News and analysis. A collection of related In the Wake blog posts.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
A slowing rate of progress
An IBM vice president said this week that the "era of invention" ended with the passing of the twentieth century, and the future mostly holds the refinement of existing inventions rather then the creation of new ones.
It's not a totally new idea, but it is an important one. According to a number of observers most possible major industrial inventions have already been invented, and the ones that haven't been will mostly stay as fiction. (And that's not because of peak oil or industrial collapse -- it's because they don't really work outside of the imagination. They're dead ends for research.)
If we were living in a civilization with access to infinite amounts of energy all this would be pretty irrelevant, since there is plenty of room for development with existing inventions. But civilization is on a collision course with ecological and energy collapse, and declining invention is another nail in the coffin of the idea of a "technofix" for civilization.
An article from the year 2000, The Slowing Rate of Progress, is very relevant to this discussion. It argues that more changed between 1900 and 1950 than between 1950 and 2000, and that the rate of change continues to decline despite popular perception to the contrary. It also suggests that economic productivity has even decreased in the last several decades. An economic indicator called "total-factor productivity"...
... tracks how efficiently the economy uses labor, capital, raw materials, and new technology. ... Between 1913 and 1972, it grew by an annual average of 1.08 percent. Then between 1972 and 1995, for reasons economists are still debating, the rate of improvement collapsed to less than one fiftieth that of the previous era, despite a widespread adoption of computers. [Or perhaps even because of computers?]
The article also has an interesting take on medicine with implications for a collapse context:
Perhaps, you say, we can at least credit modern medicine for dramatically expanding our life expectancy, even if more and more of our extra years are wasted in traffic jams or holding patterns. But on close examination, even the so-called revolution in healthcare technology turns out to have had little effect in prolonging life spans over the last half century.
To be sure, if [a couple transported from the 1950s] suffered from, say, cancer, they'd benefit from undergoing today's chemotherapy treatments, which, while still not effective in many cases, do allow most cancer patients to live longer than they would have in the 1950s. Similarly, one stands a better chance of surviving a heart attack and many other acute illnesses than one did then. But if the couple studied up on the question, they'd most likely be astonished and disappointed by how little they could improve their life expectancy by fast-forwarding into our world.
Most of the gains in life expectancy during the 20th century came before 1950 and resulted far less from medical advances such as penicillin than from improved nutrition, housing, sanitation, and the increase in average living standards. These improvements led to dramatic declines in infant mortality, which is the overwhelming reason that average life expectancy at birth has increased--not any significant lengthening of life span among those lucky enough to survive childhood diseases. Indeed, the specific role high-tech medicine has played in improving public health is so subtle as to be hardly measurable.
In Costa Rica, total healthcare expenditures per person come to just $226 a year, as compared with $4,187 in the United States, according to the World Health Organization. And there are only half as many doctors per capita as in the United States. Yet for women, life expectancy at birth is only slightly lower in Costa Rica than in the United States, and for men it's actually higher.
If the rate of progress is slowing then at some point it must have peaked. "Peak innovation" has already happened according to one researcher. James Huebner says that per capita "major innovation" (the invention of major world-changing devices) peaked in the world in 1873, and in the US in 1915. Huebner observed (shockingly!) that "perhaps there is a limit to what technology can achieve." He also believes that by 2024 the rate of technological innovation will be the same as it was during the dark ages. (See graphs.)
"The Army operates in a domestic and world energy situation that is highly uncertain," the report says. Even its outlook on nuclear energy, a key component of Bush administration policy, is not positive. "Our current throwaway nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years," the report says.
The researchers conclude that the military needs to take major steps to increase energy efficiency, make a "massive expansion" in renewable energy purchases, and move toward a vast increase in renewable distributed generation, including photovoltaic, solar thermal, microturbines, and biomass energy sources.
(The article also calls peak oil "a highly controversial theory", which is kind of like hurling yourself off of the roof of a skyscraper while insisting that "the phenomenon of 'impact' is only a highly controversial theory.")
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Massive spike in UK natural gas prices
Via Cryptogon: In the last week the price of natural gas in the UK has increased fourfold forcing cuts in industrial production. Cold weather has been one trigger combined with the fact that the UK's major natural gas storage facility is currently offline due to a recent fire.
The US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may actually be shrinking according to an economist John Williams as quoted here. The article is about how the US government massively inflates positive economic indicators by tricks like assuming all home-owners pay rent to themselves, and adding that imaginary rent income to the GDP. (It doesn't even talk about how economic indicators totally ignore social or ecological costs.)
Williams concludes that the US GDP may very well be in decline. If that's true it could be a forebearer of collapse and have a very serious impact on an economy predicated on perpetual growth.
It’s simple: once interest is charged, a perpetual growth machine is created. This perpetual growth machine requires an energy supply that is constantly expanding. Once the energy supply stops expanding, the machine implodes.
...dealing with the oil crisis requires much more than just finding a replacement for oil. It requires replacing a growth-based monetary system with a steady-state system. Few people in the modern world have any experience implementing or dealing with such a system. None of the so-called “experts” you see on television or read in the papers have any idea how to address this. Naturally, they can’t bring themselves to admit they have no idea how to handle this problem, so they simply deny its existence.
I firmly believe the collapse of modern economics will precede the collapse of the oil supply. Once the banks realize energy production is peaking, it’s “game over,” because everybody in the banking world knows without excess energy the whole system collapses.
A stagnant or shrinking economy will have a major effect on society’s expectations. With few exceptions, each generation in the United States has become materially better off than the preceding one. This pattern of increasing wealth has become an indelible part of the American Dream; a higher standard of living than our parents is practically a birthright. These expectations are the standard against which actual performance is judged. During times of failed expectations, a society is especially vulnerable to a person or philosophy promising to restore it to its former glory. The fall of the Weimar Germany is probably the best example.
And since the fall of Weimar Germany lead to the ascent of Hitler, you can see why we should consider this important.
One important fact that their panel recognized is that nuclear power would lock a society into a centralized distribution system. Nuclear plants require massive infrastructure to build and maintain, need highly specialized technicians, and must be centrally built and controlled because of their various demands. If we want to have a decentralized and radically democratic society, we need to dismantle that kind of centralized infrastructure in favour of more distributed and technologically accesible ways of meeting our needs. (And also methods which don't produce poisons that will last for thousands of generations!)
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Ethanol shortages, greenwashing
The US government is warning that there may be gasoline shortages and high prices Texas and the east coast because refineries are switching to gas / ethanol mixtures. Except that there isn't enough ethanol, and ethanol production in the US is already being used at full capacity:
As a result, the ... East Coast, particularly Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C. and Virginia, and the Texas cities of Houston and Dallas, may face tight gasoline supplies and higher fuel prices...
So they're going to compensate by reducing the ethanol in gas / ethanol mixtures in the midwest.
And there is news relating both to this and to the Bush administration's claims that there will be "startling" energy breakthroughs. This week when Bush was touring around with his new greenwash speaking points he visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the primary government research facility for renewables. However, just before he arrived his lackeys realized that NREL had just laid off much of its staff due to budget restrictions, and hired them all back at the last minute to stop themselves from looking bad.
That should give us an indication of how seriously they actually take energy research. The five million dollars for rehiring will come from recent energy projects that "that have failed to make progress."
Some people have taken this to mean that the US is about to unveil some kind of free energy / cold fusion / magical faerie dust that will generate lots of cheap energy and delay industrial collapse.
Personally I think that Bush is full of it, as usual. His "startling" breakthroughs are, if anything, probably just humdrum incremental improvements to industrial "renewable" technologies. Or maybe they are outright fabrications as likely to appear as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This is may be just one aspect of the "new" 24-hour propaganda machine.
Even if there were significant improvements to industrial energy technologies on the horizon, it wouldn't necessary delay collapse. They could even make it happen sooner, according to Jevons paradox, which states that increases in efficiency generally lead to increases in consumption (rather than decreases in consumption as most people would expect).
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Oil production peaked December 16, 2005?
Princeton geology professor Kenneth Deffeyes has analyzed recent data and concluded that world oil production peaked last December. He outlines the data at the linked article and concludes that by "2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age."
Official estimates recently placed the number of ecological refugees (people displaced by ecological degradation or disaster) at about 10 million, but that number may be significantly larger. In any case, ecological refugees outnumber all other categories of refugees, including those displaced by war. The number of ecological refugees requiring help from the Red Cross increased by a factor of ten between 1992 and 1998. And that population is due to continue to increase dramatically in the coming years, to 150 million, although it could be much more than that since the impact of climate change has been historically underestimated.
So the question for me is, with all of these new refugees from ecological causes alone how will people in power treat them? I think that the construction of new detention camps in the US gives us part of the answer.
Historically those in power have often moved indentured or enslaved labourers from their homelands and away from their communities and social support networks to exploit and indoctrinate them more effectively. This includes the slavery of Africans in America, the Gulags of Soviet Russia, and the modern day charcoal slaves of Brazil. Many of the people who currently work in sweatshops in Asia were forced into slums and factory labour after being displaced from their rural homes. And after the Second World War many people who left Europe to move to Canada or the US were forced to work as maids or domestic servants for years to be allowed citizenship, including people I know. (I'm not saying their economic circumstances forced them to work as domestic servants which is commonly the case now. I'm saying that was an explicit government requirement.) So people in an increasing population of ecological refugees would certainly be integrated as labourers in whatever exploitative system dominates the land they are displaced to.
That becomes especially true and worrying in a collapse context. As cheap oil declines those in power will surely use human power to fill in that energy gap. Much commercial fruit and vegetable in North America is currently dependant on migrant labourers to do the actual hands-on labour like picking food. Peak oil will likely mean a decrease in the availability of fuel for tractors and energy-hungry synthetic fertilizers for farms. So agriculture, and other industries, will probably see an increase in exploitative manual labour and even slavery as collapse proceeds. Indeed, the people running those industries will recognize that increased exploitative labour will be required to keep those industries intact. They certainly aren't going to recommend that people grow their own food and stop buying it or other products.
I've long thought that those in power deliberately want to destroy the world. Not just because they don't value it for its own sake (which they don't), or because its destruction is a byproduct of "business as usual". But because the world has to be destroyed to force people to participate in civilization by destroying all other means people have to sustain themselves. For those in power in industrial civilization a handy supply of labourers from a growing population of ecological refugees would only be one more handy side benefit of destroying the world. Also for them, those labourers will be especially useful during collapse.
And Canada has only 8.1 years of natural gas remaining. This isn't a big surprise seeing as natural gas production in North America peaked five years ago.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
New Orleans and Secession
Last month deconsumption noted that US states were beginning to negotiate their own contracts for oil, hinting at a movement towards secession.
Now events in New Orleans are continuing the trend. The Mayor of New Orleans says the city will seek aid from other countries after the US government has failed to provide adequate assistance. And the Governor of Louisiana has threatened to block "federal sales of leases for gas and oil off the Louisiana coast"!
This hints at a more serious general movement towards secession in the US, which includes formalized secessionist movements in states like Vermont. It's worth noting that the breaking down of large states and empires is a cardinal sign of collapse. People are realizing, especially in areas like New Orleans which have faced gridcrash, that the federal government isn't really capable of assisting them in the face of actual climate catastrophe and ecological collapse.
Even in a time of unparalleled access to energy and an immense industrial capacity, the wealthiest and perhaps most industrialized country in the world is incapable of rebuilding the infrastructure in one partially collapsed city. That tells me that large entities will find it impossible to deal with widespread gridcrash in an age of expensive energy, but that local people will of course build their own substitutes with what they have.
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
More on switchgrass and horses
After reading my post on switchgrass a few days ago, a couple of people have written in with more on the subject.
With regard to biofueled machinery not being self-steering, Egils Evalds writes:
When my father was a teenager, his uncle had a farm not far from Riga ( now considered a suburb) and one day asked to do the milk delivery because the old man was under the weather. My father asked for the route list. The uncle said: just let the horse find it. The horse followed his route, stopping at certain houses to let my father leave a bottle and collect the empties. Not a single delivery was missed.
But can you make your own tractor? Where are you going to get the steel, the
rubber, all the machined parts? I remember back in the Nicaragua days, all the stories of trucks--both military and civilian--that were useless for lack of one tiny part. Like one spark plug. Nobody local could make the wire for a new starter or
whatever. It's exactly what we're looking at in the period of energy descent and industrial collapse.
Why not just get a draft horse? They reproduce themselves, feed themeselves, and fertilize while they go. Plus they're sweet and magical, two words that could never possibly be applied to the internal combustion engine.
Apparently the average American eats about 35 teaspoons (or 173 milliliters) of sugar a day. That amount of sugar has about 2.8 megajoules of energy in it, which is the same amount of energy as there is in one fiftieth of a gallon of gasoline. Which means the energy in that daily sugar intake will get a fancy hybrid car about a mile -- but only if you completely ignore the energy costs required for its manufacture, its maintenance, its eventual disposal, the disposal of toxins produced by manufacture and use, the maintenance and manufacture of the roadway and parking lots, the fermentation of the ethanol itself, the costs of medical care for people in automobile accidents, and so on, and so on.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Ethanol from switchgrass
Switchgrass is a native grass in North America that has recently been touted as source of feedstock for industrial ethanol production. Recent coverage includes this piece from National Public Radio.
Many of the problems with biofuels that George Monbiot writes about apply here as well. One major difference is that switchgrass is a native plant and also a perennial. So compared to annual monocrops like soy, switchgrass planting would be much less destructive to the soil because it doesn't require plowing or periods of bare soil. In fact, since switchgrass has a very extensive root system, planting it (and other native grasses) where annual crops have previously been would generally be a major improvement and would take carbon out of the air and put it in the roots. Of course, if you do harvest switchgrass for ethanol and cart it away to the factory instead of letting it grow, die, and add biomass to the soil, you are simply mining the soil of matter and nutrients which will eventually cause soil loss and counteract all of the positive effects of planting it in the first place.
The main problem with using switchgrass for industrial ethanol production is that it would still require massive and destructive industrial infrastructure -- tractors, roads and highways, factories, mines and everything associated with those. It would require massive amounts of energy and cause serious long term ecological damage.
So with that it mind it's worth mentioning that switchgrass is also an excellent grass for pasture for horses, goats, and the like. It and grasses like it have been used for thousands of years to feed those creatures, who then can provide transport as part of their relationship with humans.
I have a friend who has a pasture-fed goat, and that goat pulls a little sled of firewood in the winter, and gives milk for drinking and cheese and yogurt, and meat from the occasional offspring. It requires no industrial infrastructure to build that goat, and the goat produces no toxins during its birth or life. In the process of turning switchgrass into transport via the goat (or horse, or what-have-you) there is no energy wasted by building and maintaining huge machines, factories, mines or roadways. And there is none of the ecological destruction that results from that. The goat also gives nutrients back to the land with her manure.
Now, if the people who advocate running industrial transportation on switchgrass can come up with a car that will gather its own food and water, convert it into useful energy internally, steer itself when I'm not paying attention and avoid obstacles or hazards, make copies of itself without any industrial infrastructure, feed me, give fertilizer for my garden, and produce no toxins or pollution in its use or manufacture then I'll be impressed.
But let's be honest. I'm not going to hold my breath.
Update: Just as I was getting ready to post this Lierre Keith forwarded me a message from a related discussion on the Alas Babylon listserv, where Tom Fugate writes:
I would add to this discussion the amount of human labor that's going to be involved just in feeding ourselves without fossil fuels is going to be staggering. I've been attempting to grow a good portion of my own food for several years now using manual bio- intensive methods, and it's not easy! The idea that we're going to be growing crops to make ethanol during the energy decline is really preposterous. Maybe if the wealthy want to keep their cars they will have human slaves to plow and harvest their energy crops for them, like in the plantation days.
That hasn't happened so far, and part of the reason is because that region has just had the warmest January in recorded history which has significantly reduced energy consumption. In fact, the reduction has been so much that some utility companies are charging customers an additional "adjustment surcharge" for not buying as much energy as expected.
Friday, February 3, 2006
Metal theft and industrial decomposition
As demand for metal increases perpetually, and easily available ore deposits become mined out, the theft of metal to sell as scrap is becoming increasingly common.
This week in Germany a group of well-organized folks dismantled and removed a whopping 5 km (3 miles) of railroad track. If sold for scrap the tracks would be worth about a quarter of a million US dollars.
Metal theft is also increasingly common in North America. In lower mainland British Columbia people are stealing thousands of pounds of aluminum in the diverse forms of goalposts, aluminum sockets on scoreboards, seating and pipes. In Toronto aluminum cans are being removed from blue boxes in such large quantities that the city has requested "bylaw-enforcement officers be moved to the overnight shift to monitor blue boxes"!
Across the US aluminum and copper are being targeted in the forms of pipes, radiators, air conditioners, electrical wiring and cables. In one case in Alabama an 8 mile stretch of power line was taken. And it isn't just "organized crime":
"This is just crazy," said Springfield police Detective Geoff Ashworth, who is taking up to two metal theft reports a day. "And there's no one or two, there's no six people that are specifically responsible for this. Everybody's doing it. People know the prices are up."
According to that source, "demand for copper has pushed its price to historic highs, and aluminum prices are the highest they've been in 17 years."
Part of the reason I find this interesting is because it indicates that civilization is approaching limits around the cheap availability of metals.
The other reason I find it interesting is because things like aluminum and copper are actually very well suited for the improvisation of other useful items in a collapse context. Aluminum has a fairly low melting point and can be melted and cast into new shapes with minimal tools. Copper is malleable enough that you can reshape it using only a hammer and crude anvil, a forge isn't even essential.
I like the idea of people dismantling centralized infrastructure to build useful tools for their own communities. A lot of post-apocalyptic genre movies show old factories and stores and gas stations abandoned and left standing to rust. But that's not going to happen, because there is too much useful stuff in them!
When a large, complex living organism dies there are creatures who specialize in breaking it down into water, carbon dioxide and simple chemicals that various living creatures need to nourish themselves. That's decomposition, and of course if it didn't happen we wouldn't exist and the planet would be covered in a carpet of the dead bodies of various creatures.
Similarly, when a large, complex society breaks down I expect that some people will specialize in breaking down the infrastructure into smaller parts that small and sustainable groups can use. People won't only dismantle infrastructure out of altruism or because getting rid of industrial installations and detoxifying those sites will benefit future generations (although that is the case and many people will do it for those reasons). People will do it also because it will make immediate personal and economic sense. (Even now, "everybody's doing it".)
Eventually we won't even have to convince people to dismantle massive industrial centralized infrastructure, because it won't function and won't benefit them. All we'll have to do is figure out how to depave roads and turn them into gardens, deconstruct industrial machinery and turn them into fuel-efficient woodstoves, or dismantle cars and turn them into wind-powered lighting and pumping systems, and then share those skills so that people can do it themselves.
And then we'll figure out the next step in industrial decomposition, and the step after that. So when some part we've salvaged wears out (say some electrical component), we can decompose it into something also useful and progressively less toxic. If we can devise and share the skills to help people to fill the ecological niche of decomposer then industrial decomposition will happen on a massive and distributed basis.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Scenarios suggest oil could go up to $262/barrel
CNN Money has an article reporting an effort to predict the impact of various world events on oil prices:
Hermitage Capital's Bill Browder, has outlined six scenarios that could take oil up to a downright terrifying $262 a barrel. [...]
To come up with some likely scenarios in the event of an international crisis, his team performed what's known as a regression analysis, extrapolating the numbers from past oil shocks and then using them to calculate what might happen when the supply from an oil-producing country was cut off in six different situations. The fall of the House of Saud seems the most far-fetched of the six possibilities, and it's the one that generates that $262 a barrel.
More realistic -- and therefore more chilling -- would be the scenario where Iran declares an oil embargo a la OPEC in 1973, which Browder thinks could cause oil to double to $131 a barrel. Other outcomes include an embargo by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez ($111 a barrel), civil war in Nigeria ($98 a barrel), unrest and violence in Algeria ($79 a barrel) and major attacks on infrastructure by the insurgency in Iraq ($88 a barrel).
Regressions analysis may be mathematical but it's an art, not a science.
I think their numbers are misleadingly precise based on their method of guessing. There is also a certain amount of fearmongering going on, like in the opening line, "Be afraid. Be very afraid." But it's still an interesting set of scenarios.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Children's cognitive skills on the decline
Basic cognitive skills are on the decline according to a recent study in the UK. This blows a "gaping hole" in the commonly held idea that people in "developed" countries are getting smarter and smarter, sometimes called the Flynn effect. According to the article:
Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.” [...]
In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,” says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.
In other words, many of the questions in the study's test involve the basic skills that would allow someone to, for example, improvise a water pump out of available materials.
In 1976 a third of boys and a quarter of girls scored highly in the tests overall; by 2004, the figures had plummeted to just 6% of boys and 5% of girls. These children were on average two to three years behind those who were tested in the mid-1990s.
“It is shocking,” says Adey. “The general cognitive foundation of 11 and 12-year-olds has taken a big dip. There has been a continuous decline in the last 30 years and it is carrying on now.” [...]
But what exactly is being lost? Is it really general intelligence or simply a specific understanding of scientific concepts such as volume and density? Both, say the researchers. The tests reveal both general intelligence — “higher level brain functions” — and a knowledge that is “the bedrock of science and maths” says Ginsburg. In fact it’s nothing less than the ability of children to handle new, difficult ideas. [...]
Ginsburg says parents too can do their bit. “When did children stop playing with mud, plasticine and Meccano and start playing with Xboxes and computer games?” she asks.
Children don't need to be taught basic facts about the behaviour of the physical world as the article suggests. They learn themselves when given the opportunity. When I interviewed psychologist Chellis Glendinning she told me that the "human psyche is ... built to mirror the environment. We were built to mirror the sky, and the wind, and the seasons, and then to relate to them in their language."
Our minds build a model of the world around us based on what we perceive consciously and unconsciously. So if our experience of the world is based on television or video games, we will expect the world to follow those same rules. If we play an arcade game then we learn that success is attained by performing rapid repetitive actions to accumulate imaginary abstract points (like money!). If we play a 3D shoot-em-up game we learn that progress is made by moving along a set path in a world that gives the illusion of having many choices, and by shooting any character we come into conflict with along the way.
ENERGY usage in Victoria surged 45 per cent above normal weekend levels yesterday, as air-conditioners were switched on to cope with the heatwave.
Forecasts of more hot weather this week, and power shortages yesterday in South Australia, have raised the spectre of blackouts in Victoria. [...]
Searing temperatures in South Australia ... caused widespread blackouts ...
And of course much of Australia's electricity comes from coal. So climate change leads to increased energy consumption which leads to more climate change and more consumption until it reaches a breaking point, and collapses.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Continuing grid attacks in Iraq and Russia
Despite having vast oil supplies, Iraq has been unable to supply its own gasoline and refined oil products due to refinery damage (caused during the invasion) and persistent attacks on oil infrastructure by insurgents. Iraq responded by importing gasoline and refined oil. Now it owes more than a billion dollars and oil exporters in Turkey have agreed to stop sending refined oil products to Iraq. Demand for gas in Baghdad recently increased by 30% because of the increased use of neighbourhood generators. Constant attacks on electrical infrastructure and limited availability of fuel for larger diesel generators means that electricity delivery in urban areas is unreliable and drastically reduced.
As Peak Oil progresses and oil becomes less available and more expensive it will become increasingly attractive and effective for "insurgents" of various stripes to target electrical and oil infrastructure.
Urban and Rural
A couple of people reading my article Deconstructing 'Urban vs. Rural Sustainability' seemed to conclude that I'm absolutely and universally opposed to living in cities or suburbs during collapse. That's not the case. My concern was debunking the idea that rural places were doomed to "blow away like dust," not to say that all cities or suburbs are a horrible place to be in collapse. I think that many of them will be, eventually, but that isn't the point of this article. I actually do work to create and maintain community gardens in cities and I think there are definitely some compelling reasons to consider living in cities and suburbs during collapse -- although many of my reasons for doing so are somewhat different then Hemenway's. I'm working on an essay now that will explore some of those reasons and look at the urban/rural/wilderness continuum in a collapse context.
Related to the copper story from yesterday, it's worth noting that there may only be 12-25 years of silver left based on current usage and extraction patterns. Which is even less then oil. Silver is commonly used in luxury applications, but is very important for the manufacture of computer and other electronic devices. There is also a shortage of tungsten which is used to make incandescent lightbulb filaments (though those are falling out of use anyway for fluorescents), but tungsten also has various other industrial and aerospace applications.
It is true that many of these metals could be substituted for in the event of shortages, but the substitutes would be imperfect and cause additional strain on industrial civilization as it faces declining energy supplies and increasingly ecological and climate collapses.
Copper is used in everything from automobiles to ordnance. Copper allows electricity to be generated, transported and conducted to the various outlets in a modern home. Copper is also relatively scarce compared to other metals like iron or aluminum that make up a good portion of the earth itself. So copper serves as an excellent metallic bellwether for potential future resource scarcity, according to a group of researchers who compiled data on its extraction, use, recycling and discard to estimate whether there is enough copper available to make a developed standard of living available to all the world's people. The short answer is: no.
I was actually surprised to learn that people in the US use 238 kilograms (525 pounds) per capita of copper.
[I'm posting this instead of a Q&A today. The next Q&A will be on Monday.]
When Urban vs. Rural Sustainability by Toby Hemenway started making the rounds on the internet a year ago, I thought that the article had a lot of shortcomings. But I was too busy illustrating Tools for Gridcrash to craft a response. Now, after conferring with a third generation organic family farmer for further insights into rural life, I'm going to share some of my thoughts and responses.--Aric McBay
Overall, the main point of Hemenway's article seems to be that if a major industrial crash occurred "the cities may be unpleasant," but that "the countryside may be far worse off." I'm certainly willing to engage in a discussion about that point, but in this case I think that Hemenway's arguments are based on a projection of his own personal and anecdotal experiences with country living on society at large, and on some serious misconceptions about the sustainability of the modern city. If his article was only a series of anecdotes about his own experiences with living in the country and the city, I wouldn't bother to respond to it. But I feel obligated to because many people don't seem to be seriously questioning the premises that lead him to suggest city in general is a better place to be in a hard crash.
About 300 million Chinese drink unsafe water tainted by chemicals and other contaminants according to a new report from the Chinese government. A leading government official said the greatest non-drought threat to China's water resources, is chemical pollutants and other harmful substances that contaminate drinking supplies for 190 million people.
A recent nationwide survey found that about 90% of China's cities have polluted ground water, while millions of rural Chinese face risks from naturally occurring contaminants like arsenic and excess fluorine.
The report follows a massive chemical spill in northeastern China which dumped 100 tons of benzene and other carcinogenic chemicals into the Songhua River following an explosion at a petrochemical plant. Initially local officials tried to cover up the toxic spill which eventually forced shutoff of water in the major city of Harbin and later flowed into Russian territory.
China's water problems are expected to worsen in coming years...
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Collapse is inevitable
The Anthropik Network is overflowing with great essays and writings about civilization and collapse. Jason Godesky has just posted a new essay there which supports the basic premises of this project, that collapse is inevitable -- and also that it has a very bright side:
In collapse, all the rules reverse themselves. Sustainabilty becomes not only feasible, but advantageous. Small, egalitarian groups out-compete large, hierarchical ones. Human nature becomes adaptive, rather than something we must suppress. That process is the inevitable end of any civilization, because nothing can grow forever and without limit in a finite universe. Moreover, that process will begin sooner, rather than later. It has already begun, and in all likelihood, most of us alive today will live to see its completion.
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
This is what Peak Oil looks like: Russia shuts off natural gas to Ukraine, Ukraine threatens to tap pipelines
Last week a price dispute between Russia and Ukraine caused significant reductions in the supply of natural gas to countries in Europe which recieve gas via Ukraine, including Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, France, Italy and Germany (source). Now Russia has said it will stop selling the Ukraine natural gas altogether, which does not look promising.
Ukrainian officials have said they have enough gas reserves to ease the impact of the crisis on household consumers through the winter. However, experts believe a shutdown could devastate Ukraine's natural gas-reliant metals and chemicals industries in a matter of days if no resolution is reached.
Oil prices up because of shrinking inventories and infrastructure attacks this week
I'm making note of this not because it is especially unique, but because I think it is going to become an extremely headline over the next decade or so. Reuters reports:
Oil rose beyond $59 on Thursday after Shell was forced to delay some exports of its Nigerian crude following a pipeline attack in the southern Delta. [...] Shell was forced to close a pipeline, which pumps 180,000 bpd, after unidentified gunmen on Tuesday attacked it. Oil dealers said the hold-up could last around six days. [...] U.S. distillate inventories, including heating oil, fell by 2.8 million barrels last week, due to a 9 percent surge in demand and a slowdown in refinery activity...
Update: I came across an interesting and relevant log of attacks on oil pipelines and infrastructure in Iraq from summer of 2003 to now. The attacks have been almost continuous: see Iraq Pipeline Watch. (The broader analysis on that site is pretty terrible, though.)
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Oil shortages may cause "winter of discontent"; parts of New York at risk of becoming a "frozen New Orleans"
Now the situation is looking like it might be more urgent than some have predicted. An article from US News suggests a "winter fuel crisis of high prices and shortages could darken homes and factories" across the northeastern United States:
Damage to rigs, pipelines, and processing facilities means a shortage of natural gas, the fuel that heats 52 percent of U.S. homes. The industry says 2.3 billion cubic feet per day, or 23 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural-gas production, will be offline through March. But even before the deadly storms struck, the country was consuming more natural gas than it produced and prices were at record highs. Demand grew nearly 16 percent from 1990 through 2004, driven mainly by the companies that generate electric power. Policymakers viewed natural gas as cleaner than coal and more palatable than nuclear, so it was easy to get required government approvals to build much-needed electric power plants that run on natural gas. And everyone bet heavily--and incorrectly--that prices would stay cheap. The United States now relies on Canadian imports by pipeline and has begun to call on a new source, tankers from Africa and the Middle East filled with liquefied natural gas, or LNG. But the imports haven't been enough. "The hurricanes--they hit a sick patient," says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of the American Gas Association, representing utilities. "We're vulnerable. If we were hit in the 1990s, we would not have been in this situation. But when you are consuming 100 percent of your supply, there's not much room to maneuver." [...]
Hundreds of factories will be similarly forced to lay off workers or freeze or cut wages because of high natural gas prices this winter, says the National Association of Manufacturers. [...]
The article also notes the risk of "a severe electricity shortage in the Northeast." And since New York City imports such vast quantities of energy as both electricity and fuel, it may be at special risk:
A winter failure could prove catastrophic, because any extended loss of heat could cause water pipes to burst in residential and commercial buildings alike. Also, the thousands of "traps" where steam escapes (and billows from manhole covers) could freeze and fail, causing distribution pipes to crack or lose pressure. Former Central Intelligence Agency chief Jim Woolsey, now active on energy issues, argues that parts of the city "could resemble a frozen New Orleans."
In the state of Pennsylvania a long-standing law against winter heating shut-offs has been struck down, mean that low-income people there are much more likely to have their heat turned off this winter.
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic. [...] The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us &#S211; with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back.
He goes on to underline the futility and destructiveness of efforts to replace oil with biodiesel in his article "Worse Than Fossil Fuel".
Monbiot has been writing insightful articles about fossil fuels and climate issues for some time now. Years ago he observed that "either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses." ["The Bottom of the Barrel"]
Return
to top