Peak oil primer and links

1. Peak oil primer

What is Peak Oil?

Peak Oil is the simplest label for the problem of energy resource depletion, or more specifically, the peak in global oil production. Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, one that has powered phenomenal economic and population growth over the last century and a half. The rate of oil 'production', meaning extraction and refining (currently about 83 million barrels per day), has grown in most years over the last century, but once we go through the halfway point of all reserves, production becomes ever more likely to decline, hence 'peak'. Peak Oil means not 'running out of oil', but 'running out of cheap oil'. For societies leveraged on ever increasing amounts of cheap oil, the consequences may be dire. Without significant successful cultural reform, economic and social decline seems inevitable.

Why does oil peak? Why doesn't it suddenly run out?

For obvious reasons, people have extracted the easy-to-reach, cheap oil first. The oil pumped first was on land, near the surface, under pressure and light and 'sweet' and easy to refine into gasoline. The remaining oil, sometimes off shore, far from markets, in smaller fields, or of lesser quality, will take ever more money and energy to extract and refine. The rate of extraction will drop. Furthermore, all oil fields eventually reach a point where they become economically, and energetically no longer viable. If it takes the energy of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, then further extraction is pointless.

M King Hubbert - the first to predict an oil peak

In the 1950s a US geologist working for Shell, M King Hubbert, noticed that oil discoveries graphed over time, tended to follow a bell shape curve. He posited that the rate of oil production would follow a similar curve, now known as the Hubbert Curve. In 1956 Hubbert predicted that production from the US lower 48 states would peak in 1970. <1> Shell ordered Hubbert not to make his studies public, but the notoriously stubborn Hubbert went ahead and did it anyway. As it turned out, most people inside and outside the industry dismissed Hubbert's predictions. In 1970 US oil producers had never produced as much, and Hubbert's predictions were a fading memory. But Hubbert was right, US continental oil production did peak in 1970/71, although it was not widely recognized for several years and only with the benefit of hindsight.

See first chart at http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

No oil producing region neatly fits bell shaped curve exactly because production is dependent on various geological, economic and political factors, but the Hubbert Curve remains a powerful predictive tool.

So when will oil peak globally?

For about thirty years the world has been finding less oil than it has been consuming. Discovery of new oil fields peaked in the 1960s. <2> Around fifty oil producing countries have already peaked and now produce less and less oil each year, including the USA and the North Sea. <3> Hubbert's methods, and variations of them, and other methods entirely, have been used to make various projections about the global oil peak, with results ranging from 'already peaked', to the very optimistic 2035. Many of the official figures used to model oil peak such as OPEC figures, oil company data, and the USGS discovery projections can be shown to be very unreliable. <4,> Several notable scientists have attempted independent studies, most notably Colin Campbell and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO). <6>

See second chart at http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

ASPO's latest 2004 model suggests a peak of 'conventional' oil in 2005, and all oil and gas liquids in 2008. Others such as Kenneth Deffeyes <7> and A M Samsam Bakhtiari <8> have made similar or even earlier predictions, although precise predictions are difficult as much secrecy shrouds important oil and gas data.

Globally, natural gas <9> is also expected by some to peak within decades, although its affects are more localized due to the added expense of transporting liquefied natural gas (LNG). Both British and North American natural gas may have peaked already. <10>

What does this mean?

Our industrial societies and our financial systems were built on the assumption of constant growth, growth based on ever more readily available cheap fossil fuels. Oil in particular is the most convenient and multi-purposed of these fossil fuels. Oil currently accounts for about 40% of the world's commercial energy, <11> and about 90% of transportation energy. <12> Oil is so important that the peak will have vast implications across the realms of geopolitics, lifestyle, agriculture and economic stability.

But it's just oil - there are other fossil fuels, other energy sources, right?

To evaluate other energy sources it's important to understand the concepts of embodied energy <13> and Net Energy or ERoEI - Energy Return on Energy Invested <14>. One of the reasons our economies use ever increasing quantities of oil is precisely because oil has a comparatively high ERoEI. Historically, for every barrel of oil used for exploration and drilling of oil, 100 barrels were found. This was an unprecedentedly high ratio, although these days the ratio is far lower. Certain alternative energy 'sources' actually have ERoEI ratios of less than one, such as photovoltaics (arguably) and most methods of industrially producing biodiesel and ethanol. That is, when all factors are considered, you probably need to invest more energy into the process than you get back. Hydrogen <15>, touted by many as a seamless solution, is actually an energy carrier, but not an energy source - it must be produced using an energy source such as nuclear, so while it may or may not be a convenient store of energy, it's Net Energy will be negative. Some alternatives such as wind and hydro have better ERoEI, however their potential expansion may be limited by physical factors. Even in combination it may not be possible to gather from renewable sources of energy anything like the amount of energy we are used to. For certain tasks, such as air travel, no other energy source can readily be substituted for oil. Alternative energy infrastructures require long periods of investment, on the scale of decades, to be widely implemented. We may be already leaving the period of cheap energy before we have begun seriously embarking on this task.

2. Links

Where can I get more information?

Several articles already published on this site provide good introductions to this topic:

"The coming global energy crunch". A great introductory article by Aaron Naparstek

"Plan War and the Hubbert Oil Curve", an interview with Richard Heinberg

"The Petroleum Plateau" by Richard Heinberg on the current plateau in world oil production.

"Debunking the mainstream media's lies about oil" by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

"The oil we eat" by Richard Manning looks at modern agricultures' dependence on fossil fuels


There are some great introductory websites like:

Wolf at the Door: A Beginner's Guide to Oil Depletion - available in French, Polish and English.

Life After The Oil Crash - a question and answer style introduction.

Peak Oil Center - a very concise introduction.


Some excellent original media about peak oil is being generated at:

Global Public Media

From The Wilderness Publications


Research and reference articles can be found at:

ASPO - original research from The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

DieOff.org - an alarming but scholarly collection of research


More energy news:

Crisis Energetica - in Spanish

More links, and books to read: An excellent list of links is maintained at
www.dynamiclist.com/?worldview/peakoil


3. What can be done?

Many people are working on partial solutions at various different levels, but there probably is no cluster of solutions which do not involve some major changes in lifestyles for the global affluent. Peak Oil presents the potential for quite catastrophic upheavals, but also some more hopeful possibilities, such as a return to simpler and more community orientated lifestyles.

Peak Oil Action is a grass roots awareness raising network helping people meet up and discuss peak oil. Join or start a meet-up in your neighborhood.
www.peakoilaction.org
oilawareness.meetup.com

The Post Carbon Institute Outposts. The PCI is a think tank devoted to exploring the implications of energy descent. They write, "the most important initiative of the Post Carbon Institute is working with groups of concerned citizens to prepare their community for the Post Carbon Age. These groups are Outposts in the sense that they are community-based extensions of the Post Carbon Institute; they operate autonomously yet receive guidance and electronic infrastructure from the Institute. Outposts work cooperatively in their local community to put theory about living with less hydrocarbons into practice while sharing knowledge and experiences with the global network of outposts."
www.postcarbon.org

The Community Solution to Peak Oil. "The Community Solution is a program of Community Service, Inc. Community Service is dedicated to the development, growth and enhancement of small local communities. We envision a country where the population is distributed in small communities that are sustainable, diverse and culturally sophisticated."
www.communitysolution.org

Permaculture: David Holmgren, one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept has written a book called Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability which deals explicitly with the peak oil problem. Permaculture principles work towards re-designing cultural and agricultural practices for an energy descent world. By doing a course locally or with a bit of study, you can start applying permaculture principles on a suburban or rural plot.
www.permaculture.org.au
www.holmgren.com.au

Local Currencies and Steady State Economics:
Local Currencies: Richard Douthwaite, a 'reformed economist', has proposed a number of alternative monetary systems to deal with energy decline and the associated monetary crises which might arise post-peak. Local currencies like LETS are in operation around the planet already (although LETS itself is somewhat problematic). Experiment now with local currencies to help survive economic crises.
www.feasta.org
www.communitycurrency.org/resources.html

Steady State Economics: The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) promote alternatives to the ecological insanity of growth based economics. Read their position paper at www.steadystate.org/PositiononEG.html

Intentional Communities: Intentional Community (IC) is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives and other related projects and dreams ... ICs represent one of the sanest ways of dealing with energy peak.
www.ic.org
gen.ecovillage.org
www.cohousing.org

The Uppsala Protocol is an ethical global political framework for sharing the world's remaining oil reserves more equitably than free market forces would allow, to avoid resource wars and profiteering. Help promote it:
www.isv.uu.se/uhdsg/UppsalaProtocol.html

Lobbying: Lobby governments to spend now on renewable energy and improving agricultural practices. Many facts are summarized in the following 'convince sheet' by Bruce Thomson: greatchange.org/ov-thomson,convince_sheet.html

Online Discussions:

Got questions? Want to talk with like-minded people? See these links:

www.peakoil.com - online news and forum

www.peakoilaction.org - meet people on and offline

groups.yahoo.com/group/EnergyResources - original peak oil focused email list

groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpy2 - a more solutions focused list

groups.yahoo.com/group/EnergyRoundTable - a group emphasizing discussion

There are numerous local mailing lists too, many on yahoo can be found at this link:
groups.yahoo.com/search?query=peak%20oil&ss=1

Notes:

<1> "The Coming Global Energy Crunch: A $2 gallon of gas is just the beginning" by Aaron Naparstek, New York Press (June 01 2004) http://www.nypress.com/17/22/news&columns/AaronNaparstek.cfm

<2> "Facts & Data", Peak Oil Center http://members.home.nl/peakoil/facts.html

<3> "Oil experts warn global crude supplies could peak by 2010" by Bruce Stanley, The Detroit News (May 25 2002) http://www.detnews.com/2002/business/0205/25/business-498932.htm

<4> Presentation at the Technical University of Clausthal by C J Campbell (December 2000)
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/de/lecture.html

<5> A Reply by C J Campbell to "Global Petroleum Reserves - A View to the Future" by Thomas S Ahlbrandt and J McCabe, United States Geological Survey, SolarQuestR iNet News Service
(December 01 2002) http://www.hubbertpeak.com/news/article.asp?id=3659&ssectionid=0

<6> http://peakoil.net/

<7> "A Geologist Looks at the Coming Crisis" http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/

<8> http://energybulletin.net/news.php?author=Bakhtiari&keywords=&amp;amp;cat=0&action=search

<9> "The Coming Natural Gas Crisis" http://planetforlife.com/gascrisis/index.html

<10> http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/people/matt_simmons

<11> http://www.iea.org/stats/files/selstats/cwtpese.htm

<12> http://www.copad.org/

<13> http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs31.htm

<14> http://www.oilanalytics.org/netentop.html

<15> http://energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=173


Your feedback is welcome.

Last updated 21 December 2004

http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Oil firms fund climate change 'denial'

by David Adam, science correspondent

The Guardian (January 27 2005)

Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.

Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that "a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change" is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.

Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.

Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute.

Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that claimed to "undermine" climate change claims. The Marshall institute received GBP 51,000 from ExxonMobil for its "global climate change programme" in 2003 and an undisclosed sum this month.

Prof May's warning comes as British scientists, in the journal Nature, show that emissions of carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say the average temperature could rise 11 degrees celsius, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were limited to the levels expected in 2050.

David Frame, who coordinated the climate prediction experiment, said: "If the real world response were anywhere near the upper end of our range, even today's levels of greenhouse gases could already be dangerously high".

Emission limits such as those in the Kyoto protocol would hit oil firms because the bulk of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuel products.

Prof May writes that during the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change. A Scientific Alliance spokesman said today's meeting was sponsored but funders did not influence policies. ExxonMobil said it was not involved.

One adviser is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, who is linked to the Marshall Institute. In 1998 Dr Baliunas co-wrote an article that argued for the release of more carbon dioxide. It was mass-mailed to US scientists with a petition asking them to reject Kyoto.

<> Tony Blair yesterday attempted to urge George Bush to sign a climate change accord. At the World Economic Forum he said climate change was "not universally accepted", but evidence of its danger had been "clearly and persuasively advocated" by a very large number of "independent voices".

Guardian Unlimited. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5112967-103681,00.html


Under-informed, over here

The climate change denial lobby - funded by the US oil industry - has now moved to the UK

by Bob May

The Guardian (January 27 2005)


During the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded - through the so-called Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The GCC was "deactivated" in 2001, once President Bush made it clear he intended to reject the Kyoto protocol. But the denial lobby is still active, and today it arrives in London.

The UK has become a target because the government has made climate change a focus of its G8 presidency this year. A key player in this decision is chief scientific adviser Sir David King, who became public enemy number one for the denial lobby when he described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.

In December, a UK-based group, the Scientific Alliance, teamed up with the George C Marshall Institute, a body headed by the chairman emeritus of the GCC, William O'Keefe, to publish a document with the innocuous title Climate Issues & Questions. It plays up the uncertainties surrounding climate change science, playing down the likely impact that it will have.

It contrasts starkly with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's most reliable source of information on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In its last major report in 2001, the IPCC adopted an evidence-based approach to climate change and considered uncertainties on impact. It concluded that "overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries", and that "the projected rate and magnitude of warming and sea-level rise can be lessened by reducing greenhouse gas emissions". More than 2,000 of the world's leading climate experts were involved in compiling the report - the most authoritative scientific assessment to date.

But today, the Scientific Alliance is holding a forum for members of the US and UK denial lobby to challenge the case for acting on the findings of the IPCC. The intention appears to be to get its retaliation in first before a meeting of climate change experts next week at the Hadley Centre, at which Sir David King will take part.

Possibly more worrying is how much prominence their views are receiving in the UK media. The Daily Telegraph bizarrely used an anonymous leader on the tsunami in Asia to question the value of cutting emissions: "Whether or not this would have the effects claimed by ecologists - and the science is inconclusive - any gain would be insignificant next to the changes in temperature caused by forces outside our control".

But the Daily Mail seems keenest to board the well-oiled bandwagon. Fresh from its now discredited campaign against MMR, it has run six opinion pieces over the last year questioning the science of climate change. David Bellamy and columnist Melanie Phillips have perhaps predictably joined in, but more surprising has been the conversion of Michael Hanlon, the paper's science editor.

Last week, Hanlon cited Michael Crichton's research for his new novel as a further indication that climate change science is a con. The theme of Crichton's story is that environmentalists exaggerate the threat from climate change and eventually trigger its extreme effects themselves.

It demonstrates the flakiness of the Hanlon case that he should need to rely on a sci-fi writer who has previously warned of the dangers of bringing dinosaurs back to life and of nano-robots turning the world into grey goo. All entertaining scare stories, all complete nonsense.

So there we have it. On one hand we have the IPCC, the rest of the world's major scientific organisations, and the government's chief scientific adviser, all pointing to the need to cut emissions. On the other we have a small band of sceptics, including lobbyists funded by the US oil industry, a sci-fi writer, and the Daily Mail, who deny the scientists are right. It is reminiscent of the tobacco lobby's attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer. There is no danger this lobby will influence the scientists. But they don't need to. It is the influence on the media that is so poisonous.

In a lecture at the Royal Society last week, Jared Diamond drew attention to populations, such as those on Easter Island, who denied they were having a catastrophic impact on the environment and were eventually wiped out, a phenomenon he called "ecocide". It's time for those living in denial of the evidence about the impacts of climate change to take note.

<> Lord May of Oxford is president of the Royal Society and was chief scientific adviser to the government 1995-2000

Guardian Unlimited. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5112319-111428,00.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Manuel and Saddam, Benito and Adolf

We often hear today about the Anglo-American empire waging war on tyrants that it had earlier put in power or otherwise sponsored. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban of bin Laden are prominent examples. In his book, A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (revised edition, Pluto Press, 2004), F William Engdahl says we also should include Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in the list of tyrants who rose under the sporsorship of the Anglo-American empire and later fell (along with millions of innocent bystanders) to its military.

The following is from the section entitled "Deterding, Montagu Norman, and Schacht's Hitler Project from Chapter Six of that book. Engdahl's notes are identified by <>. I have inserted supplementary information from earlier parts of the book in curly brackets, {}, just before the last paragraph below.
Bill Totten



The unstable international monetary order imposed after Versailles by London and New York bankers on a defeated central Europe came to an abrupt, if predictable, end in 1929. Montagu Norman, then the world's most influential central banker as governor of the Bank of England, precipitated the crash of the Wall Street stock market in October 1929. Norman had asked the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, George Harrison, to raise US interest rate levels. Harrison complied, and the most dramatic financial and economic collapse in US history ensued in the following months.

By early 1931, Montagu Norman and a small circle in the British establishment had plans to shift the political dynamic in central Europe in a most astonishing manner. At the time, Austria's largest banking institution was the Creditanstalt of Vienna. Closely tied to the Austrian branch of the house of Rothschild, the Creditanstalt had grown during the 1920s through an unhealthy process of merging smaller troubled banks. The largest such merger was forced onto Creditanstalt during the month of the October 1929 stock market crash, when it was asked by the authorities to take over the Vienna Bodenkreditanstalt, a real estate lender which itself had swallowed several other unhealthy banks in the previous years.

At the beginning of 1931, Creditanstalt appeared to the world to be one of the mightiest of world banks. In reality, it was one of the sickest. The draconian Versailles conditions imposed by Britain, France and the United States had dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, isolating Austria's economy from the valuable economic ties and raw materials of Hungary and the lands of eastern Europe. Austria's industrial economy had never recovered from the devastation of the First World War. Industry had run-down plants, outmoded equipment and huge unredeemable war loans. The political circumstances in Austria in the 1920s had led major parts of insolvent Austrian industry to pass into the hands of the ever-larger Creditanstalt.

Thus, by early 1931, Austria in general, and the Vienna Creditanstalt in particular, were the weak links of an international credit chain which had been built under the unhealthy foundation set by the New York banking firm of J P Morgan, in concert with the Bank of England and the London banks. Creditanstalt was unable to generate sufficient capital for its activities from the depressed Austrian economy and had become largely dependent on very short-term borrowings from London and New York to finance its activities. The Bank of England itself was actually a significant lender to Creditanstalt.

In March 1931, the French government and French Foreign Minister Briand declared themselves in determined opposition to announced negotiations between Berlin and Vienna for the forming of an Austro-German trade and customs union, a belated attempt to counter a growing world economic depression that had begun in America some months earlier. France reportedly ordered its banks to cut short-term credit lines to Creditanstalt, in a bid to bring pressure to bear on the Austrian government. What ensued that May, as rumors of a run on the deposits of Creditanstalt broke in the Vienna press, was a credit crisis which shook all of Europe. The Austrian National Bank, and ultimately the Austrian state, were forced to come to the rescue of the Creditanstalt, in what became the largest bank failure in history. Subsequent examination revealed that the crisis need never have reached such dramatic dimensions. It was intended to do so by certain powerful London and New York financiers who were preparing a dramatic shift in European geopolitics. <12> By the end of the 1920s, influential circles in Britain and the United States had decided to back a radical course for Germany.

J P Morgan bankers had already proved to themselves the usefulness of radical top-down political solutions to ensure repayment of bank loans, when they gave foreign credit to the fascist regime of Italian strongman Benito Mussolini. In November 1925, Italian Finance Minister Volpi di Misurata announced that the Mussolini government had reached an agreement on repaying the Versailles war debts of Italy to Britain and the United States. One week later, J P Morgan & Company, financial agents of the Mussolini government in the United
States, announced a crucial $100 million loan to Italy to 'stabilize the lira'.

In reality, Morgan had decided to stabilize Mussolini's fascist regime. On the urging of J P Morgan & Company and Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, Volpi di Misurata established in 1926 a single Italian central bank, the Bank of Italy, to control national monetary policy and further ensure repayment of foreign debts. Mussolini had shown himself to be the ideal strongman to discipline Italian labor unions, drive down wages and enforce sufficient austerity to guarantee foreign bank lending, or so thought Morgan's people in New York.

The man who controlled US monetary policy at the time, former Morgan banker Benjamin Strong, an intimate personal friend and collaborator of Britain's Montagu Norman, met with Volpi and the Bank of Italy governor, Bonaldo Stringher, to confirm the final details of the Italian 'stabilization' program. From Poland to Romania during the 1920s, the same combination of powerful persons - J P Morgan & Company, Montagu Norman and the New York Federal Reserve - organized effective economic control over most countries of Continental Europe, under the pretext of the establishment of 'creditworthy' national policies - an informal precursor of the role of the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s. The New York banks were the source of the significant short-term capital for this lending, and the Bank of England, together with the British Foreign Office establishment, provided the political experience to impose the policy. <13>

The most concentrated efforts of this Anglo-Saxon circle were focused on Germany during the 1920s. Following the successful imposition of Hjalmar Schacht as president of the Reichsbank in 1923, and Schacht's implementation of the draconian Dawes Plan of war reparations repayment, drafted by Morgan & Company, the German economy during the 1920s became dependent on short-term loans from London and New York banks and their collaborators in Paris. For the banks, these German short-term credits were the most lucrative in the entire world financial markets of the day. For many of Germany's banks, including the fourth-largest, Darmstadter und Nationalbank Kommandit-Gesellschaft (Danat), dependence on short-term New York and London capital borrowings had become substantial, and at punitively high interest rates. The Weimar hyperinflation had largely destroyed the capital and reserves of major German banks during the early part of the decade. Thus the expansion of German bank lending during the late 1920s was by banks with a precariously small capital base in the event of loan default or other crises. Germany stood unique among major European industrial countries by the time of the 1929-30 New York stock market collapse. She owed international bank creditors an estimated sixteen billion Reichsmarks in such short-term debts.

This unsound banking structure required only a small push to topple it in its entirety. The push came from the New York Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which, in a series of moves in 1929, raised their interest rates following more than two years of unprecedented stock market speculation as they pursued ever lower interest rates. The predictable crash in the New York stock market and the London market led to a massive withdrawal of US and British banking funds from Germany and Austria. By May 13 1931, the fuse was ready for the torch.

On that day, the large Vienna Creditanstalt collapsed. The French had decided to 'punish' Austria for entering into customs union talks with Germany by imposing currency sanctions. Creditanstalt was a Rothschild bank with heavy ties to French banking. As French funds were recalled from Austria, this toppled the fragile Creditanstalt the largest Austrian bank, which had large interests in some seventy per cent of Austria's industry. To attempt to stop the run on the Creditanstalt, Austrian banks called in all funds they had in German banks. Creditanstalt was the weak link which started the domino collapse of banking throughout central Europe.

The ensuing banking crisis, economic depression and the related tragic developments in Austria and Germany were dictated virtually to the letter by Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the governor of the New York Federal Reserve, George Harrison, and the house of Morgan and friends in Wall Street. A decision had been made to cut all credits to Germany, though even a minimal roll-over of nominally small sums would probably have stopped the crisis from erupting out of control at this early stage.

Instead, capital began to flow out of Germany in ever greater amounts. On the demand of Montagu Norman and George Harrison a new Reichsbank President, Hans Luther, dutifully abstained from doing anything to stop the collapse of the large German banks. The immediate consequence of the Creditanstalt collapse in Vienna was the related failure of the Danat-Bank of Germany. The Danat-Bank, heavily dependent on foreign credits, lost almost 100 million Reichsmarks of deposits that May. The next month, Danat lost 848 million Reichsmarks, or forty per cent of all the deposits it held while Dresdner Bank lost ten per cent and even Deutsche Bank lost eight per cent of its deposits. By late June, Bankers Trust, a Morgan bank, cut the credit line to Deutsche Bank.

Harrison demanded that Reichsbank head Hans Luther impose rigorous credit austerity and tightening in the German capital markets claiming that this was the only way to stop the flight of foreign capital. What it ensured was the overall collapse of the German banking system and industry into the worst depression imaginable.

Montagu Norman backed Harrison, and the governor of the Bank of France joined them in blaming Germany for the crisis. Desperate last-minute efforts by the Bruning government to persuade Luther to seek an emergency stabilization credit from other central banks to contain the national banking crisis were, as a result, refused by Luther. When he finally capitulated and asked Montagu Norman for help, Norman slammed the door in his face. Germany as a consequence no longer effectively had any lender of last resort.

By July 1931, some two months after the collapse of the Vienna Creditanstalt had initiated the flight of capital out of Germany, the Basle Nationalzeitung reported that the Danat-Bank was 'in difficulties', which was sufficient in the electric climate to trigger a full panic run on that bank. The bank's chairman, Goldschmidt, later charged that the Reichsbank had selectively precipitated his bank's failure with discriminatory credit rationing. The ensuing banking crisis and collapse of industry created in Germany in the winter of 1931-32 what was said to be 'the hardest winter in one hundred years'. It was the breeding ground for radical political alternatives.

In March 1930, some months before the credit cutoff against Germany was imposed by the Anglo-American bankers, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht surprised the government by handing in his resignation. The actual issue he resigned over was the offer of an emergency stabilization credit of 500 million Reichsmarks, which the Berlin government had been offered by the Swedish industrialist and financier, Ivar Kreuger, the famous Swedish 'match
king'. Kreuger and his American bankers, Lee Higginson & Company, were major lenders to Germany and other countries that had been cut off by the London and New York banks. But Kreuger's loan offer of early 1930 had explosive and unacceptable political consequences for the long-term strategy of Montagu Norman's friends. German Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding urged Schacht, who, under the terms of the Dawes reparations plan, had to approve all foreign loans, to accept the Kreuger loan. Schacht refused and on March 6 handed Reichspresident von Hindenburg his resignation. Schacht had other duties to tend to.

Kreuger himself was found dead some months later, in early 1932 in his Paris hotel room. Official autopsy registered the death as suicide, but detailed inquiry by Swedish researchers decades later made a conclusive case that Kreuger had been murdered. The persons who stood to gain most from Kreuger's death were in London and New York, though the actual details will likely remain buried along with Kreuger. With Kreuger's death ended also Germany's hope for relief. She was totally cut off from international credit. <14>

For his part, Schacht was anything but idle after his resignation from the Reichsbank. He devoted his full energies to organizing financial support for the man he and his close friend, Bank of England governor Norman, agreed was the man for Germany's crisis.

Since 1926 Schacht had secretly been a backer of the radical National Socialist German workers' Party (NSDAP) or Nazi party of Adolf Hitler. After resigning his Reichsbank post, Schacht acted as a key liaison between powerful, but skeptical, German industrial leaders, the so-called 'Schlotbarone' of the Ruhr, and foreign financial leaders, especially Britain's Lord Norman.

British policy at this juncture was to create the 'Hitler Project', knowing fully what its ultimate geopolitical and military direction would be. As Colonel David Stirling, the founder of Britain's elite Special Air Services, related in a private discussion almost half a century later, 'The greatest mistake we British did was to think we could play the German Empire against the Russian Empire, and have them bleed one another to death'.

The British support for the Hitler option reached to the very highest levels. It included Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, the man infamous for the 1938 Munich appeasement which set Hitler's armies marching to Sudetenland in the east. Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), of the Cecil Rhodes Round Table group which we met earlier, was a close adviser to Neville Chamberlain. Lothian backed the Hitler project as part of the infamous Cliveden set in British circles, as did Lord Beaverbrook, the most influential British press magnate of the day, who controlled the mass-circulation Daily Express and Evening Standard. But perhaps the most influential backer of Hitler's movement at this time in Britain was the Prince of Wales, who became Edward VIII in early 1936, until his abdication at the end of the same year.

Certain influential American establishment figures were hardly ignorant of what the Hitler movement was about. Leading Wall Street and US State Department circles had been informed from an early stage. Even before the ill-fated 1923 Munich 'beer hall putsch', a US State Department official stationed in Munich as part of the Versailles occupation of Germany, Robert Murphy, later a central figure in the postwar Bilderberg group, personally met the young Hitler through General Erich Ludendorff. Murphy, who had served under Allen Dulles in Berne during the First World War, gathering intelligence on the German Reich, was in Munich with another influential US government official, Truman Smith, assigned to US Army intelligence occupying Germany.

In his memoirs, Smith later recalled his arrival in Munich in late 1922:

I talked at length about National Socialism with the Munich Consul, Mr Robert Murphy (later a very distinguished American Ambassador), General Erich Ludendorff, Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria and Alfred Rosenberg. The latter later became the political philosopher of the Nazi party. On this visit I also saw much of Ernst F S ('Putzi') Hanfstaengl, of the well-known Munich art family. 'Putzi' was a Harvard graduate and later became Hitler's foreign press chief ... My interview with Hitler lasted some hours. The diary I kept in Munich indicates I was deeply impressed by his personality and thought it likely that he would play an important part in German politics.


In his November 1922 report to his superiors in Washington, Smith filed the following recommendation regarding his evaluation of the tiny Hitler group. Speaking of Hitler, Smith said:

His basic aim is the overthrow of Marxism ... and the winning of labor to the nationalist ideals of state and property ... The clash of party interests has ... demonstrated the impossibility of Germany's rescue from her present difficulties through democracy. His movement aims at the establishment of a national dictatorship through non-parliamentary means. Once achieved, he demands that the reparations demands be reduced to a possible figure, but that done, the sum agreed on to be paid to the last Pfennig, as a matter of national honor. To accomplish this the dictator must introduce universal reparations service and enforce it with the whole force of the state. His power during the period of fulfillment cannot be hampered by any legislature or popular assembly ...


To ensure that his colleagues in Washington's Division of Military intelligence got the point, Smith added his personal evaluation of Hitler: 'In private conversation he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical earnestness, makes a very deep impression on a neutral listener'. <15>


In late autumn of 1931, a man arrived at London's Liverpool Street railway station from Germany. His name was Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg met with the editor in chief of the influential London Times, Geoffrey Dawson. The Times gave Hitler's movement invaluable positive international publicity in the coming months. But the most important meeting Rosenberg had during this first England visit in 1931 was with Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, and arguably the most influential figure of the day in world finance. Norman had three hatreds, according to his trusted personal secretary - the French, the Catholics and the Jews. Norman and Rosenberg found no difficulty in their talks together. The introduction to Norman had come through Hjalmar Schacht. From their first meeting in 1924, Schacht and Norman developed a friendship which lasted until Norman's death in 1945.

Rosenberg concluded his fateful London visit with a meeting with a leading person of the London Schroeder Bank, which was affiliated with J H Schroeder Bank in New York and with the Cologne-based private bank, J H Stein of Baron Kurt von Schroeder. The man whom Rosenberg met from Schroeder Bank in London was F C Tiarks, who was also a member of the Bank of England directorate and a close friend of Montagu Norman.

As Baron von Schroeder and Hjalmar Schacht went to leading German industrial and financial figures to secure support for the NSDAP after 1931, the first question of nervous and skeptical industrialists was, 'How does international finance, and especially Montagu Norman, regard the prospect of a German government under Hitler?' Was Norman prepared to come in with financial credit for Germany in such an event? The reality is that at this critical juncture, when Hitler's NSDAP had little more than six million votes in the 1930 elections, the international backing of Montagu Norman, Tiarks and friends in London was decisive.

On January 4 1932, at the Cologne villa of Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Adolf Hitler, von Papen and the Cologne banker, von Schroeder, secretly arranged financing of Hitler's NSDAP, at that time de facto bankrupt with huge debts, until the planned seizure of power by Hitler. Another meeting between Hitler and Franz von Papen took place on January 4, 1933, at von Schroeder's Cologne villa, at which the plan was finalized to topple the weak government of Schleicher and build a right-wing coalition. On January 30 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the Reich.

The final London visit of Alfred Rosenberg was in May 1933, this time as one of the inner figures in the new Hitler government. He went directly to the country home in Buckhurst Park in Ascot of Sir Henri Deterding, the head of Royal Dutch Shell and arguably the world's most influential businessman. According to English press accounts, the two had a warm and eventful discussion. Rosenberg had first met Deterding during his 1931 London trip. Royal Dutch Shell had intimate contact with, and provided support for the German NSDAP. Though the details were kept secret, reliable British reports of the day were that Deterding had provided substantial financial support to the Hitler project in its critical early phases.

{Engdahl says on pages 58 and 62 of the book that Royal Dutch Shell was covertly owned by the British Government, and says on page 59 that Deterding served as a trusted agent of British secret intelligence.}

While Norman and the Bank of England had adamantly refused to advance a pfennig of credit to Germany at the critical period in 1931 (thus precipitating the banking and unemployment crisis which made desperate alternatives such as Hitler even thinkable to leading circles in Germany), as soon as Hitler had consolidated power, in early 1933, the same Montagu Norman moved with indecent haste to reward the Hitler government with vital Bank of England credit. Norman made a special visit to Berlin in May 1934 to arrange further secret financial stabilization for the new regime. Hitler had responded by making Norman's dear friend Schacht his minister of economics as well as president of the Reichsbank. The latter post Schacht held until 1939. <16>

Notes:

12. Dieter Stiefel. Finanzdiplomatie und Weltwirtschaftskrise: Die Krise der Creditanstalt fur Handel und Gewerbe, 1931. Frankfurt a.M.: Fritz Knapp Verlag, 1989.

13. Richard H Meyer. Bankers' Diplomacy: Monetary Stabilization in the 1920's. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

14. Lars-Jonas Angstrom. 'Ivar Kreuger blev mordad!' Svenska Marknaden. August 1987. Stockholm.

15. Truman Smith. Berlin Alert: The Memoirs and Reports of Truman Smith. Stanford California: Hoover Institution Press, 1984.

16. Among the more useful references for this little-discussed topic are J and S Pool. 'Hitlers Wegbereiter zur Macht: Die geheimen deutschen und internationalen Geldquellen, die Hitlers Aufsteig zur Macht ermoglichten'. Munchen: Scherz Verlag, 1979; Heinz, Pentrzlin. 'Hjalmar Schacht'. Berlin: Verlag Ullstein GmbH, 1980; Also useful is Harold James. The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.


Also see "Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951 - Federal Documents" by John Buchanan and Stacey Michael, The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 248 Number 3 (November 07 2003)
at http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Virility and Slaughter

Battle Strategy of the First World War

by Richard Koenigsberg


In the First World War, 1914-1918, it is estimated that nine million soldiers were killed, twenty-one million wounded, and nearly eight million taken prisoner or reported missing. Thus, of sixty-five million troops mobilized, nearly thirty-eight million, or fifty-eight percent were casualties. What was the meaning of this massive episode of civilizational destruction? Why were millions of young men killed or mutilated?

In this paper, I examine what happened during the First World War from the perspective of the central strategy that guided battle, that of the "offensive at all costs". The belief that it was worthwhile to attack whenever possible derived from the idea that morale and discipline were the crucial factors determining success on the battlefield. A nation could achieve victory only if its troops had the courage and will to continue to attack in the face of heavy casualties.


The First World War As Perpetual Slaughter

When I began my research on the First World War and encountered this episode of perpetual, futile slaughter, I assumed that historians were capable of accounting for what had occurred. My assumption was unfounded. Although historians report the events, they are unable to explain the magnitude of destruction and persistence of the slaughter. One of the best and most prominent historians of the First World War, Jay Winters, concludes his six-part video series in a tone of baffled bewilderment, summing up his reflections as follows: "The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict."

As one studies the battles of the First World War and learns of the prodigious number of human beings killed in each of them, the mind boggles. What was going on? What kept the war going? Why did leaders persist in sending young men to die? Why didn't Generals alter their battle strategy when it was evident that what they were doing did not work? Why did soldiers rarely rebel against their fate? Why did they continue to fight on even though death stared them in the face?

The First World War began when Germany attacked France through Belgium, expecting a quick victory that did not occur. The French counterattack also failed. Britain joined the war to honor its treaty obligation with Belgium. Soon there was stalemate. The combatants then built five hundred miles of zigzagging trenches in France and settled in on opposing lines, many less than one thousand yards from one another. Which side would give in first?

The high casualty rate during this war reflected the nature of the battle strategy. "Attack" occurred when massive numbers of troops along the front line, supported by artillery fire from thousands of guns, got out of trenches and ran into "no man's land", hoping to cut the barbed wire, assault enemy trenches and break through the opposing line. Attacks were nearly always unsuccessful. Here is Modris Eksteins' description of the fundamental pattern:

The victimized crowd of attackers in no man's land has become one of the supreme images of this war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. "We were very surprised to see them walking", wrote a German machine gunner of his experience of a British attack at the Somme. "The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing, we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them."


Ecksteins describes the results of the first year of fighting on the Western front, 1914:

German and French casualties had been staggering. The Germans lost a million men in the first five months. France, in the "battle of the frontiers" of August, lost over 300,000 men in two weeks. Total French losses by the end of December were comparable with the German, roughly 300,000 killed and 600,000 wounded or missing.


What did all of this killing and dying accomplish? Eksteins writes, "For over two years the belligerents on the Western Front hammered at each other in battles that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction".


The Doctrine of the "Offensive at All Costs"

How may one account for such monumental destructiveness? How can one explain the fact that governments and military leaders persisted in employing a battle strategy that continually failed while costing millions of men their lives? We move toward understanding the slaughter by examining the battle-doctrine that guided the thinking of many British officers and military leaders of other European nations. This doctrine of the "offensive at all costs" grew out of the Russo-Japanese war, 1904-05, where the Japanese sent wave after wave of men against the Russian lines and machine-guns, eventually overwhelming them. Europeans were impressed by the "morale and discipline" of the Japanese soldiers, which allowed them to push forward relentlessly in the face of horrendous massacres.

Thus evolved a paradigm that fixed on the "psychological battlefield" as the key element of warfare, the real problem being whether troops had the courage and will to cross the fire swept zone, suffer heavy casualties in the attack and still keep going. The doctrine of the offensive was put forth as the antidote to modern firepower. Precisely because modern firepower made the offensive difficult, therefore offense must be heavily overemphasized. An offensive strategy was likely to be very costly in manpower in the face of modern weapons such as machine-guns; the doctrine of the offensive must take account of this and still remain offensive.

It even was sometimes suggested that offensive tactics must actually aim at heavy losses since this was the reliable and sure way of getting through enemy defenses. In the American movie about the First World War, Paths of Glory, the General justifies his ruthless tactic of requiring his soldiers to attack in the face of machine-guns by explaining that soldiers on the front line of the assault "absorb bullets and shrapnel and by doing so allow other men to get through".

Given a battle strategy guided by the philosophy of the offensive at all costs, British officers who did not encourage the offensive spirit often were removed. In 1918, General Sir Hubert Grough complained to his aide that his troops had "no blood lust" and his officers "no spirit of the offensive". He told his aide, "I want to shoot two officers". The aide said, "Beg your pardon, Sir, there are no officers under sentence". Grough looked at him as if to say, "You fool", and explained, "Yes, I know that, but I want to shoot two officers as an example to others". Two officers were shot.

The fear of removals gave General Headquarters considerable leverage. Faced with obviously hopeless attacks, commanding officers were reluctant to complain and felt compelled to attack regardless of circumstances. Attacks that failed with considerable casualties were given a sympathetic hearing, whereas attacks that failed with light casualties inevitably were condemned. If a Brigadier lost a position, he might be removed, not for losing the position, but for not losing enough men in trying to hold it. Haig castigated Division 49 for not holding Ancre in September 1916, complaining, "Total losses of this division are under a thousand!"


The Battle of the Somme

In 1916, the British felt that they had found a commander-in-chief with the courage and resolve to sustain the heavy losses that would be necessary to break through the German line. General Douglas Haig believed that, given an adequate supply of arms and men, victory could be achieved quickly, though not without great loss of life. The specter of massive losses did not deter him. Haig said that what was needed for victory was patriots who "knew the importance of the cause for which we were fighting".

Whereas Germans, he said, had been "impregnated from youth up with an intensely patriotic feeling so that they willingly die for their country", British men could not do this unless well led. To Haig's annoyance, this simple fact seemed to have escaped the King who, during a visit to the front seemed inclined to think that our troops are "by nature brave". The King, Haig said, is ignorant of "all the efforts which commanders must make to keep up the morale of their men and all the training necessary to enable a company to go forward as a unit in the face of almost certain death".

British strategy was set forth in a document written by General Montgomery dated April 11 1916, asserting, "The assaulting troops must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines, each line adding fresh impetus to the preceding line". Although two or three lines of attack sometimes succeed, yet four or more lines usually succeeded. "War", Lieutenant General Ian Hamilton declared, is the "triumph of one will over another weaker will". According to the theory of the offensive at all costs, victory essentially was a question of morale, belonging to the side that could cross the fire-swept zone and persist in the attack in spite of heavy casualties. Such a determined assault would unnerve the enemy, delivering a decisive moral and physical blow.

In July 1916, British forces amassed along a thirty-mile front near the Somme River, hoping to achieve a breakthrough. Haig said that if you tried for a great, decisive victory, it would be necessary to get your men killed. An extraordinary artillery shelling preceded the attack. For several weeks, 100,000 shells a day were fired. It seemed impossible that the German soldiers could survive such a barrage. Hiding themselves deep within their trenches or bunkers, most of them, however, did survive. When the British attacked, German soldiers rushed to their machine-gun posts.

The July 1 attack on the Somme was a disaster, the worst day in British military history, 20,000 dead, 40,000 wounded. This result, however, is not unlike what occurred at the Battle of Loos. Pushing through to the German line on the second day of battle, British troops crossed the road. Their numerical superiority was considerable, but several dozen German machine guns faced them. The German regimental diary describes what happened:

Ten columns of extended line could clearly be discerned. Each advancing column was estimated at more than a thousand men, offering such a target as had never been seen before, or thought possible. Never had the machine gunners such straightforward work to do nor done it so effectively. They traversed to and fro along the enemy's ranks unceasingly. The men stood and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across open grassland. As the entire field of fire was covered with the enemy's infantry, the effect was devastating and they could be seen falling literally in hundreds.


These were not atypical results of the British strategy of the "offensive at all costs". Was the Somme campaign called off after the first few disastrous days? On the contrary, it continued for five months, with horrible scenes like those described above occurring again and again. During the second week, the British were losing 10,000 men, an entire division, per day, and for the remainder of the battle the daily average was 2500 men.


"Virility" and the Battle of Verdun

Another spectacle of mass-slaughter took place in 1916 at Verdun. German General von Falkenhayn - convinced that the French would defend the forts of Verdun to the last man - told Kaiser Wilhelm that whether the forts were captured or not, the French forces would "bleed to death", thus permitting Germany to emerge victorious. General von Falkenhayn's statement - that he would compel the forces of France to bleed to death - is one of the most famous (or notorious) of the First World War, crystallizing the underlying assumption of this "war of attrition": The losing side would be the one that ran out of men first. The war would end when one side or another had no more blood to give.

A French officer conceived of the Battle of Verdun as nothing less than a pure contest of French and German masculinity. "The two races", he said, have "put all their youth into the furnace, to test which is the strongest and most virile". For their initial attack at Verdun, the Germans brought up 2.5 million shells, using for the purpose some 1,300 trains. By June, the artillery had grown to about 2,000 guns. It was calculated that in just over four months of battle a million shells had been pumped into this dedicated stretch of ground, an average of 100 shells per minute.

The French action to recapture the famous Fort Douaumont employed 711 guns on a front of just over three miles. A notice in the fort today informs us that 1,000 shells were used for every square meter of the battlefield. Verdun was captured by the Germans - then recaptured by the French - so nothing changed except that there were 650,000 more dead soldiers. When added to that of the Somme, this made a death toll in 1916 of almost a million men; an average of more than 6,600 men killed every day, more than 277 every hour, nearly five men a minute.

Imagine the pathetic plight of those who were on the battlefield at Verdun, confined within a narrow space that glowed like an oven for miles because of the constant artillery bombing. During battles, most soldiers barely knew what was going on, spending most of their time hiding from the incessant shelling and bombardment of rifles and machine-gun fire rather than actually fighting. A French Lieutenant described his situation: "Nearly all of our trench has caved in. In what remains, we have scraped our niches in the walls. We huddle up in them to get at least a bit of shelter from the explosions, but we are so tightly packed that our sore limbs can't move." He notes that before attacking his men were either "drunk, howling out patriotic airs, or weeping with emotion or despair". One had the temerity to remark within earshot of the company commander: "Baa, baa, I am the sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse".

We have observed that an officer conceived of the battle of Verdun as a test to determine which of the two races - French or German - was the most virile. We now can see that "virility" amounted to the capacity to endure endless slaughter. To be virile was equivalent to being willing to die when one's nation asked one to do so. The soldier is represented as the embodiment of active masculinity. The actual stance of the soldier at the battle of Verdun, however, was one of abject passivity.

Soldiers during the First World War - those of every nation - were expected to obey their officers and to do their duty without shirking; to offer no resistance when they were ordered to put their bodies onto the battlefield to face mutilation and death. The "strength" of a soldier amounted to his willingness to submit to the leadership absolutely and resign entirely to his fate. To be virile, in short, was to offer oneself up as a sacrificial victim.


The Sacred Ideal

Wayne Dyer in his book War declares, "You offer yourself to be slain: This is the essence of being a soldier. By becoming soldiers, men agree to die when we tell them to." Joanna observes Bourke in Dismembering the Male that the most important point to be made about the male body during the Great War is that it was "intended to be mutilated". She notes, "There was no limit to the danger to which the male body could be subjected. Gunfire cut bodies in half." In war, men's bodies are turned over to the state and its leaders to be used as seen fit, mutilated or destroyed in the name of the sacred ideal.

What is the nature of the sacred ideal in the name of which bodies may be mutilated and destroyed? The sacred ideal that generates killing and dying is, of course, one's nation, for example, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, et cetera. These are the objects or entities that require and justify abject submission. In a lecture that formed an important part of their training, Colonel Shirley told British officers that the words that he was about to speak would be among the most "serious you will ever hear in all your lives. Now that you have entered upon the service of your Country, you must proceed to serve her with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." He consoles his officers by telling them that if they have done their best and yet must fall, they might take comfort in the thought that "you will have suffered for a cause greater and more noble than that for which any man has ever yet sacrificed his all".

Patriotic rhetoric resonated. One million volunteers joined the British army in the first year of the war. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. On September 9 1915, Basil Hart asked his parents not to wear mourning clothes in the event of his death. He wrote, "I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief, but of one for thanksgiving, for no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country and the cause of civilization".

Eight months of battle did not alter these noble sentiments. On May 27 1916, he appended the following words to his will: "Also I wish to say that while I feel it an honor to die for England, I feel it an even greater honor to die as an officer of the British Regular Army - many of the finest gentlemen whom God has sent into this world". Similar expressions of commitment and devotion were common among soldiers of all nations. Shortly before his death, Frenchman Robert Dubarle wrote of the "glorious privilege of sacrificing oneself, voluntarily. Let us try, without complaining too much to offer our sacrifice to our country and to place the love of fatherland above our own grief."

Willingness to go to battle and if necessary to die, then, was the way in which one demonstrated one's devotion to one's nation, the sacred ideal. To fight for one's nation - risking bodily mutilation and death - represented the pledge of allegiance in its most radical form. A reporter described his encounter with a Canadian soldier who had been wounded in battle, but survived:

As I looked into his face and saw the look of personal victory over physical pain, I gripped him by the hand and said, "My good man, when you go back to your home, you need not tell them that you love your country - just show them your scars".


In Great Britain, Bourke observes, soldiers' mutilations were spoken of in public rhetoric as badges of courage, hallmark of their glorious service, and proof of patriotism. The wounded or disabled soldier was "not less but more of a man". According to the London Times, "Next to the loss of life, the sacrifice of a limb is the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his country". The virtue of giving over a part of one's body to one's nation was expressed in a song entitled "England's Broken Dolls" that was popular during the war:

A man and maiden met a month ago.
She said, "There's one thing I should like to know
Why aren't you in khaki or navy blue?
And fighting for your country like other men do?
The man looked up and slowly shook his head
Dear Madam, do you know what you have said.
For I gladly took my chance.
Now my right arm's out in France.


Virility and Slaughter

I've provided several accounts of how British soldiers were torn apart by machine-gun fire as they attacked. In the following report, British General Rees describes the massacre of his own brigade as they moved toward German lines.

They advanced in line after line, dressed as if on parade and not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out. I saw the lines, which advanced in such admirable order melting away under fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back. I have never seen, indeed could never have imagined such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination. The reports from the very few survivors of this marvelous advance bear out what I saw with my own eyes: that hardly a man of ours got to the German Front line.


It is evident that in spite of the total failure of the attack, General Rees regarded the destruction of his brigade in a positive light. He observes that not a man "shirked" in the face of the machine gun and rifle fire that wiped them out. He is proud that even though his troops were "melting away under fire", the soldiers continued to advance "in admirable order". In the face of the barrage of bullets, his men did not waver, break ranks, or attempt to come back. The General gushes that he had never seen such a magnificent display of "gallantry, discipline and determination". Although his soldiers were slaughtered and "hardly a man of ours got to the German Front line", he characterizes the advance as "marvelous".

Or perhaps is it more accurate to say that the General believed the assault was marvelous precisely because British soldiers had been slaughtered. The General does not view the battle from the perspective of success or failure. His perception is shaped, rather, by his judgment of the morale and spirit demonstrated by his troops. It is the fact that his soldiers were being riddled with bullets - yet continued to advance - that leads him to conclude that the attack had been "marvelous".

General Rees responded positively to the slaughter of his own men because he viewed their behavior as a testimonial to the depth of their devotion. By virtue of the fact that they did not shirk but continued to advance in the face of machine-gun fire, his troops showed that they were committed absolutely to the ideals of Great Britain, the British Empire and its leaders. Willingness to walk into machine-gun fire provided definitive proof that the soldiers loved their country.

Soldiers during the First World War were required to adopt a posture of absolute submission to their nation and its leaders - obedience unto death. Conscientious objectors in Britain during the First World War were disenfranchised. Some thought that soldiers who had not seen overseas service should have the right to vote taken away from them. In the First World War, the social consensus was that the body of the soldier belonged to the nation-state. The nation could use these bodies as it saw fit.

War requires that the soldier hand over his body to his country. In order to encourage men to do be willing to do this, the soldier's role is represented in terms such as honor, masculinity and virility. In the First World War, however, being honorable, masculine and virile was equivalent to entering a situation where there was substantial probability that one would be slaughtered. One demonstrated one's virility by getting out of a trench and walking into machine gun fire. Such is the strange paradox of war: That "goodness" or morality requires a posture of abject submission; that "love" requires self-destruction; that willingness to die becomes the highest form of virtue.

Copyright 2004 Richard Koenigsberg. Designed by Orion Anderson.

http://home.earthlink.net/~libraryofsocialscience/virility.htm


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

They kill reporters, don't they?

Yes, as part of a system of information control
that will allow the mass killing of civilians

by Edward S Herman

Published in Z Magazine (December 2004)


It has long been a problem for the US imperial establishment that using their ever-improving arsenal of death in projecting power, from Vietnam to Iraq, kills large numbers of target state civilians, in violation of widely accepted norms of morality, international law, and in contradiction of the regular claims of good intentions toward the civilian victims supposedly being "liberated" (from Communism or rule by a bad man).

Even worse, it can upset people at home, who don't like to know about, let alone see, the mangled bodies of bombed civilians, or even a GI using a lighter to burn down the home of a Vietnamese peasant family (as in a famous Vietnam war photo). The home population may be struck by the incompatibility of these deaths and destructive acts with the alleged benevolent war aims, with the result that support for the military venture may fade and even be transformed into a political opposition.

The imperial establishment has worked hard to prevent this obstruction to their war-making power. Its leaders have no concern whatsoever over target country civilian casualties, and may even regard them as useful, except for the problem of public relations. This is a leadership and establishment that was able to positively exult over the Indonesian army and paramilitary slaughter of a million or more civilians in 1965-66, and the even greater mass killing of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese civilians by US forces and US proxies from the time of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US puppet leader of South Vietnam from 1954 to 1963, to the US exit in 1975, was of absolutely no concern to a string of US administrations - Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

It was only the killings in Cambodia by Pol Pot from 1975-78 that elicited great humanistic indignation from US leaders and mainstream media. The mass killing of East Timorese by the Indonesian military from 1975, in the same time frame as the Pol Pot killings, was, like that of the Vietnamese, of no concern to US leaders or the mainstream media, and produced neither publicity nor indignation. These victims were "unworthy", or "unpeople" in Mark Curtis's usage, the criterion shunting civilians into these classes being that these were OUR or a client state's victims. (A main theme of Curtis's valuable new book Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses [Vintage: 2004] is that the British establishment's concern over civilian victims, except those of enemy states, has long been non-existent. "In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are invoked, they are only for public relations purposes" [page 3]).


Full-Spectrum Domination: Including Media Choices of News and Frames

A first principle of controlling information in the interest of "freedom" - to kill civilians without impediment - is that the war-makers must dominate the frames and factual evidence used by the media. This has become easier as the media have become more commercial, concentrated and dependent on the government for favors (such as rights to merge, rights to spectrum allocations, tax and labor policies, protection abroad, information access) and as the growing rightwing echo chamber has served as an enthusiastic conduit and enforcer of government propaganda. The government has also become more efficient at feeding the media suitable information, providing experts for TV commentary, embedding and coopting journalists, keeping reporters away from inconvenient scenes and sources, and bullying them and their bosses into silence on matters that put state policy in an unfavorable light (helped by the rightwing enforcers).

In fact, information policy has become openly recognized as a weapon of war and is included among the elements of the US official strategy of "full spectrum dominance", which US military experts Jim Winters and John Giffin have indicated means both "building up and protecting friendly media and degrading information received by your adversary" (quoted in David Miller, "Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control", January 2004, http://www.coldtype.net ). Friendly media may be subsidized and given privileged access to information, and some friendly media may even be created by the state (for example, the Iraq Media Network, paid for by the Pentagon). Media deemed hostile may be "degraded" by harassment and even cruise missile attacks. This policy is hardly new, but reached a new peak in planning, resort to violence, and extensive usage in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

A problem for the mind control managers is the brazenness with which the United States has projected power since the fall of the Soviet Union, with three major wars of aggression, even more aggressive support for Israel's ultra-ethnic cleansing, and an openly publicized plan for global domination by force and threat of force. This has contributed to the growth of more alert dissident communities, helped along by the Internet and the rise of alternative media, of which Al Jazeera is the most important (on Iraq, it reaches far more people than CNN). Mind control works best at home, with its reliable mainstream media cooperation, but the US managers are working hard to extend its influence globally.

In frame domination a regular feature of government assaults on foreign targets is demonization of target country leaders, who, like Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, were often allies treated gently by the media prior to their fall from grace (that is, failure to take orders, not human rights abuses). This permits a steady focus on the abuses of the target country leadership rather than on the real reasons for the attack and the pains inflicted on target country civilians. It is also easier to use extreme force because the civilian population can be declared "willing executioners" who put the demon into power and/or have failed to remove him. This argument is used even against civilian populations allegedly ruled by a "dictator" against whom civilians may have limited power of removal. It goes almost without saying that the US, Indonesian and Israeli populations are never declared "willing executioners" although at least in the US and Israeli cases the populations do have the power to remove murderous regimes.


The Fraud of Allegedly Minimizing Civilian Casualties

Another part of the official arsenal is to claim a sincere effort to minimize civilian casualties, helped by "precision bombing" and "surgical strikes" aimed solely at military targets. There is absolutely no reason to believe these claims as regards either intent or result, as in each recent US war of aggression - Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - there is evidence that non-military sites have been regularly targeted, that bombing raids often hit strictly civilian sites because of poor or no evidence of military relevance, and that sites are regularly attacked where civilian casualties are highly probable even if there is a valid military target (in violation of international law). It is a huge fraud that hundreds of bombing attacks on sites where civilians are sure to be killed, even where they are not specifically targeted, does not constitute a "deliberate" killing of civilians (for a good legal and substantive discussion, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder [Pluto: 2004], pages 46-56).

In Yugoslavia, the United States, under NATO cover, openly extended targets to civilian sites like power stations, factories producing only consumers goods, farms, and even hospitals, museums, churches and monasteries, with the clear and sometimes acknowledged aim of making civilians suffer to force an early surrender. In Afghanistan bombing raids were often carried out against civilian sites based on unverified rumor, and pilots regularly bombed in response to a flash that might have been the firing of a weapon (the wedding party at Krakak; the killing of four Canadian soldiers), and pilots shot at and killed numerous unidentified individuals in flight, and even a tall man with a beard who "might" have been Bin Laden, along with five other peasants (for examples, see my "'Tragic Errors' As An Integral Component of Policy", Z Magazine, September 2002.). Targets included nine mosques (with at least 120 civilians killed) and three hospitals - the latter a regular US target in Vietnam as well. Afghanistan was a "free fire zone", to use the parlance of the genocidal US operations in Vietnam.

Fallujah has also been a free fire zone, both in the April assault and that in November, with few if any restraints on targeting. As in Afghanistan, targets have included hospitals, mosques, power facilities, ambulances, and fleeing civilians - young, old, male and female. In Fallujah the phrase for the "liberal rules of engagement" is "weapons free", and reporter Kevin Sites, who spent some days with the marines in Fallujah, says that "Weapons free means the marines can shoot whatever they see - it's all considered hostile".

There are of course regular official efforts to deny civilian casualties, and lying about them is standard operating procedure, often brazen lying to the point of laughability (some samples are provided in "'Tragic Errors' As An Integral Component of Policy"). But when denial is impossible and the lies are exposed too authoritatively, there are regrets, assurances that the "tragic errors" and "collateral damage" were all sad mistakes and certainly not deliberate, and if enough publicity attaches to the sad mistake there are announcements that an "investigation" is underway. We rarely hear the results of these investigations, and sometimes there is evidence that they never took place. Thus, after British ITN journalist Terry Lloyd was killed by US marines in Iraq, Colin Powell promised an investigation, but some time later when ITN investigators spoke with the marines involved, the investigators were told that the marines had never been questioned in any investigation (see Tim Gopsill, "Target the Media", in David Miller, editor, Tell me lies [Pluto: 2004], pages 253-4). There are never any costs attached to these tragic errors and collateral damage - to the attackers - unless we include the building up of a huge reservoir of hate based on de facto murders for which there is no legal remedy in the present world order.

It was acknowledged during the war against Yugoslavia that the turn to the bombing of civilian sites was for the purpose of inflicting pain on civilians, and it has occasionally been admitted as regards both Afghanistan and Iraq that killing civilians has its merits - because the civilians were sometimes suspected of supporting the Taliban or Iraqi resistance, and because killing civilians and its threat would instill fear and help render the population quiescent as well as less willing to help insurgents. In Iraq, a "senior Bush administration official" is quoted in the New York Times saying that the bombing of Fallujah was helpful in that it would push the "citizenry" of Fallujah to deny sanctuary and assistance to the insurgents, adding "that's a good thing". A "Pentagon official" was also quoted as saying: "If there are civilians dying in connection with these attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision. Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that?"

Attacking civilians directly or with assured collateral damage is a war crime, as "The Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives" (Protocol 1, Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions, 1977 supplement). Attacking hospitals and deliberately depriving civilians of access to medicines and doctors are war crimes. Deliberately depriving civilian populations of food and water is a war crime. Shooting anybody that walks into the street or tries to cross a river seeking refuge is a war crime. The "wanton destruction" of a city is a war crime. These are all features of the US assaults on Fallujah, so that US authorities and their Iraqi puppet ("Saddam without a moustache") are violating these articles on a continuing and large scale.


Avoiding Body Counts of Civilians Killed

Another weapon in the public relations arsenal of the death-machine managers is negative: don't count bodies. The political and racist double standard here is staggering. In Kosovo, after the 78-day bombing war, the Clinton administration allocated $25 million to the Tribunal for a search for bodies, and of course the body searches in Bosnia have been going at it for years; whereas in the aftermath of the Indonesian massacres of East Timorese in the run-up to the 1999 East Timorese vote for independence, the justice-loving Western powers were uninterested in body-counts, and so were the mass media.

US body counts are known in detail and reported, whereas Vietnamese, Afghan and Iraqi civilian tolls are not, at least from official and mainstream media sources. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war Colin Powell stated that "Body counts don't interest me", and during the current aggression-occupation General Tommy Franks has acknowledged: "We don't count bodies". He meant Iraqi civilian bodies. The number of US personnel missing in action or prisoners of war in Vietnam was constantly harped upon in the US mainstream, but the number of Vietnamese missing in action and a count of the vast civilian toll in Vietnam were of no interest, and as Noam Chomsky has pointed out that civilian toll in Indochina is not even known within the range of millions (and estimates run up to four million). In Iraq today, the media reported at one point that 38 GIs had been killed in the November US assault on Fallujah, but no figures are given for the Iraqi civilians killed - unworthy victims, or unpeople, by rule of political-racist bias, but serving the function of protecting the US onslaught from adverse information.


Preventing Others From Counting Civilian Bodies

Equally important, and a complement of the official policy of not counting bodies, is preventing others from counting bodies (or reporting such counts). This involves buying up, intimidating, or destroying the media, journalists, and even hospitals and doctors in hospitals, who might testify to civilian casualties. Actions along these lines have been carried out on a large scale.

Most recently, the media reported that among the first actions of the US forces in Fallujah was to bomb out of existence a clinic and take over the main General Hospital. One of the stated purposes of the takeover was to "shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties" (Eric Schmitt, "A Goal is Met. What's Next?", New York Times, November 15 2004). "Propaganda" is used here in the Orwellian sense of information that does not serve OUR propaganda needs. There is no suggestion in this article, or elsewhere in the paper or mainstream media, that this one of "several accomplishments" by US forces in Fallujah was immoral and a straightforward violation of international law (see further, David Peterson, ZNet Blogs, November 8 2004; http://blog.zmagazine.org/index.php/weblog/entry/iraq5/ ).

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all photos made by Denver-base Space Imaging, the only commercial operator collecting high resolution images by satellite, thereby preventing possible public access to satellite photos of some of the several hundred villages bombed by the US Air Force.

In another notorious case, a soldier even threatened to shoot Doug Struck, a Washington Post reporter who was trying to visit a just-bombed site in Afghanistan. The Pentagon didn't want anybody looking at the results of those bombings.

The Pentagon's and other official US attacks on media entities that might disclose inconvenient information has been extensive. In Afghanistan, the Pentagon went after all known indigenous radio stations, and some that didn't exist any more, displaying their imperfect information sources: On October 8 2001, naval ships fired four cruise missiles at an unused radio mast east of downtown Kabul. The radio station, which hadn't been in operation for a decade, was hit by three missiles, but a fourth went astray and completely destroyed a United Nation's-funded de-mining agency, Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC), instantly killing four Afghan night watchmen and injuring two other UN staff persons and two other Afghans (a case described in Marc Herold's forthcoming Afghan Bodies Don't Lie: Faces of 'Collateral Damage').

It is well-known that Colin Powell pressed officials of Qatar to crack down on Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera (and the web site Arabia.com) were subjected to major hacker attacks that caused brief Al Jazeera web site closures and intermittent interruptions throughout the war. The level of the most serious attack suggested government involvement (Faisal Bondi, "Al Jazeera's War", in David Miller, editor, Tell me lies [Pluto: 2004], pages 248-9). The US-chosen Allawi government of Iraq raided and closed down Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad. One condition insisted on by the United States in the April negotiations for a truce fire in Fallujah was that Al Jazeera agree to move its cameras and personnel out of the city, where that broadcaster had been able to transmit hostile "propaganda" (that is, photos of and interviews with civilian victims; pictures of ambulances under fire, et cetera).

The United States bombed and destroyed the main broadcasting station in Belgrade during the 1999 bombing war (while killing sixteen people); it bombed all of the regional radio stations of Radio Shuriet in Afghanistan, and it bombed the Al Jazeera broadcasting facilities in Kabul. Shortly after the start of the Iraq invasion, on March 25 2003, US forces bombed the Iraqi TV station. On April 8, the day after their entry into Baghdad, US forces attacked Al Jazeera's broadcasting facilities there, despite the fact that Al Jazeera officials had told the US military the precise coordinates of their offices in the hope that this would make it more difficult for them to make another "tragic error". This anti-media warfare was hardly noticed by the US mainstream media.


Intimidating and Killing Reporters

The US bombing of the Al Jazeera station in Kabul in 2001 was explained by US officials as a result of detection of a satellite uplink indicating an interview with a Taliban member, and US officials have gone farther, stating publicly that any uplink from enemy territory if detected by US planes could be the basis for an attack, without differentiation between journalism and enemy communications (see Gopsill, "Target the Media", pages 251-3). This threat to bomb even "friendly" journalists and stations would be a strong deterrent to placing them in enemy territory, and the threat helped induce CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox to pull out of Baghdad before the March 2003 invasion. Gopsill notes that "This exodus was pleasing to the Pentagon", causing the US public to be "ignorant of what their forces were doing to the city."

The policy of encouraging the embedding of journalists, complemented by warnings, threats and occasional attacks on "unilaterals", had a similar affect of diminishing the likelihood of reporting outside US military control. Unilateral journalist Terry Lloyd, traveling with several others in a vehicle with huge markings of TV, was shot and killed by US marines, but a Marine general in charge of public relations had warned that "having independent journalists wandering the battlefield is fraught with lots of problems". Unilaterals were consequently sparse, leaving the reporting to the "embeds" and Arab media. Faisal Bodi points out that "From the outset of the war the news followed two tracks: the 'Embed' line laid by Centcom, and the independent line by news providers like Al Jazeera who had the courage to locate hacks in the war zone". ("Al Jazeera's War", in Miller, Tell me lies, page 245). The Embed line was not concerned with civilian casualties.

On April 8 2003, US forces not only bombed the Al Jazeera facilities in Baghdad, they also attacked Abu Dhabi TV facilities located there. On the same day a tank shelled the media facilities and personnel at the Palestine Hotel, killing two journalists and seriously injuring three others. The assault on the hotel is interesting in part because once again US officials engaged in serial lying in "explaining" the attacks - the numerous media personnel in the Hotel, and their video shots, uniformly contradict the official claims of shooting or other action or threat from the Hotel; all of them agree with Robert Fisk's statement that the US response was "a straightforward lie".

The day after this attack on the journalists in the Palestine Hotel, the US invaders, using an armoured personnel carrier, pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein right outside the hotel, passing it off as an Iraqi celebration of the victory. The journalists from the hotel filmed this charade, and as Tim Gopsill says, reported it "as the coalition's greatest moment of triumph. Such magnanimity on the part of people who had just been shot at is remarkable".

Concluding Note

This "magnanimity" flows from structure and internalized bias that causes the media to performs miracles of apologetics for state policy. They can report with great indignation false stories of Saddam's alleged removal of babies from incubators in Kuwait, but the destruction of a clinic and seizure of the main hospital in Fallujah, cutting off of the water supply to this and two other cities, leveling Fallujah with advanced weaponry, and Madeleine Albright's remark that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through the "sanctions of mass destruction" was "worth it", are treated at best with brevity and with no detectable indignation. What the US military is doing to Iraqi civilians is largely unreported in the US media, and documentary evidence collected by outsiders is kept out of sight. A tape of US soldiers badly mistreating Iraqi civilians caught by Swedish journalist Urban Hamid was not saleable here: Hamid says "It's obvious that the mainstream media exercise some kind of self-censorship in which people know this is a hot potato and don't touch it because you are going to get burned". (Quoted in Michael Massing, "Iraq, the Press, and the Election": http://alternet.org/mediaculture/20569/ .)

In short, the mainstream media are "willing collaborators" in imperial policies that involve the mass killing of civilians - their leaders and many of their journalists are spiritual "Embeds" who hardly need coercion and threats to see their government's view of things, but they and their associates are also under pressure from the media leaders, the government, and the private enforcers to stay away from such "controversial" matters as the killing of unworthy victims or unpeople. The media serve as an arm of the state, and do a better job of state propaganda than systems of explicit government control and crude propaganda. This is state propaganda voluntarily provided, though from parties with symbiotic connections to the state and deriving substantial benefits from this relationship.

Edward S Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/

(Added and last modified on December 8 2004)


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Myth of Progress

by Kirkpatrick Sale

Earth Crash Earth Spirit (July 22 2003)


I can remember vividly sitting at the dinner table arguing with my father about progress, using upon him all the experience and wisdom I had gathered at the age of fifteen. Of course we live in an era of progress, I said, just look at cars - how clumsy and unreliable and slow they were in the old days, how sleek and efficient and speedy they are now.

He raised an eyebrow, just a little. And what has been the result of having all these wonderful new sleek and efficient and speedy cars, he asked. I was taken aback. I searched for a way to answer. He went on.

How many people die each year as a result of these speedy cars, how many are maimed and crippled? What is life like for the people who produce them, on those famous assembly lines, the same routinized job hour after hour, day after day, like Chaplin's film? How many fields and forests and even towns and villages have been paved over so that these cars can get to all the places they want to get to - and park there? Where does all the gasoline come from, and at what cost, and what happens when we burn it and exhaust it?

Before I could stammer out a response - thankfully - he went on to tell me about an article written on the subject of progress, a concept I had never really thought of, by one of his Cornell colleagues, the historian Carl Becker, a man I had never heard of, in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a resource I had never come across. Read it, he said.

I'm afraid it was another fifteen years before I did, though in the meantime I came to learn the wisdom of my father's skepticism as the modern world repeatedly threw up other examples of invention and advancement - television, electric carving knife, microwave oven, nuclear power - that showed the same problematic nature of progress, taken in the round and negatives factored in, as did the automobile. When I finally got to Becker's masterful essay, in the course of a wholesale re-examination of modernity, it took no scholarly armament of his to convince me of the peculiar historical provenance of the concept of progress and its status not as an inevitability, a force as given as gravity as my youthful self imagined, but as a cultural construct invented for all practical purposes in the Renaissance and advancing the propaganda of capitalism. It was nothing more than a serviceable myth, a deeply held unexamined construct - like all useful cultural myths - that promoted the idea of regular and eternal improvement of the human condition, largely through the exploitation of nature and the acquisition of material goods.

Of course by now it is no longer such an arcane perception. Many fifteen-year-olds today, seeing clearly the perils with which modern technology has accompanied its progress, some of which threaten the very continuance of the human species, have already worked out for themselves what's wrong with the myth. It is hard to learn that forests are being cut down at the rate of 56 million acres a year, that desertification threatens eight billion acres of land worldwide, that all of the world's seventeen major fisheries are in decline and stand a decade away from virtual exhaustion, that 26 million tons of topsoil is lost to erosion and pollution every year, and believe that this world's economic system, whose functioning exacts this price, is headed in the right direction and that direction should be labeled "progress".

E E Cummings once called progress a "comfortable disease" of modern "manunkind", and so it has been for some. But at any time since the triumph of capitalism only a minority of the world's population could be said to be really living in comfort, and that comfort, continuously threatened, is achieved at considerable expense.

Today of the approximately six billion people in the world, it is estimated that at least a billion live in abject poverty, lives cruel, empty, and mercifully short. Another two billion eke out life on a bare subsistence level, usually sustained only by one or another starch, the majority without potable drinking water or sanitary toilets. More than two billion more live at the bottom edges of the money economy but with incomes less than $5,000 a year and no property or savings, no net worth to pass on to their children.

That leaves less than a billion people who even come close to struggling for lives of comfort, with jobs and salaries of some regularity, and a quite small minority at the top of that scale who could really be said to have achieved comfortable lives; in the world, some 350 people can be considered (US dollar) billionaires (with slightly more than three million millionaires), and their total net worth is estimated to exceed that of 45 per cent of the world's population.

This is progress? A disease such a small number can catch? And with such inequity, such imbalance?

In the US, the most materially advanced nation in the world and long the most ardent champion of the notion of progress, some forty million people live below the official poverty line and another twenty million or so below the line adjusted for real costs; six million or so are unemployed, more than thirty million said to be too discouraged to look for work, and 45 million are in "disposable" jobs, temporary and part-time, without benefits or security. The top five percent of the population owns about two-thirds of the total wealth; sixty percent own no tangible assets or are in debt; in terms of income, the top twenty percent earn half the total income, the bottom twenty percent less than four percent of it.

All this hardly suggests the sort of material comfort progress is assumed to have provided. Certainly many in the US and throughout the industrial world live at levels of wealth undreamed of in ages past, able to call forth hundreds of servant-equivalents at the flip of a switch or turn of a key, and probably a third of this "first world" population could be said to have lives of a certain amount of ease and convenience. Yet it is a statistical fact that it is just this segment that most acutely suffers from the true "comfortable disease", what I would call affluenza: heart disease, stress, overwork, family dysfunction, alcoholism, insecurity, anomie, psychosis, loneliness, impotence, alienation, consumerism, and coldness of heart.

Leopold Kohr, the Austrian economist whose seminal work, The Breakdown of Nations, is an essential tool for understanding the failures of political progress in the last half-millennium, often used to close his lectures with this analogy.

Suppose we are on a progress-train, he said, running full speed ahead in the approved manner, fueled by the rapacious growth and resource depletion and cheered on by highly rewarded economists. What if we then discover that we are headed for a precipitous fall to a certain disaster just a few miles ahead when the tracks end at an uncrossable gulf? Do we take advice of the economists to put more fuel into the engines so that we go at an ever-faster rate, presumable hoping that we build up a head of steam so powerful that it can land us safely on the other side of the gulf; or do we reach for the brakes and come to a screeching if somewhat tumble-around halt as quickly as possible?

Progress is the myth that assures us that full-speed-ahead is never wrong. Ecology is the discipline that teaches us that it is disaster.

Before the altar of progress, attended by its dutiful acolytes of science and technology, modern industrial society has presented an increasing abundance of sacrifices from the natural world, imitating on a much grander and more devastating scale the religious rites of earlier empires built upon similar conceits about the domination of nature. Now, it seems, we are prepared to offer up even the very biosphere itself.

No one knows how resilient the biosphere, how much damage it is able to absorb before it stops functioning - or at least functioning well enough to keep the human species alive. But in recent years some very respectable and authoritative voices have suggested that, if we continue the relentless rush of progress that is so stressing the earth on which it depends, we will reach that point in the quite near future. The Worldwatch Institute, which issues annual accountings of such things, has warned that there is not one life-support system on which the biosphere depends for its existence - healthy air, water, soil, temperature, and the like - that is not now severely threatened and in fact getting worse, decade by decade.

Not long ago a gathering of elite environmental scientists and activists in Morelia, Mexico, published a declaration warning of "environmental destruction" and expressing unanimous concern "that life on our planet is in grave danger". And recently the US Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement endorsed by more than a hundred Nobel laureates and 1,600 members of national academies of science all over the world, proclaimed a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" stating that the present rates of environmental assault and population increase cannot continue without "vast human misery" and a planet so "irretrievably mutilated" that "it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know".

The high-tech global economy will not listen; cannot listen. It continues apace its expansion and exploitation. Thanks to it, human beings annually use up some forty percent of all the net photosynthetic energy available to the planet Earth, though we are but a single species of comparatively insignificant numbers. Thanks to it, the world economy has grown by more than five times over in the last fifty years and is continuing at a dizzying pace to use up the world's resources, create unabating pollution and waste, and increase the enormous inequalities within and between all nations of the world.

Suppose an Objective Observer were to measure the success of Progress - that is to say, the capital-P myth that ever since the Enlightenment has nurtured and guided and presided over that happy marriage of science and capitalism that has produced modern industrial civilization.

Has it been, on the whole, better or worse for the human species? Other species? Has it brought humans more happiness than there was before? More justice? More equality? More efficiency? And if its ends have proven to be more benign than not, what of its means? At what price have its benefits been won? And are they sustainable?

The Objective Observer would have to conclude that the record is mixed, at best. On the plus side, there is no denying that material prosperity has increased for about a sixth of the world's humans, for some beyond the most avaricious dreams of kings and potentates of the past. The world has developed systems of transportation and communication that allow people, goods, and information to be exchanged on a scale and at a swiftness never before possible. And for maybe a third of these humans longevity has been increased, along with a general improvement in health and sanitation that has allowed the expansion of human numbers by about tenfold in the last three centuries.

On the minus side, the costs have been considerable. The impact upon the earth's species and systems to provide prosperity for a billion people has been, as we have seen, devastatingly destructive - only one additional measure of which is the fact that it has meant the permanent extinction of perhaps 500,000 species this century alone. The impact upon the remaining five-sixths of the human species has been likewise destructive, as most of them have seen their societies colonized or displaced, their economies wrenched and shattered, and their environments transformed for the worse in the course of it, driving them into an existence of deprivation and misery that is almost certainly worse than they ever knew, however difficult their times past, before the advent of industrial society.

And even the billion whose living standards use up what is effectively 100 percent of the world's available resources each year to maintain, and who might be therefore assumed to be happy as a result, do not in fact seem to be so. No social indices in any advanced society suggest that people are more content than they were a generation ago, various surveys indicate that the "misery quotient" in most countries has increased, and considerable real-world evidence (such as rising rates of mental illness, drugs, crime, divorce, and depression) argues that the results of material enrichment have not included much individual happiness.

Indeed, on a larger scale, almost all that Progress was supposed to achieve has failed to come about, despite the immense amount of money and technology devoted to its cause. Virtually all of the dreams that have adorned it over the years, particularly in its most robust stages in the late 19th century and in the past twenty years of computerdom, have dissipated as utopian fancies - those that have not, like nuclear power, chemical agriculture, manifest destiny, and the welfare state, turned into nightmares. Progress has not, even in this most progressive nation, eliminated poverty (numbers of poor have increased and real income has declined for 25 years), or drudgery (hours of employment have increased, as has work within the home, for both sexes), or ignorance (literacy rates have declined for fifty years, test scores have declined), or disease (hospitalization, illness, and death rates have all increased since 1980).

It seems quite simple: beyond prosperity and longevity, and those limited to a minority, and each with seriously damaging environmental consequences, progress does not have a great deal going for it. For its adherents, of course, it is probably true that it doesn't have to; because it is sufficient that wealth is meritorious and affluence desirable and longer life positive. The terms of the game for them are simple: material betterment for as many as possible, as fast as possible, and nothing else, certainly not considerations of personal morality or social cohesion or spiritual depth or participatory government, seems much to matter.

But the Objective Observer is not so narrow, and is able to see how deep and deadly are the shortcomings of such a view. The Objective Observer could only conclude that since the fruits of Progress are so meager, the price by which they have been won is far too high, in social, economic, political, and environmental terms, and that neither societies nor ecosystems of the world will be able to bear the cost for more than a few decades longer, if they have not already been damaged beyond redemption.

Herbert Read, the British philosopher and critic, once wrote that "only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines". It is a profound insight, and he underscored it by adding that "only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them".

An apprenticeship to nature - now there's a myth a stable and durable society could live by.

(from John Filiss' Primitivism web site)

http://www.eces.org/articles/000146.php

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Countdown to global catastrophe

by Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

The Independent (January 24 2005)


The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as ten years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

The report, Meeting The Climate Challenge, is aimed at policymakers in every country, from national leaders down. It has been timed to coincide with Tony Blair's promised efforts to advance climate change policy in 2005 as chairman of both the G8 group of rich countries and the European Union.

And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.

The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.

More ominously still, it assesses the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after which the two-degree rise will become inevitable, and says it will be 400 parts per million by volume of carbon dioxide.

The current level is 379 parts per million, and rising by more than 2 parts per million annually - so it is likely that the vital 400 parts per million threshold will be crossed in just ten years' time, or even less (although the two-degree temperature rise might take longer to come into effect).

"There is an ecological timebomb ticking away", said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Centre for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute. The group's chief scientific adviser is Dr Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010. It also calls on the G8 to form a climate group with leading developing nations such as India and China, which have big and growing carbon dioxide emissions.

"What this underscores is that it's what we invest in now and in the next twenty years that will deliver a stable climate, not what we do in the middle of the century or later", said Tom Burke, a former government adviser on green issues who now advises business.

The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the two degrees celcius level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly", it says.

"It is likely, for example, that average-temperature increases larger than this will entail substantial agricultural losses, greatly increased numbers of people at risk of water shortages, and widespread adverse health impacts. [They] could also imperil a very high proportion of the world's coral reefs and cause irreversible damage to important terrestrial ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest."

It goes on: "Above the two degrees level, the risks of abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change also increase. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than ten metres over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

Copyright 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=603975


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Peak Oil in the Mainstream

The Coming Oil Crisis

by Dan Ackman

Prophets Of Doom column, Forbes Online (January 13 2005)


The world economy has gotten fairly comfortable with oil at $45 a barrel. But how will it react to paying $100 a barrel three years from now? Or $150 in five years?

That's what the future holds according to Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management and author of The Oil Factor (Warner Books 2004). The result, Leeb says, will be double digit inflation - if we're lucky. If we're not, it will be a severe depression. We asked Leeb to explain the gilding of black gold.

You say the price of oil will rise much higher than it already has. Why?

"The problem we have is that there are 2.3 billion people in Chindia", Leeb says, using shorthand for a combined China and India.

"Today, China and India use the energy-equivalent of 5.5 barrels of oil per person per year, while rich nations use 39. No matter how rosy your thinking is as to the global supply of oil, there is no way there is going to be enough to satisfy the demands of an extra 2.3 billion people coming online."

As China and India become rich nations, the demand for oil could grow at 6% per year, compared to 2% recently. Currently, the world has almost no excess supply. The planet is operating at anywhere from 95% to 99% capacity, Leeb says. "There is no margin for error". The only way the system can respond is continued price increases.

How bad will it get?

At the end of 1999, oil was trading for around $10 a barrel. Since then, it has risen by about 29% per year. Simply extending the trend line means that oil will be at $100 a barrel in about three years and at $160 in five years, Leeb says. If prices rise the way they have in the last year, the resulting levels will be even higher, and that's without any major geopolitical crisis in the Persian Gulf or anywhere else. "It's not a heroic position", Leeb says. "But I don't know how you avoid it".

What will the result be?

We'll see historically high inflation of 11% to 15%, according to Leeb. "That's not even so unusual", Leeb says. He notes that the US has had bouts of inflation at that level during the two world wars and in the 1970s at the tail end of Vietnam.

"We're kind of overdue", he says.

Economically, the US is already on a kind of war footing, with the war on terror, Iraq, massive military spending and a shortage of a key commodity, specifically oil.

"I hope I'm wrong", he says. "I've never wanted to look more like an idiot than I do right now. But I don't see it."

The "optimistic" side of the scenario is that you can live with high inflation, and even make money with the right investment strategy. Leeb favors oil stocks like ExxonMobil and BP and traditional hedges like real estate, and is especially high on oil service stocks like Schlumberger and Transocean.

When and why will it bottom out?

"I don't see it bottoming out soon", he says. "I think it's a decade - or generation - long problem. A depression would stop it. But as long as the Federal Reserve keeps real interest rates negative, that can be avoided."

The better outcome may be that "as energy prices continue to rise, we'll organize a worldwide effort to develop alternative energies", Leeb says. "Maybe that will even bring the world together".

http://www.forbes-global.com/home/energy/2005/01/10/cx_da_0110doomoil.html



The End of Oil?

by Mark Williams

TechnologyReview.com (Febuary 2005)

Massachussets Institute of Technology


If the actions - rather than the words - of the oil business's major players provide the best gauge of how they see the future, then ponder the following. Crude oil prices have doubled since 2001, but oil companies have increased their budgets for exploring new oil fields by only a small fraction. Likewise, US refineries are working close to capacity, yet no new refinery has been constructed since 1976. And oil tankers are fully booked, but outdated ships are being decommissioned faster than new ones are being built.

If those clues weren't enough, here's a news item that came out of Saudi Arabia on March 6 2003. Though it went largely unremarked, the kingdom's announcement that it could not produce more oil in response to the Iraq War was of historic importance. As Kenneth Deffeyes notes in Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak, it meant that as of 2003, there was no major underutilized oil source left on the planet. Even as established oil fields have reached their maximum production capacity, there has been disappointing production from new fields. Globally, according to some geologists' estimates, we have discovered 94 percent of all available oil.

The Saudis' announcement arrived right on schedule - at least, once the three-year delay imposed by OPEC's anti-US embargo and production cutbacks of the 1970s was factored in. In 1969, the prominent geologist M King Hubbert predicted that a graph of world oil production over time would look like a bell curve, with a peak around the year 2000. Thereafter, he argued, production would drop - slowly at first, then ever faster.

Hubbert had a track record as a prophet: his 1956 forecast that US domestic oil production would peak in the early 1970s proved correct. Kenneth Deffeyes, who started out in 1958 as a young petroleum geologist at Shell's Houston labs working alongside Hubbert, became so convinced by the man's theories that by 1963 he had left the oil business, except for occasional consulting work; he is now a professor emeritus of geosciences at Princeton University. In Beyond Oil, Deffeyes takes readers through Hubbert's analysis in a highly readable style, even boiling down the complex mathematics into a few pages of graphs.

The prognosis? Deffeyes has no doubt that by 2019, the year in which Hubbert's theories indicate global oil production will drop to ninety percent of current rates, human ingenuity will have found replacement energy sources (see "What Energy Crisis?", below). But Deffeyes is optimistic about the long term only because he believes that by 2010, pressures will grow so intense that they'll create the resolve necessary to develop a new energy economy. In the short term, he foresees continually rising oil prices that force industry after industry closer to the wall. He fears not just escalating resource wars around the world but also mass starvation in some countries, since the 6.4 billion people living on the earth today are fed thanks largely to the successes of the 20th century's "green revolution", which, among other innovations, brought petrochemical-based fertilizers into wide use.

Because fifteen years ago we failed to begin developing the new energy sources and technologies we need now, Deffeyes argues, in the immediate future we'll have to rely on what we've got. In Beyond Oil, he examines how we might optimize the use of our geologically derived energy sources.

Deffeyes suggests that coal will make a comeback and that Fischer-Tropsch conversion - the process by which the Nazi regime turned coal into gasoline to keep its Panzers running during World War Two - might become commonplace. He grants that there'll be an outcry over the ecological costs of burning coal; similarly, there'll be much agonizing as nuclear power plants are again rolled out. But Deffeyes believes that M King Hubbert, whose 1956 paper predicting the US oil production peak is titled "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels", was right: nuclear power will be part of our response to decreasing reserves of oil and natural gas, as necessity overrides any political opposition.

Ultimately, says Deffeyes, we may just have to resign ourselves to relying more on coal, wind, and nuclear fission for electricity - and switching to high-efficiency diesel and hybrid automobiles - in order to ration our remaining oil reserves for as long as possible. Abundant energy from fossil fuels was a one-time gift, Deffeyes concludes, that lifted humanity up from subsistence agriculture and has led to a future based on renewable resources.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/review_oil.asp?p=0



What Energy Crisis?

Question and Answer with Peter Huber

by Spencer Reiss

Peter Huber, an engineering professor turned telecommunications lawyer, doesn't worry whence the next electron will come.

Q: The idea that we're running out of energy is deeply ingrained. How can it be so wrong?

A: It's very easy to get pessimistic about energy. Energy doesn't just drop into your lap. The idea that demand will someday outpace supply seems obvious. But historically that hasn't happened, and there's good reason to suppose it won't, because the factors that determine supply are overwhelmingly technological. And our technology improves very fast. Energy technology in particular is advancing faster than it ever has before.


Q: Why is your new book, The Bottomless Well, subtitled The Twilight of Fuel?

A: What matters isn't the price of a barrel of oil. What matters is the price of getting mom and the kids to the soccer field. And that depends on two factors: the cost of the fuel and the cost of all the hardware, the technology, we wrap around it. Fuel is an ever diminishing part of the equation.


Q: You mean efficiency saves the day?

A: The opposite: efficiency always leads to more consumption, not less. Hybrid cars and semiconductor lights are very quickly going to be cloned into all sorts of new applications that don't even exist today, and total energy consumption will rise, not fall. One highly energy-efficient Nintendo machine per teenager consumes far more power in the aggregate than one ENIAC per planet.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/forwards.asp?p=1


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Why we all need to get out more

Humanity has gone back to its origins. We live in caves again, but the cave is now a glass palace. David Nicholson-Lord sees unpleasant results for our social and cultural lives, as well as for our health

by David Nicholson-Lord

New Statesman (January 24 2005)

Nearly a century ago, the only surviving member of the Yahi tribe of North America walked out of the Californian hills and into American legend. Ishi was feted as the last genuine native hunter-gatherer and became the subject of extensive anthropological and biographical research. He was also the focus of some cultural soul-searching. Questioned about civilisation and its discontents, as his biographer Theodora Kroeber reported, Ishi was "sure he knew the cause ... an excessive amount of indoor time". It was "not a man's nature to be too much indoors", he declared.

Some ninety years after Ishi's death, things are much worse. If you're reading this article, the odds are not only that you are inside, but that you spend much, probably most, of your life indoors - staring at a screen, manipulating words or symbols, attending meetings in brightly lit rooms. You probably spend more and more time on the internet too, shopping, chatting, researching. And exercise? Well, there's the gym in the basement ...

Homo sapiens passed much of its early history holed up in caves and it is now returning to its origins. For today's postmodern troglodyte, however, labouring in the knowledge economy, the cave is a lofty glass palace. And whereas the souterrain of palaeolithic times remained earthbound, the contemporary version has floated free. It is a multi-glazed, shrink-wrapped work module, sealed off by technology and security systems from anything that interferes with the pursuit of economic gain and career advancement. To enter it, and to ascend by lift to its summit, is to free oneself from trees, wind, rain, sunshine, the earth beneath. It is, almost literally, to abandon nature.

Humans have been trying to escape the exigencies of nature for most of their history - and we are nearly there. The current century will be the first in which most of us live in towns and cities. In 1800, according to the United Nations, only 2 per cent of the world's population was urban. Now the figure is about 48 per cent, and it is expected to rise to 61 per cent by 2030. The UK is already 89 per cent urban.

In the wake of the move into cities has come the great retreat indoors. Indeed, the two migrations have overlapping causes - the decline of outdoor occupations such as agriculture and forestry, the move to a manufacturing and then to a service economy, the search for controlled environments in which economies could be run more predictably. High land prices in cities helped drive buildings into the sky; 20th-century speculative development and building technology did the rest, turning the contemporary office block into a parallel indoor universe, a carpeted and air-conditioned version of the Victorian sweatshop. Meekly, we file in and sit down, grateful for the comforts that appear to surround us. But at what cost to our health and sanity?

According to the government's UK 2000 Time Use Survey, most of our days are now gobbled up by sleeping, working, eating, travelling and screen-watching - activities conducted inside boxes of one sort or another. Less than half an hour in the average day is spent in purposeful outdoor activity. Research in the US suggests that the average American spends 95 per cent of his or her time indoors isolated from nature. The UK's survey is more specific - out of 1,440 minutes each day, it says, we spend precisely one minute in the countryside or at the seaside.

In evolutionary terms, the migration to the "double indoors" of city and building represents a huge and abrupt change of habitat - in the case of Britons, this has been accomplished in the space of perhaps half a dozen generations, as against 350,000 generations or so spent as hunter-gatherers or pastoralists. It would therefore be surprising if there were not some ill-effects. Some we are familiar with. The great urban indoors is an ecosystem occupied by sedentary grazers and in not much more than a generation has made us so fat that obesity and its associated ills - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - now rank among the biggest health problems in the developed (that is, urban) world. As a recent report from the World Health Organisation pointed out, urbanisation is associated with a shift towards "energy-dense" diets, high in saturated fats and sugars. Part of the reason is that our (reasonably healthy) peasant diets are no longer available - so we fall into the hands of the food transnationals. But there may also be an element of compensation: we are eating to cheer ourselves up.

The best-known symptom of our discomfort was the appearance, in the 1980s, of "sick building syndrome". This showed up as a rash of physical and mental ills - from coughs and colds to headaches, tiredness and depression - that beset workers in deep-plan offices, affecting up to eighty per cent of staff. The syndrome remains something of a mystery - are its causes physical or psychological? Faulty air-conditioning is clearly one culprit and ought, technically, to be remediable. Yet, after more than two decades, we have not even solved this problem - one recent study found that staff in air-conditioned offices are twice as likely to be off work and to suffer from ear, nose and throat problems. Could air-conditioning, with its tendency to supply dry, germ-laden, deoxygenated air, simply be incapable of replicating a "healthy" outdoor atmosphere?

New research by the environment organisation WWF has cast light on another potential cause of sick building syndrome - the build-up of toxins, whether sucked in by ventilation or given off by synthetic furnishings and equipment. Chemicals in the blood of volunteers tested by WWF include many found in computers, furniture and fabrics, air-fresheners and beauty products. Buildings - like cities, but far more effectively - have the effect of trapping and concentrating pollution, from whatever source. In that sense alone, it seems, you're better off out of them.

But sick building syndrome also took us into more uncertain territory - the world of lightlessness, for instance. As winter arrives in the northern hemisphere, millions suffer from seasonal affective disorder - Sad, or "winter blues" - caused by lack of sunlight. Spending most of one's life under artificial lights appears to create a variant of this, labelled malillumination syndrome (MIS). The past decade has also thrown up growing concerns about Vitamin D deficiency. Once associated with poverty and long working hours in Victorian slums, it is now resurfacing among affluent troglodytic westerners.

The main source of Vitamin D is sunlight; the best-known sign of its deficiency is rickets. But Vitamin D deficiency, and lack of sunlight, appear to be connected to a host of other conditions. These include, in no particular order, cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and infertility. Researchers into Sad and MIS also point to links with mental disorders - depression, fatigue, hyperactivity, aggression. The implications are far-reaching. In one experiment, for example, mice reared under natural light lived more than twice as long as those reared under pink fluorescent lights.

None of this is conclusive but it is, at the very least, strongly suggestive. And what it suggests is maladaptation on a grand scale - a species moving to a habitat that does not suit it. Factor in the competitive pressures that now dominate our synthetic indoor universe - the average lunch break has dropped to 27 minutes, with twenty per cent of workers never taking one, compared to seven per cent in 1990 - and you have a recipe for chronic stress. So it is no great surprise that people have taken to binge-drinking and overeating (classic reactions to stress) or that depression is so prevalent in the developed world. By 2020, the World Health Organisation says, depression will be second only to heart disease in the global burden of illness.

Forget the science for a moment, however, and examine other, more complex narratives. The first concerns the world we have left behind: the once-great outdoors. In a scientific culture, it is conventional to explain symptoms of maladaptation in physiological terms - in the case of sunlight, for example, the relationships between the retina, the pineal gland, the hormone melatonin and the all-important hypothalamus gland, which regulates sleep and waking cycles, appetite, metabolism, hormone production, reproductive function and mood. Our indoor lives, judging by this logic, deny us fresh air, moisture, oxygen and sunlight, and offer us germs and pollution instead: no wonder they make us ill. But does the story end with physiology? Or, to put it another way, where does physiology end and, say, philosophy begin?

Urbanisation has produced in human beings an often acute sense of disconnection from nature - and in recent years we have seen much research on why this might matter. If people can see trees or greenery, they fall ill less and recuperate better; they are happier, more cheerful and relaxed, more able to concentrate, less aggressive. Apartment blocks with more greenery suffer less crime. Roads lined with trees reduce driver stress and rage. Although it is a bizarre comment on contemporary positivism that we feel we have to prove such effects - every builder of parks and gardens since Nebuchadnezzar took them for granted - the cause remains elusive. Is it an evolutionary adaptation, some encoded memory of the blue skies and green plains of our African origins? We don't know; we can, however, speculate.

Nature is the ultimate Other, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans spoken of by the philosopher Rudolf Otto. It is what prompts poets and peasants alike to metaphysical speculation and ontological wonder. As works such as The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James suggest, it is probably the primary source of the religious impulse, the raw material of spirituality. The Harvard biologist E O Wilson said something like this when he developed his theory of "biophilia" - that human beings have an innate "love" for nature - and he asked: "What will happen to the human psyche when such a defining part of the human evolutionary experience is diminished or erased?"

It is worth reminding ourselves that psyche is the Greek word for soul, and thus that when we banish nature so comprehensively from our lives, the cost may be a good deal more than a dysfunctional hypothalamus. Nor would you have to be a millenarian - or even an heir to the throne - to see, in some aspects of contemporary culture, not least the rise of evangelism, the signs of spiritual malaise. Thoreau wrote: "The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature - of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter - such health, such cheer, they afford forever!" Deprived of much of this - deprived even, thanks to urban lighting, of the traditionally psyche-arousing glories of the night sky - is it any wonder we are all so angst-ridden?

Whether you agree with this or not, a second narrative deserves attention. Confined inside office ziggurats, locked away with fellow professionals, where do we learn the arts of social tolerance - of mixing with others unlike ourselves? Where do we learn new ideas if everyone around us thinks as we do? Environmental determinism teaches that the way we lay out our lives - the patterns and proximities of buildings, spaces, landscapes - vitally shapes their content. Accidental flat-sharers become lifelong friends, heavily trafficked streets destroy neighbourliness. Elites that armour-plate themselves into inaccessibility may thus pose as much of a threat to the health of a culture or a politics as does the spread of gated communities to social harmony. In an indoor world, elites talk only to each other. They learn only what they choose to and encounter "the environment" only rarely.

The world beyond the gates, the forsaken outdoors, thus assumes a wider role. In the case of the "public realm" - spaces nobody owns or controls - it is a source of social learning, of how the "other half" lives. As Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities found, this can often be challenging. In the shape of nature, the challenge is more fundamental, because unlike any of its surrogates - TV, films, the internet, PlayStation - the reality is unscripted and unpredictable. It is also unfathomable. In a world without it, one could therefore argue, human beings talk only to themselves, and find the conversation flat, stale and unprofitable. From this perspective, the different narratives fuse, giving us a sharper view of what we are losing; and a sense, too, that Ishi was right. We really do need to get out more.

David Nicholson-Lord is the author of Green Cities: And Why We Need Them (New Economics Foundation, 2003). His novel, The Fortieth Night, is published this year.

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2005

http://www.newstatesman.com


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Methane Madness

A Natural Gas Primer

by Randy Udall & Steve Andrews

Community Office for Resource Efficiency (2001)

Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.


In 2000 the wellhead price of natural gas skyrocketed 400%. This was the sharpest energy price increase the nation had ever seen, outdoing even the oil spikes of the 1970s. The price hikes hit hard, hammering homeowners, business, and industry, contributing to rolling blackouts in California, weighing on the stock market, and unleashing a frenzy of new drilling. It was, one expert wrote, a "train wreck". So what comes next? The stakes are high; 70% of new homes are heated with natural gas, and the nation's electric utilities have wagered $100 billion that it is the 'fuel of the new millennium. " But what if they are wrong? Was this winter's crisis a passing anomaly, or the tip of an iceberg? This Natural Gas Primer examines the past, present, and future of our most versatile fuel.

Superior Fuel

A transparent vapor, lighter than air, natural gas provides one-fourth the nation's energy. What we call gas is mostly methane, a wonderful molecule, ubiquitous and invisible, a polite servant which does many tasks well. Natural gas can heat your home, dry your clothes, grill your steak, run a car or a power plant. It is critical to agriculture, both as an energy source for food processing and as a key feedstock for fertilizer. About 45% of the nation's gas goes to industry - pulp and paper, cement and asphalt, chemicals, plastics, and petroleum refining. Gas is also the cleanest fossil fuel, producing about half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal. The nation has 320,000 gas wells. Per capita, we use about a dumpster's worth of gas each day. Each year, 280 million Americans use as much natural gas as three billion people in Europe and Asia.

The Past At A Glance

Gas is the "youngest" of the fossil fuels; its use has risen 1000-fold since 1900. Domestic production was negligible before 1920, rose sharply after World War II, peaked in 1973, dipped during the "gas bubble" of the 1980s, and has flat-lined since. In the past eighty years, we've consumed about 950 trillion cubic feet. By some estimates, almost half the gas that will ever be produced in this country has already been burned. Easy come, easy go. Half gone, half left. Much of the "gone" was cheap and easy to produce. Much of what's left will be relatively more expensive and difficult to extract. The Big Easy is over.

The US consumes 28% of the globe's natural gas. But unlike oil, which we import from 25 nations, 99% of our gas is produced in North America. See "US Natural Gas Production" chart at http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

Perils Of Conventional Wisdom

The roots of the current energy crisis date back twenty years. The 1979 Oil Shock unleashed a frenzy of petroleum exploration and in the early 1980s, 80,000 wells were spudded each year. As it turned out, we didn't find that much oil, but we did find a lot of gas. A glut was born.

Between 1983 and 1996, the real price of gas fell by 46%. Everyone grew complacent. Industry, government, and environmentalists alike proclaimed that gas would be cheap and superabundant far into the future. Whatever your politics, this was comforting news. Want to run millions of cars with natural gas? No problem. Order 180,000 Megawatts of gas-fired power plants to run the Information Economy? Makes perfect sense. As gas got cheaper and cheaper, frivolous uses joined essential ones. Snowmelt your driveway? Sure, why not? Install radiant tubing under golf course greens? "Atta baby". Little by little, wishful thinking morphed into conventional wisdom just in time to get blindsided by a perfect storm.

The Perfect Storm

The metaphor was coined by Matt Simmons, an investment banker to the energy services industry who writes World Oil magazine's annual review of petroleum developments. Last year, as oil prices tripled and natural gas prices quadrupled, he advised the Bush campaign about our energy predicament. "An energy crisis is descending over the world", Simmons wrote. "The situation is grave. The world has not run out of oil and North America has not run out of natural gas. What we are short of is any way to grow our energy supply. North America has no excess natural gas capacity. What we do have is extremely aggressive decline rates, making it harder each year to keep current production from falling. A massive number of gas-fired power plants have been ordered. But, each gas to run them is simply not there."

Cinderella Story

Gas and oil are both hydrocarbons, and they are often found together in the same reservoir. But in the early years of the Oil Era, gas was considered the ugly stepchild of the petroleum family, a safety hazard with no market value, and drillers cursed when they found it. In many parts of the world gas is still worthless, you literally can't give it away. Here in North America, gas sold for 30 cents per thousand cubic feet as recently as 1974. At that price, a winter's heat for a Denver home would cost thirty bucks. But those days are history.

Profane Bills

In much of the US, the average home consumes its volume in methane each winter month. That much heat used to cost $80; this past winter, the cost nearly doubled. In December 2000, wholesale gas prices briefly touched $10 per thousand cubic-feet. In January 2001, prices averaged $8, and homeowners in Chicago, Boston, and Denver were hammered by $200 utility bills. But the shock to the national billfold didn't end there. Farmland Industries shut down some of its fertilizer plants because using pricey natural gas to make cheap fertilizer didn't make sense. Higher gas prices helped to torpedo California's ill-fated experiment with electricity deregulation, driving its two largest utilities to the brink of bankruptcy. By spring 2001, wellhead gas prices had receded from their dizzying heights, but were still twice what they were twelve months earlier.

See "Monthly Gas Prices: 1999-2001" chart at
http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

Drilling With Charlie

One reason gas prices have skyrocketed is that there are only 1,350 drilling rigs searching for gas in North America. It takes ten men to run a rig, they rotate twelve-hour shifts night and day, one week on, one week off. Visiting a drilling site is to witness a remarkable display of American guts, ingenuity, and know-how. But, when you've only got 1,350 drill bits trying to meet the energy appetites of 280,000,000 Americans ... is it any surprise the roughnecks are falling behind?

During the last fifteen years, while the rest of American prospered, the petroleum industry got hammered by wild swings in oil prices. More than 600,000 people were laid off, and as a result the oil patch lost a generation. Today the workforce is dominated by men in their fifties and kids in their teens. One driller named Charlie Brister, a thoughtful veteran who's been laid off four times, says this: "We live in the most energy intensive civilization the world has ever known, and yet the average American knows nothing about energy. But things may have to get a lot more critical before the public is ready to hear the truth. You piss everyone off if you try to explain to a typical Republican that 'There's not enough oil in the US for us to be self sufficient' or tell a typical environmentalist that 'Wind and solar cannot meet 100% of our energy needs."

See third chart at http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

The Depletion Treadmill

In June 1999, a disturbing article was published in Oil & Gas Journal. It described how Texas, which produces one-third of the nation's gas, must drill 6,400 new wells each year to keep its production from plummeting. That's 17 wells each-day. As recently as 1998, the state only needed to drill 4,000 wells to keep annual production steady. The reason for the change? As drillers target ever-smaller pools, new wells experience steeper depletion rates. Indeed, a typical new well has an astounding first-year decline of 56%, which is another way of saying it begins dying soon after it is born. No one tikes talking about depletion; it is the crazy aunt in the attic, the emperor without clothes, the wolf at the door. But the truth is that drillers in Texas are chained to a treadmill, and they must run faster and faster each year to keep up.

Texas Well Depletion. See "Depletion Rules: New Texas Gas Well" chart at http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

Canada To The Rescue?

The United States is the world's largest importer of natural gas. But unlike oil, which we buy from 25 nations, 99% of our gas is produced here in North America. Domestic supplies meet 85% of our needs, the other 15% comes from Canada. Most Canadian gas is produced in Alberta, although significant new fields have been found near Nova Scotia. The Canadians have historically been eager to ship methane south, and today half the country's gas is exported to the States. But last winter, as Canadian gas bills doubled, a debate over this practice began. Canada is, after all, a frigid country and some Canadians are beginning to suggest capping the amount of gas sent to the "damn Yankees" so that future generations will have adequate supplies. Gas fields in western Canada are aging like those in Texas, and the Canadians are wrestling their own depletion demons, running their own treadmill. It takes twenty new wells per day, nearly 7,500 per year, to keep Alberta's production from declining.

See "Canada Gas Exports to the US" chart at http://www.mnforsustain.org/udall_and_andrews_methane_madness.htm

Gas On Ice

As traditional fields decline, Canadian and US producers are dusting off plans to tap Arctic gas.

There's lots of gas on Alaska's North Slope and at the Mackenzie River Delta. But to tap either field will require a feat of civil engineering, snaking 2,000 miles of steel pipe across tundra, permafrost, and muskeg, doable but not quick or cheap. Current estimates are that Arctic gas is at least six years and $8 billion away. And no miracle cure, either, since a five-foot pipe could provide only about five percent of our current consumption. Other supply options? The shallow Gulf of Mexico is in steep decline, but the deepwater Gulf is producing increasing amounts. Coalbed methane from Wyoming and Colorado is now meeting seven percent of the nation's needs. New England has begun to receive gas from Nova Scotia. The industry wants to drill in areas that are now off-limits, including offshore California, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and parts of the Rockies. It is also possible to import liquefied natural gas, chilled to minus 260 degrees fahrenheit, on special tankers. The US now gets about one percent of its gas this way, a percentage that should increase to three percent by 2010.

Power Surge

The nation's long-standing glut of natural gas and electrical capacity, along with the world's spare oil capacity, vanished simultaneously in spring 2000. Prosperity and the Internet are partly responsible. Fueled by cheap energy, the US economy grew 60% since 1986, an astounding 5% in 2000 alone. Gas consumption grew 36% over that period. But it was the demand for electricity - up 5.4% in 1998, an astounding rate for such a large economy- that has had the biggest impact on gas prices. To meet our growing electricity needs, utilities have ordered 180,000 Megawatts of gas-fired power plants to be installed by 2005. It was a logical thing to do: gas is the cheapest, cleanest way to convert fossil fuel to electricity. But if ordering one gas turbine makes perfect sense, ordering 1,000 is a recipe for disaster. No one in the utility industry asked the key question: can we produce enough gas to run all those plants? Many experts think the answer is no.

See "Proposed Power Plant Additions" chart at http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

Pipelines & Caves

During the summer, gas is pumped into underground caverns for use the next winter. This schedule is now being crimped by Sunbelt air conditioners, whose demand for gas-fired electricity is soaring. Gas used to keep us warm; now we ask it to keep us cool, too. Since the storage system was never sized for the A/C load, we've depleted our storage cushion. In March 2001, gas-in-storage reached its lowest level in history. Pipelines are another critical part of the gas puzzle. Without a pipeline, natural gas is worthless, a constraint first recognized by the Chinese. They were drilling for gas in 1000 AD - but their pipeline materials were limited to bamboo. American pipelines today could stretch to the Moon. Most date to post-World II, when Gulf Coast supplies were tied to markets in the Midwest and New England. Since pipelines are prone to corrosion, beer keg-sized diagnostic tools called "pigs" are pushed through the lines to search for weak spots, not always in time. In August, 2000, a pipeline exploded in New Mexico, killing ten people, and crimping gas deliveries to California. Many aging pipelines need to be rebuilt, replaced, or expanded to deliver more gas to urban areas, where the new fleet of gas-fired power plants will be moored. In December 2000, gas delivered to Los Angeles briefly fetched $69, equivalent to $400 for a barrel of oil.

A Wicked Hangover

In hindsight, the 1990s were the Big Bonfire, an unprecedented energy binge. As natural gas and gasoline prices shrunk, new houses and cars grew gargantuan. Soccer moms bought SUVs and Americans consumed their body weight in natural gas and oil every five days. Happy Hour is now over, and we are nursing a wicked hangover. The road ahead is strewn with energy potholes and related economic hazards. For decades natural gas has been our most versatile fuel and obedient servant. Versatility is a virtue, but it is also a curse for it allows everyone to make methane plans without "checking the gas tank". According to the Energy Information Administration, by 2005 we may need twenty percent more natural gas than we use today; by 2015, fifty percent more. But US production has flat-lined for fifteen years, and Canada is treading water, too. So where's the new gas gonna come from?

Trillion Dollar Gamble

With no debate, and little consideration of the long-range implications, the nation has embarked on a "dash for gas". This chart shows how future gas prices will be driven by skyrocketing demand for gas-fired electricity. To meet the electricity sector's gluttonous appetite - forecast to triple by 2015 - we will need to build a pipeline to Alaska, double the number of drilling rigs, and open large swaths of federal land now off-limits to drilling. But even that may not be enough. In truth, the dash for gas may be the ultimate pipe dream, a dangerous delusion, a risky chimera, an ill-considered "vision in search of reality". If it turns out that we can't find sufficient gas to run hundreds of new powerplants, then what? Pick from this list: build new coal or nuclear plants; get serious about renewables, particularly wind power, now cheaper than gas; or invest real money in energy efficiency. Coal is our most abundant fossil fuel, but it also carries the specter of climate change; no nuclear plants have been ordered in 22 years; renewables are increasingly cost-effective but intermittent.

Efficiency is a proven winner, but it's not a "free lunch". All solutions require time and capital. During the interim, we may soon hit an "energy ceiling", beyond which consumption can not grow.

See "Natural Gas Consumption: 1997-2017" chart athttp://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

Hold `Em Or Fold `Em

President Bush has been dealt a tough hand. Indeed, he has inherited the most severe and complicated energy challenge the nation has ever faced. The average American family will spend more than $3,000 on electricity, oil, and natural gas this year. The economy is going south. Wall Street is struggling. Blackouts threaten to become a way of life, and not solely on the Left Coast. Two-thirds of the nation's oil and almost half the nation's natural gas have been burned. The world is almost out of spare oil production capacity. The President's instincts are to find more energy wherever he can: He wants to play the "ANWR card"; drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would have no effect on the nation's energy posture for at least five years.

But if events have conspired against Bush, they have also created an historic opening. The former oilman has a tremendous opportunity, perhaps even an obligation, to do what no President has ever done: level with the American people about our energy challenges and, as important, our efficiency opportunities. Just as the fervent red-baiter, Richard Nixon, was the only American politician who dared make peace with Communist China, Bush's background enables him to speak truth to power.

This fireside chat is long overdue., "As a former oilman, I'd like to believe that we can drill our way out of the current crisis", the President might say. "But our oil and gas fields are aging, and no one can turn back the clock. Any attempt to solve the nation's energy problems by increasing energy supplies without reducing the growth in energy demand is doomed to failure. Yes, we need to drill more wells and tap new supplies, but we also must become much more productive in our use of energy. Indeed, our prosperity depends on it. Tonight I am proposing an eight point, bipartisan plan to make America the most energy efficient country on Earth ..."

Farfetched? Perhaps. But even a great nation can deny reality only so long. If Bush doesn't ante up, his successor will.

More Information?

This pamphlet is designed to provide a quick introduction to our natural gas predicament. If you need additional information, we've compiled our favorite sources, articles, and web sites in a Natural Gas Resource Summary. View it at www.altenergy.org/core or request a hard copy at core@aspeninfo.com .

Contact the authors at rudall@aol.com, sbandrews@worldnet.att.net.

Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE)
Box 9707, Aspen, Colorado 81612
Tel: 970-544-9808 Fax: 970-544-9599

http://www.aspencore.org/Fossil/methane_madness.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Reasons to be cheerful

by Jared Diamond

In our second extract from his new book, Jared Diamond reveals why he is cautiously optimistic for the future of the planet and outlines the choices we have to make to protect our environment.

The Guardian (January 13 2005)


People often ask me, "Jared, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world's future?" I answer, "I'm a cautious optimist". I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don't make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don't succeed at that effort, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse.

That's the reason why I decided to devote most of my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our problems have to be taken seriously and won't go away otherwise. On the other hand, we shall be able to solve our problems - if we choose to do so. That's why my wife and I did decide to have children seventeen years ago: because we saw grounds for hope.

One basis for hope is that, realistically, we are not beset by insoluble problems. While we do face big risks, the most serious ones are not beyond our control, like a possible collision with an asteroid of a size that hits the Earth every hundred million years or the horrific tsunamis that struck in the Indian ocean. Instead, they are ones that we are generating ourselves.

Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for grabs. We don't need new technologies to solve our problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most part we just need the political will to apply solutions already available.

Of course, that's a big "just". But many societies did find the necessary political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others.

Another basis for hope is the increasing diffusion of environmental thinking among the public around the world. While such thinking has been with us for a long time, its spread has accelerated, especially since the 1962 publication of Silent Spring. The environmental movement has been gaining adherents at an increasing rate and they act through a growing diversity of increasingly effective organisations, not only in the US and Europe but also in the Dominican Republic and other developing countries. At the same time as the environmental movement is gaining strength at an increasing rate, so too are the threats to our environment.

What are the choices that we must make if we are now to succeed, and not to fail? Two types of choices seem to me to be crucial.

One of those choices has depended on the courage to practise long term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. This type of decision making is the opposite of the short term, reactive decision making that too often characterises our elected politicians - "ninety-day thinking".

Set against the many depressing bad examples of such short term decision making are the encouraging examples of courageous long term thinking in the past, and in the contemporary world of NGOs, business and government. Among past societies faced with the prospect of ruinous deforestation, Easter Island and Mangareva chiefs succumbed to their immediate concerns, but Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders and 16th century German landowners adopted a long view and reafforested. China's leaders similarly promoted reafforestation in recent decades and banned logging of native forests in 1998. In business, the American corporations that remain successful (for example Procter & Gamble) don't wait for a crisis before re-examining their policies.

Courageous, successful, long term planning also characterises some governments and some leaders, some of the time. Over the last thirty years a sustained effort by the US government has reduced levels of the six main air pollutants nationally by 25%, even while energy consumption and population increased by 40% and vehicle miles driven by 150%.

The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of those treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches? Australia is reappraising its identity as a British agricultural society. The Icelanders and many traditional caste societies of India in the past, and Montana ranchers dependent on irrigation in recent times, did reach agreement to subordinate their individual rights to group interests.

All of these were achieved despite being agonisingly difficult. Hence they also contribute to my hope. They may inspire modern first world citizens with the courage to make the most fundamental reappraisal now facing us: how much of our traditional consumer values and first world living standards can we afford to retain? I already mentioned the seeming political impossibility of inducing first world citizens to lower their impact on the world.

The alternative, of continuing our current impact, is more impossible. This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future - except for all other conceivable scenarios.

Actually, while it won't be easier to reduce our impact, it won't be impossible, either. Remember that impact is the product of two factors: population, multiplied times impact per person. As for the first of those two factors, population growth has recently declined drastically in all first world countries, and in many third world countries as well - including China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, with the world's largest, fourth largest and ninth largest populations respectively.

Intrinsic population growth in Japan and Italy is already below the replacement rate, such that their existing populations (that is, not counting immigrants) will soon begin shrinking.

As for impact per person, the world would not even have to decrease its current consumption rates of timber products or of seafood: those rates could be sustained or even increased, if the world's forests and fisheries were properly managed.

My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalised modern world's interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archaeologists and television. Today, though, we turn on our televisions or radios or pick up our newspapers, and we see, hear, or read about what happened in Somalia or Afghanistan a few hours earlier.

We have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples. That's an opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a degree. My hope is that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference.

Is Jared right?

The author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel will be talking live online on Thursday January 20 at 3 pm. Post your questions and messages for Jared Diamond now here.

Extracted from Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive by Jared Diamond, published by Allen Lane on January 17 at ￡20. c Jared Diamond. To obtain a copy at the offer price of ￡18.40 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1388503,00.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

True blue

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (January 2005)

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. -- Thomas Jefferson

The London Daily Mirror published the result of last year's American presidential election under the headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" which was the same question that on the morning of November 3 confounded every late- or early-rising Democrat in Manhattan. If by noon I'd heard it asked in all the tones of voice meant to express shock, disgust,
bewilderment, and shame, neither had I come across anybody equipped with an intelligible or ready answer. Among the company at lunch in a downtown restaurant catering to the literary trade what passed for conversation consisted of little else except the exchange of stunned silences. All present had been so certain that the election would go the other way. How could it not? The American people might be dumb, but were they also deaf and blind? Who but a lunatic or a columnist for the New York Post could fail to see President George W Bush as a dishonest and self-glorifying braggart lost in the fog of a quack religion. Surely the facts spoke for themselves. Under a pretext demonstrably false, the man had embarked the country on a disastrous and unnecessary war, mortgaged its economic future to foreign banks, assigned the care of the natural environment to the machinery certain to strip the land, poison the water, and pollute the air. What else did a voter need to know? Didn't people read the papers, look at the news broadcasts from Baghdad, wonder what had happened to their pension or their job?

So unforeseen was the calamity at the polls - the Republicans enlarging their majorities in both the Senate and the House as well as President George W Bush winning a decisive plurality of the popular vote - that it was thought deserving of a higher order of politically scientific interpretation than ordinarily was to be found in a college civics class. Something heavy was afoot, something mystical or maybe criminal, and such is the speed of our modern system of communications and the fast-drying character of its instant wisdoms that within a single twenty-four-hour news cycle the tale of the Democratic Defeat was packaged in both an authorized and an unauthorized version. The mainstream print and broadcast media reported an election decided on "the moral issues"; the Internet blogosphere brought word of an election stolen by God-fearing thieves.

As was to be expected of the newspaper of record, the New York Times preferred the more hygienic text, and its op-ed page on November 4 offered no fewer than three commentaries on the separation of the country's spiritual and intellectual powers. The historian Garry Wills explained that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had come to grief in the Pentecostal wilderness south of Chattanooga, that "many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution". Maureen Dowd deplored the politics of fear and intolerance with which President Georgw W Bush had recruited "a devoted flock of evangelicals" to the banners of holy crusade; Thomas Friedman discovered himself in a country undreamed of in the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, where what has been lost is the distinction between church and state, where religion trumps science. The authors took no joy in their observations - possibly because their message was not much different from the propaganda delivered by Rush Limbaugh and the Reverend Jerry Falwell to the right-wing gospel crowd - but they testified to the existence of two Americas, one of them occupied by the virtuous souls in the great Midwestern heartland ("values voters", churchgoing and culturally conservative), the other inhabited by cynical apostates (nihilist at birth, often homosexual) trading foreign currencies and languages in the secular cities on the nation's seacoasts. Like it or not, the partition was encoded in the colors of the electoral map and therefore one to which we must pay heed.

Writing for the same op-ed page on November 6, Nicholas Kristof developed the evidence into a sermon. The time had come, he said, for the Democratic Party to find its way back to God. "I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation", he said, "but it's not. It involves compromising on principles". For the wayward politicians among his readers who might have lost their Bible in a Taiwanese bordello or the belly of a whale, he suggested a few first steps on the road to redemption - "Don't be afraid of religion"; argue theology with Republicans; "Hold your nose and work with President Bush as much as you can because it's lethal to be portrayed as obstructionist"; Democrats must learn to defer to local sensibilities.

Similar instructions soon appeared on all the blackboards of the national news media - many fine words about the "healing" process binding up the wounds of partisan bitterness and strife - and on November 16 the chastened and recently reduced minority of Democrats still present in the Senate deferred to the sensibility of the nearest clergymen and named as their leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Non-obstructionist and much admired for his never having to hold his nose, Reid fit the description of a Democrat saved by Jesus - a teetotaling Mormon, a former Capitol Hill police officer, opposed to abortion, co-sponsor of the constitutional amendment deeming it a crime to burn the flag, careful to say nothing that anybody might remember, described by his colleagues as "strong as a new rope when he needs to be", as amiable as Mr Rogers, the kind of guy who'll "make the trains run on time".

I don't doubt that the country is as rich in moral values as it is in apple trees, but I'm never sure that I know what the phrase means, or how it has come to be associated with the Republican Party, the Santa Fe Trail, or the war in Iraq. How is it moral for the President of the United States to ask a young American soldier to do him the service of dying in Fallujah in order that he might secure for himself a second term in the White House? Why is it moral to deny medical care to forty million people who can't pay the loan-shark prices demanded by the insurance companies but to allow twelve million American families to go hungry in the winter? What is moral about an administration that never goes before a microphone to which it doesn't tell a lie?

Nor do I believe the sales pitch for the fruitful plains of Christian goodness lying to the west of the Mississippi River. When I read the advertisements distributed by the Heritage Foundation and the brewers of Colorado beer, I think of Tom DeLay (the House majority leader currently under threat of felony indictment, always quick to quote from scripture but quicker still to give or take a bribe), of Kenneth Lay (former chairman of the Enron Corporation, which relieved its investors of $60 billion and bilked the state of California of $2 billion), the young and entrepreneurial George W Bush, who made his fortune by extorting it from the citizens of Arlington, Texas.

So also with the story about the conservative culture said to defend the faithful in small country towns against the wickedness of modern art and the sin of neon light, or the one about the sturdy forms of economic self-reliance that preserve the homespun country folk in Kansas, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Both stories are as false as the image of New York City as a sink of iniquity, or of the Republican Party as the friend of the common man. The red states live on the charity of the blue states, more abjectly dependent on government subsidy than a Harlem welfare mother or the owner of a California football team, and if network television and the supermarket press can be taken as a measure of the culture that sustains the heartland dream of heaven, it is a product of the pagan, not the Christian, imagination - Las Vegas the Garden of Eden, the miracle of the loaves and fishes outpointed by a winning number in the lottery, the 72,000 nymphs and fauns dancing to the tune of the pornographic websites nearer to hand than the 72 black-eyed virgins promised by Allah to the martyrs of Islamic jihad.

Like the romance of the American West, the virtue of the American heartland is a proposition floated by speculators on the literary and financial markets located in the nation's godless seaports. The nineteenth-century settlement of the trans-Mississippi west was promoted by New York railroaod operators who promised the pioneers a land of milk and honey and sent their wagons forth into bankruptcy and a desert; the Hollywood entertainment industry performs a similar service for an audience wishing to imagine itself cast in a Frank Capra movie, guarded by comic book heroes, the happiest people on earth at play in the fields of the Lord, free to drink from the foun-tain of youth sold under the counter in an Ecstasy pill, over the counter as a prescription for Viagra.

I can understand why columnist Kristof might wish that President Bush's return to the White House was not "just a matter of presentation", but if I don't know how else to account for the result except as a matter of the cinematography and the sound effects, neither do I think it astonishing or deplorable. An American presidential election is a movie, usually a very bad movie, but the American public likes bad movies, and President Bush was more convincing in the role of Batman than was Senator John Kerry in the role of Flash Gordon. The production values are the moral values.

The movie playing in the mainstream media during the first week after the election conformed to the specifications of a major studio release along the lines of Titanic or Lord of the Rings; the one that opened in the blogosphere multiplex resembled a film noir independently produced by Quentin Tarantino. Rising from the depths of the cyberspatial void like flotsam from a sunken ship, the tumult of postings and emails brought forth long lists of numbers, ten-page attachments, rumors of Republican election officials as corrupt as Huey Long, and it was hard to know who or what was telling the truth, which websites could be trusted, and which ones were being operated by paranoid conspiracy theorists or Captain Nemo. Much of the testimony was anecdotal or so circumstantial as to be open to an inference precisely opposite to the one intended, but a good deal of it bore the stamp of reliable witness and incontrovertible fact. The fragments of a possible narrative could be found in what was known to have occurred in Florida - statistical anomalies, election laws configured to prevent any chance of a recount, the malfunction of easily abused voting machines, many voters denied access to the polls, large numbers of ballots spoiled or lost - and although the scraps of evidence didn't make the weight of an indictment on charges of either grand or petty larceny, they at least provided clues worthy of further investigation:

<> A precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, possessed of only 638 voters awarded 4,258 votes to Bush.

<> In forty-seven of the sixty-seven counties in Florida, Bush received more votes than there were registered Republicans.

<> Of the 120,200,000 votes cast on Election Day roughly a third were processed by electronic voting machines supplied not by government but by private corporations, at least one of them (Diebold) controlled by a zealous partisan of the Republican Party who made no secret of his wish to bring victory home for the holidays. The software programs enjoyed the protection grant ed to commercial trade secrets.

<> In three states that relied extensively on paper ballots (Illinois, Maine, Wisconsin) the exit polls corresponded to the final tally. In six states that relied extensively on electronic touchscreens (North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio) the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final tally invariably favored Bush.

<> In ten of the eleven swing states the final result differed from the predicted result, and in each instance the shift added votes for Bush.

<> Voters in six states, most particularly those in three Florida counties (Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach) reported touching the screen for Kerry and seeing their ballots marked for Bush.

<> The electronic machines in Broward County began counting absentee ballots backward once they had recorded 32,000 votes; as more people voted, the official vote count went down.

<> Exit polls in states equipped with verifiable paper receipts corresponded to the final tally; in states employing electronic touch screens the margin of difference between exit polls and the final tallies was as high as five, seven, and nine percent.

The credibility of the story adrift in cyberspace had less to do with the certainty of the numbers than with the character of the Bush Administration. If we know nothing else about the government now returning to office in Washington, we know that it doesn't hesitate to cheat and steal and lie. Its family values are those of the Corleone and Soprano families, and thus in line not only with the heartland values of the nineteenth-century American frontier but also with the predatory modus operandi of our twenty-first-century business corporations; an administration capable of perpetrating the murderous fraud of Operation Iraqi Freedom almost certainly would count it as a loss of face if it couldn't further serve God's will by fixing a presidential election.

The other supposition lending credence to the tale told on the Internet followed from the indignant reaction to it on the part of the mainstream media. Under the front-page headline "Vote fraud theories spread by blogs are quickly buried", the New York Times on November 12 published a report that compensated for its lack of journalistic enterprise with a tone of mockery and disdain- "Weblog hysteria", "Experts soon able to debunk". The unnamed experts (professors at Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford) addressed only those suspicions that were most easily allayed; the more troubling questions they left unburied. Similar admonitions appeared in the Washington Post ("Ultimately, none of the most popular theories holds up to close scrutiny"), in the Boston Globe ("Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories"). The motions to dismiss were seconded by various spokesmen for the Kerry campaign, among them David Wade, quoted in the Times as saying that "I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true, but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't re-write the past."

We do nothing else except rewrite the past - in every morning's newspaper, every novel, poem, history book, interoffice memo, message posted on a refrigerator or the Internet. We inhabit the landscapes of our stories, and of the two best-selling fictions explaining the Democratic Defeat, I found myself more at home in the one about the robbery. Although not without its flaws, at least it was consistent with what I know of the country in which I was born and proudly count myself a citizen, the story vouched for in the writings of Henry Adams and Mark Twain, in line with the taking of the land from the Mexicans and the Indians, with the heroic scale of the government fraud embedded in the building of the transcontinental railroad, with the Teapot Dome swindle, the stock-market collapse of 1929, the Internet bubble of fond and recent memory. An American story, true blue and fire-engine red. If the Democrats don't spoil it with a Bible and a flag, maybe they can regain the courage, traditional and culturally conservative, to steal the next election.

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Media Fairyland

The US media is creating a world of make believe

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 18 2005)

On Thursday, the fairy king of fairyland will be re-crowned. He was elected on a platform suspended in mid air by the power of imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most powerful person on earth.

How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? To find out, take a look at two squalid little stories which have been concluded over the past ten days.

The first involves the broadcaster CBS. In September, its 60 Minutes programme ran an investigation into how George Bush avoided the Vietnam draft. It produced memos which appeared to show that his squadron commander in the Texas National Guard had been persuaded to "sugarcoat" his service record. The programme's allegations were immediately and convincingly refuted: Republicans were able to point to evidence suggesting the memos had been faked. Last week, following an inquiry into the programme, the producer was sacked, and three CBS executives were forced to resign.

The incident couldn't have been more helpful to Bush. Though there is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the collapse of CBS's story suggested that all the allegations made about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the news. CBS was furiously denounced by the rightwing pundits, with the result that between then and the election, hardly any broadcaster dared to criticise George Bush. Mary Mapes, the producer whom CBS fired, was the network's most effective investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the forger was either a moron or a very smart operator.

It's true, of course, that CBS should have taken more care. But I think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives would now be looking for work. How many people have lost their jobs, at CBS or anywhere else, for repeating bogus stories released by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Kerry's record in Vietnam? How many were sacked for misreporting the Jessica Lynch affair? Or for claiming that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme in 2003? Or that he was buying uranium from Niger, or using mobile biological weapons labs, or had a hand in 9/11? How many people were sacked, during Clinton's presidency, for broadcasting outright lies about the Whitewater affair? The answer, in all cases, is none.

You can say what you like in the US media, as long as it helps a Republican president. But slip up once while questioning him, and you will be torn to shreds. Even the most grovelling affirmations of loyalty won't help. The presenter of 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, is the man who once told his audience, "George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where". <1> CBS is owned by the conglomerate Viacom, whose chairman told reporters "we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company". <2> But for Fox News and the shockjocks syndicated by ClearChannel, Rather's faltering attempt at investigative journalism is further evidence of "a liberal media conspiracy".

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In 1998, CNN made a programme which claimed that, during the Vietnam war, US special forces dropped sarin gas on defectors who had fled to Laos. <3> In this case, there was plenty of evidence to support the story. But after four weeks of furious denunciations, the network's owner, Ted Turner, publicly apologised in terms you would expect to hear during a showtrial in North Korea: "I'll take my shirt off and beat myself bloody on the back". CNN had erred, he said, by broadcasting the allegations when "we didn't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt". <4> As the website wsws.org has pointed out, it's hard to think of a single investigative story - Watergate, the My Lai massacre, Britain's arms to Iraq scandal - which could have been proved at the time by journalists "beyond a reasonable doubt". <5> But Turner did what was demanded of him, with the result that, in media fairyland, the atrocity is now deemed not to have happened.

The other squalid little story broke three days before the CBS people were sacked. A US newspaper discovered that Armstrong Williams, a television presenter who (among other jobs) had a weekly slot on a syndicated TV show called America's Black Forum, had secretly signed a $240,000 contract with the US Department of Education. <6> The contract required him "to regularly comment" on George Bush's education bill "during the course of his broadcasts" and to ensure that "Secretary Paige [the Education Secretary] and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests". <7>

It's hard to see why the administration bothered to pay him. Williams has described as his "mentors" Lee Atwater - the man who, under Reagan's presidency, brought a new viciousness to Republican campaigning - and the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond. <8> His broadcasting career has been dedicated to promoting extreme Republican causes and attacking civil rights campaigns.

What makes this story interesting is that the show he worked on was founded, in 1977, by the radical black activists Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, to "allow Black reporters to hold politicians and activists of all persuasions accountable to Black people". <9> They sold their shares in 1980, and the programme was later bought by the Uniworld Group. With Williams's help, the new owners have reversed its politics, and turned it into a recruitment vehicle for the Republican party. Williams appears to have been taking money for doing what he was doing anyway.

These stories, in other words, are illustrations of the ways in which the US media is disciplined by corporate America. In the first case the other corporate broadcasters joined forces to punish a dissenter in their ranks. In the second case a corporation captured what was once a dissenting programme and turned it into another means of engineering conformity.

The role of the media corporations in the United States is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.

So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first learn to live in fairyland.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Quoted by Michael Massing, 27th September 2001. Press Watch. The Nation.

2. No author, 24th September 2004. Guess Who's a GOP Booster? The Asian Wall Street Journal.

3. CNN, 7th June 1998. The name of the programme was "Valley of Death".

4. Barry Grey, 16th July 1998. Why did CNN retract its nerve gas report? http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/cnn-j16.shtml

5. ibid.

6. Greg Toppo, 7th January 2005. White House Paid Commentator to Promote Law. USA Today.

7. David D Kirkpatrick, 8th January 2005. TV Host Says US Paid Him To Back Policy. The New York Times.

8. George E Curry, 17th January 2005. Armstrong Williams: No Money Left Behind. New Pittsburgh Courier.

9. Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, 12th December 2002. America's Black Rightwing Forum. The Black Commentator, Issue 20.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/01/18/media-fairyland-/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

A Modest Defence of The President

and His Policies of Creative Destruction

Inauguration - John Gray justifies Fallujah and Guantanamo and looks forward to further developments in Bush's crusade for freedom.

by John Gray

New Statesman (January 17 2005)

The intensifying war in Iraq looks like being a watershed in modern history. Critics of the war have focused on the suffering it has involved and pointed to a number of errors that have been made in the course of the country's ongoing reconstruction. The suffering and mistakes are real enough, but they should not be allowed to conceal the much larger change of which the war is a part. Liberal societies are evolving rapidly to a higher stage of development, in which many traditions will become obsolete.

Under the aegis of the world's most advanced liberal state, torture and collective punishment have once again become normal practice in the conduct of war. To some this may seem anomalous, even contradictory. In reality it is the inner logic of liberal values applied in a time of unprecedented transformation. Liberalism is a universal creed and the crusade for freedom cannot be fettered by archaic legal procedures. Treaties such as the Geneva Convention may have served the cause of freedom in the past, but today they are obstacles to liberal values. A global revolution is in progress in which such quaint relics have no place.

There are many signs that the new American administration has grasped this truth. In Europe, the Bush White House is frequently caricatured as an ultra-reactionary cabal, but this only shows that Europeans are mired in the past. It requires only a little impartial observation - unclouded by the anti-Americanism that is so prevalent in Europe - to see that it is, in fact, an administration dominated by ultra-liberals. By no stretch of the imagination can the neoconservatives who are the intellectual and moral backbone of the administration be called reactionaries or, indeed, conservatives. As they have always made clear, they are radical progressives dedicated to a worldwide democratic revolution in which the freedoms enjoyed by Americans become the entitlement of all. This and nothing else is Mr Bush's mission.

Over the coming four years we can expect to see its commitment to universal freedom continued and extended. In Iraq, the liberation of Fallujah will be repeated in other cities, and America will take the fight for freedom to another level. The reform of antiquated legal and penal practices that has been pioneered in Guantanamo will be taken further. Serious consideration will be given to applying the policies of pre-emptive attack and regime change to Iran, and perhaps Syria. In these and other areas the Bush administration will be acting as the vanguard of human freedom, and it will receive the unswerving support of all those - such as Tony Blair - who understand that it is doing no more than applying core liberal values in the turbulent conditions of our time.

Despite the evidence of the Bush administration's actions, there will be those who quibble with the idea that it is dedicated to liberal ideals. In order to dispel this confusion, let us consider the nature of liberalism, and what - if applied consistently - it means in practice. Take regime change. For true liberals, sovereign states can only be accidents of history, with no claim on our allegiance. Human rights know no borders. Only individuals have rights, and when states violate them they can be invaded and overthrown. A new state can then be established, which respects its citizens as autonomous individuals.

As we all know, things are not always so straightforward. When we are liberating human beings from oppressive regimes, we must reckon with the dead weight of history. Many, perhaps even most, human beings display an irrational attachment to their existing identity, and it cannot be taken for granted that they will automatically welcome the freedom that is being offered them after regime change. They may fail to perceive their culture as being oppressive and be tempted to resist the advance of liberal values. If regime change is really to work in these circumstances, the entire society must be rebuilt. However, in order for that to be possible, it must first be destroyed.

It is this insight that underpins the initiative that is presently being implemented in Fallujah. There are those who say that the destruction of Fallujah is an act of collective punishment for the murder of four American contractors last March. From a narrow legal point of view this may be correct, but "flattening Fallujah" - as the initiative has come to be described by US forces - has a larger significance. It is an early trial of the top-to-bottom reconstruction of Iraqi society that will be required if liberal values are to prevail in the country and the new regime is to survive.

According to US sources, Fallujah's 250,000 inhabitants will return to the devastated city only slowly. This is in order for them to be biometrically catalogued - fingerprinted and retina-scanned - and given an ID card which they will be required to display at all times. With these cards in view, they will be free to move to a number of authorised destinations. Access to and from the city will be controlled by well-fortified checkpoints, with authority to use deadly force if any of the city's residents violate the conditions under which they have been permitted to return. Private motor vehicles will be forbidden. With these policies in place, the entire population can be subjected to continuous surveillance.

From an historical standpoint this may seem no more than another variation on the "secure hamlet" programmes that were used by the British in Malaya and the Americans in Vietnam, with limited success - particularly in Vietnam. Looking to the future, however, it can be seen as a necessary first step in a programme of social reconstruction in which Iraqis are being prepared for life as autonomous individuals. A modern liberal society cannot function if people are locked into networks of family and clan, and acquire their beliefs and values from authoritarian religious leaders. If there is to be anything resembling personal autonomy in the new Iraq, these traditional structures must be dissolved. It is not enough to raze buildings and empty cities. The underlying framework of society must be deconstructed, and reconstituted on a liberal model. This is the experiment under way in Fallujah, which will surely be extended to Mosul, Ramadi and other cities.

It is an ambitious undertaking, with no guarantee of success. For those who are not used to it freedom can come as a shock, and in Iraq the shock of freedom has been considerable. A certain amount of disorder has resulted, and except in the Kurdish zones (where there are no US troops) the forces of fundamentalism and terrorism seem temporarily to have been strengthened. Further military action will undoubtedly be required, including intensive bombing to soften up rebel-held cities and the deployment of hit squads to eliminate insurgents, on the model of the action taken by the Reagan administration in El Salvador some twenty years ago.

Still, it cannot be expected that further military action by America's forces in Iraq - however intensive - will eradicate the insurgency entirely. The problem of terrorism is global, and it demands a global solution. It is in order to tackle this problem that Mr Bush is extending the far-reaching reforms of penal and judicial practice implemented during the first administration. It has been announced that US authorities are planning to use the facility they have established at Guantanamo for the permanent detention without charge or trial of some of its inmates. Under these new arrangements, detainees will be housed in humane conditions that permit activity and socialising during what is expected to be lifelong confinement. The first Bush II administration's directives allowing the use of modern interrogation techniques will not be altered - and rightly so. As I noted in a New Statesman essay some time ago ("A modest proposal", 17 February 2003), the common belief that torture is always contrary to liberal values has no rational basis. No one has the right to attack basic human rights - and terrorism is above all an attack on human rights. No human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured.

The American authorities - closely followed, as ever, by the British - have understood this basic truth, and are setting up a permanent legal framework in which torture can be regulated. At a hearing of the Senate judicial committee this month, President Bush's nominee for the post of attorney general, Alberto R Gonzales, strongly defended his record as legal counsel in the first Bush II administration. In a memorandum to the president in 2002, Gonzales had announced the "new paradigm" that "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions". Quizzed by members of the committee, the presidential nominee held to this view and went on to suggest that the US should consider renegotiating such treaties.

Whether or not the US formally reneges on the Geneva Convention, torture has been re-established in the legal process - not only in America but also in Britain, where courts now accept evidence obtained by its use. These reforms will surely prevent many abuses. The administrative confusion that prevailed at Abu Ghraib, which allowed a number of embarrassing incidents to be widely publicised, is unlikely to recur.

It is no accident that torture has been reintroduced by the world's pre-eminent liberal state. To be sure, torture is used by many regimes - not only those inspired by liberal ideals. It is routinely employed in tyrannies and the ramshackle failed states that litter the globe; but only in liberal states is it part of a crusade for human rights. Liberalism is a project of universal emancipation, and torture will be necessary as long as the spread of liberal values is resisted. When the Bush administration authorises the use of torture, it does so in the cause of human progress.

It is this that explains why there has been so little resistance to its reintroduction. The reform of legal procedure required has been quite far-reaching, yet it has been implemented quickly and effectively, and with the evident support of enlightened opinion. It is encouraging to report that most liberal commentators have tacitly endorsed the reform, while a growing number - so far mostly in the United States - actively defend it. Sadly, continental Europe - thoroughly corroded by moral relativism and lacking any deep commitment to the universality of liberal values - has been slow to accept the need for change.

No one can doubt the scale of the revolution that is under way throughout the world, but there may still be some who question that it is inspired by liberal values. The Iraq war is old-fashioned imperialism, they will say, not the next step in liberalism. There can be no doubt that Iraq's large oil reserves figured in the strategic calculations that were made in the White House in the run-up to war. The neoconservatives who engineered American military intervention in Iraq have always made clear that securing control of the country's oil is a crucial part of their strategy of democratising the Middle East, but this is far removed from anything resembling imperialism. Aside from exploiting them for their resources, European imperialists left the countries that they conquered much as they were. While they may have talked of spreading civilisation, they did little in practice to alter the underlying societies. In contrast, America plans to transform Iraq into a freedom-loving democracy.

It is a task that must be completed in the fairly near future, or else support for the war may crumble in the United States. Mr Bush would then be under pressure to declare victory and withdraw US forces before the job is done - an outcome Europeans have expected all along. The fragile interim regime would collapse and the country would descend into civil war and theocracy. Iraq's oil would pass out of US control - most likely into Iranian hands - and Saudi Arabia would face worsening instability, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the American economy. The entire American project in the Middle East would be endangered, and American power itself put at risk.

With these dangers in mind, Mr Bush may well decide to extend the war to Iran. Such a move will be risky. US forces are already somewhat stretched, and a further land invasion would pose some difficult logistical problems. Even if the US confines itself to bombing Iran, it risks retaliation through an escalation of Iranian-supported unconventional warfare in Iraq.

However, the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East has never been one that seeks mere stability. In the words of the neoconservatives who now more than ever shape its policies, the US aims to promote "creative destruction" throughout the region. Iran's nuclear ambitions are, in any case, shifting the balance of power. In these conditions, a widening of the war is the logic of events.

It is also the logic of liberal values. Liberalism is nothing if it is not a crusade, and the Middle East clearly needs conversion. The battle will be hard and long, and the hope of progress may sometimes be dim. Yet it will not be extinguished. It is burning even now, as Mr Bush and his neoconservative strategists plan the next phase of the global democratic revolution.

(Apologies to Jonathan Swift)

John Gray is the author of Heresies: against progress and other illusions, published by Granta Books

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2005

http://www.newstatesman.com/200501170012


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

When Will the Joy Ride End?

by Randy Udall and Steve Andrews, 1999

Home Power (February/March 2001 issue)

NOTE: See http://www.hubbertpeak.com/debate/udall/joyride.htm for a version of this essay containing charts and tables not included in this text version.

BLACK MAGIC. During the last century oil has transformed the world. British coal launched the Industrial Revolution, but American oil put the pedal to the metal. No other material has so profoundly changed the face of the world in such a short time. Petroleum is black magic, the lifeblood of our civilization. The petroleum industry provides forty percent of the globe's energy and is humanity's largest commercial enterprise. Oil is our most concentrated, flexible, and convenient fuel. Without petroleum there would be no automobile industry, no tourism. Without petroleum 2% of Americans could not feed the remaining 98%. But oil is more than energy. It's the key feedstock for plastics, medicines, clothing, pesticides, paint, and thousands of other products. Fueling Toyota or fabricated into Tupperware, petroleum is the world's premier commodity. Soon, experts say, world oil production will reach an all-time high, an apex, a peak. Then, after a short plateau, it will decline forever. What historians will someday call the Oil Era will last just two centuries. In 1998 we are closer to its end than its beginning.

THE OIL TRIBE. In 1859 oil was struck in Pennsylvania. The magic fluid unleashed Yankee ingenuity, put America on wheels, and helped to create the world's richest superpower. The transformation was unimaginably swift: In 1859 Americans traveled on horseback; in 1969 they drove Mustangs and flew to the Moon. Today it is difficult to overstate oil's importance to our economy. Four percent of the world's people, we use 25% of the world's oil. We are an Oil Tribe, the Petroleum Clan, imbibing about three gallons per person per day. The automobile is our most cherished icon, a new car our symbol of success. The local gasoline station is our secular temple where each week 150 million Americans "fill 'er up". An average American drives 1,000 miles a month, 12,000 miles a year, the distance to the Moon every twenty years. The Oil Tribe numbers 265 million. Together we weigh about 34 billion pounds. Hungry for speed, addicted to motion, we consume our weight in petroleum every seven days.

BLESSED BY GEOLOGY. Cheap oil has always been an American birthright. Through fate and geology, the United States was extravagantly blessed. Our original cargo was about 260 billion barrels; only one country, Saudi Arabia, had more. Oklahoma alone possessed more oil than Germany or Japan. California had more than Germany, Japan, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Italy combined. The US has - or rather had - twenty times as much oil as India, sixteen times as much as Brazil, three times more than China. From 1859 to 1939 the US produced two-thirds of the world's oil. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in oil-starved desperation and Hitler failed to capture Russia's Baku oil field, American petroleum, and the industrial output it nourished, triumphed in World World War Two.

STRENGTH THROUGH EXHAUSTION. As recently as 1950 the US was producing half the world's oil. Forty-eight years later, we don't produce half our own oil. Domestic production peaked in 1970, 27 years ago, and today we produce just 45% of the crude we consume. To fuel our economy we've drilled more and pumped longer than any nation on Earth, pursuing an oil policy that's been called "Strength Through Exhaustion". Although the US remains the world's third largest producer, about 65% of our petroleum has been burned. It's downhill from here.

LIKE DEATH AND TAXES. Perhaps for the same reason that State Farm sells life insurance rather than death insurance, oil companies shun phrases like extraction and depletion. Instead they prefer production, as in "Chevron produces oil". This implies that we can manufacture oil at will, the way we do jeans or computers. In truth, petroleum reserves are finite and depletion is a reality like death and taxes. Oil fields have been compared to track athletes whose best performance comes early in life. After a youthful sprint upwards, production peaks, plateaus, declines, and ends. Chevron speaks of the US as "mature" or "aging". That's mature, in the same way that 75 year-old golfer Arnold Palmer is mature. Tiny Kuwait, smaller than New Jersey, has three times the reserves of the entire US. To better grasp the concept of depletion, consider Pennsylvania.

PENNZOIL. Our most famous motor oil honors the state where the Oil Age began. Prior to the invention of the automobile, most oil was burned in kerosene lamps. For the first 25 years of the era Pennsylvania was the world's leading producer. (John D Rockefeller coined America's largest fortune by cornering the Pennsylvania market.) In 1891 the Quaker State produced enough oil to light the US for seven months. In 1937, when its production reached a second lower peak, Pennsylvania supplied enough to run the now motorized country for seven days. Today the state's oil could power the US for only three hours. Although there are still 19,000 wells in Pennsylvania, collectively they produce a puny 6,900 barrels each day. In contrast, Saudi Arabia produces eight million barrels - 1,100 times as much - from just 1,400 wells.

GUSHERS IN TEXAS. As oil prospectors, some of them retired whalers, continued to harpoon the Earth, oil was struck in New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and then, Texas. Texas was a gusher, America's first world class find. If Texas had been a sovereign country, its oil riches would have placed it in the world's top ten. The state's original reserves were six times greater than those of India, four times greater than Brazil, twice as large as Norway. Texas was big, as big as the braggadocio it came to symbolize. As thousands of men made fortunes in the oil patch, a new social class arose: the "oil millionaires". The Hunt brothers, George Bush, and Lyndon Johnson all made money in Lone Star oil. For the last seventy years the state has been America's leading oil producer. But production in Texas peaked in 1972 and has been declining rapidly since. According to the American Petroleum Institute, about eighty percent of all the oil that will ever be produced in Texas is gone. This is not an anomaly. Thirty-one states produce oil and all are past their peaks. Oklahoma peaked in 1927, Colorado in 1956, Wyoming in 1970, Alaska in 1988.

SWISS CHEESE. Well, okay, if Pennsylvania and Texas are played out, why not drill more wells somewhere else? In fact, the US is already one of the most thoroughly explored and drilled countries on Earth. Of the 4.6 million wells worldwide, 3.4 million have been drilled in this country. Very very few prospects remain. With the exception of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a few deep water basins, we've been there and done that. From the oil industry's perspective, the US is Swiss cheese.

THE LAST HURRAH. The oil industry employs many smart, inventive, and creative people. In a quest to find more oil, the industry has developed a host of new exploration techniques, computer imaging software, and drilling methods. Many are being put to good use in the Gulf of Mexico. There, the oil majors are drilling in 5,000 feet of water - an astounding fact - with the likelihood that they will soon sink wells in 10,000 feet. Analysts expect the Gulf to be America's last great bonanza. A mile under the ocean floor may lie fifteen billion barrels. It's a lot of oil, but only as much as the nation uses every 2.5 years.

HUNTING ELEPHANTS. Ghawar. Burgan. Safaniya-Khafji. Zakum. These are the strange, unfamiliar names of the four largest oil fields in the world. Oil occurs rarely in nature and when it does it's often concentrated in large amounts. About seventy percent of the world's petroleum is found in 370 giant fields, nicknamed "elephants" because they are so huge. Western civilization - life as we know it - is based on these elephants. In part because they are so big, the elephants were easy to find and inexpensive to produce. (To get oil out of Ghawar, for example, costs the Saudis less than $1 per barrel.) The discovery rate for elephants peaked in the 1960s. It's getting harder and harder to find new ones. Indeed, many geologists believe that elephants are nearing extinction, that only a handful remain unfound.

THE COMING PEAK. In the same way that US oil production peaked in 1970, global production is destined to peak during the first two decades of the coming century. Some analysts expect a peak around 2005; some suggest it will be 2010; others believe it will come as late as 2020. The exact date can't be predicted, since it will depend as much on economic and political factors as on geology. The biggest wild card? Saudi Arabia, the world's most prolific oil province. If the Saudis invest hundreds of billions of dollars they could double their output to meet expected demand. But they may decide not to double production, choosing instead to produce somewhat less oil and charge more for it. Although predicting the peak is impossible, this great turning point is imminent.

COLLISION IN SLOW MOTION. A decline in world oil production? The thought takes some getting used to. What seems impossible is inevitable. The crunch may arrive suddenly. Or in slow motion. As Reagan's former Energy Secretary Donald Hodel says, "We're sleepwalking to disaster". When it happens, journalists will shout, "We're running out of oil". That's not true. Rather, we are running out of cheap oil. After production peaks oil still will be readily available at a higher price, though in slowly declining amounts, for at least fifty years. What we face is not a short-term crisis but a chronic shortfall. No one will freeze in the dark (America still has a century of coal and fifty years worth of natural gas), but the transition to more expensive oil could be bumpy.

CRUDE CRUNCH. As global oil production nears the peak, oil prices will rise, perhaps overnight with staggering impacts on the global economy. This absolutely predictable, absolutely inevitable oil crunch will likely have tremendous economic impacts. Hitting as the Baby Boomers retire, it could rock our economy, psychology, and sense of self.

GIMME THAT OIL TIME RELIGION. Of course, not everyone agrees that we face an imminent crisis. (In part, it depends on how you define "imminent". Some people define it as "before I'm dead".) Business Week recently ran a cover article on global oil. The take home: don't worry, be happy, Exxon has you covered. (Call CORE for a reprint.) Energy Secretary Pena talks hopefully about "reversing the decline in US oil production". This is whistling past the graveyard. There's not that much oil left to find in the US. That's why the oil majors are trying to muscle in on Russia's Caspian Sea, 9,000 long miles from home. How the Caspian qualifies as "our oil" I'm not sure. The Chinese need it as badly as we do. Nonetheless, Henry Kissinger and Dick "Desert Storm" Cheney are lobbying to gain US companies preferential treatment.

ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL. There are many ways to soften the inevitable transition to a world in which oil is more expensive. They include more efficient cars, smarter land use planning, mass transit, and alternative fuels - but we won't begin implementing them, at the local or national level, until we recognize that a grave problem looms. At the moment, this nation is asleep at the wheel. Time is short. If we want to retool our transportation systems, a world oil peak in 2010 or even 2020 is next month. A peak in 2005 is a train wreck tomorrow. But few are talking about this predictable development. Even fewer are planning for it.

ROAD WARRIORS. In 1900 oil married the automobile. Together they gave birth to a century of travel. Today oil is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of America that we can't imagine life without it. Fish don't worry about water and Americans don't worry about oil. Instead we swim in it. Think of your life: the kid schlepping, commuting, and errand running. Skiing on the weekend, Thanksgiving at mom's, a conference in Chicago, a jaunt to Vegas or Lake Powell, a Sunday drive to Grand Junction. I know middle-class Coloradans who do their Christmas shopping in Minnesota at the Mall of America. Texans drive 1,000 miles to shoot a Colorado elk, hunting-and-gathering taken to new extremes. Oil is fundamental to agribusiness: the average potato travels 750 miles. How long have people in Colorado been eating bananas grown in Guatemala and beer brewed in Germany? How much longer do you think? Will driving a Saab to Moab to go mountain biking be a weekend option in 2050? By then Saabs will get eighty miles to the gallon and so it might be. Then again, maybe not.

FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE. More than half the world's oil - and seventy percent of US oil - will be consumed during a single human lifetime. That span happens to coincide with the Baby Boomer generation born after World War Two. The graph at left shows the phenomenon. The Boomers were conceived as auto culture kicked into overdrive. As newborns, they were driven home from the hospital in a car. They grew up listening to songs like Mustang Sally and Little GTO. Getting a driver's license was their rite of passage. During their lives many Baby Boomers will drive and fly a million miles, equal to forty trips around the globe. Magellan and Amelia Earhart were the famous circumnavigators of their day. Now every man is Magellan, every woman Amelia.

SLICING THE PIE. Geologists estimate that US oil production will ultimately total 260 billion barrels. A sliver of that pie was consumed between 1859 and 1949, the first ninety years of the Oil Era. A much larger slice - if we can call seventy percent of the pie a slice - will be used between 1950 and 2025. Our grandchildren and their kids' kids will inherit what's left. By 2025, when US population will exceed 300 million, just fifteen percent of US oil will remain.

SNOOZE YOU LOSE. When our grandchildren ask where all the oil went, how will we answer them? We're engaged in a one-time hydrocarbon feeding frenzy the likes of which the world has never seen before and will never see again. As someone who once drove a pickup truck to Patagonia I may not be the best person to ask, but is there a neglected ethical issue here? About a year ago I was standing on Main Street in Aspen when a semi drove by. Emblazoned in large letters on the side was a question: WE'VE SHOT ALL THE BUFFALO NOW WHAT DO WE DO? In 1872 there were fiften million bison roaming the Great Plains. A decade later only a thousand were left. Pelt hunters had ruthlessly slaughtered the rest. The heedless waste, the bloodthirsty savagery seems criminal today. I wonder if future generations will view our pell-mell liquidation of oil, arguably Earth's most valuable resource, as equally senseless, shortsighted, and greedy. If there were a ready substitute that would be one thing. But there isn't. In fact, there is no substitute for oil in the ways and volumes in which we use it today. Petroleum is a gift of geology, a one-time windfall - and we're spending it like there's no tomorrow.

LYRICS. Everyone has their favorite car song. Daddy took my T-Bird away ... Every woman I know is crazy about an automobile ... I've got the fastest wheels in town ... Mustang Sally, you better slow your Mustang down ... I drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry ... Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends ...

CAR BOMB. You hear about the population explosion. And yes, the population has doubled from three billion to six billion since 1950. In the same period, car numbers shot up from 50 million to 500 million. Cars, in other words, are reproducing five times faster than people. They're breeding like (VW) Rabbits.

WHO WILL FUEL CHINA? America was first to enter the Oil Age. We got a sixty-year headstart on most nations. The developing world is racing to catch up. From Asia to Africa, three billion people crave the automobile lifestyle. Who can blame them? Mobility is wonderful. GM, Ford, and Toyota are building new plants in China, India, and Thailand. But Asia is oil poor. India has almost no oil. High hopes for new discoveries in the Tarim, a frontier basin in western China, have not been realized. The Chinese national oil company is investing in Venezuela, Gulf of Mexico, and Caspian Sea - a telling vote of no confidence in prospects at home. Without large domestic reserves it will be impossible for China and other densely populated countries to develop an oil-intensive lifestyle like Americans enjoy. If India and China used as much oil per person as we do, world production would have to triple. It can't; there's not enough oil. But if it could, all the globe's remaining oil would be consumed within twenty years. After that ... well, you wouldn't have to worry about your next car payment. Looking ahead, the tremendous inequities in oil distribution - and consumption - are morally troubling and militarily worrisome. As oil depletion spreads worldwide, by 2015 five nations in the volatile Middle East will produce half the world's oil. As more Asians take to the road and demand outstrips supply, oil prices will rise. Economic jousting for oil - who can pay most - is certain. Military confrontation can't be ruled out. With America using three times more oil than any other nation, future generations of young Americans may again take to the battlefield for oil.

REALITY CHECK. Which nations have oil and which nations use it? Fully two-thirds of the world's oil is in five Muslim countries. The chart at right explains why Iraq's Saddam Hussein gets press, why the State Department frets about Iran, why the US military did not leave Saudi Arabia after the 1990 Gulf War, and why we fought that war in the first place. (George Bush: "Our way of life is at stake".) America's future, Japan's future, Europe's future, China's future, Europe's future ... all are inextricably linked to the Middle East. In the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the US military is building fortified air bases. Ostensibly we are there to protect our Saudi friends. In reality, we are an occupying force protecting our access to their oil. Some Saudis are resentful of our presence, as we would be if they were building air bases in Nevada. Would we leave their county if asked? I wonder. My son is seven. He'll be eighteen, fighting age, in 2009, about the time an Oil Crunch may arrive.

OPEC REDUX. As the US produces less oil, we must import more. Indeed, America imports more oil than any other nation uses. Uncle Sam's appetite is humonguous, verging on gluttony. We import more than Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden collectively use. And why not, because at $15 to $25 a barrel, imported oil is a steal. The tab for 1997 came to $67 billion, less than one percent of the nation's gross domestic product. The bargain may not, indeed can not, last. As global population and oil demand rise, more and more people will be competing for less and less oil. By 2015, only a handful of nations will be exporting significant quantities, and a revitalized Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, our old OPEC nemesis, will be in driver's seat again, able to control prices at will. Since Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait can sustain their projected production past 2020, the world will not suddenly "run out" of oil. But $16 a barrel will be a thing of the past.

SPORT UTES. In recent years, as oil prices have plummeted, Americans have fallen in love with gas guzzling minivans, light trucks, and sport utility vehicles. In Seattle Microsoft millionaires drive Humvees. Light trucks and sport utes command 45% of the new car market in the US, a powerful trend aimed in exactly the wrong direction. That these vehicles sell well is not surprising. They tower above traffic, can summit Everest, and are safe in a crash (good because sport utes have more than their share.) If they're thirsty, so what? Gasoline costs are only 1/8th the total cost of driving. Driving a car that gets thirty miles per gallon rather than a fifteen miles per gallen sport-ute saves about $520 a year - not much in many budgets. Americans care little about fuel efficiency because gasoline is inexpensive. In Europe motorists pay $3 to $5 a gallon. Most is tax, added by governments to encourage conservation. A Suburban has a forty-gallon tank. Filling up in Finland would cost 200 bucks. Needless to say, Finns shun Suburbans. Bargain-rate gasoline has a hidden cost, but we don't pay it at the pump. Rather, we pay $50 billion in taxes to protect access to Persian Gulf oil, we pay in smog and premature deaths from air pollution, we pay in climate change. But when gasoline is less expensive than milk, Americans have little incentive to conserve. People aren't dumb.

If gas is cheap, oil must be abundant. Big is best. If you have an Explorer I'll get an Expedition. It's a 'fuels paradise". Party hearty.

A LIGHT GOES ON. "In America we consume the most energy per capita in the world. That's got to change." Who said it? Not Ralph Nader or Amory Lovins. Rather, it was Louis Hughes, a General Motors vice president for international operations. The oil companies and automakers are beginning to understand that we must move quickly to develop a more oil-efficient economy. Toyota is selling 66 miles per gallon cars in Japan. Honda is poised to follow. From a global perspective, oil is not a "sunset industry" - after all, 65% of the world's petroleum remains to be produced. Nonetheless, oil companies are beginning to diversify. Royal Dutch Shell recently launched a renewable energy division and British Petroleum is making solar panels. The ultimate heresy: General Motors supports a fifty cent per gallon gasoline tax. In this case, what's good for GM would be good for America.

SILVER BULLETS. Oil depletion is a slow, wasting disease. Is there a quick fix, a miracle cure? Actually, there are exciting new developments. They include technology for converting natural gas to a diesel-like fuel; horizontal drilling and 3D imagery to recover more oil from aging fields; cars powered by fuel cells that run on hydrogen rather than gasoline; telecommuting and other social changes that reduce oil consumption. All can buy time, delay the peak, and soften the transition that must follow. None, though, can cure depletion, or greatly reduce America's dependence on imported oil. Technology shows promise, but the negative trends remain more powerful. Every day the world uses 73 million barrels and finds 15 million. Consumption up, discoveries down. Burning more than we earn - a surefire recipe for bankruptcy.

STOCK TIPS. Forbes and Fortune recommended oil stocks in 1995. In 1997 energy service companies were the stars of Wall Street. But maybe there will be another stock-buying opportunity. The economic turmoil in the Pacific, the Asian flu, will dampen energy demand for a year or two. With the collision between rising demand and limited supplies still five to ten years away, it's a good time to travel. Fly to Baja, take a cruise, see Costa Rica. Life's a journey, enjoy the ride. Around 2005 you might want to unload your shares in Winnebago.

SILVER BULLETS II. The physics of a Pontiac (or pickup) are abysmal. According to Rocky Mountain Institute, just 1% of the energy in the gasoline moves the driver. About 15% moves his steel shell, the two-ton carapace. The remainder is lost in the engine, drivetrain and to wind resistance. This is actually great news, because it suggests there's tremendous scope for improvement. Soon you'll be able to buy a car that gets 65 miles per gallon. These clean, efficient "21st Century" cars may capture a third of the market by 2010. But adding 20 million fuel-frugal cars a year to a global fleet that may then number 800 million will have only a modest impact on oil consumption. Every little bit helps, but it will be decades before the world fleet is dramatically more efficient.

OIL IS ASPEN. Our ski economy is much more dependent on oil than snow. After all, we can make snow. At Buttermilk or Highlands or Ajax, oil's importance is affirmed every few minutes as a loud jet accelerates down the runway. One in five Aspen skiers fly in from overseas. Economically, Aspen functions as a snowy suburb of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. How long can this continue? Decades perhaps, not forever.

DRIVING BLIND. Petroconsultants, a respected Geneva energy consulting group, recently concluded that by 2050 world oil consumption will be just one-fourth what it is today. Another oil expert, University of Colorado professor John D Edwards, predicts that world oil production will peak in 2020 at ninety million barrels per day. "If the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to increase productive capacity to these levels are not available, peak production will occur earlier. Planning without anticipating this trend is analogous to driving without a gas gauge."

TREX. Most people abhor change. Change is scary. Mentally, we tend to be prisoners of the past, hoping that the future will be just like the present, only more so. Abundant oil is all we've known. Cheap gas is a given. But this quaint assumption may soon take a beating. The silver miners who settled Aspen in 1880 didn't drive Range Rovers. It's a safe bet that Aspenites in 2090 won't drive them either. If the average person has a car 50 or 100 years from now it will be dramatically more efficient and powered by hydrogen or electricity. The heyday of the guzzler is passing. The gargantuan 6,000-pound fourteen miles per gallon Expeditions that now rule the road are to the car as the T Rex was to the dinosaur: the end of the line.

PURE SPECULATION. Inexpensive oil is so deeply embedded in our economy, psychology, and even diet that it's difficult to imagine a world in which oil will be more expensive. What would a sudden spike in oil prices mean for Aspen? Let me speculate, knowing I'll probably get it wrong. An oil crunch might, where nothing else has, rein in the valley's real estate boom. Some believe that the stratospheric prices in the upper valley are a speculative bubble waiting to burst. Our valley's economy has proved remarkably resilient to other shocks, but this one could shatter Wall Street. An Oil Crunch would also slow tourism. Because only ten percent of an airplane ticket pays for fuel, the direct effects would be dwarfed by the larger inflationary impacts. Psychology will come into play, too, since inexpensive oil buttresses the belief that growth is inevitable, stocks go up, and things get better. But, come what may, higher gasoline prices are not the end of life as we know it. After a rocky year or two or three of global recession, people will adjust, life will go on. Most Europeans already pay $3 or more per gallon; Americans presumably could, too.

DEBATING THE TRAIN. Over the last seventy years the automobile grew dominant because oil was cheap. All across America trains gave way to cars. Neighborhoods surrendered to suburbs. In the words of the song, we "paved paradise and put up a parking lot". In Colorado, too, the transportation network we see today is an artifact of abundant oil, an era that's destined to end. With oil depletion in mind, the suggestion that we should remain auto dependent, construct underground garages, and six-lane Highway 82 seems like old think. Is our long-term vision driving cars fueled with gasoline on tires made of petroleum on roads paved with asphalt? Hell-o! To quote Marshall McLuhan, that's like "speeding into the future while trying to steer with a rear-view mirror". The train may or may not make economic sense. But as we debate whether valleywide rail is a wise investment, our focus should not be 2008, a short decade from now. Rather it should be 2018 or 2028, when world oil production will be falling, as global population continues to climb. As we study rail, let's not assume the status quo is sustainable, because it's not. By 2025, driving alone seventy or eighty miles to work may be as obsolete as riding a horse to work is today.

HARD ROCK CAFE. Is there really no substitute on the petroleum menu? Our natural gas reserves wouldn't last long if we burned them in both homes and cars, but what about all that oil shale near Parachute? Oil lobbyists will tell you there's tons of "unconventional" oil tied up in Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan heavy oil, and Colorado's oil shale. True enough, but that's like saying hang gliders can substitute for airplanes. Producing unconventional oil has more in common with hard-rock mining than with typical oil production, where you crank a valve and let it flow. The former is a slow, arduous, energy-intensive process that will never replace a tenth of today's conventional oil. Indeed, there's some question whether oil shale yields more energy than it takes to produce it. If conventional oil is black magic, oil shale is fool's gold.

FLOW, RIVER, FLOW. Every 24 hours the global economy burns 73 million barrels of oil. If you poured all that oil into a river it would be the size of the Colorado as it flows through Glenwood Springs. That modest river propels all motorized motion on the planet. Every car in Carbondale, China, and Chile. Every Boeing, every Airbus. Semis, autos, trucks, bulldozers, B-1 bombers, motorcycles, supertankers, tugboats, tractors, lawn mowers, snowmobiles, jet skis, snowblowers ... if it moves it's powered by oil. Looking ahead, oil demand is projected to increase rapidly. By 2010 most experts predict the world will be consuming ninety million barrels a day, 25% more than it does now. Sometimes between 2005 and 2020, world oil production will reach an apex, an all-time high, a peak. A plateau in production will be followed by a relentless inexorable decline.

DOOMERS & BOOMERS. World oil experts fall into two camps, pessimists and optimists. It's striking how little difference there is between them. Both camps agree we've already used 800 billion barrels. The pessimists, or doomers, think there's one trillion left and that oil production may peak by 2005. Boomers believe there's 1.8 trillion left and that production will peak in 2020. If fifteen years is the only difference between pessimists and optimists, perhaps we ought to begin planning for a world in which oil is not as abundant as it is today.

LIFE IN 2050. By 2050 a world of perhaps nine billion people will be consuming only as much oil as three billion did in 1950. There will be three times less oil per person. Oil will be more expensive. Is this a Doomsday message? Not necessarily. A more sustainable world may actually be a better place in which to live. The difficulty is getting from here to there.

WHY HAVEN'T I HEARD THIS BEFORE? Who would tell you? Exxon? Ford? Bill Clinton? "Remember my Bridge to the 21st Century? Well, there's a big pothole on the far side. I'm sending Al over there right now to patch it up. When you hit that rough spot, remember Hillary feels your pain". Should Ronald Reagan have told us? "My fellow Americans, it is not morning in America. Actually, it's getting on towards sundown." The Oil & Gas Journal publishes articles on oil depletion, but the coming crisis is not yet on the mainstream media's radar. It's astounding that, in a country like ours, which uses 25% of the world's oil, no one is responsible for setting oil policy. The oil majors produce oil. Carmakers make cars. The Pentagon spends $50 billion a year safeguarding our "cheap" Persian Gulf imports. The US Department of Energy cleans up nuclear bomb plants. If ignorance is bliss, this must be Nirvana.

SOURCES & INFO. This petroleum primer was written by Randy Udall, Director of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, with Steve Andrews, a Denver-based energy analyst. Our numbers and graphs were derived from US Geological Survey, British Petroleum, and American Petroleum Institute reports. Oil consumption to 1996 is historical record. Depletion curves and future consumption were extrapolated from conservative assumptions and personal interviews with world oil experts, including Chuck Masters, Neil Foreman, L F 'Buzz' Ivanhoe, Colin Campbell, Joseph Riva, and James MacKenzie. Different scenarios can be imagined, some uglier, some prettier. No one can predict the future. But, on the strength of our research, America can expect a wake-up call before 2020. It could come tomorrow. Even 2020 is only 8,000 days away, which, given the stakes, isn't far. If you want more info call CORE. Good books: The Coming Oil Crisis by Colin Campbell and GeoDestinies by Walter Youngquist. CORE has the former ($25); to order the latter call (800) 827 2499. The Prize, Daniel Yergin's classic oil history, is available in text or video at local libraries. Good Internet sites: http://ecotopia.com and http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/papers/world_oil/index.htm. CORE will host a half-day seminar on world oil this spring [1999]. If you wish to attend, call for details.

The Big Question Site of the Week at Seven Wonders: Is there an oil crisis? When will the Joy Ride End? [February 14, 2001]

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/debate/udall/joyride.htm

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Power to the people

No tsunami warning system could prevent another disaster while so many live without electricity

by Jeremy Rifkin

The Guardian (January 14 2005)

As relatives grieve for the tsunami dead, questions are being asked about why there was no advanced warning so that people could quickly move to higher ground. There was enough time to warn people but because an adequate global warning system was not in place, as many as 200,000 people died needlessly. According to officials, the earthquake, which struck off the coast of Indonesia, was detected immediately by seismic stations around the globe. Australia, which has a tsunami warning system, issued an alert less than half an hour after the earthquake.

The UN disaster reduction office in Geneva calculated the tsunami took a full hour to reach the Indonesian coast, another two hours before reaching Thailand and Sri Lanka, and almost six hours before reaching Africa. What, then, went wrong? The problem, says John Clague, an expert on earthquakes at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, is that "there is no infrastructure to communicate it". Here lies the rub.

While industrialised nations and transnational corporations have been busy connecting the far reaches of the planet into a seamless communication grid to expedite the instantaneous exchange of commercial information, little or no effort has been expended on creating a global communications infrastructure that would warn millions of people about unfolding natural disasters.

The technology exists to install sophisticated sensing devices across the Earth's environs and at the bottom of the oceans to detect volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, et cetera. And in many parts of the world, partial systems are in place. What's missing is the means to communicate immediate unfolding catastrophic events to the hundreds of millions of people in harm's way. Most people are still not connected to the global communications grid. Many have never made a telephone call.

UN officials say that instituting an early warning system will be taken up at a conference on disaster reduction in Kobe, Japan, next week. But what's likely to be left unsaid is how to communicate with millions of individuals if people have no access to electricity. Here's what you won't hear from policy makers meeting in Kobe.

To achieve universal global electrification by 2050 - a goal set by international development agencies - would require bringing electricity to 100 million additional people every year. Providing these additional users with an average per capita electricity consumption equivalent to what US consumers enjoyed in 1950 would require the creation of ten million megawatts of new electricity capacity globally by 2050 - four times today's consumption.

The US Electric Power Research Institute estimates that to reach this goal a new 1,000 megawatt power plant would have to be brought on line every 48 hours for the next fifty years. And, it adds, 50% of the new capacity would need to be carbon-free to comply with global environmental requirements. The job would need a capital commitment of between $100 billion and $150 billion per year.

Providing enough electricity so that every human being can be connected to a global communication infrastructure will need a big shift in our global energy regime, away from the dependency on fossil fuels and toward a renewable-energy future powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The world is running out of oil and natural gas. With the price of oil in world markets hovering at $50 a barrel, the cost of electricity is out of reach for millions of people in developing nations. The situation is only going to worsen as we reach peak global production of oil between 2010 and 2040.

What we should be talking about is how best to mobilise the world's resources to help make the long-overdue transition to renewable forms of energy and a hydrogen economy. Making the shift to a hydrogen energy regime is the only way, in the long run, to narrow the gap between the connected and the unconnected. As the price of hydrogen-powered fuel cells and accompanying appliances continues to plummet, these products will become far more widely available, as was the case with radios, computers and mobile phones.

The goal ought to be to provide stationary fuel cells for every neighbourhood and village in the developing world. Villages can install renewable energy technologies - photovoltaic, wind, biomass, et cetera - to produce their own electricity and then use it to separate hydrogen from water and store it for subsequent use in fuel cells. In rural areas, where commercial power lines have not yet been extended because it is too expensive, stand-alone fuel cells can provide energy quickly and cheaply. Mini-energy grids can connect urban neighbourhoods as well as rural villages into expanding energy networks.

I think of the pictures of all the children, their bodies washed up on shore, never to be able to live out the lives they were entitled to. Perhaps it is time to think of the global communications grid as more than just a tool of commerce or entertainment and begin to harness it to secure the wellbeing of the human race.

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth

jrifkin@foet.org

Guardian Unlimited. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1390094,00.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Tightening Conflict

Population, Energy Use, and the Ecology of Agriculture

by Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel (1994)


In the last half century the technological development of agriculture has dramatically changed the performance of farming. The changes have been both positive and negative: on the positive side a more stable and abundant food supply has resulted; on the negative side more environmental degradation, more dependence on fossil energy, and a lower energy efficiency. Understanding the reason for these changes requires exploring the relationship between technological development, population, natural resources and environmental sustainability for development. For this reason, in this paper we will discuss the use of energy in agriculture and its relation to the performance of the economy (in part I), and the issues of future development, standards of living and a sustainable environment related to population pressure (in part II).


I. Energy, Agriculture and Development

The dual nature of agriculture.

Agriculture must be compatible with both society's needs and the natural ecosystem. Rapid population growth and the technical development of society have led to difficulties for farmers worldwide to maintain this dual compatibility. In fact, today farmers face demands for a high productivity as well as environmentally sound, sustainable farming practices.

In rural, developing societies, local environmental constraints historically shaped techniques of production and socioeconomic structures. Agricultural strategies and social activities favored long-term ecosystem sustainability. However, the quality of life reached by traditional farming systems is low compared with that of modern western agricultural systems - short life span, low level of education, and absence of social services, et cetera. In other words, "subsistence farming systems" are economically not sustainable when these societies interact with more developed socioeconomic systems.

The dramatic transformations that have occurred in the economy of developed countries have radically changed their farming strategies. Farmers operating in developed countries abandoned traditional techniques of production to keep their income competitive with that in other sectors of society. This required the adoption of techniques that provide high returns per hour of labor. Therefore, large monocultures which rely heavily on technical inputs resulted. For example, in the United States, the amount of corn produced per hour of labor is today 350 times higher than the Cherokees could raise with their traditional agriculture.

This enormous jump in farmer productivity would not have been possible without large injections of fossil energy and machine power. In fact, the flow of energy input in modern US agriculture is fifty times higher than in traditional agriculture. However, the higher income of modern farmers has a price: high-technology agricultural techniques depend on non-renewable stocks of oil and have negative environmental impacts which lower the sustainability of the agroecosystem. These impacts include soil erosion, reduced biodiversity, chemical contamination of the environment by fertilizers and pesticides, and mining of groundwater. Hence, current intensive agriculture based on heavy technological subsidies of fossil energy is ecologically not sustainable.

Energy and Society

Humans transform energy inputs found in their environment into a flow of useful energy used to sustain their social and economic needs. This conversion can be obtained in two ways. First, by transforming food energy into muscular power within the human body; this is called endosomatic or metabolic energy. Second, by transforming energy outside the human body, such as burning gasoline in a tractor; this is called exosomatic energy. In order to have either endosomatic or exosomatic energy conversions, society must have access to adequate energy inputs.

The two major sources of energy used by humans are solar energy and fossil energy resources. Solar driven or renewable energy sources represent almost 100 percent of the endosomatic and exosomatic energy flows in pre-industrial societies; they sustained human development for more than 99 percent of human existence. Fossil or non-renewable energy represents more than ninety percent of the exosomatic energy used in the United States and other developed countries; however, this growing reliance of modern societies on fossil energy started only 150 years ago, or much less than one percent of human existence.

Solar and fossil energy sources have different characters. The solar energy captured by photosynthesis is renewable or unlimited in its time dimension, but its exploitation is limited in its rate of flow. This means that if we want to double the quantity of biomass harvested (such as crops for food or cornstalks, fast growing trees, et cetera for energy), at a fixed technological level, we need to double the land exploited. To double animal power we need more animals and double the land devoted to fodder. On the other hand, fossil energy is a stock-type resource, that is limited in its time dimension - sooner or later it will be exhausted - but, while the stock lasts, it can be exploited at a virtually unlimited rate.

The access to fossil energy removed the limitation on the density at which exosomatic energy can be utilized, and societies experienced a dramatic increase in the rate of energy consumption. The exo/endo energy ratio has jumped from about four to one, a value typical of solar powered societies, to more than forty to one in developed countries (in the US it is more than ninety to one). Clearly, this brought about a dramatic change in the role of the endosomatic energy flow. Endosomatic energy, that is food and human labor, no longer delivers power for direct economic processes. Humans generate the flow of information needed to direct huge flows of exosomatic power produced by machines and powered primarily by fossil energy. To provide an example of the advantage achieved: a small gasoline engine will convert 20% of the energy input of one gallon of fuel into power. That is, the 38,000 kilocalories in one gallon of gasoline can be transformed into 8.8 kilowatt-hours, which is about three weeks of human work equivalent. (Human work output in agriculture = 0.1 horespower, or 0.074 kilowatts, times 120 hours.)

Fossil energy and the food system.

More than ten kilocalories (kilogram-calories or "large calories") of exosomatic energy are spent in the US food system per kilocalorie of food delivered to the consumer. Put another way, the food system consumes ten times more energy than it provides to society in food energy. However, since in the US the exo/endo energy ratio is 90/1, each endosomatic kilocalorie (each kilocalorie of food metabolized to sustain human activity) induces the circulation of 90 kilocalories of exosomatic energy, basically fossil. This explains why the energy cost of food of 10 exosomatic kilocalories per endosomatic kilocalorie is not perceived as high when measured in economic terms. Actually, despite a net increase in the energy and monetary cost per kilocalorie of food in the US over the last decades, the percentage of disposable income spent by US citizens on food has steadily decreased and is now only about fifteen percent of disposable income.

Based on a 10/1 ratio, the total direct cost of the daily diet in the US is approximately 35,000 kilocalories of exosomatic energy per capita (assuming 3,500 kilocalories per capita of food available per day for consumption). However, since the average return of one hour of labor in the US is about 100,000 kilocalories of exosomatic energy, the flow of exosomatic energy required to supply the daily diet is made accessible by about twenty minutes of labor.

In subsistence societies, about four kilocalories of exosomatic energy (basically in the form of biomass) are required per kilocalorie of food consumed. Thus, the total direct cost of the daily diet is much lower in absolute terms, approximately 10,000 kilocalories of exosomatic energy per capita (assuming a food supply of 2,500 kilocalories per day per capita). On the other hand, because of the limited access to fossil energy, the average return of human labor in subsistence societies is low. In such a system up to five hours of labor are required to supply the daily diet. In terms of human labor, in subsistence societies the daily diet costs sixteen times more than in the US food system.

In countries with a high exo/endo energy ratio, food production no longer provides a direct energy or power supply to society. Food production, however, is still essential to the economy of all nations. Because of the high opportunity cost of human time, there is a strong incentive to lower the human time allocated to the management of the food system. Therefore, technological development in food systems of developed societies is principally aimed at (i) reducing the requirement of labor in food production, (ii) increasing the safety of food, and (iii) reducing the time required for food preparation. Although this strategy of technological development causes an increase in the direct costs of food security, both in production and processing of food, it allows humans to switch a large fraction of their time to other, more productive economic sectors.

For example, in West Europe the percentage of the active population employed in agriculture fell from 75 percent before the industrial revolution (around the year 1750) to less than 10 percent today; in the US this figure fell from 80 percent around the year 1800 to only 2 percent today. The percentage of the total US female population active in the money economy rose from 9.7 percent in the year 1870 to 44.7 percent today. Thanks to energetically expensive, but timesaving food products women no longer have to spend long hours in food-related activities, but can participate in paid economic activities.

Fossil energy and agriculture in developed and developing countries.

Modern techniques for farming in developed countries are based on massive injection of fossil energy. This results in lowering the energy efficiency (output-input ratios), and a rapid depletion of non-renewable oil stocks. The two forces driving this development are (i) the increasing productivity per hour of labor of farmers (increasing the income and standard of living of farmers, and making available more labor for other economic sectors), and (ii) the increasing productivity per unit of land area (increasing the total food supply).

Although there are numerous negative effects in terms of environmental sustainability and energy efficiency with modern farming techniques, farmers in developing countries are adopting some of them, especially high yielding varieties, fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. This adoption, along with more cash crop production, has resulted in some disruption of structures and functions of traditional socioeconomic systems. Fossil energy is used to overcome the ecological constraints limiting food output. This has contributed to the widespread relaxation of cultural control on human fertility. Between the end of World War II and 1970, fertility rates rose virtually everywhere in the third world. The rapid growth in the world population is associated with the maximum expansion of fossil energy use.

The increase in birth rates plus the reduction in mortality rates by control of disease resulted in an explosive growth in world population. This resulted in a dramatic shrinkage in the quantity of natural resources available per capita. Under this demographic pressure, developing countries were forced to increase their use of fossil energy in agriculture.

In developing countries, the use of fossil energy has been to prevent starvation rather than to increase the standard of living of farmers and others. Concluding his analysis of the link between population growth and the supply of nitrogen fertilizers Smil makes this point beautifully: "The image is counterintuitive but true: survival of peasants in the ricefields of Hunan or Guangdong - with their timeless clod-breaking hoes, docile buffaloes, and rice-cutting sickles - is now much more dependent on fossil fuels and modern chemical syntheses than the physical well-being of American city dwellers sustained by Iowa and Nebraska farmers cultivating sprawling grain fields with giant tractors. These farmers inject ammonia into soil to maximize operating profits and to grow enough feed for extraordinarily meaty diets; but half of all peasants in Southern China are alive because of the urea cast or ladled onto tiny fields - and very few of their children could be born and survive without spreading more of it in the years and decades ahead."

Strategies of energy use in world agriculture.

Different strategies in energy use in agriculture can be found in the USA, Western Europe, Africa and China. These differences can be explained in terms of availability of natural resources, population density and standard of living.

For example, farming systems in Western Europe use heavy energy subsidies in order to keep labor productivity high and also to make maximum use of the limited land. In the US, fossil energy is mainly used to boost farmers' productivity (income), and productivity per hectare is not as much a concern as in Europe.

In China, large quantities of fossil energy are used to boost the productivity of the land, because there is little land arable per capita. Agriculture provides the major source of employment in China (67 percent of the economically active population). Therefore, the standard of living of that society is low.

In Africa, little fossil energy is used in agriculture. Thus, the productivity both per farmer and per hectare is low. If the situation remains unchanged, shortage of food will continue to grow as the population increases.

This comparison shows that energy can be used in agriculture to boost the productivity of labor and/or land.

For example, the food energy yield per hour of labor in Western Europe is more than twenty times higher than in China, but less than a fifth of that in the US. Even though Western European agriculture uses almost twice as much energy as US agriculture per kilogram of cereal produced, the productivity of cereal per hour of European farm labor is lower than in the US. For this reason, European farmers require more government subsidies than US farmers to have comparable incomes. The lower agricultural performance in Europe despite higher energy use is due to the limited availability of land (the land area available per farmer in Europe is about 1/7th of that available in the USA).

The effect of demographic pressure can also be seen by comparing the performances of Chinese and US agriculture. China has a fossil energy consumption per hectare higher than the US However, this high fossil energy use has the goal of boosting the yield per hectare (increase the food supply) and does not generate an increase in farmers' income (as indicated by the low productivity per hour of labor). To get approximately the same yield, US farmers work only 10 hours/year per hectare in grain production compared with more than 1,000 hours/hectare for Chinese agriculture. The US economy manages in this way to sustain its farmers at an income level that is almost comparable to that of workers in other US economic sectors, but that is almost a hundred times higher than the income of Chinese farmers.

In this example, again, we can assess the importance of the land constraints: the average area cropped per farm worker in the US is about 64 hectares, compared with only 0.2 hectares per worker in China. Where the population density is high, as in China, fossil energy based inputs are required in large quantities not so much to increase the standard of living, but to increase food yield per hectare. The US enjoyed in the past a fairly low demographic pressure and this resulted in the possibility of using fossil energy mainly to increase the productivity of labor (guaranteeing an acceptable income for farmers). At low population density, fossil energy can be used to guarantee a high income to farmers, and to make workers available for the rest of the economy.

Put another way, if China tried to modernize its society reaching levels of exo/endo energy typical of western standards, it would have to (i) absorb an enormous number of farmers in other economic sectors (hundreds of millions!), and (ii) further boost the energy consumption in the agricultural sector, since due to the limitation of land (0.09 hectare per capita of arable land) Chinese agriculture would face a situation even worse than in Western Europe. A "modernized" Chinese agriculture would be required to provide food for the population, while absorbing only a little fraction of human time, and providing a high income to farmers.

Moreover, it should be noted that when farmers comprise only a small fraction of the population, and society undergoes a massive process of urbanization, the real energy cost of supplying food is shifted from agriculture to the post-harvest section of the food system. In general, three to five kilocalories are spent in processing, distribution, packaging and home preparation for each kilocalorie spent in producing food at the farm level.

Such a development would imply not only a formidable flow of energy required to build and run the technological plant required to absorb at least eighty percent of the current Chinese farmers into the industrial/ services sector, but also a further increase of energy use in the agricultural sector (well above the western European levels). They might theoretically be able to get such an energy input for a while, by using their coal resources, but they would probably choke themselves on the pollution and induce an environmental impact of enormous dimensions. Furthermore, in case of continued demographic growth, it is also doubtful that it would be possible to further boost the productivity of land (output per hectare) to accommodate the increased population. It is well known that, after a certain threshold, energy subsidies (fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, et cetera) have a declining return. "Available long-term comparisons show that in China's Zhediang and Shandong provinces the typical rice response to additional units of nitrogen application during the 1980s was only fifty to sixty percent of that of the 1960s, in the Suzhou area of Jiangsu province it was only around one-third, and around Wuxi (also in Jiangsu) there have been no returns at all."

The excessive demographic pressure in China seems to mean that food security, a high standard of living, and respect for the environment are goals almost impossible to achieve at the same time.

Finally, a look at the current performance of Africa's agriculture is another source of serious concern. From the low level of fossil energy consumption, it can be inferred that many farmers are still using traditional techniques of production (fallow rotation, a use of land which requires a low population density) . Because of the demographic explosion experienced in the last decades, the African situation will get even worse: (i) declining food supplies, because there is too little land per capita and little fossil energy and technology for food production; (ii) increasing poverty, because the limited natural resource, fossil energy and technology available are mostly diverted to their own uses by the few elites; (iii) increasing environmental degradation, because traditional methods of agriculture performed at too high population density shorten crop rotations and further stress the environment.

Actually, all three of these effects are already taking place, and current demographic trends do not leave much hope for positive changes in the near future. Africa has the highest rate of population growth in the world at three percent per year, a doubling time of 23 years! In the future the trends appear to be increasing dependence on fossil energy for agricultural production, increasing poverty, increasing deficits in food supply, and increasing ecological destruction.

From the above, it is clear that ecological and human perspectives collide when it comes to technological performance in agriculture. For example, an increase in the output/input energy ratio can be seen as a positive event on the ecological side. However, this is not always beneficial at the societal level, as illustrated by African agriculture, which has the highest energy output/input ratio but the lowest exo/endo energy ratio and life span. For developed societies, the output/input energy ratios in agriculture are lower than those in Africa, but this allows the labor force to move to other economic sectors. When a society has an exo/endo energy ratio so low that it is convenient to use labor intensive techniques to save capital and fossil energy, the standard of living is much lower than those considered acceptable in the western world.


II. The Future: Energy, Population and Sustainability

Limits to the Intensification of Agriculture.

The prime resources of agriculture - land, water, energy, and biological resources - function interdependently, and each can be utilized to a degree to make up for a partial shortage in one or more of the others. For example, to bring desert land into agricultural production, it can be irrigated.

However, this can occur only if groundwater or surface water is available, if sufficient fossil energy is available to pump and move the water, if monetary resources are available to buy the required technology, and if the soil is suitable for irrigation and fertile to support crop growth.

Moreover, intensive farming techniques have an impact on the pattern of energy flows in ecosystems. In general, they reduce the capability of an ecosystem to use solar energy for evapotranspiration, gross primary production, and recycling nutrients. This "ecological cost" of agriculture has been overlooked by most economic analyses.

The long-term productivity of agroecosystems depends on the sustainability of natural resources including biological, soil, and water resources. Therefore, an environmentally sound agriculture has limits in its use of these renewable resources. For example, an upper limit exists to the increase in productivity of an agroecosystem. Currently, with most intensive agriculture there is serious land degradation, loss of top soil, chemical pollution, and groundwater mining.

Fossil energy inputs and sustainability.

About 330 quads (1 quad = 1015 BTU) of all forms of energy per year are used worldwide by humans. A large fraction of this energy, about 81 percent, is provided by fossil energy worldwide each year. Moreover, about 50 percent of all solar energy captured by photosynthesis worldwide is already used by humans, but most of it is captured as food and other agricultural products, which are not included in the 330 quads. That agricultural output is already inadequate to meet human needs for food and forest products. We would be in grim trouble if we had to derive our energy needs from current basic photosynthetic production, as our ancestors did. Given the anticipated decline in fossil fuel use, and the continued growth of human populations, that problem is ahead of us rather than behind us.

The total consumption in the US is 77 quads of energy . This is almost three times the 28 quads of solar energy harvested as crop and forest products, and about forty percent more energy than the total amount of solar energy captured each year by all US plant biomass. Per capita use of fossil energy in North America (expressed as conventional fossil fuel equivalent) is about 7,000 liters of oil per year or five times the world average level!

As noted earlier, large quantities of fossil energy based fertilizers are major sources of nutrient enhancement of agricultural soils throughout the world. Pesticides are also fossil based and their production and use imply a significant consumption of fossil energy. Annual world pesticide use has been estimated at 2.5 million metric tons, of which 0.6 million metric tons are used in North America.

Projections of the availability of fossil energy resources are discouraging. A recent report published by the US Department of Energy based on current oil drilling data indicates that the estimated amount of US oil reserves has plummeted. This means that instead of the 35-year supply of US oil resources, that was projected about ten years ago, the current known reserves and potential discoverable oil resources are now limited to less than 15 years' consumption at present levels. Since the United States is now importing more than half its oil, a serious problem already exists. It should be noted that an increased demand of the US economy for oil on the international market could lead to higher prices. This would dramatically affect US agriculture as well as the agriculture of many developing countries already heavily dependent on fossil energy based inputs (mainly fertilizers).

Clearly, there is a room for substitutability among fossil energy sources, and natural gas and coal are expected to increase their share as soon as oil supply will decrease. However, gas supplies are not at all that much better off. Coal is not infinite and it exacts a high environmental cost or a high price to clean it up.

Increased standard of living and population pressure.

The large increases in fertilizers and pesticides used in developed countries are due to the abandonment of traditional agricultural technologies. For some major crops like corn, crop rotations have been abandoned. Now nearly fifty percent of US corn land is grown continuously as a monoculture. This has caused an increase in the number of corn pests and the need for more pesticides to protect the crop. Since 1945 the use of synthetic pesticides in the US has grown 33-fold, yet crop losses to pests continue to increase.

In developing countries, it is population pressure and poverty that push the abandonment of sound techniques of agricultural production, such as fallows and crop rotations. Population growth means shrinking environmental resources per capita (land, soil, water and biological resources), a need for increasing yields per hectare and a sooner or later a dependence on fossil energy. When the development of a country at a low exo/endo ratio is prevented by its demographic trap, negative ecological side effects are generated by the increased use of energy in agriculture. Environmental degradation tends to drive down the income of farmers and the available food supply per capita.

Overall, demographic pressure and the search for a high standard of living are forcing increased use of fossil energy while oil and gas stocks are rapidly disappearing.

The population-resource equation and the law of decreasing returns.

The population-resource equation can be written as follows:

Natural resources use x Technology =

Population x per capita Consumption.

However, the ability of technology to make up for the shortage of natural resources is limited. It is not possible to achieve an unlimited increase in both the population and the per capita consumption by simply adding more technology to the limited endowment of natural resources. The efficiency of a technological process can never be higher than one, meaning that technological capital should be considered a complement to natural capital rather than a substitute. Technology cannot make accessible more natural resources, such as land and water, than are available; it can only improve the limited efficiency of resource use.

A decreasing return per unit of effort takes place when an intensification of exploitation of natural resources occurs. Moreover, after a certain threshold there is no substitution of technology for natural services. For example, the world fish catch is already close to 100 million tons, and that is thought to be the maximum possible catch from the sea. Improving fishing vessel technologies, as has been done, reduces the fishery stock and leads to decreasing fishery yields. "Maintaining even 80 million tons sustainability will depend upon careful fisheries management, protection and restoration of coastal wetlands, and abatement of ocean pollution- none of which seems in prospect at the moment". Aquaculture is supplying today about 12 million tons but the expansion of this supply is limited by environmental risks and operation costs. A further large increase in human population numbers simply lowers the availability of fish per capita.

Future changes and the potential transition toward sustainability.

Currently worldwide there is serious degradation of land, water, and biological resources generated by the increasing use of fossil energy by the world's population. Already, more fossil energy is used than is available in the form of a sustainable supply of biomass, more nitrogen fertilizer is used per year than could be obtained by natural supply, water is pumped out of underground reservoirs at a higher rate than it is recharged, and more minerals are taken out of mines than are formed by biogeochemical cycles. Fossil energy and technology enabled humans to (temporarily) sustain excesses. At present and projected world population levels, the current pattern of human development is not ecologically sustainable. The world economic system is built on depleting, as fast as possible, the very natural resources on which human survival depends.

Clearly, this is a flaw in human logic. Humans must learn how to manage natural resources in a sustainable manner and determine the number of humans compatible with an acceptable standard of living.

A sustainable use of renewable resources is possible only if (i) known environmentally sound agricultural technologies are implemented, (ii) various known renewable energy technologies are put in place, (iii) major increases in energy efficiency are achieved to reduce the exosomatic energy consumption per capita, and (iv) population size and the consequent level of withdrawal of natural resources are compatible with maintaining the stability of environmental processes.

Assuming (optimistically) that the first three points will be achieved in the US in the next decades (with a reduction to less than half of the exosomatic energy consumption per capita), still the "sustainable US economy" mentioned would be possible only with a smaller population than the current 256 million (for example, about 200 million). In general, the lower the population density the higher the ratio of natural resources of land, water, clean air, biota, and solar energy per capita, and the lower the cost humans have to pay for these vital services. Agriculture would have more natural nutrients, water, and biological resources. Chemical pollutants would be reduced. With more abundant natural resources per capita, the standard of living for everyone would be improved.

Unfortunately, the actual trend of demographic growth both in the US and world is not toward sustainability (a population size within the ecosystem's carrying capacity) or optimum population size (a population size lower than the maximum possible, thus permitting a higher standard of living). US population is projected to double to more than 500 million in just 63 years and world population is projected to double to about 11 billion in about 40 years.

Approximately one-third of the world's arable land and forests were lost during the past forty years due to mismanagement and degradation. Currently, there is only 0.28 hectare of arable land per capita with a world population of 5.5 billion people. It is estimated that about 0.5 hectare per capita is needed for a diverse and varied diet. With the world population to double to 11 billion people, there will be less than 0.15 hectare per capita in just forty years (very close to a "Chinese situation"). At the same time, evidence suggests that arable land degradation is increasing as poor farmers burn more crop residues and dung as fuel for cooking and other purposes, instead of returning them to the land.

The threat to food and environmental security created by population growth is clear today. (i) Most of the 183 countries in the world are now dependent in some degree on food imports. Cereal exports that supply most of those imports now come from the surpluses produced in a few countries with relatively low population densities and intensive agriculture (in 1989 the United States, Canada, Australia, Oceania and Argentina provided more than 81 percent of net cereal export on world market.) (ii) Some developing countries, like China, already use more fertilizer per hectare than the US. This intensive use of fossil based fertilizers is just to help meet food needs in these developing countries. What will a future slowdown of fossil energy consumption (either because of a decline of oil supply or because of growing restrictions on fossil fuel use to limit its environmental impact) mean to both developed and developing countries?

Conclusion

To use a Dutch expression:

"A development policy without a population program is like mopping the floor with the water turned on". (P Bukman)

At this stage of human development, any serious policy concerned with energy saving, environmental sustainability, increasing jobs, and improving the standard of living has to be based on reducing population pressure. This applies to both developed countries (as the US) and developing countries. The US has a privileged situation in that it can afford to escape the demographic trap in which many developing countries are already struggling. However, it must set the goal of an adequate quantity of arable, pasture and forest land available per capita. This will provide the margin to make agriculture environmentally sound. It will offer the option of using some biomass production for energy, and it will reduce the pressure on land, water, air, energy, and biological resources. Such a program is vital if we want to maintain a decent standard of living for future generations.

The level of energy consumption that will be enjoyed by a future "sustainable society" will lie below the one reached today by developed countries (based on the relentless exploitation of fossil fuels) and above the one typical of pre-industrial societies which rely completely on photosynthesis. Renewable energies have to play a major role to substitute for the role currently played by fossil energy. The lower the population density, the lower will be the demand of energy for food production, the lower the environmental impact of agriculture, the larger the choice of possible alternative energy sources and in the last analysis, the higher the probability of achieving an acceptable standard of living and eco-compatibility.

http://www.dieoff.com/page69.htm

Mario Giampietro is a senior researcher at the Istituto Nazionale della Nutrizione, Rome, and presently a visiting scholar at Cornell University, where David Pimentel is a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

There's no fuel like an old fuel

We pay too little for gas, not too much.
The real price shock will come when oil starts to run out.

by William Rees

The Globe and Mail (March 29 2000)

Canadians live in a big, cold country. We depend on fossil fuels to heat the place in winter and to transport virtually everything we need to survive over vast distances within the country. On a per capita basis we are the world's largest trading nation, totally dependent on fossil fuels to connect us materially to the world. Thanks to production agriculture and industrial food processing, the food we eat now "contains" more fossil energy than solar energy. In fact, for all the paper wealth being generated by high-tech and Internet stocks, the country's entire post-industrial economy still floats on a stream of oil and gas. No wonder that in recent weeks Canadians have been take aback by a large increases in the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and now natural gas.

The federal government has responded to the price hikes by announcing that the Conference Board of Canada will undertake an independent review of competitive forces operating in the industry's refining and marketing sectors. The Canadian Automobile Association has responded by calling the review a waste of time. According to the CAA, since almost half the cost of gas at the pump is taxes, the government should cut excise taxes and the GST (Goods and Services Tax) on fuel by several cents a litre. So who's to blame here, greedy oil companies or the government?

In the interest of getting our money's worth out of the projected $600,000 Board review, I'd like to propose that the study be extended in scope - and consider longer-term factors affecting the price of energy. It would be a costly error to assume that a competitive marketplace necessarily tells the truth about the real costs of fossil fuel or that government intervention to ensure fairness would reduce prices to consumers.

There are two parts to this argument. A 1998 report by the Washington-based International Centre for Technology Assessment - titled The Real Price of Gas - quantified the numerous external costs associated with the use of fossil-fueled motor vehicles that are not reflected in US consumer prices: hidden costs such as direct subsidies to the oil industry from governments; publicly funded infrastructure costs; and the health and environmental costs associated with burning fossil fuels (for example, breathing "second-hand exhaust"). These direct and indirect subsidies seriously distort energy markets and burden the economy with rampant inefficiency.

Depending on the definition of the subsidies and the quality of available data, the report found that total unaccounted cost in the United States was as much as $1.7 trillion (US) annually. A fuller social-cost accounting for fossil fuel use would result in a gasoline price per gallon of between $5.60 and $15.14 (as much as ten times what Midwest Americans currently pay after recent price hikes). The array of subsidies to the oil industry and users of fossil fuel in Canada is roughly comparable to that in the States, so we can translate this into a price of roughly $2.00 (Canadian) to $5.40 per litre of gas.

Add in the recent escalating costs of climate change and prices would climb considerably higher. In other words, even with the burden of existing taxes, North Americans are paying a fraction of the price they would pay for gas in a perfectly functioning market.

The invariable consequence of underpricing is overuse. We live in large energy-inefficient houses, drive ever-bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles and are generally squandering, in a few decades, a non-renewable resource that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. Even if there were no other issues at hand, it would be economically rational for the government to intervene in today's energy economy to correct at least some market imperfections. This would certainly result in significantly greater taxes and prices at the pump.

But there's another issue at hand. The world is running out of oil. Recent price hikes are mere tremors heralding the real price shock to come.

Oil "production" (that is, extraction) peaked in North America in 1984. Several recent studies project world oil production to peak by 2013 or sooner, possibly as soon as 2007. Even the necessarily conservative International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook, 1998 concurred for the first time that global output could top out between 2009 and 2012 and decline rapidly thereafter. IEA data project a nearly 20-per-cent shortfall of supply relative to demand by 2020 that will have to be made up of from "unidentified unconventional" sources (that is, known oil-sands deposits have already been taken into account). Other studies show that by 2040 total oil output from all sources may fall to less than half of today's 25-26 billion barrels of oil per year.

And running out of oil is not running out of just oil. Oil is the means by which industrial society obtains (and overexploits) all other resources. The world's fishing fleets, its forest sector, its mines, and its agriculture all are powered by liquid portable fossil fuels - seventeen per cent of the US energy budget, most of it oil, is used just to grow, process, and transport food alone. Keep in mind too that petroleum is not just a fuel. Oil and natural gas are the raw material for medicines, paints, plastics, agricultural fertilizers and pesticides. Since oil is directly or indirectly a part of everything else, the scarcity of oil and the coming price shock means higher prices all round.

Some economists argue that rising prices enable us to exploit less accessible deposits, that the resource is "constantly renewed as it is extracted". This is grossly misleading. The physical stock of exploitable oil is not being "renewed". Improved technology has simply made a dwindling supply more accessible. Abundant short-term market supplies then effectively short-circuit the price increases that would otherwise signal impending real
scarcity, even as finite stocks are depleted.

Moreover, oil exploration is very much subject to diminishing material returns. Despite increasing effort, we currently discover less than six billion barrels of new oil a year, not even a quarter of present consumption. In much of the world, oil extractors used to discover fifty barrels of oil for every barrel consumed in drilling and pumping. Today the ratio is five to one, heading to one for one by 2005. At that point, there will no point in extracting oil at any price even though plenty will be left in the ground.

What about substitutes? The fact is that no suitable substitutes are yet in sight for the fossil fuels used in heavy farm machinery, construction and mining equipment, diesel trains and trucks, and ocean-going freighters. Jet aircraft cannot be powered by electricity, whatever its source. It is also no small irony that we need high-intensity fossil fuel to produce the machinery and infrastructure required for most alternative forms of energy. Sunlight is simply too "dilute" to use in manufacturing the high-tech devices and equipment required for its own conversion to heat and electricity. Industrial civilization faces a paradox: we need oil to move beyond the age of oil.

The human population has grown six-fold in less than 200 years. The global economy has quintupled in less than fifty. No factor has played a greater role in the explosive growth of the human enterprise than abundant, cheap fossil fuel. No other resource has changed the structure of economies, the nature of technologies, the balance of geopolitics, and the quality of human life as much as petroleum. Little wonder that some scientists believe that
passing the peak of world oil production will be a shock to the human enterprise like no other event in history. Population and consumption are still on a steep trajectory but the rocket is running out of fuel.

In this light, the Conference Board of Canada has a duty to urge governments to get real about energy policy and pricing in Canada and the world beyond. Significant price increases are long overdue. Governments have known about the deteriorating supply situation for years - yet prefer to allow the public to wallow in ignorance. This in turn creates a political climate in which a looming crisis remains invisible and corrective action is impossible.

We need higher energy prices now to signal the scarcity to come. Without higher prices we won't invest in the technologies needed for a smooth transition to the post-petroleum age. Without higher prices we won't conserve the fossil energy needed to manufacture alternative technologies. Without higher prices, the life expectancy of industrial society may well be one generation.

William E Rees is an ecological economist and professor in the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning.

http://etheridge.ca/articles/no-fuel-old-fuel.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

A Call for Action

by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

From The Wilderness (June 15 2004)

Abstract

Unprecedented warnings from the scientific community indicate that the planet's ecosystems are stressed near the point of collapse; business as usual is no longer possible, and we have little time left to respond. Civilization is also approaching a nexus of social crises. All of these problems result from the nature of capitalism, and we cannot expect solutions from political leaders or corporations. Therefore, this author is soliciting advice from experts and from anyone who might have suggestions as to what measures can people of limited means undertake to ease their transition into a post-petroleum world. Submissions will be published in a book, the profits of which will be used to inform people and possibly provide grants in order to help people prepare for the coming transition.

Contents

1. A Planet in Crisis
2. Business as Usual
3. The Result of Business as Usual
4. An End to Business as Usual
5. Submission Guidelines


A Planet in Crisis

The world's scientific community has issued an unprecedented series of warnings over the past decade. <1> They have worked feverishly to assess the state of the planet, and have found that all of the Earth's ecosystems are suffering, with many near the point of collapse. They warn us that we have one generation, or at most two, to remedy this situation. <2> Yet even they do not understand how little time we have left. They tell us that business as usual cannot go on. And their assessment goes unheeded.


We are warned that the planet is threatened by global climate change and by ozone depletion. Ice masses in the Arctic and Antarctic are beginning to break up, and species vulnerable to increased ultraviolet penetration are diminishing. Skin cancers and eye cataracts are on the increase, as is desertification the world over. Northern species are retreating as warm-loving species expand from equatorial regions to high latitudes, bringing with them diseases once termed tropical. And plant species the world over, including many of our important crop species, are stressed by increased ultraviolet penetration. <3>

We are already in the middle of the third greatest extinction event in the history of the planet. The extinction rate is from 100 to 1,000 times in excess of the natural rate of extinction. <4> The diversity of life on this planet, which is a clear indication of the health of the biosphere and its ability to adapt to change, is severely diminished. Humankind has appropriated fully half of the incipient sunlight on this planet available for photosynthesis, and has put into cultivation virtually all of the arable land on this planet. <5> The rest of the biota is forced to make due with the marginal lands which are left, or to scavenge from our refuse.

Modern agriculture is draining the soil of nutrients far faster than they can be replaced, while soils are being eroded wherever they are exposed. Surface water is being diverted to the point that in many riverbeds barely a trickle remains, and groundwater is being pumped out for agricultural and industrial use at rates exceeding the recharge rates many times over. <6> The world's fisheries are collapsing. <7> Everywhere, supplies of vital resources are being depleted. <8>

At the other end of the entropy scale, garbage dumps are overflowing. Pollution, heavy metals and manufactured chemicals are tainting the atmosphere, the water, and the ground, entering into food chains everywhere. It is doubtful that there is a person alive today who is not storing manufactured poisons in her or his body. <9>

This is but a sampling from a myriad of problems associated with conducting business as usual. The world scientific community is warning us that we must deal with these problems now, while there is still time, or these problems will deal with us. Yet few of these scientists know how very little time we have to deal with these problems. We do not have a generation or two. In all likelihood, we have at most a few years.

Within the next five to ten years, our energy base will begin to contract irreversibly. This shrinking energy base will be due to the inevitable peak and decline of global oil production. We currently live in the opulence of the oil age. Each of us has the energy equivalent of at least a dozen slaves to do our work for us, and to pamper us with all of the latest technological comforts. Hydrocarbons are used as feedstock for over 500,000 different products: fertilizers, medicines, plastics, insulation, computers, asphalt, inks & toners, paints, glues, solvents, antiseptics, golf balls, CDs, trash bags, nail polish, detergents, and chewing gum - to name but a few. <10> And virtually all of our industrial processes are run by the energy of hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons have provided us with a treasure trove of high-quality, easily obtainable energy, from which we could draw at an unlimited rate for so long as the supply lasted. And it is that abundant energy store which has powered all of our technological advances, including the green revolution, making possible a nearly logarithmic growth in human population. When it comes to the bang for the buck, there is nothing to equal oil. One liter of petrol holds as much energy as 1,000 liters of natural gas, three kilograms of firewood, or 24 solar panels working all day in sunny Brisbane. <11> Oil provides 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per kilocalorie than coal. <12>

Yet we are fast approaching the day when we will have produced all the easily obtainable oil. <13> From here on out we must invest increasing amounts of energy to produce oil. In short order, we will reach a day when it will take as much energy to produce (that is, extract and, ultimately, refine and bring to market) a barrel of oil as we will get out of that barrel of oil. Past this point, the net energy of oil production will fall into the negative range. We will never run out of oil; there will always be some oil in the ground. Oil wells are not abandoned because they dry up - they are abandoned because the net energy production has reached zero.

Nothing has the bang for the buck of oil, and nothing can replace it - either separately or in combination. Ethanol has a net energy value of zero (not accounting for soil and water damage and other costs due to unsustainable agricultural practices) - it is subsidized as a boon to agribusiness. <14> Solar energy produces marginal net energy, and solar photovoltaic cells (PVC) are built from hydrocarbon feed stocks. Wind turbines do have an appreciable net energy profile - but the wind is intermittent at best. <15>

The highly touted hydrogen fuel cells are not an energy source at all, but are more properly termed a form of energy storage. Free hydrogen does not exist on this planet. It requires more energy to break a hydrogen bond than will ever be garnered from that free hydrogen. The current source of hydrogen is natural gas - that is, a hydrocarbon. In the envisioned system of solar PVC & hydrogen fuel cells, every major component of the system, from the PVC to the fuel cells themselves will require hydrocarbon energy and feedstocks. The oil age will never be replaced by a hydrogen fuel-cell economy. <16>

Coal is abundant, but its net energy profile is poor compared to oil, and will continue to diminish fast. Coal production is extremely harmful to the environment, and burning coal is far dirtier than oil. <17> Nuclear power plants are simply too expensive to build, uranium is rare, and the wastes (including decommissioned plants) must be stored and guarded virtually forever. <18>

Industrial, green revolution-style agriculture is particularly energy intensive. Every calorie of food produced today requires ten calories of hydrocarbon energy. <19> This includes the energy of packaging and shipping to the store, but not the energy of consumers traveling to and from the store, nor the home energy costs of cooking the food. Without hydrocarbons, this planet can only produce enough food to sustain a population of 2.5 billion. The current world population is in excess of 6 billion. In the US, without industrial agriculture, we will only be able to feed two-thirds of our current population. <20>

Our energy base will soon begin to contract. The planet's resources are being depleted, and we are being faced with a planet in crisis. Business as usual cannot go on.


Business as Usual

Instead of focusing on these critical problems, which threaten to undermine the quality of life on this planet, we have chosen to ignore them. Instead of looking for and implementing answers, we put the bulk of our efforts into denying the very existence of these problems or, failing that, denying that anything needs to be done about them. At most, we shake our heads before continuing with our conspicuous consumption and our push for a global free market.

Neo-classical economists tell us that the market will solve all of our problems. They assure us that pollution, resource depletion, the collapse of ecosystems and the failure of agriculture will produce economic stimulus which will spur the discovery of new resources and the development of new technologies. The market, they say, will maintain equilibrium no matter how much people and the environment have to suffer as a consequence. But we must avoid any impetus towards regulations which might restrict economic growth. They have no clue how economic growth can be maintained with a shrinking energy base, so they blithely deny any possibility of the latter.

The neo-classical economists believe that free market capitalism has proven its supremacy through the collapse of authoritarian communism. Globalization is the endgame of capitalism, pushing for open access to resources throughout the globe while driving down labor costs to provide cheap products and maximum profits. All we have to do to share in the benefits of this supposedly benevolent system is to consume, consume, and consume more.

Yet the power disparity upon which this system is based has been exaggerated to the breaking point. The royalty and the robber-barons of previous eras never dreamed of such a concentration of wealth as that experienced now by the Waltons, the Gates, and the Eisners of the world. In the United States as of 2002, the average CEO made 282 times as much as the average worker. <21> And the average worker today in the US is actually making comparatively less than thirty years ago, though worker productivity has increased. <22>

Outsourcing has given corporations the ability to move jobs to wherever workers can be paid the least, and where their operations will be subjected to the least regulation and the least taxation. White collar workers are no less vulnerable to outsourcing. Even service sector jobs are moving out of the US whenever possible. And to fill the poor paying jobs that remain, corporations are bringing in tens of thousands more immigrants every year. As a result, globalization has become a race to the bottom for the working class, for communities, and for ecosystems throughout the world.

Not only are people in the working class working harder for less pay, they are also receiving fewer benefits than comparatively thirty years ago. <23> In the US, consumers are maintaining a record level of personal debt, and personal bankruptcy now exceeds the divorce rate. Meanwhile, our social safety net is being dismantled and our infrastructure is being allowed to decay, where it is not being privatized. Public education has to go begging while the prison industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the country. <24>

Rugged individualism is the standard of the day, forcing all of us into direct competition. The basic human instinct toward cooperation has been all but forgotten in the mad rush to push everyone else aside. Our society has become atomized; the village green has been replaced by the shopping mall. Open debate and the free communication of ideas and news can now only be found in cyberspace.

Yet, at the same time, true individuality and originality has become suspect. People are encouraged to conform. Cultural distinctions are being lost in the homogenization of the cultures of the globe - what Benjamin Barber called "McWorld."

Much of the public is becoming increasingly bovine, unquestioningly following authority. Critical thinking has been replaced by reactionary impulses, response to emotional appeals, and other substitutes for rational debate. Atomized and removed from direct interaction with the world around them, the overworked populace are largely dependent on the cultural fodder which is tendered to them by the marketplace. It's a diet of mental junk food, blended of anxious fantasy, appeals to consume, fear mongering and quietism, promoted by media industry whose paying advertisers prefer an audience of passive spectators, addicted to entertainment and largely unable to govern their own affairs.


The Result of Business as Usual

None of this should come as a surprise. This is all a natural and foreseeable result of business as usual in a capitalist system. In that system, capital generates profit through the exploitation of labor and resources. So, as capitalism approaches its climax on a global scale, it has to result in an unstable power disparity with the concentration of wealth among a small and exclusive upper class, an impoverished and disempowered working class, bankrupt communities, overstressed ecosystems and a depleted resource base. The only way to avoid this is to do away with capitalism.

Capitalism cannot be reformed. Any attempt to regulate it more fairly, any attempt to reform capitalism - be it monetary reform or any other sort of reform - is destined to fail due to the basic unalterable nature of capitalism. Regulations and reforms may help to level out the playing field for a time, but in the long run capitalism will find a way to circumvent or deregulate any attempt to temper it. Capitalism is a system of exploitation which is ultimately unsustainable.

As such, capitalism is antithetical to democracy. A system is democratic only to the extent that its citizens are equal - in their political rights; in their access to participatory social space; in their opportunities to secure purchasing power without the threat of poverty or asset seizure; and in their recourse to the law, whose equal protection must be guaranteed to everyone if the term "democracy" is to meaningfully apply. Genuine popular sovereignty (the literal meaning of democracy) is sustained by an informed citizenry. Yet capitalism is based upon the exploitation of power disparities, and its smooth operation is maintained by a disempowered, uninformed working class.

Here lies the reason for the failure of democracy in the US. And here is the secret of why our founding fathers chose a system of representative democracy, and why the ratification of the US Constitution was resisted by the public in its day. The framers of the constitution were, without exception, rich white males worried about a popular uprising. Under the draperies of democracy, they designed a political system where decision making power was insulated from the general population and easily controlled by the rich and powerful. This disparity was later heightened by granting a protected status and legal rights to corporations. <25>

As a result, every war the US has ever fought, every intervention the US has ever sponsored, and every bit of foreign aid the US has ever supplied was undertaken to support the right of the upper class to exploit labor and resources, all under the guise of democracy.


An End to Business as Usual

Business as usual can no longer be allowed to proceed. To go on with business as usual is to promote the collapse of civilization, the destruction of ecosystems, the death of billions of human beings, untold suffering and impoverishment for those who survive, and just possibly the extinction of life on this planet at a level to match or exceed the end of the Permian Era. <26> And all this to ease our consciences, as we allow the end play of unbridled greed and ignorance.

We cannot trust our elected leaders to do the right thing, much less our corporations. There is very little time left, and it could very well be impossible at this point to redesign our entire civilization. But we can possibly restructure our own lives and our local communities to survive the transition. This is our duty to generations to come, and to the rest of the biosphere.

But we need options and advice. We need practical suggestions which can be undertaken by individuals, families and small communities. We need guidance on what can be achieved at a local level with limited means. And we need advice on how to achieve this in the most democratic and egalitarian manner possible.

To aid in this, I am here soliciting advice from specialists in various fields, such as permaculture, social ecology, progressive labor, and other disciplines. And I am putting out a call for articles from anyone who feels that she or he has some advice to offer. The topic is: Given the conditions set forth in this paper, what measures can people of limited means undertake to ease their transition into a post-technological world?

The resulting suggestions will be collected, along with this essay, and published. Any profits from this project will be used to educate people about the changes ahead, and hopefully to offer grants in order to help people prepare for the transition.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Geologist, Science Journalist, Novelist
Holly, Michigan, USA
April 26th 2004

Submission Guidelines

<> All submissions should be 3,000 words or less.

<> All submissions should include a title and a synopsis of two or three sentences explaining the contents of the paper.

<> All submissions should address the question: Given the conditions set forth in this paper, what measures can people of limited means undertake to ease their transition into a post-technological world?

<> Email submissions should be included in the body of the email. No attachments please. If you need to use graphs and illustrations, query first. All email should be addressed to calltoaction0416@earthlink.net

<> Snail mail submissions should be double spaced, in standard paragraph format. All snail mail should be addressed to Dale Allen Pfeiffer, PO Box 892, Clarkston, MI, USA 48347.

<> Deadline: The tentative deadline for submissions is July 30th, 2004.


Chapter Headings

Suggested chapter headings are as follows. These may be altered or additional headings may be added.

General Topics (Topics which can apply to anyone anywhere in the world)
1. Food (permaculture & sustainable agriculture, etc)
2. Building (building and remodeling for sufficiency, etc)
3. Energy Generation (Wind turbines, methane generation, etc)
4. Transportation (bicycles, horses, etc)
5. Barter and Alternative Local Economics (economies of scale, alternatives to money, etc)
6. Organizing (community organizing, cooperatives, etc)
7. Democratic & Egalitarian Models (consensus decision making, and other techniques to ensure democracy but avoid the dictatorship of the majority; worker owned businesses, reparations)
8. Urban Survival (urban gardening, water gathering, etc)

Regional Sections (Advice for particular regions, generalized for the main ecosystem types on the planet, though area specific papers are welcome.)
1. Temperate Forests
2. Rainforest
3. Coastal Areas
4. Fresh Water Areas
5. Mountain Regions
6. Deserts
7. Grasslands
8. Tundra
9. Islands
10. Wetlands
11. Scrub Brush Regions

Dale Allen Pfeiffer
PO Box 892
Clarkston, MI. USA 48347


Endnotes

1 For the story of these warnings see The End of the Oil Age, Chapter 15, Imminent Peril, Part 1, by this author; (http://www.lulu.com/allenadale). Or find the same article in the archives at www.fromthewilderness.com.

The individual warnings can be found online:

Population Growth, Resource Management and a Sustainable World. Joint Statement of the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences, 1992. Archived at http://www.dieoff.com/page7.htm

World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. Union of Concerned Scientists, 11/18/1992. http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/page.cfm?pageID=1009

Joint Statement by 58 of the World's Scientific Academies. US National Academy of Sciences, 10/27/1993. http://www4.nas.edu/iap/iaphome.nsf/weblinks/SAIN-4XVKHY?OpenDocument

Joint National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society Resolution: Towards Sustainable Consumption. US National Academy of Sciences, 1997. http://www4.nas.edu/NAS/nashome.nsf/Multi+Database+
Search/65F4E52642745F1485256709006FBD91?OpenDocument

World Scientists' Call for Action. Union of Concerned Scientists, December, 1997. http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/page.cfm?pageID=1007

Transition to Sustainability in the 21st Century: The Contribution of Science & Technology. InterAcademy Panel, May 2000. http://www4.nas.edu/iap/iaphome.nsf/weblinks/SAIN-4XVLCT?OpenDocument

2 An overview of these global assessment studies can be found in The End of the Oil Age, Chapter 15, Imminent Peril, Part 1, by this author; (http://www.lulu.com/allenadale). Or find the same article in the archives at www.fromthewilderness.com. The actual assessment studies can be accessed via these links:

Guide to World Resources, 2000-2001: People & Ecosystems; The Fraying Web of Life. World Resources Institute, April 2000. http://wri.igc.org/wri/wrr2000/

Global Environmental Outlook-3. United Nations Environment Programme, May 22 2002. http://www.grida.no/geo/geo3/

State of the World 2003. Worldwatch Institute, June 2003. http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/sow/2003/

3 The story of industry-induced global climate change is presented in my ongoing series Global Climate Change and Peak Oil, which can be found at www.fromthewilderness.org.
The scientific case for industry-induced climate change, and its impact, are discussed in full detail at Climate Change 2001, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, 2001. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/

And a statement of the world's scientific academies supporting this study can be found at The Science of Climate Change. 5/17/2001. http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/files/statfiles/document-138.pdf

Some web sites with information about ozone depletion are:
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/
http://www.igc.org/envreview/blaustei.html
http://www.arn.org/currpage/uvhealth.htm

Sites with additional information about global climate change are:
http://www.climatehotmap.org/
http://www.ucsusa.org/warming/

4 An excellent website for information on the current mass extinction is: http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html

5 Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis, Vitousek, P.M. et al. Bioscience 36, 1986. http://www.science.duq.edu/esm/unit2-3

Land, Energy and Water: the constraints governing Ideal US Population Size, Pimental, David and Pimental, Marcia. Focus, Spring 1991. NPG Forum, 1990. http://www.dieoff.com/page136.htm

6 For information about the effects of modern agriculture, see The End of the Oil Age, Chapter 17, Eating Fossil Fuels, by this author; (http://www.lulu.com/allenadale). Or find this same article in the archives at www.fromthewilderness.com.

Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, Executive Summary, Pimentel, David and Giampietro, Mario. Carrying Capacity Network, 11/21/1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page40.htm

7 Collapse of Wild Fisheries, Western Canada Wilderness Committee. Co-published by Wilderness Committee and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, Vol. 21. No. 5; Fall, 2002.
http://www.wildernesscommittee.org/campaigns/marine/policy/fish_farms/reports/fall2002/collapse

Why Fisheries Collapse and What To Do About It, Roughgarden, Jonathan, & Smith Fraser. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 93, pp. 5078-5083; May, 1996.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/93/10/5078.pdf

8 The Limits to Growth, Meadows, Dennis, et al. Universe Books, 2nd Edition.

Limits to Growth: the 30 year global update, Meadows, Dennis, Randers, Jorgen, & Meadows, Donella. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, June 2004.

Influence of Capital Inertia on Renewable Resource Depletion, Weisbuch, Gerard, et al. Labratorie de Physique Statistique de l'Ecole Normale Superieure; February, 1997. http://www.lps.ens.fr/~weisbuch/inert/p3/p3.html

9 http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/

10 The Oil Crash and You, Thomson, Bruce. Look in the RunningOnEmpty2 Yahoo Group's files section. Document name: !CONVINCE SHEET v19.doc. 9/2/2001. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2/files/

11 Oil Crisis Powerpoint Presentation, Stasse, Mike. Look in the RunningOnEmpty2 yahoo group's files section. Document name: oil crisis.ppt. 2/14/2004. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2/files/

12 Synopsis, edited by Hanson, Jay. March 8, 2001. http://www.dieoff.com/synopsis.htm

13 "Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist, and Albert Bartlett (using various methodologies) have all estimated a 'peak' in 'conventional oil' around 2005. Moreover, the CEOs of Agip, ENI SpA, (Italian oil companies) and Arco have all published estimates of peak in 2005. So it seems like a reliable estimate." Synopsis, edited by Hanson, Jay. March 8, 2001.
http://www.dieoff.com/synopsis.htm

For more information on the peak of global oil production, see The End of the Oil Age, by this author. Lulu Press, April, 2004. http://www.lulu.com/allenadale.

Or The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Heinberg, Richard. New Society Publishers, 2003.

The Energy Information Administration and the US Geological Survey estimate peak world oil production around 2025 to 2030. But their methodologies have been highly criticized, and members of both agencies have privately expressed doubts concerning these estimates.

14 Ethanol from Corn: clean renewable fuel for the future, or drain on our resources and pockets?, Patzek, Tad W. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, June 14, 2003. http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/Courses/E11/PatzekEthanolPaper.pdf

Ethanol from Corn: just how unsustainable is it?, Patzek, Tad W. Seminar at Stanford University. http://pangea.stanford.edu/ESYS/Energy%20seminars/patzek_ethanol.pdf

15 The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Heinberg, Richard. New Society Publishers, 2003; pp. 139-146.

16 For a critical look at some of the problems associated with hydrogen fuel cell technology, see The End of the Oil Age, Chapter 8, Much Ado about Nothing, by this author. Lulu Press, April, 2004. http://www.lulu.com/allenadale

Or see The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Heinberg, Richard. New Society Publishers, 2003; pp. 146-149.

17 The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Heinberg, Richard. New Society Publishers, 2003; pp. 129-132.

Beyond Oil, Gever, John, et al. Univ. Pr. Colorado, 1991. pp. 65-68.

18 The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Heinberg, Richard. New Society Publishers, 2003; pp. 132-139.

19 The Tightening Conflict: Population, Energy Use, and the Ecology of Agriculture, Giampietro, Mario and Pimentel, David, 1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page69.htm

20 The End of the Oil Age, Chapter 17, Eating Fossil Fuels, Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. Lulu Press, April, 2004. http://www.lulu.com/allenadale

21 Executive Excess 2002, Anderson, Sarah, et al. Institute for Policy Studies & United for a Fair Economy, August 26th, 2003. http://www.ufenet.org/press/2003/EE2003.pdf

22 State of Working America 2002-2003: Executive Summary and Introduction. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epinet.org/press/embargoed/swa2002.pdf

23 Ibid.

24 The Prison Industry. http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PII.jsp?topicid=119

25 Toward an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution and other Illusions, Fresia, Jerry. South End Press, 1988.

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to present, Zinn Howard. Perennial, 2003 (latest edition).

26 The Permian Era ended approximately 250 Million Years Ago, in an extinction event which killed off 95% of all marine life on the planet, and 70% of all land families. It was much worse than the end of the dinosaurs, which ranks a distant second on the list of extinction events (the current extinction event ranks third). It is now most widely accepted that the Permian Extinction began with volcanic outgassing leading to global warming, which in turn sparked off massive methane venting from permafrost and from the ocean floor, resulting in runaway global warming. The implications for modern global warming are frightening.
For more on the Permian Extinction, a good starting place is:
http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Palaeofiles/Permian/intro.html



http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061504_call_action.html 15jun04

The home page of this website is www.mindfully.org

Please see our Fair Use Notice

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Punitive - And It Works

Sweden proves the neoliberals wrong about how to slash poverty.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 11 2005)

"Does not already the response to the massive tidal wave in south east Asia", Gordon Brown asked on Thursday, "show just how closely and irrevocably bound together ... are the fortunes of the richest persons in the richest country to the fate of the poorest persons in the poorest country?" <1>

The answer is no. It is true that the very rich might feel sorry for the very poor, and that some of them have responded generously to the latest catastrophe. But it is hard to imagine how the fate and fortunes of the richest and poorest could be further removed. The ten richest people on earth have a combined net worth of $255 billion - roughly 60% of the income of sub-Saharan Africa. <2> The world's 500 richest people have more money than the total annual earnings of the poorest three billion. <3>

This issue - of global inequality - was not mentioned in either Brown's speech or Tony Blair's simultaneous press conference. Indeed I have so far failed to find a reference to it in the recent speeches of any leader of a G8 nation. I believe that the concern evinced by Blair and Brown for the world's poor is genuine. I believe that they mean it when they say they will put the poor at the top of the agenda for the G8 summit in July. The problem is that their concern for the poor ends where their concern for the rich begins.

There is, at the moment, a furious debate among economists about whether global inequality is rising or falling. No one disputes that there is a staggering gulf between rich and poor, which has survived decades of global economic growth. But what the neoliberals - who promote unregulated global capitalism - tell us is that there is no conflict between the whims of the wealthy and the needs of the wretched. The Economist magazine, for example, argues that the more freedom you give the rich, the better off the poor will be. Without restraints, the rich have a more powerful incentive to generate global growth, and this growth becomes "the rising tide that lifts all boats". Countries which intervene in the market with "punitive taxes, grandiose programmes of public spending, and all the other apparatus of applied economic justice" condemn their people to remain poor. A zeal for justice does "nothing but harm". <4>

Now it may be true that global growth, however poorly distributed, is slowly lifting everyone off the mud. Unfortunately we have no way of telling, as the only current set of comprehensive figures on global poverty is - as researchers at Columbia University have shown - so methodologically flawed as to be useless. <5>

But there is another means of testing the neoliberals' hypothesis, which is to compare the performance of nations which have taken different routes to development. The neoliberals dismiss the problems faced by developing countries as "growing pains", so let's look at the closest thing we have to a final result. Let's take two countries which have gone all the way through the development process and arrived in the promised land of prosperity. Let's compare the United Kingdom - a pioneer of neoliberalism - and Sweden: one of the last outposts of distributionism. And let's make use of a set of statistics the Economist is unlikely to dispute: those contained within its own publication, the 2005 World in Figures. <6>

The first surprise, for anyone who has swallowed the stories about our unrivalled economic dynamism, is that, in terms of gross domestic product, Sweden has done as well as we have. In 2002 its GDP per capita was $27,310, and the UK's was $26,240. This is no blip. In only seven years between 1960 and 2001 did Sweden's per capita GDP fall behind the United Kingdom's. <7>

More surprisingly still, Sweden has a current account surplus of $10 billion and the UK a deficit of $26 billion. Even by the neoliberals' favourite measures, Sweden wins: it has a lower inflation rate than ours, higher "global competitiveness" and a higher ranking for "business creativity and research".

In terms of human welfare, there is no competition. According to the quality of life measure published by the Economist (the "human development index") Sweden ranks third in the world, the UK eleventh. Sweden has the world's third highest life expectancy, the UK the 29th. In Sweden, there are 74 telephone lines and 62 computers per hundred people; in the UK just 59 and 41.

The contrast between the averaged figures is stark enough, but it's far greater for the people at the bottom of the social heap. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economist does not publish this data, but the United Nations does. Its Human Development Report for 2004 shows that in Sweden 6.3% of the population lives below the absolute poverty line for developed nations ($11 a day). <8> In the United Kingdom the figure is 15.7%. Seven and a half per cent of Swedish adults are functionally illiterate - just over one third of the UK's figure of 21.8%. In the United Kingdom, according to a separate study, you are over three times as likely to stay in the economic class into which you were born than you are in Sweden. <9> So much for the deregulated market creating opportunity.

The reason for these differences is straightforward. Over most of the 20th century, Sweden has pursued, in the words of a recent pamphlet published by the Catalyst Forum, "policies designed to narrow the inequality of condition between social classes". <10> These include what the Economist calls "punitive taxes" and "grandiose programmes of public spending", which, remember, do "nothing but harm". These policies in fact appear to have enhanced the country's economic competitiveness, while ensuring that the poor obtain a higher proportion of total national income. In Sweden, according to the UN, the richest 10% earn six times as much money as the poorest 10%. In the UK the ratio is fourteen. <11>

So for countries hoping to reach the promised land, there is a choice. They could seek to replicate the Swedish model of development - in which the benefits of growth are widely distributed - or the United Kingdom's, in which they are concentrated in the hands of the rich. That's the theory. In practice they have no choice. Through the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, the G8 governments force them to follow a model closer to the UK's, but even harsher and less distributive. Of the two kinds of capitalism, Blair, Brown and the other G8 leaders have chosen for developing countries the one less likely to help the poor.

Unless this changes, their "Marshall plan for the developing world" is useless. Brown fulminates about the fact that, five years after "almost every single country" signed up to new pledges on eliminating global poverty, scarcely any progress has been made. <12> But the very policies he implements as a governor of the IMF make this progress impossible. Despite everything we have been told over the past 25 years, it is still true that helping the poor means restraining the rich.

www.monbiot.com.

References:

1. Gordon Brown, 6th January 2005. International Development in 2005: the challenge and the opportunity. Speech at the National Gallery of Scotland.

2. http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

3. John Cavanagh and Sarah Anderson, 2003. World's Billionaires Take a Hit, But Still Soar. http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/billionaires.htm

4. No author, 11th March 2004. A question of justice? The Economist

5. Sanjay G Reddy and Thomas W Pogge, March 2003. How Not To Count The Poor. http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/. Their findings are paper is summarised at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/05/06/rich-in-imagination/

6. The Economist, 2004. Pocket World in Figures, 2005 edition. Profile Books, London.

7. You can see a table of the figures for 1960-1998, compiled from the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.publicpurpose.com/lm-ppp60+.htm. I have taken the figures for 1999-2001 from the UN Human Development reports, 2001-2003.

8. United Nations Development Programme, 2004. Human Development Report: Cultural Liberty in Today's Diverse World. UNDP, New York.

9. L Dearden, S Machin and H Reed, 1997. Intergenerational mobility in Britain. Economic Journal #107; and T Osterberg, 2000. Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden. Review of Income and Wealth Series 46, No 4, both cited in Ben Jackson and Paul Segal, October 2004. Why Inequality Matters. The catalyst Forum, London.

10. Ben Jackson and Paul Segal, October 2004. Why Inequality Matters. The catalyst Forum, London.

11. United Nations Development Programme, 2004. Human Development Report: Cultural Liberty in Today's Diverse World. UNDP, New York.

12. Gordon Brown, ibid.


http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/01/11/punitive-and-it-works/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The End of Cheap Oil

by Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere

Scientific American (March 1998)


See picture at http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

In 1973 and 1979 a pair of sudden price increases rudely awakened the industrial world to its dependence on cheap crude oil. Prices first tripled in response to an Arab embargo and then nearly doubled again when Iran dethroned its Shah, sending the major economies sputtering into recession. Many analysts warned that these crises proved that the world would soon run out of oil. Yet they were wrong.

Their dire predictions were emotional and political reactions; even at the time, oil experts knew that they had no scientific basis. Just a few years earlier oil explorers had discovered enormous new oil provinces on the north slope of Alaska and below the North Sea off the coast of Europe. By 1973 the world had consumed, according to many experts' best estimates, only about one eighth of its endowment of readily accessible crude oil (so-called conventional oil). The five Middle Eastern members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) were able to hike prices not because oil was growing scarce but because they had managed to corner 36 percent of the market. Later, when demand sagged, and the flow of fresh Alaskan and North Sea oil weakened OPEC's economic stranglehold, prices collapsed.

The next oil crunch will not be so temporary. Our analysis of the discovery and production of oil fields around the world suggests that within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand. This conclusion contradicts the picture one gets from oil industry reports, which boasted of 1,020 billion barrels of oil in "Proved" reserves at the start of 1998. Dividing that figure by the current production rate of about 23.6 billion barrels of oil a year might suggest that crude oil could remain plentiful and cheap for 43 more years - probably longer, because official charts show reserves growing.

Unfortunately, this appraisal makes three critical errors. First, it relies on distorted estimates of reserves. A second mistake is to pretend that production will remain constant. Third and most important, conventional wisdom erroneously assumes that the last bucket of oil can be pumped from the ground just as quickly as the barrels of oil gushing from wells today. In fact, the rate at which any well - or any country - can produce oil always rises to a maximum and then, when about half the oil is gone, begins falling gradually back to zero.

From an economic perspective, when the world runs completely out of oil is thus not directly relevant: what matters is when production begins to taper off. Beyond that point, prices will rise unless demand declines commensurately.

Using several different techniques to estimate the current reserves of conventional oil and the amount still left to be discovered, we conclude that the decline will begin before 2010.

See FLOW OF OIL graph at http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

We have spent most of our careers exploring for oil, studying reserve figures and estimating the amount of oil left to discover, first while employed at major oil companies and later as independent consultants. Over the years, we have come to appreciate that the relevant statistics are far more complicated than they first appear.

Consider, for example, three vital numbers needed to project future oil production. The first is the tally of how much oil has been extracted to date, a figure known as cumulative production. The second is an estimate of reserves, the amount that companies can pump out of known oil fields before having to abandon them. Finally, one must have an educated guess at the quantity of conventional oil that remains to be discovered and exploited. Together they add up to ultimate recovery, the total number of barrels that will have been extracted when production ceases many decades from now.

The obvious way to gather these numbers is to look them up in any of several publications. That approach works well enough for cumulative production statistics because companies meter the oil as it flows from their wells. The record of production is not perfect (for example, the two billion barrels of Kuwaiti oil wastefully burned by Iraq in 1991 is usually not included in official statistics), but errors are relatively easy to spot and rectify. Most experts agree that the industry had removed just over 800 billion barrels of oil from the earth at the end of 1997.

Getting good estimates of reserves is much harder, however. Almost all the publicly available statistics are taken from surveys conducted by the Oil and Gas Journal and World Oil. Each year these two trade journals query oil firms and governments around the world. They then publish whatever production and reserve numbers they receive but are not able to verify them.

The results, which are often accepted uncritically, contain systematic errors. For one, many of the reported figures are unrealistic. Estimating reserves is an inexact science to begin with, so petroleum engineers assign a probability to their assessments. For example, if, as geologists estimate, there is a ninety percent chance that the Oseberg field in Norway contains 700 million barrels of recoverable oil but only a ten percent chance that it will yield 2,500 million more barrels, then the lower figure should be cited as the so-called P90 estimate (P90 for "probability ninety percent") and the higher as the P10 reserves.

In practice, companies and countries are often deliberately vague about the likelihood of the reserves they report, preferring instead to publicize whichever figure, within a P10 to P90 range, best suits them. Exaggerated estimates can, for instance, raise the price of an oil company's stock.

See SUSPICIOUS JUMP graph at http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

The members of OPEC have faced an even greater temptation to inflate their reports because the higher their reserves, the more oil they are allowed to export. National companies, which have exclusive oil rights in the main OPEC countries, need not (and do not) release detailed statistics on each field that could be used to verify the country's total reserves. There is thus good reason to suspect that when, during the late 1980s, six of the eleven OPEC nations increased their reserve figures by colossal amounts, ranging from 42 to 197 percent, they did so only to boost their export quotas.

Previous OPEC estimates, inherited from private companies before governments took them over, had probably been conservative, P90 numbers. So some upward revision was warranted. But no major new discoveries or technological breakthroughs justified the addition of a staggering 287 billion barrels of oil. That increase is more than all the oil ever discovered in the US - plus forty percent. Non-OPEC countries, of course, are not above fudging their numbers either: 59 nations stated in 1997 that their reserves were unchanged from 1996. Because reserves naturally drop as old fields are drained and jump when new fields are discovered, perfectly stable numbers year after year are implausible.

See GLOBAL PRODUCTION OF OIL graph at http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

Another source of systematic error in the commonly accepted statistics is that the definition of reserves varies widely from region to region. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission allows companies to call reserves "proved" only if the oil lies near a producing well and there is "reasonable certainty" that it can be recovered profitably at current oil prices, using existing technology. So a proved reserve estimate in the US is roughly equal to a P90 estimate.

Regulators in most other countries do not enforce particular oil-reserve definitions. For many years, the former Soviet countries have routinely released wildly optimistic figures - essentially P10 reserves. Yet analysts have often misinterpreted these as estimates of "proved" reserves. World Oil reckoned reserves in the former Soviet Union amounted to 190 billion barrels of oil in 1996, whereas the Oil and Gas Journal put the number at 57 billion barrels of oil. This large discrepancy shows just how elastic these numbers can be.

Using only P90 estimates is not the answer, because adding what is 90 percent likely for each field, as is done in the US, does not in fact yield what is 90 percent likely for a country or the entire planet. On the contrary, summing many P90 reserve estimates always understates the amount of proved oil in a region. The only correct way to total up reserve numbers is to add the mean, or average, estimates of oil in each field. In practice, the median estimate, often called "proved and probable", or P50 reserves, is more widely used and is good enough. The P50 value is the number of barrels of oil that are as likely as not to come out of a well during its lifetime, assuming prices remain within a limited range. Errors in P50 estimates tend to cancel one another out.

We were able to work around many of the problems plaguing estimates of conventional reserves by using a large body of statistics maintained by Petroconsultants in Geneva. This information, assembled over forty years from myriad sources, covers some 18,000 oil fields worldwide. It, too, contains some dubious reports, but we did our best to correct these sporadic errors.

According to our calculations, the world had at the end of 1996 approximately 850 billion barrels of oil of conventional oil in P50 reserves - substantially less than the 1,019 billion barrels of oil reported in the Oil and Gas Journal and the 1,160 billion barrels of oil estimated by World Oil. The difference is actually greater than it appears because our value represents the amount most likely to come out of known oil fields, whereas the larger number is supposedly a cautious estimate of proved reserves.

For the purposes of calculating when oil production will crest, even more critical than the size of the world's reserves is the size of ultimate recovery - all the cheap oil there is to be had. In order to estimate that, we need to know whether, and how fast, reserves are moving up or down. It is here that the official statistics become dangerously misleading.

See GROWTH IN OIL RESERVES graph at http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

According to most accounts, world oil reserves have marched steadily upward over the past twenty years. Extending that apparent trend into the future, one could easily conclude, as the US Energy Information Administration has, that oil production will continue to rise unhindered for decades to come, increasing almost two thirds by 2020.

Such growth is an illusion. About eighty percent of the oil produced today flows from fields that were found before 1973, and the great majority of them are declining. In the 1990s oil companies have discovered an average of seven billion barrels of oil a year; last year they drained more than three times as much. Yet official figures indicated that proved reserves did not fall by sixteen billion barrels of oil, as one would expect rather they expanded by eleven billion barrels of oil. One reason is that several dozen governments opted not to report declines in their reserves, perhaps to enhance their political cachet and their ability to obtain loans. A more important cause of the expansion lies in revisions: oil companies replaced earlier estimates of the reserves left in many fields with higher numbers. For most purposes, such amendments are harmless, but they seriously distort forecasts extrapolated from published reports.

To judge accurately how much oil explorers will uncover in the future, one has to backdate every revision to the year in which the field was first discovered - not to the year in which a company or country corrected an earlier estimate. Doing so reveals that global discovery peaked in the early 1960s and has been falling steadily ever since. By extending the trend to zero, we can make a good guess at how much oil the industry will ultimately find.

We have used other methods to estimate the ultimate recovery of conventional oil for each country [see box on next two pages], and we calculate that the oil industry will be able to recover only about another 1,000 billion barrels of conventional oil. This number, though great, is little more than the 800 billion barrels that have already been extracted.

See section entitled "How Much Oil is Left to Find?" below.

It is important to realize that spending more money on oil exploration will not change this situation. After the price of crude hit all-time highs in the early 1980s, explorers developed new technology for finding and recovering oil, and they scoured the world for new fields. They found few: the discovery rate continued its decline uninterrupted. There is only so much crude oil in the world, and the industry has found about ninety percent of it.

Predicting when oil production will stop rising is relatively straightforward once one has a good estimate of how much oil there is left to produce. We simply apply a refinement of a technique first published in 1956 by M King Hubbert. Hubbert observed that in any large region, unrestrained extraction of a finite resource rises along a bellshaped curve that peaks when about half the resource is gone. To demonstrate his theory, Hubbert fitted a bell curve to production statistics and projected that crude oil production in the lower 48 US states would rise for thirteen more years, then crest in 1969, give or take a year. He was right: production peaked in 1970 and has continued to follow Hubbert curves with only minor deviations. The flow of oil from several other regions, such as the former Soviet Union and the collection of all oil producers outside the Middle East, also follows Hubbert curves quite faithfully.

The global picture is more complicated, because the Middle East members of OPEC deliberately reined back their oil exports in the 1970s, while other nations continued producing at full capacity. Our analysis reveals that a number of the largest producers, including Norway and the UK, will reach their peaks around the turn of the millennium unless they sharply curtail production. By 2002 or so the world will rely on Middle East nations, particularly five near the Persian Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), to fill in the gap between dwindling supply and growing demand. But once approximately 900 billion barrels of oil have been consumed, production must soon begin to fall. Barring a global recession, it seems most likely that world production of conventional oil will peak during the first decade of the 21st century.

Perhaps surprisingly, that prediction does not shift much even if our estimates are a few hundred billion barrels high or low. Craig Bond Hatfield of the University of Toledo, for example, has conducted his own analysis based on a 1991 estimate by the US Geological Survey of 1,550 billion barrels of oil remaining - 55 percent higher than our figure. Yet he similarly concludes that the world will hit maximum oil production within the next fifteen years. John D Edwards of the University of Colorado published last August one of the most optimistic recent estimates of oil remaining: 2,036 billion barrels of oil. (Edwards concedes that the industry has only a five percent chance of attaining that very high goal.) Even so, his calculations suggest that conventional oil will top out in 2020.

Factors other than major economic changes could speed or delay the point at which oil production begins to decline. Three in particular have often led economists and academic geologists to dismiss concerns about future oil production with naive optimism.

First, some argue, huge deposits of oil may lie undetected in far-off corners of the globe. In fact, that is very unlikely. Exploration has pushed the frontiers back so far that only extremely deep water and polar regions remain to be fully tested, and even their prospects are now reasonably well understood. Theoretical advances in geochemistry and geophysics have made it possible to map productive and prospective fields with impressive accuracy. As a result, large tracts can be condemned as barren. Much of the deepwater realm, for example, has been shown to be absolutely nonprospective for geologic reasons.

What about the much touted Caspian Sea deposits? Our models project that oil production from that region will grow until around 2010. We agree with analysts at the USGS World Oil Assessment program and elsewhere who rank the total resources there as roughly equivalent to those of the North Sea that is, perhaps fifty billion barrels of oil but certainly not several hundreds of billions as sometimes reported in the media.

A second common rejoinder is that new technologies have steadily increased the fraction of oil that can be recovered from fields in a basin - the so-called recovery factor. In the 1960s oil companies assumed as a rule of thumb that only thirty percent of the oil in a field was typically recoverable; now they bank on an average of forty or fifty percent. That progress will continue and will extend global reserves for many years to come, the argument runs.

Of course, advanced technologies will buy a bit more time before production starts to fall [see "Oil Production in the 21st Century", by Roger N Anderson, on page 86]. But most of the apparent improvement in recovery factors is an artifact of reporting. As oil fields grow old, their owners often deploy newer technology to slow their decline. The falloff also allows engineers to gauge the size of the field more accurately and to correct previous underestimation - in particular P90 estimates that by definition were ninety percent likely to be exceeded.

Another reason not to pin too much hope on better recovery is that oil companies routinely count on technological progress when they compute their reserve estimates. In truth, advanced technologies can offer little help in draining the largest basins of oil, those onshore in the Middle East where the oil needs no assistance to gush from the ground.

Last, economists like to point out that the world contains enormous caches of unconventional oil that can substitute for crude oil as soon as the price rises high enough to make them profitable. There is no question that the resources are ample: the Orinoco oil belt in Venezuela has been assessed to contain a staggering 1.2 trillion barrels of the sludge known as heavy oil. Tar sands and shale deposits in Canada and the former Soviet Union may contain the equivalent of more than 300 billion barrels of oil [see "Mining for Oil", by Richard L George, on page 84]. Theoretically, these unconventional oil reserves could quench the world's thirst for liquid fuels as conventional oil passes its prime. But the industry will be hard-pressed for the time and money needed to ramp up production of unconventional oil quickly enough

Such substitutes for crude oil might also exact a high environmental price. Tar sands typically emerge from strip mines. Extracting oil from these sands and shales creates air pollution. The Orinoco sludge contains heavy metals and sulfur that must be removed. So governments may restrict these industries from growing as fast as they could. In view of these potential obstacles, our skeptical estimate is that only 700 billion barrels of oil will be produced from unconventional reserves over the next sixty years.

Meanwhile global demand for oil is currently rising at more than two percent a year. Since 1985, energy use is up about thirty percent in Latin America, forty percent in Africa and fifty percent in Asia. The Energy Information Administration forecasts that worldwide demand for oil will increase sixty percent (to about forty billion barrels of oil a year) by 2020.

The switch from growth to decline in oil production will thus almost certainly create economic and political tension. Unless alternatives to crude oil quickly prove themselves, the market share of the OPEC states in the Middle East will rise rapidly. Within two years, these nations' share of the global oil business will pass thirty percent, nearing the level reached during the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. By 2010 their share will quite probably hit fifty percent.

The world could thus see radical increases in oil prices. That alone might be sufficient to curb demand, flattening production for perhaps ten years. (Demand fell more than ten percent after the 1979 shock and took seventeen years to recover.) But by 2010 or so, many Middle Eastern nations will themselves be past the midpoint. World production will then have to fall.

With sufficient preparation, however, the transition to the post-oil economy need not be traumatic. If advanced methods of producing liquid fuels from natural gas can be made profitable and scaled up quickly, gas could become the next source of transportation fuel [see "Liquid Fuels from Natural Gas", by Safaa A Fouda, on page 92]. Safer nuclear power, cheaper renewable energy, and oil conservation programs could all help postpone the inevitable decline of conventional oil.

Countries should begin planning and investing now. In November a panel of energy experts appointed by President Bill Clinton strongly urged the administration to increase funding for energy research by $1 billion over the next five years. That is a small step in the right direction, one that must be followed by giant leaps from the private sector.

The world is not running out of oil - at least not yet. What our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend.


How Much Oil is Left to Find?

We combined several techniques to conclude that about 1,000 billion barrels of conventional oil remain to be produced. See graphs a, b, c, d near end of http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

First, we extrapolated published production figures for older oil fields that have begun to decline. The Thistle field off the coast of Britain, for example, will yield about 420 million barrels (a).

Second, we plotted the amount of oil discovered so far in some regions against the cumulative number of exploratory wells drilled there. Because larger fields tend to be found first - they are simply too large to miss - the curve rises rapidly and then flattens, eventually reaching a theoretical maximum: for Africa, 192 billion barrels of oil. But the time and cost of exploration impose a more practical limit of perhaps 165 billion barrels of oil (b).

Third, we analyzed the distribution of oil-field sizes in the Gulf of Mexico and other provinces. Ranked according to size and then graphed on a logarithmic scale, the fields tend to fall along a parabola that grows predictably over time (c). (Interestingly, galaxies, urban populations and other natural agglomerations also seem to fall along such parabolas.)

Finally, we checked our estimates by matching our projections for oil production in large areas, such as the world outside the Persian Gulf region, to the rise and fall of oil discovery in those places decades earlier (d).

- Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere


The Authors

Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere have each worked in the oil industry for more than forty years. After completing his PhD in geology at the University of Oxford, Campbell worked for Texaco as an exploration geologist and then at Amoco as chief geologist for Ecuador. His decade-long study of global oil-production trends has led to two books and numerous papers. Laherrere's early work on seismic refraction surveys contributed to the discovery of Africa's largest oil field. At Total, a French oil company, he supervised exploration techniques worldwide. Both Campbell and Laherrere are currently associated with Petroconsultants in Geneva.


Further Reading

Updated Hubbert Curves Analyze World Oil Supply. L F Ivanhoe in World Oil, Vol 217, No 11, pages 91-94; November 1996.

The Coming Oil Crisis. Colin J Campbell. Multi-Science Publishing and Petroconsultants, Brentwood, England, 1997.

Oil Back on the Global Agenda. Craig Bond Hatfield in Nature, Vol 387, page 121; May 8 1997.


http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Eating Fossil Fuels

by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

From The Wilderness (October 03 2003)


Human beings (like all other animals) draw their energy from the food they eat. Until the last century, all of the food energy available on this planet was derived from the sun through photosynthesis. Either you ate plants or you ate animals that fed on plants, but the energy in your food was ultimately derived from the sun.

It would have been absurd to think that we would one day run out of sunshine. No, sunshine was an abundant, renewable resource, and the process of photosynthesis fed all life on this planet. It also set a limit on the amount of food that could be generated at any one time, and therefore placed a limit upon population growth. Solar energy has a limited rate of flow into this planet. To increase your food production, you had to increase the acreage under cultivation, and displace your competitors. There was no other way to increase the amount of energy available for food production. Human population grew by displacing everything else and appropriating more and more of the available solar energy.

The need to expand agricultural production was one of the motive causes behind most of the wars in recorded history, along with expansion of the energy base (and agricultural production is truly an essential portion of the energy base). And when Europeans could no longer expand cultivation, they began the task of conquering the world. Explorers were followed by conquistadors and traders and settlers. The declared reasons for expansion may have been trade, avarice, empire or simply curiosity, but at its base, it was all about the expansion of agricultural productivity. Wherever explorers and conquistadors traveled, they may have carried off loot, but they left plantations. And settlers toiled to clear land and establish their own homestead. This conquest and expansion went on until there was no place left for further expansion. Certainly, to this day, landowners and farmers fight to claim still more land for agricultural productivity, but they are fighting over crumbs. Today, virtually all of the productive land on this planet is being exploited by agriculture. What remains unused is too steep, too wet, too dry or lacking in soil nutrients. <1>

Just when agricultural output could expand no more by increasing acreage, new innovations made possible a more thorough exploitation of the acreage already available. The process of "pest" displacement and appropriation for agriculture accelerated with the industrial revolution as the mechanization of agriculture hastened the clearing and tilling of land and augmented the amount of farmland which could be tended by one person. With every increase in food production, the human population grew apace.

At present, nearly forty percent of all land-based photosynthetic capability has been appropriated by human beings. <2> In the United States we divert more than half of the energy captured by photosynthesis. <3> We have taken over all the prime real estate on this planet. The rest of nature is forced to make due with what is left. Plainly, this is one of the major factors in species extinctions and in ecosystem stress.

The Green Revolution

In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. <4> That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.

The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of fifty times the energy input of traditional agriculture. <5> In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more. <6>

In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994). <7> Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

<> 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer

<> 19% for the operation of field machinery

<> 16% for transportation

<> 13% for irrigation

<> 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)

<> 05% for crop drying

<> 05% for pesticide production

<> 08% miscellaneous <8>

Energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking are not considered in these figures.

To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock. <9> According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer. <10> Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.

Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.

In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased four-fold while crop yields only increased three-fold. <11> Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

Fossil Fuel Costs

Solar energy is a renewable resource limited only by the inflow rate from the sun to the earth. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are a stock-type resource that can be exploited at a nearly limitless rate. However, on a human timescale, fossil fuels are nonrenewable. They represent a planetary energy deposit which we can draw from at any rate we wish, but which will eventually be exhausted without renewal. The Green Revolution tapped into this energy deposit and used it to increase agricultural production.

Total fossil fuel use in the United States has increased twenty-fold in the last four decades. In the US, we consume twenty to thirty times more fossil fuel energy per capita than people in developing nations. Agriculture directly accounts for seventeen percent of all the energy used in this country. <12> As of 1990, we were using approximately 1,000 liters (6.41 barrels) of oil to produce food of one hectare of land. <13>

In 1994, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the output/input ratio of agriculture to be around 1.4. <14> For 0.7 Kilogram-Calories (kcal) of fossil energy consumed, US agriculture produced 1 kcal of food. The input figure for this ratio was based on FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) statistics, which consider only fertilizers (without including fertilizer feedstock), irrigation, pesticides (without including pesticide feedstock), and machinery and fuel for field operations. Other agricultural energy inputs not considered were energy and machinery for drying crops, transportation for inputs and outputs to and from the farm, electricity, and construction and maintenance of farm buildings and infrastructures. Adding in estimates for these energy costs brought the input/output energy ratio down to 1. <15> Yet this does not include the energy expense of packaging, delivery to retail outlets, refrigeration or household cooking.

In a subsequent study completed later that same year (1994), Giampietro and Pimentel managed to derive a more accurate ratio of the net fossil fuel energy ratio of agriculture. <16> In this study, the authors defined two separate forms of energy input: Endosomatic energy and Exosomatic energy. Endosomatic energy is generated through the metabolic transformation of food energy into muscle energy in the human body. Exosomatic energy is generated by transforming energy outside of the human body, such as burning gasoline in a tractor. This assessment allowed the authors to look at fossil fuel input alone and in ratio to other inputs.

Prior to the industrial revolution, virtually 100% of both endosomatic and exosomatic energy was solar driven. Fossil fuels now represent 90% of the exosomatic energy used in the United States and other developed countries. <17> The typical exo/endo ratio of pre-industrial, solar powered societies is about 4 to 1. The ratio has changed tenfold in developed countries, climbing to 40 to 1. And in the United States it is more than 90 to 1. <18> The nature of the way we use endosomatic energy has changed as well.

The vast majority of endosomatic energy is no longer expended to deliver power for direct economic processes. Now the majority of endosomatic energy is utilized to generate the flow of information directing the flow of exosomatic energy driving machines. Considering the 90/1 exo/endo ratio in the United States, each endosomatic kcal of energy expended in the US induces the circulation of 90 kcal of exosomatic energy. As an example, a small gasoline engine can convert the 38,000 kcal in one gallon of gasoline into 8.8 KWh (Kilowatt hours), which equates to about three weeks of work for one human being. <19>

In their refined study, Giampietro and Pimentel found that ten kcal of exosomatic energy are required to produce one kcal of food delivered to the consumer in the US food system. This includes packaging and all delivery expenses, but excludes household cooking). <20> The US food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.

Assuming a figure of 2,500 kcal per capita for the daily diet in the United States, the 10/1 ratio translates into a cost of 25,000 kcal of exosomatic energy per capita each day. However, considering that the average return on one hour of endosomatic labor in the US is about 100,000 kcal of exosomatic energy, the flow of exosomatic energy required to supply the daily diet is achieved in only twenty minutes of labor in our current system. Unfortunately, if you remove fossil fuels from the equation, the daily diet will require 111 hours of endosomatic labor per capita; that is, the current US daily diet would require nearly three weeks of labor per capita to produce.

Quite plainly, as fossil fuel production begins to decline within the next decade, there will be less energy available for the production of food.

Soil, Cropland and Water

Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. Technologically-enhanced agriculture has augmented soil erosion, polluted and overdrawn groundwater and surface water, and even (largely due to increased pesticide use) caused serious public health and environmental problems. Soil erosion, overtaxed cropland and water resource overdraft in turn lead to even greater use of fossil fuels and hydrocarbon products. More hydrocarbon-based fertilizers must be applied, along with more pesticides; irrigation water requires more energy to pump; and fossil fuels are used to process polluted water.

It takes 500 years to replace one inch of topsoil. <21> In a natural environment, topsoil is built up by decaying plant matter and weathering rock, and it is protected from erosion by growing plants. In soil made susceptible by agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year. <22> Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding thirty times faster than the natural formation rate. <23> Food crops are much hungrier than the natural grasses that once covered the Great Plains. As a result, the remaining topsoil is increasingly depleted of nutrients. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from US agricultural soils every year. <24> Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.

Every year in the US, more than two million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging. On top of this, urbanization, road building, and industry claim another one million acres annually from farmland. <24> Approximately three-quarters of the land area in the United States is devoted to agriculture and commercial forestry. <25> The expanding human population is putting increasing pressure on land availability. Incidentally, only a small portion of US land area remains available for the solar energy technologies necessary to support a solar energy-based economy. The land area for harvesting biomass is likewise limited. For this reason, the development of solar energy or biomass must be at the expense of agriculture.

Modern agriculture also places a strain on our water resources. Agriculture consumes fully 85% of all US freshwater resources. <26> Overdraft is occurring from many surface water resources, especially in the west and south. The typical example is the Colorado River, which is diverted to a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. Yet surface water only supplies sixty percent of the water used in irrigation. The remainder, and in some places the majority of water for irrigation, comes from ground water aquifers. Ground water is recharged slowly by the percolation of rainwater through the earth's crust. Less than 0.1% of the stored ground water mined annually is replaced by rainfall. <27> The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies agriculture, industry and home use in much of the southern and central plains states has an annual overdraft up to 160% above its recharge rate. The Ogallala aquifer will become unproductive in a matter of decades. <28>

We can illustrate the demand that modern agriculture places on water resources by looking at a farmland producing corn. A corn crop that produces 118 bushels/acre/year requires more than 500,000 gallons/acre of water during the growing season. The production of 1 pound of maize requires 1,400 pounds (or 175 gallons) of water. <29> Unless something is done to lower these consumption rates, modern agriculture will help to propel the United States into a water crisis.

In the last two decades, the use of hydrocarbon-based pesticides in the US has increased 33-fold, yet each year we lose more crops to pests. <30> This is the result of the abandonment of traditional crop rotation practices. Nearly fifty percent of US corn land is grown continuously as a monoculture. <31> This results in an increase in corn pests, which in turn requires the use of more pesticides. Pesticide use on corn crops had increased 1,000-fold even before the introduction of genetically engineered, pesticide resistant corn. However, corn losses have still risen four-fold. <32>

Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection, to remediate the environment and simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.

US Consumption

In the United States, each person consumes an average of 2,175 pounds of food per person per year. This provides the US consumer with an average daily energy intake of 3,600 Calories. The world average is 2,700 Calories per day. <33> Fully nineteen percent of the US caloric intake comes from fast food. Fast food accounts for 34% of the total food consumption for the average US citizen. The average citizen dines out for one meal out of four. <34>

One third of the caloric intake of the average American comes from animal sources (including dairy products), totaling 800 pounds per person per year. This diet means that US citizens derive forty percent of their calories from fat - nearly half of their diet. <35>

Americans are also grand consumers of water. As of one decade ago, Americans were consuming 1,450 gallons per day per capita, with the largest amount expended on agriculture. Allowing for projected population increase, consumption by 2050 is projected at 700 gallons per day per capita, which hydrologists consider to be minimal for human needs. <36> This is without taking into consideration declining fossil fuel production.

To provide all of this food requires the application of 0.6 million metric tons of pesticides in North America per year. This is over one fifth of the total annual world pesticide use, estimated at 2.5 million tons. <37> Worldwide, more nitrogen fertilizer is used per year than can be supplied through natural sources. Likewise, water is pumped out of underground aquifers at a much higher rate than it is recharged. And stocks of important minerals, such as phosphorus and potassium, are quickly approaching exhaustion. <38>

Total US energy consumption is more than three times the amount of solar energy harvested as crop and forest products. The United States consumes forty percent more energy annually than the total amount of solar energy captured yearly by all US plant biomass. Per capita use of fossil energy in North America is five times the world average. <39>

Our prosperity is built on the principal of exhausting the world's resources as quickly as possible, without any thought to our neighbors, all the other life on this planet, or our children.

Population & Sustainability

Considering a growth rate of 1.1% per year, the US population is projected to double by 2050. As the population expands, an estimated one acre of land will be lost for every person added to the US population. Currently, there are 1.8 acres of farmland available to grow food for each US citizen. By 2050, this will decrease to 0.6 acres. 1.2 acres per person is required in order to maintain current dietary standards. <40>

Presently, only two nations on the planet are major exporters of grain: the United States and Canada. <41> By 2025, it is expected that the US will cease to be a food exporter due to domestic demand. The impact on the US economy could be devastating, as food exports earn $40 billion for the US annually. More importantly, millions of people around the world could starve to death without US food exports. <42>

Domestically, 34.6 million people are living in poverty as of 2002 census data. <43> And this number is continuing to grow at an alarming rate. Too many of these people do not have a sufficient diet. As the situation worsens, this number will increase and the United States will witness growing numbers of starvation fatalities.

There are some things that we can do to at least alleviate this tragedy. It is suggested that streamlining agriculture to get rid of losses, waste and mismanagement might cut the energy inputs for food production by up to one-half. <44> In place of fossil fuel-based fertilizers, we could utilize livestock manures that are now wasted. It is estimated that livestock manures contain five times the amount of fertilizer currently used each year. <45> Perhaps most effective would be to eliminate meat from our diet altogether. <46>

Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel postulate that a sustainable food system is possible only if four conditions are met:

1. Environmentally sound agricultural technologies must be implemented.

2. Renewable energy technologies must be put into place.

3. Major increases in energy efficiency must reduce exosomatic energy consumption per capita.

4. Population size and consumption must be compatible with maintaining the stability of environmental processes. <47>

Providing that the first three conditions are met, with a reduction to less than half of the exosomatic energy consumption per capita, the authors place the maximum population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. <48> Several other studies have produced figures within this ballpark (Energy and Population, Werbos, Paul J http://www.dieoff.com/page63.htm; Impact of Population Growth on Food Supplies and Environment, Pimentel, David, et al http://www.dieoff.com/page57.htm).

Given that the current US population is in excess of 292 million <49>, that would mean a reduction of 92 million. To achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States must reduce its population by at least one-third. The black plague during the 14th Century claimed approximately one-third of the European population (and more than half of the Asian and Indian populations), plunging the continent into a darkness from which it took them nearly two centuries to emerge. <50>

None of this research considers the impact of declining fossil fuel production. The authors of all of these studies believe that the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050. The current peaking of global oil production (and subsequent decline of production), along with the peak of North American natural gas production will very likely precipitate this agricultural crisis much sooner than expected. Quite possibly, a US population reduction of one-third will not be effective for sustainability; the necessary reduction might be in excess of one-half. And, for sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion people <51> to 2 billion - a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race.

Three Choices

Considering the utter necessity of population reduction, there are three obvious choices awaiting us.

We can - as a society - become aware of our dilemma and consciously make the choice not to add more people to our population. This would be the most welcome of our three options, to choose consciously and with free will to responsibly lower our population. However, this flies in the face of our biological imperative to procreate. It is further complicated by the ability of modern medicine to extend our longevity, and by the refusal of the Religious Right to consider issues of population management. And then, there is a strong business lobby to maintain a high immigration rate in order to hold down the cost of labor. Though this is probably our best choice, it is the option least likely to be chosen.

Failing to responsibly lower our population, we can force population cuts through government regulations. Is there any need to mention how distasteful this option would be? How many of us would choose to live in a world of forced sterilization and population quotas enforced under penalty of law? How easily might this lead to a culling of the population utilizing principles of eugenics?

This leaves the third choice, which itself presents an unspeakable picture of suffering and death. Should we fail to acknowledge this coming crisis and determine to deal with it, we will be faced with a die-off from which civilization may very possibly never revive. We will very likely lose more than the numbers necessary for sustainability. Under a die-off scenario, conditions will deteriorate so badly that the surviving human population would be a negligible fraction of the present population. And those survivors would suffer from the trauma of living through the death of their civilization, their neighbors, their friends and their families. Those survivors will have seen their world crushed into nothing.

The questions we must ask ourselves now are, how can we allow this to happen, and what can we do to prevent it? Does our present lifestyle mean so much to us that we would subject ourselves and our children to this fast approaching tragedy simply for a few more years of conspicuous consumption?

Author's Note

This is possibly the most important article I have written to date. It is certainly the most frightening, and the conclusion is the bleakest I have ever penned. This article is likely to greatly disturb the reader; it has certainly disturbed me. However, it is important for our future that this paper should be read, acknowledged and discussed.

I am by nature positive and optimistic. In spite of this article, I continue to believe that we can find a positive solution to the multiple crises bearing down upon us. Though this article may provoke a flood of hate mail, it is simply a factual report of data and the obvious conclusions that follow from it.

Endnotes

1 Availability of agricultural land for crop and livestock production, Buringh, P. Food and Natural Resources, Pimentel. D. and Hall. C.W. (eds), Academic Press, 1989.

2 Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis, Vitousek, P.M. et al. Bioscience 36, 1986. http://www.science.duq.edu/esm/unit2-3

3 Land, Energy and Water: the constraints governing Ideal US Population Size, Pimental, David and Pimentel, Marcia. Focus, Spring 1991. NPG Forum, 1990. http://www.dieoff.com/page136.htm

4 Constraints on the Expansion of Global Food Supply, Kindell, Henry H. and Pimentel, David. Ambio Vol. 23 No. 3, May 1994. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. http://www.dieoff.com/page36htm

5 The Tightening Conflict: Population, Energy Use, and the Ecology of Agriculture, Giampietro, Mario and Pimentel, David, 1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page69.htm

6 Op Cit. See note 4.

7 Food, Land, Population and the US Economy, Pimentel, David and Giampietro, Mario. Carrying Capacity Network, 11/21/1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page55.htm

8 Comparison of energy inputs for inorganic fertilizer and manure based corn production, McLaughlin, N.B., et al. Canadian Agricultural Engineering, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2000.

9 Ibid.

10 US Fertilizer Use Statistics. http://www.tfi.org/Statistics/USfertuse2.asp

11 Food, Land, Population and the US Economy, Executive Summary, Pimentel, David and Giampietro, Mario. Carrying Capacity Network, 11/21/1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page40.htm

12 Ibid.

13 Op Cit. See note 3.

14 Op Cit. See note 7.

15 Ibid.

16 Op Cit. See note 5.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Op Cit. See note 11.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Op Cit. See note 3.

26 Op Cit. See note 11.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Op Cit. See note 3.

31 Op Cit. See note 5.

32 Op Cit. See note 3.

33 Op Cit. See note 11.

34 Food Consumption and Access, Lynn Brantley, et al. Capital Area Food Bank, 6/1/2001. http://www.clagettfarm.org/purchasing.html

35 Op Cit. See note 11.

36 Ibid.

37 Op Cit. See note 5.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Op Cit. See note 11.

41 Op Cit. See note 4.

42 Op Cit. See note 11.

43 Poverty 2002. The US Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/poverty02/pov02hi.html

44 Op Cit. See note 3.

45 Ibid.

46 Diet for a Small Planet, Lappe, Frances Moore. Ballantine Books, 1971-revised 1991. http://www.dietforasmallplanet.com/

47 Op Cit. See note 5.

48 Ibid.

49 US and World Population Clocks. US Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

50 A Distant Mirror, Tuckman Barbara. Ballantine Books, 1978.

51 Op Cit. See note 40.


Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The End of the Oil Age

by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

Centre for Research on Globalisation (July 30 2003)

www.globalresearch.ca


Current civilization is founded upon an abundance of cheap energy derived from hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons not only run our transportation; they provide the power for all of our technology. Take a moment to think about your immediate home environment. Not only do hydrocarbons take you to work and to the grocery store; they are used for virtually everything around you. Your home and your furniture were built using the energy of hydrocarbons. If your chair has a metal frame, that metal was forged with hydrocarbons. Your carpet and your polyester clothing are products of hydrocarbons. All of the plastics around you are derived from hydrocarbons. Even this journal was printed and delivered using hydrocarbons. The very value of the money in your wallet is pegged to oil.

Go to the refrigerator (powered and produced via hydrocarbons) and take out any food item. Every single calorie of food requires ten calories of hydrocarbons. This is the blessing of modern hydrocarbon based agriculture with its natural gas based fertilizers and oil based pesticides. The human population on this planet currently exceeds 6 billion. Without hydrocarbon based agriculture, it is estimated that this planet could only sustain 2.5 billion people.

Previous to the industrial revolution, all civilizations were built on the energy of slave labor. Even the United States required the sweat of slaves during its early years. The industrial revolution rendered slavery, and all other forms of servitude, obsolete. First it was coal which supplied the power to run our furnaces. But eventually coal was replaced by oil, with its far superior caloric content. It was the late 1800s when we began to seriously exploit oil resources. This abundance of cheap, high content energy gave rise to the technological revolution of the last hundred years. There are various estimates of the slave equivalents of modern civilization, but there is no doubt that every one of us sits in an opulent home built and served by a multitude of hydrocarbon slaves.

What is this black sticky stuff which is so ubiquitous, and so vital, to modern civilization? Hydrocarbons, it could be said, are the ultimate solar energy source. Oil and natural gas are formed in special geological and biological circumstances, over the course of millions of years. On a human time scale, they are truly nonrenewable resources.

The great hydrocarbon resources which have powered our civilization for the past century began with immense algal mats in the warm oceans of the Mesozoic Era. As dead algae slowly settled onto the floor of ocean shelves (neither too deep nor too shallow), it formed a thick organic ooze, rich in carbohydrates formed during the life of the organisms. In areas with moderate sediment influx, this algal ooze would eventually be buried. And as the sediment load above it became heavier and the burial became deeper, the organic ooze would be compacted and cooked into hydrocarbons. Near the shore, or in river channels, where leafy vegetation mixed in with the algal ooze, natural gas would be the final product. Likewise, if the algal ooze was buried too deeply, it would be cooked into natural gas. But the remainder would form the sticky black deposits which we know as oil.

After millions of years, the sediment has been transformed to an oil bearing shale. But that is only part of the story. Now we need pressure to force the hydrocarbons out of the shale and send them on their migration toward the surface. This is the goal of these hydrocarbons, to reach the surface of the earth and dissipate into the atmosphere. Fortunately for us, not all rock formations are porous enough to allow the hydrocarbons passage. In many areas, traps are formed in folded nonporous rock formations and in salt domes and ancient coral reefs. It is in these traps where the hydrocarbons will collect over many ages to form the oil deposits which have powered modern civilization.

Now enter the humans. Here is an exploration team fortunate enough to discover a sizable oil reserve. Wells are drilled to tap into the oil. Now oil in the ground flows at about the same rate as damp in a stone foundation, with the one major difference being that the oil is held at much higher pressure. When a new well is drilled, the open hole gives free passage to the pressurized oil immediately around it, which then surges to the surface. The effect is the classic gusher featured in so many films. However, once the pressure has been equalized in the immediate vicinity of the drill hole, you must begin supplying more and more energy to pump the oil through the rock or sediment to the well. Eventually you will reach a point where you must invest as much energy to pump the oil as you will get out of it. When this point is reached, production ends and the well is capped forever.

See first graph at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PFE307A.html

If you draw a graph of oil production over time, it will resemble the classic bell curve. The production curve will start from nothing, ascend to a peak production rate, and then begin to descend. The descending side of the curve means that you are investing more energy to produce the oil, which makes the oil more expensive. In the 1950s and 1960s a petroleum geologist named King Hubbert developed a methodology for combining the profiles of oil wells in a field to draw a production curve for the entire field. From there he went on to develop production curves for regions and even countries. Using industry data, Dr Hubbert was able to tie his production curves to the discovery rate with a lag time of about thirty years.

Using his methodology, Dr Hubbert predicted that oil production in the United States would peak in 1970. King Hubbert was ridiculed and condemned for his prediction. The conventional wisdom, as espoused by the US Geological Survey (USGS), being that oil production would continue to rise for many years to come. Unfortunately for us, King Hubbert was correct. Oil production in the United States peaked in the early 1970s and has been declining ever since. Right now we are importing over 50% of our oil needs. The US production peak of the early 1970s set the stage for the oil shocks of that decade and the rise of OPEC. However, at that time we were able to increase imports to make up for the difference between domestic production and demand. Alaskan and North Sea oil were brought online soon enough to defang OPEC, and the US became the oil protectorate of the world by forcing OPEC to accept the dollar as the currency for oil sales.

A number of predictions were made over the years following the US peak regarding the global oil peak. Many people now look back on these false predictions and use them to condemn the current scientific consensus. However, none of these early predictions were actually made by oil geologists with access to the data base of the oil industry. Over the years the methodology has been improved and the data base has been augmented.

It was in the 1990s that oil geologists finally felt confident enough in the data to draw up graphs for world oil production. Two leaders in this effort are Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere, petroleum geologists working for Petroconsultants. Petroconsultants holds one of the most complete data bases in the industry. In 1997, Petroconsultants annual report of the state of the oil industry (which cost a whopping $10,000 per copy) dealt strictly with the topic of peak production and predicted that world production would peak in the first decade of the new century and begin its irreversible decline sometime around 2010.

There have been several other independent assessments since then, and most agree on the timeframe. The most notable difference is the 2000 USGS report which stated that world oil production would not peak until 2020 at the earliest. However, it has been shown that the USGS study is deeply flawed. They accepted as valid oil reserves anything which had a 10% or greater chance of being found. The realistic benchmark is 50%. Three years after publication, the USGS report has already proven unreliable in comparison with actual production and discovery rates.

There are a lot of problems with oil production data. The industry has a tendency to underreport initial discoveries so that they can add them on later to give the impression of a steady discovery rate. A steady discovery rate looks more appealing to investors. OPEC countries, on the other hand, have a marked tendency to over-inflate their oil reserves when it comes time to adjust quotas under OPEC. And politically, nobody wants to let the general population know that the party is almost over. The US Energy Information Association (EIA) has publicly stated - though in a roundabout manner - that first they project future energy demand and then they come up with reserve and production figures to meet projected demand. Making sense of the data requires a lot of detective work, but a scientific consensus has been achieved.

See second graph at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PFE307A.html

The standard is espoused by Campbell and Laherrere. According to this scenario, we are at peak production right now. Currently, we are engaged in a tango between world oil production and the global economy. Rising oil prices lead to economic stagnation and a decrease in demand, which then leads to lower production and a softening in oil prices, until economic rebound results in demand once again rising above production. Of course, this is a simplified model. It would take much more space to add in all the other economic and oil factors, not to mention the effects of oil wars.

However, the major oil companies have started making coded announcements indicating that they know the future of the oil business will not match its past. Instead of investing in production and discovery, all of the majors have been shedding exploration staff and consolidating their holdings. None of this bespeaks a growing industry. And insiders know that there is very little excess capacity to be found anywhere. Saudi Arabia is just about the only country with the capability to increase production by any noticeable amount, and even they would be hard pressed to do so.

The world will not peak all at once. Most producers have already peaked. The only countries which have not yet peaked are all OPEC members: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and The United Arab Emirates. Note that these are all Middle Eastern countries. These nations taken collectively are called the swing producers: those countries which are still able to increase production to meet demand. And it is uncertain how long they will be capable of performing as swing producers.

See third graph at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PFE307A.html

There was considerable hope prior to the Afghan War that the Caspian Sea held oil reserves which would match - if not dwarf - the Middle East. However, exploration has produced disappointing results. The Caspian region does not hold nearly as much oil as at first supposed, and the oil found is highly tainted by sulfur. As a result, the oil majors have been scaling back their involvement in the Caspian region.

Some point to Russia as a rival to Saudi Arabia. This ignores the reality that Russia is simply resuming a production capacity that faltered following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian production peaked in 1987. The following graph, which was produced several years ago, is not entirely accurate in profiling Russia's secondary peak, which should rise more steeply and will probably drop more dramatically. Aggressive Russian production now will be paid for by a quicker peak and a steeper decline.

See fourth graph at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PFE307A.html

Richard Duncan and Walter Youngquist developed a system in the late 1990s to model world oil production. As they ran simulations on this model, they attempted adding on additional units of oil, each unit equivalent to a reserve the size of the North Sea. Additional units brought into production after the peak had no effect on peak production. But they found that several additional units brought into production before the peak could delay the peak by a year or two. This would be equivalent to several new North Sea discoveries. Yet, oil exploration geologists warn that all we will find from now on are small isolated pockets. All of our knowledge and technological advancement have gone to show us where oil does not exist.

Still there are economists who will tell you that it is only a matter of money. If we throw enough money into exploration and development we will increase production. This seems to belie actual experience. Over the last thirty years increased investment and technological advances have led to only marginal gains in discovery and production. If it were otherwise, the industries would not be scaling back.

Others say that we will abandon hydrocarbons for better energy sources. This ignores the fact that there is no other energy resource capable of delivering as much energy as hydrocarbons - not renewables, not unconventional resources such as tar sands, not even coal. The only thing which comes close is nuclear, and this has too many other problems.

There are many true believers - including Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham - who point to a world run by fuel cells. What fuel cell proponents won't tell you is that hydrogen fuel cells are not an energy source. They are more properly a form of energy storage. In the natural world there is no such thing as free hydrogen. Hydrogen must be produced from a feeder material. Nor is it mentioned that it takes more energy to break a hydrogen bond than can be gained through the forging of a hydrogen bond. This is basic chemistry, as implied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a result, hydrogen fuel cells will always have a net energy loss. Nor are they as clean as claimed. The pollution is simply removed from the individual vehicles to the plant where free hydrogen is generated. It is most likely that the hydrogen fuel cell myth is being promoted simply to keep the public - and investors - from panicking.

The truth is that peak oil has already had an impact on all of the major events of this young century. And it will have a major impact on all of our lives at a most personal level in the years to come. The public needs to be informed. Our civilization is about to undergo a radical change unparalleled in history. And those we are allowing to call the shots are more concerned with their own personal gain than with the general welfare.

Copyright D A Pfeiffer 2003 For fair use only.

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PFE307A.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Disasters waiting to happen

The tsunami may have been an act of nature, but further environmental catastrophes caused by humans will be much worse.

by Jared Diamond

The Guardian (January 06 2005)

The events of Boxing day have shown us all how fragile our existence is. The tsunami was an unavoidable natural disaster, which could happen anytime. But not all disasters are so beyond our control. Our own actions may provoke global catastrophes just as forceful as those in the Indian ocean.

Take the human impact on sea levels. Imagine you live on an island safely fifteen feet above sea level. If human-induced climate change raises those levels by only a few feet, the difference man has made could spell disaster in the event of a twelve foot tsunami. We cannot stop another tsunami. But the threats of man-made environmental collapse are now more pressing than ever.

Ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both. The ecologist would likely answer: "That's a no-brainer, it's obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others."

Then ask a first world politician, who knows nothing and cares less about the environment and population problems, to name the world's worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those problems, are also creating problems for us rich first world countries. Surprise, surprise: the two lists would be very similar.

Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.

The results of these transparent connections are far-reaching and devastating. There are genocides, such as those that exploded in Bangladesh, Burundi, Indonesia, and Rwanda; civil wars or revolutions, as in most of the countries on the lists; calls for the dispatch of troops, as to Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia; the collapse of central government, as has already happened in Somalia and the Solomon Islands; and overwhelming poverty, as in all of the countries on these lists.

Hence the best predictors of modern "state failures" prove to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high infant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the population in their late teens and twenties, and hordes of young men without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias.

Those pressures create conflicts over shortages of land, water, forests, fish, oil, and minerals. They create not only chronic internal conflict, but also emigration of political and economic refugees, and wars between countries arising when authoritarian regimes attack neighbours in order to divert popular attention from internal stresses.

In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them.

As for terrorists, you might object that many of the political murderers, suicide bombers, and 9/11 terrorists were educated and moneyed rather than uneducated and desperate. That's true, but they still depended on a desperate society for support and toleration. Any society has its murderous fanatics; the US produced its own Timothy McVeigh and its Harvard-educated Theodore Kaczinski. But well-nourished societies offering good job prospects, like the US, Finland, and South Korea, don't offer broad support to their fanatics.

The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalisation. We are accustomed to thinking of globalisation in terms of us rich advanced first worlders sending our good things, such as the internet and Coca-Cola, to those poor backward third worlders. But globalisation means nothing more than improved worldwide communications, which can convey many things in either direction; globalisation is not restricted to good things carried only from the first to the third world. We in the US are no longer the isolated Fortress America to which some of us aspired in the 1930s; instead, we are tightly and irreversibly connected to overseas countries. The US is the world's leading importer nation, we import many necessities and many consumer products, as well as being the world's leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world's leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world. That's why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, our trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers.

We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, thirty years ago, you had asked a politician to name the countries most geopolitically irrelevant to our interests, the list might surely have begun with Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognised as important enough to warrant our dispatching US troops. The US can no longer get away with advancing its own self-interests, at the expense of the interests of others.

When distant Somalia collapsed, in went American troops; when the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union collapsed, out went streams of refugees to all of Europe and the rest of the world; and when changed conditions of society, settlement, and lifestyle spread new diseases in Africa and Asia, those diseases moved over the globe.

We need to realise that there is no other planet to which we can turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to learn to live within our means.

By world standards, southern California's environmental problems are relatively mild. Jokes by east coast Americans to the contrary, this is not an area at imminent risk of a societal collapse. Los Angeles is well known for some problems, especially its smog, but most of its environmental and population problems are modest or typical compared to those of other leading first world cities.

I moved here in 1966. Thus, I have seen how southern California has changed over the last 39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing.

The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in LA are those directly related to our growing and already high population: our incurable traffic jams, the very high price of housing, the long distances, of up to two hours and sixty miles one way, over which people commute daily in their cars between home and work. Los Angeles became the US city with the worst traffic in 1987 and has remained so every year since then.

No cure is even under serious discussion for these problems, which will only get worse. There is no end in sight to how much worse Los Angeles's problems of congestion will become, because millions of people put up with far worse traffic in other cities.

Environmental and population problems have been undermining the economy and the quality of life in southern California. They are in large measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages, garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises, and traffic congestion. However, there are many reasons commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental problems. These objections are often posed in the form of simplistic one-liners. Here are some of the commonest ones:


"The environment has to be balanced against the economy"

This portrays environmental concerns as a luxury but puts the truth backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums.

Just think of the damage caused by agricultural weeds and pests, the value of lost time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks, and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinisation. It adds up to a few hundred million dollars per year here, a billion dollars there, another billion over here, and so on for hundreds of different problems.

For instance, the value of "one statistical life" in the US - ie, the cost to the US economy resulting from the death of an average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national economy - is usually estimated at around $5 million (GBP 2.6 million). Even if one takes the conservative estimate of annual US deaths due to air pollution as 130,000, then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion (GBP 340 billion) per year. That illustrates why the US Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess of costs) of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health costs.


"Technology will solve our problems"

Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that the new technologies now under discussion will succeed, and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon.

But actual experience is the opposite. Some dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don't. Those that do succeed typically take a few decades to develop and be phased in widely: think of gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television and computers.

New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problem they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely far more expensive than preventive measures to avoid creating the problem in the first place: for example, the billions of dollars of damages and cleanup costs associated with major oil spills, compared to the modest cost of safety measures to minimise the risks of a major oil spill.

All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. What makes you think that, as of January 1 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves those it previously produced?

A good example is chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The coolant gases formerly used in refrigerators and air conditioners were toxic and could prove fatal if the appliance leaked while the homeowner was asleep at night. Hence it was hailed as a great advance when CFCs (alias freons) were developed as synthetic refrigerant gases.

They are odourless, non-toxic, and highly stable under ordinary conditions at the Earth's surface, so that initially no bad side effects were observed or expected. But in 1974 it was discovered that in the stratosphere they are broken down by intense ultraviolet radiation to yield highly reactive chlorine atoms that destroy a significant fraction of the ozone layer protecting us and all other living things against lethal ultraviolet effects.

Unfortunately, the quantity of CFCs already in the atmosphere is sufficiently large, and their breakdown sufficiently slow, that they will continue to be present for many decades after the eventual end of all CFC production.


"We can switch to electric cars, or to solar energy"

Optimists who make such claims ignore the unforeseen difficulties and long transition times regularly involved. For instance, one area in which switching based on not-yet-perfected new technologies has repeatedly been touted as promising to solve a major environmental problem is automobiles.

The current hope for a breakthrough involves hydrogen cars and fuel cells, which are technologically in their infancy. Equally, there is the motor industry's recent development of fuel-efficient hybrid gas/electric cars. However, the automobile industry's simultaneous development of SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles), which have been outselling hybrids by a big margin more than offset their fuel savings. The net result of these two technological breakthroughs has been that the fuel consumption and exhaust production of the American car fleet has been going up rather than down.

Another example is the hope that renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, may solve the energy crisis. These technologies do indeed exist; many Californians now use solar energy to heat their swimming pools, and wind generators are already supplying about one-sixth of Denmark's energy needs. However, wind and solar energy have limited applicability because they can be used only at locations with reliable winds or sunlight.

The recent history of technology shows that conversion times for adoption of major switches, such as oil lamps to gas lamps to electric lights, require several decades. It is indeed likely that energy sources other than fossil fuels will make increasing contributions to our motor transport and energy generation, but this is a long-term prospect.


"The world's food problems will be solved by more equitable distribution and genetically modified (GM) crops"

The obvious flaw is that first world citizens show no interest in eating less so that third world citizens could eat more. While first world countries are willing occasionally to export food to mitigate starvation occasioned by some crisis (such as a drought or war), their citizens have shown no interest in paying on a regular basis to feed billions of third world citizens.

If that did happen but without effective overseas family planning programs, which the US government currently opposes on principle, the result would just mean an increase in population proportional to an increase in available food.

Genetically modified food varieties by themselves are equally unlikely to solve the world's food problems. In addition, virtually all GM crop production at present is of just four crops (soy-beans, corn, canola, and cotton) not eaten directly by humans but used for animal fodder, oil, or clothing, and grown in six temperate-zone countries or regions. Reasons are the strong consumer resistance to eating GM foods and the fact that companies developing GM crops can make money by selling their products to rich farmers in mostly affluent temperate-zone countries, but not by selling to poor farmers in developing tropical countries. Hence the companies have no interest in investing heavily to develop GM cassava, millet, or sorghum for farmers in developing nations.


"Just look around you: there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse"

For affluent western citizens, conditions have indeed been getting better, and public health measures have on the average lengthened lifespans in the third world as well. But lifespan alone is not a sufficient indicator: billions of third world citizens, constituting about 80% of the world's population, still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level.

Even in the US, an increasing fraction of the population is at the poverty level and lacks affordable medical care, and all proposals to change this situation have been politically unacceptable. In addition, all of us know as individuals that we don't measure our economic wellbeing just by the present size of our bank accounts: we also look at our direction of cash flow.

When you look at your bank statement and you see a positive GBP 5,000 balance, you don't smile if you then realise that you have been experiencing a net cash drain of GBP 200 per month for the last several years, and at that rate you have just two years and one month left before you have to file for bankruptcy.

The same principle holds for our national economy, and for environmental and population trends. The prosperity that the richer nations enjoy at present is based on spending down its environmental capital in the bank. It makes no sense to be content with our present comfort when it is clear that we are currently on a non-sustainable course.


"Why should we believe the fearmongering environmentalists this time?"

Yes, some predictions by environmentalists have proved incorrect, but it is misleading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that were proved wrong, and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that proved to be right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong.

We comfortably accept a certain frequency of false alarms and extinguished fires, because we understand that fire risks are uncertain and hard to judge when a fire has just started, and that a fire that does rage out of control may exact high costs in property and human lives. No sensible person would dream of abolishing the town fire department just because a few years went by without a big fire. Nor would anyone blame a homeowner for calling the fire department on detecting a small fire, only to succeed in quenching the fire before the fire truck's arrival.

We must expect some environmentalist warnings to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environmental warning systems were much too conservative. The multi-billion-dollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms.


"The population crisis is already solving itself"

While the prediction that world population will level off at less than double its present level may or may not prove to be true, it is at present a realistic possibility. However, we can take no comfort in this possibility, for two reasons: by many criteria, even the world's present population is living at a non-sustainable level; and the larger danger that we face is not just of a two-fold increase in population, but of a much larger increase in human impact if the third world's population succeeds in attaining a first world living standard.

It is surprising to hear some first world citizens nonchalantly mentioning the world's adding "only" two-and-a-half billion more people (the lowest estimate that anyone would forecast) as if that were acceptable, when the world already holds that many people who are malnourished and living on less than $3 (GBP 1.60) per day.


"Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent first world yuppies"

This view is one that I have heard mainly from affluent first world yuppies lacking experience of the third world. In all my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru, and other third world countries with growing environmental problems and populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well how they are being harmed. They know it because they immediately pay the penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to afford clothes, books, and school fees for their children.

Another view that is widespread among affluent first world people, but which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all those environmental problems, which really don't concern them because the problems fall mainly on third world people (though it is not politically correct to be so blunt).

Actually, the rich are not immune to environmental problems. Chief executive officers of big western companies eat food, drink water, breathe air, and have (or try to conceive) children, like the rest of us. While they can usually avoid problems of water quality by drinking bottled water, they find it much more difficult to avoid being exposed to the same problems of food and air quality as the rest of us. Living disproportionately high on the food chain, at levels at which toxic substances become concentrated, they are at more rather than less risk of reproductive impairment due to ingestion of or exposure to toxic materials, possibly contributing to their higher infertility rates and the increasing frequency with which they require medical assistance in conceiving.

In addition, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.

As for first world society as a whole, its resource consumption accounts for most of the world's total consumption that has given rise to the impacts described at the beginning of this chapter. Our totally unsustainable consumption means that the first world could not continue for long on its present course, even if the third world didn't exist and weren't trying to catch up to us.


"If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die"

In fact, at current rates most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems discussed at the beginning of this chapter will become acute within the life-time of young adults now alive.

Most of us who have children consider the securing of our children's future as the highest priority to which to devote our time and our money. We pay for their education and food and clothes, make wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of helping them to enjoy good lives fifty years from now. It makes no sense for us to do these things for our individual children, while simultaneously doing things undermining the world in which our children will be living fifty years from now.

This paradoxical behaviour is one of which I personally was guilty, because I was born in the year 1937, hence before the birth of my children I too could not take seriously any event (like global warming or the end of the tropical rainforests) projected for the year 2037. I shall surely be dead before that year, and even the date 2037 struck me as unreal. However, when my twin sons were born in 1987, I realized with a jolt: 2037 is the year in which my kids will be my own age of fifty. It's not an imaginary year! What's the point of willing our property to our kids if the world will be in a mess then anyway?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1383672,00.html

<> Professor of physiology at UCLA since 1966, Jared Diamond developed a parallel career in the ecology and evolution of New Guinea birds while in his twenties, then added a professorship in geography when, in his fifties, his interest grew in environmental history. Boston-born son of a physician father and teacher/musician/linguist mother, he is a Pulitzer prize-winning author of bestselling books including The Third Chimpanzee (HarperCollins, 1992) and Why is Sex Fun? (Basic Books, 1997). He and his wife Marie Cohen, a clinical psychologist at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine have twin seventeen-year-old sons. In his spare time he watches birds and is learning his 12th language, Italian.

<> Extracted from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond published by Allen Lane on January 17 at GBP 20. To obtain a copy at the offer price of GBP 18.40 with free UK postage call the Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

What will it REALLY take to tackle the human over-population crisis?

by Oneida Kincaid

Earth Crash Earth Spirit (November 12 2003)

Probably the major environmental problem the world faces is human overpopulation. The way I like to dramatize this is to ask people to imagine what would happen if all 6.3 billion of us humans somehow miraculously switched tomorrow to living as hunter/gatherers (the original "sustainable" mode of human existence). In many areas of the world there wouldn't be one deer, rabbit, bear, duck, monkey or gorilla left inside of three months, and in some areas, like Europe or Japan, what little wildlife still remains would probably be gone in less than a week.

Indeed, already large swaths of what is left of Africa's rainforests suffer from what biologists call "empty forest syndrome" due to the hunting of wildlife for the so-called "bushmeat" trade. And in October 2002, a study by Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the Wildlife Conservation Society, published in the journal BioScience, found that 83 percent of the world's total land surface and 98 percent of the areas where it is possible to grow the world's three main crops - rice, wheat, and maize - are now directly impacted by human activities such as cities, farming, mining, fishing, logging, roads, waterways, dams, and electrical power grids. Given a human ecological footprint that damn near covers the entire earth, it shouldn't come as any surprise that we now face a mass extinction crisis, collapsing fisheries, a growing number of "dead zones", and other signs of global ecological collapse.

In short, if we don't soon start really dealing with human overpopulation instead of continuing along with the same old, obviously ineffectual efforts, all of the so-called "sustainable-use" technology in the world - solar and hydrogen energy, recycling, straw-bale homes, et cetera - won't mean a thing.

Before digging any further into this discussion of what it would mean to really deal with the overpopulation crisis, let's quickly define a few terms so we're all in the same ballpark:

Scientists define "carrying capacity" as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it is dependent.

"Drawdown" refers to the process by which a species uses up the resources in its habitat faster than they can be replaced and so ends up having to "borrow" resources, in one form or another, from other places and other times.

"Overshoot" is the result of continued drawdown - when a species' population and use of resources in an ecosystem exceeds its carrying capacity - and there is no way to recover or replace what was lost.

A population "crash" or "die-off" is the inevitable consequence of overshoot, that is, it is a precipitate decline in species numbers. When a species exceeds the capacity of its environment in one life-giving respect or another, there is nothing that can be be done until that species' population is reduced to the level at which the resources can recover. In extreme cases of overshoot, a population crash or die-off can become a "die-out" (extinction).

The biological record is replete with examples of the process of drawdown, overshoot, and die-off/extinction. Perhaps the simplest example is what happens when yeast are added to crushed grapes in order to make wine. The yeast cells eagerly gobble up nutrients from the sugary crushed grapes around them and rapidly expand their population without a thought to the consequences of drawdown. Within weeks, however, the "pollution" they produce - alcohol and carbon dioxide - have so filled their environment that they are unable to survive. The resulting crash means an acute die-off and then extinction of that population of yeast.

Another example of the process of drawdown, overshoot, and die-off is David Klein's classic study of the reindeer on Saint Matthew Island off Alaska. In 1944, a group of 29 reindeer were moved to the island (which previously had no reindeer), but without the corrective (negative) feedback of such predators as wolves and human hunters. In just nineteen years, the population first swelled to 6,000 and then "crashed" in three years to a total of 41 females and one male, all in miserable condition.

Even worse is that the ecological impacts of the "overshoot" permanently reduced the island's carrying capacity for reindeer. Klein estimated that the original carrying capacity of the island was about five reindeer per square kilometer, but at the population peak there were eighteen per square kilometer. After the crash there were only 0.126 animals per square kilometer and even this was probably too many because the overpopulation of reindeer had stripped the island of most of its lichens. Recovery of lichens under zero population conditions takes decades; with a continuing resident population of reindeer it may never occur. Overshooting the carrying capacity of Saint Matthew Island thus resulted in a reduction of its carrying capacity for reindeer by at least 97.5 percent.

Over and over, scientists have documented what happens when a species' population spins out of control - inevitably its population "crashes". Such population crashes are not pretty, typically involving mass starvation and/or epidemic disease. A human population crash will most likely be much, much uglier, given our historical proclivity for resorting to violence - war, genocide, et cetera - to settle conflicts over shortages of critical resources such as adequate living space, clean water, and food. Easter Island is a good, if sobering, example.

When it was first settled by humans a thousand years ago, Easter Island was a rich, forested land covered with palms and a small native tree called the sophora. On its sixty-four square miles a prosperous and literate culture developed organizational and engineering skills that enabled it to erect the massive stone statues along the coastline for which the island is now famous.

But the population of the island also eventually increased to an estimated 4,000 people, leading to a steady drawdown of vegetation that eventually deforested the entire island and exhausted its soils. Eventually a situation of overshoot was reached, resulting in conflict over scarce food acreage, and ultimately warfare, cannibalism and social chaos and decay. By the time of Captain Cook's voyage to the island in 1775, there were barely 630 people left eking out a marginal existence; a hundred years later, only 155 islanders remained. [See Jared Diamond's excellent article, Easter's End <1>.]

Scientists have discovered mathematical equations based on body weight that predict how many herbivores (plant-eating mammals) and carnivores (meat-eating mammals) a natural ecosystem can support. These equations indicate a average global carrying capacity of 0.12 individuals per square kilometer for a carnivorous mammal the size of modern Homo sapiens weighing an average of roughly 65 kilograms (142 pounds), and 2.1 per square kilometer for a herbivore of the same weight. Pre-agricultural humans, however, were omnivorous, eating both plants and meat. A liberal estimate of the average population density our species would likely have maintained without agriculture is therefore around 1.0 to 1.5 individuals per square kilometer, similar to the average density at which hunter-gatherers lived until most of them were wiped out by "civilization".

If humans were to occupy and live on every bit of Earth's habitable terrestrial surface (about 130 million square kilometers) at densities around 1.0 to 1.5 persons per square kilometer, the human population would only be about 130 million to 200 million people. Instead, our current population is over six billion, that is, over thirty times what the population of a omnivorous mammal of our size Earth is ecologically prepared to deal with. According to the United Nations, in 1999 the average global human population density was about 44 people per square kilometer, substantially above what the human population should "naturally" be. (See, for example, "Nature's Place: Human Population and the Future of Biodiversity" by Richard P Cincotta, PhD. and Robert Engelman, available at <2> as a 3.9 megabyte pdf file.)

In order to sustain the current level of human overpopulation, we now take for human use something around fifty percent of what scientists refer to as Earth's "net primary productivity" or NPP - that is, the total growth of plants, trees, et cetera, produced each year from the solar energy that reaches the Earth. In other words, just one species out of tens of millions is now taking for its own purposes roughly fifty percent of what plant growth Earth produces each year, leaving the rest of Earth's millions of species in a desperate and often losing struggle to survive on a planet that has effectively been reduced in size by half. Given these facts, it's therefore hardly comes as a surprise that life on Earth is now facing a sixth mass extinction "event".

The global ecological situation has now become very dire due to the accumulated impacts of human overpopulation. [If you don't believe that, please take some time to review the articles in the Life Disintegrating (Earth Crash) <3> part the weblog and the older parts of this site <4> <5> <6>.] And the situation is soon going to get worse, much - much worse - despite all the soothing bromides regularly issued by various "experts" assuring us that the human population growth rate is gradually dropping and supposedly will reach the much-vaunted "zero population growth" rate in forty to eighty years. That may indeed be true, but it is completely beside the point - Earth's ecosystems are collapsing now under the crushing pressures of human overpopulation, not forty to eighty years in the future. "Stabilizing" the global human population at eight or ten or twelve billion people forty to eighty years from now will be too late - instead we need to start to dramatically reduce human population now. The only real question before us is how.

Given that humans are not exempt from the rules of population biology (despite our pretensions otherwise - see Nature's Little Rule Book <7>), it is inevitable that the human population will eventually "crash" - the only question left is if it will be in the form of an horrific, starvation and disease-driven collapse like the reindeer on Saint Matthew Island, or from a nuclear holocaust or other form of massive warfare as ever-increasing numbers of people struggle over ever-increasing shortages of arable land, water, and other natural resources, or whether - in the hope of avoiding a global holocaust - we immediately begin taking the necessary steps to rapidly and significantly reduce human population levels.

How do we "rapidly and significantly" reduce human population? There are really only two ways: kill a lot of people, or for most people to immediately stop having babies. Although I dearly love babies (and toddlers and kids in general), like most people I would much prefer the second option.

There could, of course, just be an outright ban on anyone having children for the next thirty or forty years, but I think people psychologically need babies and children in their lives. So although it results in a somewhat less rapid population decline, this is best way I can see the second option working: Everyone in the world (with the possible exception of indigenous peoples threatened with extinction) comes together into (hopefully compatible) groups of twenty or so people with the agreement that the group will only have two children and that all group members will help with the support and parenting of those children. (Note that I haven't worked out all of the mathematics of this approach in terms of exactly how many children could be allowed per group in order to reduce the human population to a truly ecological sustainable level within the next thirty years or so. Perhaps someone with access to population forecasting software can run some scenarios on that?)

I will be the first to admit that such an approach is neither appealing (at least on its face) nor likely. However, as much as I have searched for an alternative, I just can't see any other way out of the mess we humans have got ourselves (and the rest of life on Earth) into in the face of the rising crescendo of ecosystem collapses now occuring - increasing numbers of "dead zones", water shortages, collapsing fisheries, rapidly accelerating extinction rates, massive deforestation, and so on.

At any rate, one more question remains to be addressed in this discussion: What exactly constitutes a "truly ecological sustainable" human population. Most "experts" within what I call the "sustainability industry" (the Worldwatch Institute, et cetera) seem to suggest about one to two billion people would be "sustainable" - for humans, at least. I would argue, however, that the figure of 130 to 200 million cited above, based on Earth's actual ecological carrying capacity for an human-sized omnivore, is the only population target supported by science, not wishful thinking. Indeed, the optimum human population is probably now considerably less than that, given that, as occurred on Saint Matthews Island due to overbrowsing by reindeer, human-caused ecosystem degradation through such activities as deforestation, agriculture, overfishing, and pollution has significantly reduced Earth's general carrying capacity (for all life, not just human).

It should be noted, too, that the estimate of an ecologically optimal human population of 130 to 200 million is based on the assumption that all of those people are essentially living as hunter-gatherers, and is therefore must be significantly reduced if we decide we can't live without books, computers, factories, et cetera, given the ecological footprint of even the most supposedly "green" or "sustainable" technologies.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that there is, of course, no guarantee that such a population reduction program (assuming its unlikely acceptance by the world's people in the near future) will in fact successfully avoid general ecological collapse across the globe. Although nature indeed contains an awesome amount of resilency, it also contains an equally awesome level of inertia once it begins to "fall". I liken it to the felling of a giant tree:- although one must cut through much of its base before it begins to ever-so-slowly lean and then, having passed some critical threshold, suddenly accelerates into a rapid crash to the ground, it's almost impossible to stop it from falling all the way to the ground once it does begin to fall.

The big question here, of course, is how close the "tree of life" on Earth is to crashing to the ground. It's a difficult question to answer, because, seen through human eyes, nature moves in slow motion. But after having been immersed for eight to twelve hours almost every day over much of the last four years in documenting the continuing ecological destruction around the globe and the beginning signs of collapse in terms of such things as widespread crashes in amphibian populations, et cetera, I personally think the tree has definitely started to lean. It's hard to say just when the critical threshold will be crossed, after which the tree basically cannot be stopped as it crashes to the ground, but my sense is that it's not very far off - maybe twenty years at the most, and more likely less.

So why bother advocating a radical population reduction program like the above if the tree of life has already started to lean and it's just a matter of time before we're all doomed to "crash" with it? Well, that's why this site is called Earth Crash Earth Spirit.

Seriously, ECES is an unusual hybrid - a mix of rigorous science in looking at the environment and what ten thousand years of so-called "progress" and "civilization" has done to both people and the planet, and an understanding that there are realms beyond the physical world - an understanding based on experiences tested as rigorously as any scientific theory. In the end, if the tree of life on Earth is to be healed, it will be through a spiritual healing much more than by physical actions alone such as reducing human population. In other words, please check out the Another Way of Living (Earth Spirit) section <8>, because it's really the most important part of this site.

Oneida Kincaid

http://www.eces.org/articles/000307.php

Links:

<1> http://www.eces.org/articles/000543.php

<2> http://www.populationaction.org/resources/publications/naturesplace/NaturesPlace.pdf

<3> http://www.eces.org/articles/cat_life_disintegrating_earth_crash.php

<4> http://www.eces.org/archive/dwc_pages/

<5> http://www.eces.org/archive/ec/ecwhatsnew.shtml

<6> http://www.eces.org/archive/ec/np_articles/archive/arc.shtml

<7> http://www.eces.org/articles/000133.php

<8> http://www.eces.org/articles/cat_another_way_of_living_earth_spirit.php


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

The Vanishing

In "Collapse", Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves.

by Malcolm Gladwell

The New Yorker (January 03 2005 issue)

A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable - a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years - and then they vanished.

The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking; $29.95). Diamond teaches geography at UCLA and is well known for his best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel (W W Norton, 1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In "Collapse", he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history's losers - like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of those things - or, at least, he's interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society's relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. "Collapse" is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem - soil, trees, and water - because societies fail, in Diamond's view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model of the time - devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.

The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.

But Greenland's ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of strong winds. "The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than is grass", he writes. "With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire valley." Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock - particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit - they called them skraelings, "wretches" - and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen's robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.


Diamond's argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society's collapse. Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal civilization of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of smallpox. European Jewry was destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the disappearance of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little Ice Age, which descended on Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds, ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One archeologist refers to this as the "It got too cold, and they died" argument.) What all these explanations have in common is the idea that civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God.

But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it's a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island's forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. "I have often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?'", Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of "Collapse". Those trees were felled by rational actors - who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

This doesn't mean that acts of God don't play a role. It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn't get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn't adapt to the country's changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman's dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. "Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland ... starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding", he writes. "Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?" It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn't eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.

Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It would have diversified their diet.

Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren't thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. "The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland's difficulties", Diamond writes. "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity". He goes on:

To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.


Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.

Diamond points out that the Easter Islanders did not practice, so far as we know, a uniquely pathological version of South Pacific culture. Other societies, on other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, chopped down trees and farmed and raised livestock just as the Easter Islanders did. What doomed the Easter Islanders was the interaction between what they did and where they were. Diamond and a colleague, Barry Rollet, identified nine physical factors that contributed to the likelihood of deforestation - including latitude, average rainfall, aerial-ash fallout, proximity to Central Asia's dust plume, size, and so on - and Easter Island ranked at the high-risk end of nearly every variable. "The reason for Easter's unusually severe degree of deforestation isn't that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident", he concludes. "Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people". The problem wasn't the Easter Islanders. It was Easter Island.

In the second half of "Collapse", Diamond turns his attention to modern examples, and one of his case studies is the recent genocide in Rwanda. What happened in Rwanda is commonly described as an ethnic struggle between the majority Hutu and the historically dominant, wealthier Tutsi, and it is understood in those terms because that is how we have come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb and Croat, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural antagonism. It's an explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond. The Hutu didn't just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at the land: steep hills farmed right up to the crests, without any protective terracing; rivers thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading to irregular rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population densities; the exhaustion of the topsoil; falling per-capita food production. This was a society on the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study of such societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal chaos. In "Collapse", Diamond quite convincingly defends himself against the charge of environmental determinism. His discussions are always nuanced, and he gives political and ideological factors their due. The real issue is how, in coming to terms with the uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest of us have turned ourselves into cultural determinists.


For the past thirty years, Oregon has had one of the strictest sets of land-use regulations in the nation, requiring new development to be clustered in and around existing urban development. The laws meant that Oregon has done perhaps the best job in the nation in limiting suburban sprawl, and protecting coastal lands and estuaries. But this November Oregon's voters passed a ballot referendum, known as Measure 37, that rolled back many of those protections. Specifically, Measure 37 said that anyone who could show that the value of his land was affected by regulations implemented since its purchase was entitled to compensation from the state. If the state declined to pay, the property owner would be exempted from the regulations.

To call Measure 37 - and similar referendums that have been passed recently in other states - intellectually incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the reason your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions to a developer is that it's on a pristine hillside: if everyone on that hillside could subdivide, and sell out to Target and Wal-Mart, then nobody's plot would be worth millions anymore. Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38, allowing them to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values caused by Measure 37?

It is hard to read "Collapse", though, and not have an additional reaction to Measure 37. Supporters of the law spoke entirely in the language of political ideology. To them, the measure was a defense of property rights, preventing the state from unconstitutional "takings". If you replaced the term "property rights" with "First Amendment rights", this would have been indistinguishable from an argument over, say, whether charitable groups ought to be able to canvass in malls, or whether cities can control the advertising they sell on the sides of public buses. As a society, we do a very good job with these kinds of debates: we give everyone a hearing, and pass laws, and make compromises, and square our conclusions with our constitutional heritage - and in the Oregon debate the quality of the theoretical argument was impressively high.

The thing that got lost in the debate, however, was the land. In a rapidly growing state like Oregon, what, precisely, are the state's ecological strengths and vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use priorities have on water and soil and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond writing about the Measure 37 debate, and he wouldn't be very impressed by how seriously Oregonians wrestled with the problem of squaring their land-use rules with their values, because to him a society's environmental birthright is not best discussed in those terms. Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs - with making sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of witnesses following the announcement of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays - that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone.

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland - crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers - which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050103crbo_books

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Killing vs Helping

Bush and Blair no longer seem able to see the difference.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 04 2005)

There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of AIDS. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry.

The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised GBP1000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly GBP100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry.

Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the West, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy.

But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to