to be pure hobby. As the entire world plunges into a global recession/depression, that will soon change. The demand for these books will absolutely explode. Will publishing firms still be in business? Will distribution reach your locale? Perhaps. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Here's some of what I've purchased:
-- Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long
-- Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
-- The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control
-- Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables
-- All New Square Foot Gardening
-- The Vegetable Gardener's Bible
-- Gardening When it Counts
- Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds for Domestic Supply, Fire and Emergency Use
-- The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
-- The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book
-- Storey's Basic Country Skills: A Practical Guide to Self-Reliance
-- Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
-- Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills
-- Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash
-- Tom Brown's Guide to City and Suburban Survival
-- Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands (Vol. 1)
The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live It
Where There Is No Dentist
The Secure Home
Don't forget Where Women Have No Doctor.
I'm rather partial of my wife :-).
Matthew,
Or a cut off of oil from the Middle East could end highway use and create the emergency that exhausts the stocks of these books and bankrupts Amazon.
Everyone should be educating librarians about Peak Oil and requesting orders of these books.
As they are usually good listeners and open to new ideas, librarians are the most likely folks to take Peak Oil seriously.
When Technology Fails by Mathew Stein...sort of an encyclopedia of the other books listed.
Hi Roger,
None of us have any control over this catastrophe. This globe is moving like the Titanic at full steam. It was too late to change course even 20 years ago, and we hit the iceberg long ago.
As soon a oil production starts to decline, everything will be frozen as it is. There will be no capital, no electric economy, nor algal diesel. Soon everything will be spent on just heating homes and producing and moving food, for a time.......
You are right, few will face reality, especially politicians and leaders. I've communicated with many and they run and hide. But a few people will get some good info on what is coming and will know more about what to do. See my comments above on taking technology to the other side.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the monastic life is not for me, no siree. My plans call for the continued good life.
Cheers,
Cliff
Wow! This is rich. And demonstrates amazing prejudice and rigidity. The people you slander have much more nuance than you give them credit for.
This paragraph seems to be self-contradictory:
On the one hand, harvesting power from wind (and sun) is not supposed to produce any jobs. On the other hand, increasing cost of power from oil is supposed to devastate employment.
Well, which? If rising oil prices hurts employment, then domestic energy production will help employment.
Hi Bruce,
My take on this is that Cliff's questions, taken up one at a time, are important ones. As is yours.
As I see it, the issue is something along the lines of whether "domestic energy production" is both 1) feasible in the financial sense, and in the "energy sense" or 2) net energy return? In other words, for how long would domestic energy production help employment? Is that more the underlying issue?
Is there a way to have a functioning "all electric" economy and/or self-sustaining "electrical" infrastructure?
Some combination of grid, distributed energy, "no growth" (?)?
The material underpinnings of a non-FF working manufacture?
Design that and then work backwards to "how to get there from here?" - (Question mark?)
While, at the same time, addressing the inter-connection of population growth, consumption growth, resource limitation, preserving and expanding human rights (or cultural change).
Hi Aniya,
Here is the answer to all of your questions. When the cost of oil gets very high, soon, the U.S. will not be able to heat homes and maintain the highways. Without the highways the power grid will fail, and then nothing works, and most people in the U.S. will die of exposure, infectious diseases, dysentery, etc.
Do you see any changes coming as far a public awareness or congressional awareness of the Peak Oil catastrophe??? No. So things are moving in a certain direction and there will be no preparation for living without oil.
The first statement is misleading and the second is wrong because they ignore installing, repairing and replacing solar and wind devices. Electrical infrastructure needs maintenance, repair and replacement which can not currently be outsourced overseas. Any oil importing country will get a boost from domestic wind and solar because less money will flow out of the country to purchase crude oil. Photovoltaic and solar hot water systems installed on people's roofs reduce (or eliminate) the homeowner's electric bill or generate income. The price of photovoltaic and solar hot water systems have not yet declined from mass production. Solar hot water panels can be made easily and cheaply by a do-it-yourselfer.
As for solutions there have been many articles and comments here on TOD that discuss them, from organic gardening to electric trains. As I like to say, we need to go renewable, sustainable and environmentally friendly pronto, or we're history. The majority endlessly debate the solutions as impractical or too expensive while doing nothing. Here in the U.S., there is an attitude problem among the people and a lack of leadership.