Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Recent News and Events

I’ve been rather busy with my day job lately, so posting has been difficult.

I have some interesting news, though.

First, it seems the Iranians are looking to sell their oil in euros, not dollars. If I recall correctly, the last country to try that was Iraq, and if I’m not mistaken, I think the USA started bombing the crap out of them shortly thereafter. I don’t think the USA will invade Iran – as the incompetent fascist boobs in the Pentagon’s North Annex (aka the White House) haven’t got the brains, money, or manpower to invade Iran. Nope nope nope – I think what will happen is the American Spooks will figure out where the Iranian nuke development sites are, and then sick the Israelis on it. Given that Iraq and Jordan are between Iran and Istrael, I seriously doubt Iran would engage in a direct military response. But dollars for donuts some suicide bombers would probably show up in Tel Aviv…. It would be a big mess, but Iraq would still be grabbing the headlines.

People have asked me, “Geeee Mister Studebaker, what do you think we should do in Iraq?”

I think we should get the hell out of there as fast as possible – but the real key is Iran, and the USA should stop jerking Iran around and sit down and make some real peace happen. If George Bush had even a nano-fraction of the balls that his bluster implies, he’d pull a Nixon and secretly fly his stupid smirking ass to Tehran and Make A Special Peace. Both the USA and Iran have common interests, and we owe Iran a lot of political favours given the miserable history the two have shared. Sure, they took hostages, and killed a bunch of people, and that was pretty freakin’ evil, but in the greater scheme of things, the USA has done vastly more damage to Iran over the years than Iran has done to the USA.

Even a dedicated imperialist like Thomas P M Barnett knows that the key to peace in the middle east lies in Iran…

But, no, Georgie Peorgie hasn’t the sense to do that – he’d rather hunker down and get mean… Why? Because he and his junta are too stupid for words and can’t understand how their fixations work against their own best interests. Which is oddly coincidental with their powerbase who are less well educated than the opposition, and consistently vote against their own best interests and sign up for a Republican Junta who not only doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them, but considers them to be a bunch of gullible wackos.

Russia has been increasingly less interest in coddling American interests – not like they had that much to begin with – but now the Russians are saying they would be very happy to refine nuclear fuel for Iran.

Also, there is big buzz that Lieberman might be tapped to become U.S. SECDEF. Great. That’s just all we need….

Thursday, December 01, 2005
Nihilism part 02

One of my esteemed listmates on Energy Resources responded to my note on Nihilism, and had some good points. I responded to his post as follows.

Mr C wrote:

>You have more than a good point.

Thanks for noticing! I get so much grief so often, it’s nice to hear a positive voice.

>So lets be constructive.
>Let me start by modifying your proposition
>into an If-then-else.

OK.

>IF (conditions are met)
>THEN {we will migrate into a sustainable future }
>ELSE {we will have severe economic depression;
>a final obliteration of the biosphere;
>and ultimately a crash of the human population due to
>overshoot exhausting essential resources};
>We may want to make some modifications to the THEN and ELSE
>statements. But this is easy. Defining the conditions to be
>met is where all the work is at. Believe me, this is the way
> hardest part, and probably the reason so many intellectuals on
>this subject come to rest in the doomer category, myself
>included.

I agree, it is a daunting task.

>So lets make it easy for the first step. Lets only name the
>conditions that need to be met without getting hung up just
>yet on “how” that condition is to be met, or ever could be
>met. This way at least we can say we defined the problem just
>a little better by reducing it into its components.

I agree. Also, to mis-use/apply an old Marxist term, the “prevailing conditions” at the time of will have their own dynamic and set of contradictions, which are largely unpredictable in specific, even though the substructural political economy is essentially unchanged since the 19th century. Which is a coplicated way to say: we don’t know what it will be like then, although the economic fundamentals will probably be similar to today.

>Here are just a couple of the conditions that need to be met
>to bring us into the THEN clause and out of the ELSE clause.

(I’ve snipped a bit for clarity’s sake:)

>A: present energy consumption is within the sun’s annual
>budget for Earth
>B: non-renewable petroleum is reserved for use as a mineral
>and not a fuel
>AND solar, hydro, wind and biomass at sustainable levels
>are the only fuel sources used for all human activities.
>AND ??…
>As you hopefully can see, the lists will be long and decompose
> ever more into further lists of conditions if you attempt to
>properly deconstruct the problem.

>I’ll jump way ahead and bubble it all back up and say stupid >things like “the people in the Los Angeles basin can no longer
> drive fossil fuel powered vehicles to carry out their daily
>lives”. It is near impossible to impose such a conclusion,
>and yet it is impossible to avoid external reality imposing
>the same conclusion over time given our draw down and exhaustion
>of stored fossil energy.

OK: try this: how to double the effective mileage of a given fleet? Even/Odd driving restrictions. Forces people to buddy up.

How to get old clunkers off the road? CA’s plan is fairly ingenious. Up the smog restrictions preventing older cars from passing. If it fails, the state will buy the car for $1000 and send it to the crusher for recycling. My 1991 Toyota Corolla has a weak oil ring in one of the cylinders, causing it to just *barely* fail. I could have leaned out the injectors and have it shake and shudder through the test, but the car is only worth $1200, and has some nasty dents thanks to a certain clueless asshole who lives down the street… But anyway – I’ll be getting a cheque for $1000 in January.

You see- there are lots of ways – each one plays a small role, but in agregate, they amount to something. The problem is, right now, they don’t amount to enough. THAT has to change, and that’s why we have to work on making it happen. The alternative is not acceptable.

>I’ll shift back to doomer now and just say that I find the
>scale and complexity of our problems so intractable when
>confronted with the reality of politics that it does indeed
>seem hopeless. Yet I agree with you that nihilism is not any
>answer at all. This is probably why so many people are on the
>ROE2 list, in my words, “trying to figure out how best to survive
>the coming dark ages”. Homesteading, communities and forming
>other kinds of safety bubbles is the repeating theme. Plus the
>occassional side themes of “guns, and how best to defend your >family from roaming dog packs and the occassional looter”.

Could you send me a URL so I can get on that list? thanks.

>Like you, I refuse to say it is hopeless. But I’m quite
>stymied on how to create a positive future for the big
>picture pre-collapse. There is some amount of hope to be
>found in constructing small pictures that form refuge from
>this very large catastrophe in the making.

I belive it is to be done one step at a time, with more and more people making one step at a time. Eventually you have an entire flood of people doing the right thing.

The first thing to do is to Get The Message Across, and even though I despise them, I must say that the TV ads for BP are a step in the right direction. I don’t believe BP is *actually* doing all it can to help avert catastrophe, but at least in the past few months with all the money they made after Katrina, they do seem to have bought a clue or two and are doing what they can to inform people that Things Are Going To Change.

The next thing to do is to MARKET the change. It’s kind of like dieting. You don’t lose weight by not eating. Yes, you will lose weight that way, but you eventually DIE. The way you lose weight is by eating LESS, eating BETTER, and EXERCISING. If you pigged out and slothed your way into obesity, then you have to eat properly and exercise your way into svelteness. Same goes for the first world. We pigged our way into this, so now we have to manage our intake to get out of it.

Eating less: Consume fewer items, consume less energy.
Eating right: acquire things that are built to last and are functional and integral. Acquire energy from green sources.
Exercising: develop local sources for the acquisition of food, clothing, and shelter. Have this process even atomised into household production systems (growing gardens, beer, cheese, etc.) and then into neighbourhood/town exchange systems.

Also, the solar diet isn’t the only energy source – there is wind, geothermal, tides, etc. Technically, wind is solar, and tides are lunar, but you get the idea.

As I said before: it’s not going to be easy, and the longer all this gets put off, the more dire the transition is *guaranteed* to be. I’m not discounting the “doomer” scenario – I’m simply giving it some perspective and USEFULNESS contexted in the IF/THEN or (by your angle, which is a good one) IF/THEN/ELSE. WiI *thin that context, it has a great deal of meaning. Outside that context, it’s an invitation to paralysis.

I *really* appreciate your take on this. Yes, it is *HARD*. But if we don’t figure it out, it won’t get figured, and then we’re screwed.

That’s why I’ve been hammering away at issues of Victory/Crash conditions. It’s kind of like classical software testing. You have to test the boundary conditions, load, race conditions, input/output, usability, design, etc. It’s all part of making a proper piece of software work.

WE, and I mean WE, as in everyone born since 1945, has a responsibility to Help Figure It Out. Now. Not later. And that’s why I’m bringing up these “meta-issues” of Victory/Crash conditions and definitions. Once we have a grip on what we need to have happen, we can set about inventing our way to that conclusion. Otherwise, we’re just wasting our time.

I’m going to post this to my blog – it’s a good discussion.

Again, thanks for the feedback. This weekend I will be looking at these parameters in greater detail, and I hope I can arrive at some suggestions or ideas for directions and policies and other points of debate and action.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005
How to Avert Catastrophe: Community
There’s been a great deal of discussion about Peak Oil, and much of it has taken on a kind of narcissistic schadenfreude – where there is a kind of cruel laughter “Muuuaahahahahahahaaa” that seems to permeate the discussion and defines The Real Peak Oilers from the noobs and the cornicopians. Why it is narcissistic is that we’re talking about Ourselves in such a dismissive and gloating manner. That is not the way to win friends and influence people. You can’t build a community of concerned citizens by telling them “Most of you are going to die”. All you get out of that is a nihilistic cult.

This does not invalidate their position: there is a non-zero probability that we could see a massive die-off in the next 30 years. How? If nations do nothing to prepare for a post-petroleum world, and are then hit with avian flu and regional nuclear resource wars – that would pretty much insure the elimination of about 80% of the human race, right off the bat. Between the starvation, the disease, and the radiation, there wouldn’t be much left to work with.

However, I don’t see that as a genuine likelyhood – more as a possibility that becomes increasingly probable if specific conditions aren’t met. One of the factors that will most greatly mitigate against such a massive and immediate die off is Community. People working with people to the collective good. One development toward said community is this blog. I know this is not the first blog regarding this issue, nor will it be the last. But it’s the one you’re reading now, and so, in this immediate sense, we share an attention and can form a community, however temporary it is as you read this, of two.

You, my dear reader, and I are now linked together – from the words I type at 9.30 in the morning on a cool grey Tuesday to whenever and where ever you read them – we can communicate – you can leave a comment below, and we can discuss ideas. There are other blogs and I will be collecting links to them.

The first one you will see to your right, under the “Blogs” heading, is to the New York City Oil Drum blog – run by PeakGuy. He writes well and with precision about energy issues related to New York City – eevrything from Bike Lanes on Second Ave to more philosophical and insightful issues regarding the social integration of Peak Oil theory. Check him out!

In order to avert true catastrophe, we will all need to “pull together”. To quote Ben Franklin – “We must hang together or surely we will all hang separately.” Local groups need to take action to get their neighbours aware of the problem and working to immediate mitigation solutions. This can be on very small scales: just getting the old geezer across the street to use CFL bulbs and to turn off his porch light at night is a good first step. Things scale from there. If each city works at that level, we can see significant mitigation efforts come to fruition – everything from community food banks and backyard farm associations to neighbourhood energy management via windmills.

The facts are plain to see – we’re quickly approaching or have actually arrived at Peak Oil. The time to act is now, before it all hits the fan. If we wait for it to hit the fan, it will be too late. Community organising at a neighbourhood level is easier than organising at a state or national level. This is especially true if such organisations are helped and/or guided by local government. Officials in local government need to be educated on the facts of the issue, and need to understand what is at stake for their constituencies, including the mayor or the county supervisor. If approached properly, they can be brought on to help in the process, and could actually be a source of funding to get these programs going and co-ordinated.

Every community has its own priorities and complexities, so there can never be a top-down formula for success. That’s why local organising is critical – each community will have its own set of skills and needs and if organised from the bottom up, and then co-ordinated across from larger city-wide/county/regional perspective, significant mitigation efforts can be brought to bear and all uniquely tailored and perfectly fitted to the local conditions.

In future entries I hope to feature more about such efforts. An immediate example that comes to mind is what is going on in Willets, California.

There is also this interesting article regarding Local Governments Role in the Transition to a Post-Petroleum Society.

If we organise ourselves now, we can more easily ride out the storm later – we can Transition to a Post-Petroleum World instead of Collapsing Into It. This is not to say such a transition will be painless – on the contrary – we are looking at some difficult times ahead. But difficult is better than the bleaker visions of the more extreme theories surrounding Peak Oil.

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I’ve noticed that many blogs use Google Ads to support themselves. I am considering much the same – so over the next few weeks you might see a major adjustment to the appearance of Early Warning.

Monday, November 28, 2005
Victory Conditions

Let’s pretend that people were the size of mice and consumed the ratio of resources of a mouse to an average ethiopian, the earth could possibley sustain 100 billion or even more of us. But that’s not how we’re built – we’re bigger and require more food and space. In order to procure the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, we need (X) resources and when said resources are divided among ever larger numbers of people, the amount per capita goes down. As it is presently structured, the USA/Canada, Japan, and Europe (.i.e. the First World and the now quickly ramping up China and India) consume way more resources than the earth can possibly provide and this is clearly going to come to a halt (not an end) fairly soon in an historical sense.

If we could reduce the resource consumption per capita by some crazy multiple, there wouldn’t be a problem. So: the challenge is clear: how do we get from point A (here, today) to point B (there, later) with the least amount of catastrophic events? Continued research (combined with consciousness raising, appropriate energy policy decision making, grassroots mobilisation, consumption reduction, etc.) may lead to other innovations to help us get to point B.

I think an interesting problem is some thing I discussed several weeks ago, and got some, but not much response on:

What IS a CRASH?
What IS VICTORY?

I’ll paraphrase/modify the previous discussion – if the end result of a Crash is defined as “living in tents and chasing buffalo” but it takes 200,000 years to get there, IS IT A “CRASH”? How about 100,000 years? Or 5,000 years? Or 1,000 years? Or 500 years? It seems the closer we get to present day, the more it is seen as a “Crash”. Therefore: the “crash” does not exist, and will not exist except in the sense that it becomes an object of perception and experience.

What constitutes Victory over the Energy Crisis? Would a gradual transition to “living in tents and chasing buffalo” ever be considered a Victory? If so, and it takes 200,000 years to get there, then is the Crash ans the Victory the same thing? If so, then the nihilist wing of the Cassandran position comes to the fore: rather than wait to live in tents and chase buffalo in 200,000 years, make it happen by 2015.

However, this only has weight with the assumption that “living in tents and chasing buffalo” is a Victory. If it is not a victory condition, then other issues come to the fore, by necessity, depending on the choice of victory conditions. As a consequence, I see a lot of gloating on the part of the Cassandras and a lot of pigheadedness on the part of the cornicopians. As I have also noted, the Cassandras have a really good stick, and the cornicopians have a pretty weak looking carrot. However – if we are to prevent catastrophe, the Cassandran position must be maintained in order to goad the populace into action. However, the innovations by the Cornicopians shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as a “day late and a dollar short”.

I think it is of paramount importance that we establish Victory Conditions. Once we figure out what is required, we can set about inventing our way to such targets. If we don’t establish Victory Conditions, then we’ll be on the same hamster cage roller as the capitalist system itself: not knowing where it’s going, but getting there really fast.

It is also imperative that Crash Conditions be defined relative to Victory Conditions – as I noted above, it is a simple matter to define them as identical at some great distance in the future. Since such a scenario is of a remote probability, Crash conditions need to be defined in near term points, and the Cassandran position is very clear on this. The only problem is this: a near-term crash could create a logical condition of irrelevence.

Socrates is a man
All men are mortal
: Socrates must die

The problem is: in order to prove the middle you’d have to kill everyone including yourself, in which case, the point is moot. The same goes for the Cassandra position: if the worst fears are realised, then it simply doesn’t matter. Therefore, the Cassandran position fails to persuade, and (worst of all) actually gives ammunition to the Cornicopians, only this time, it’s live Ammo, because people will suffer because of it.

Therefore, the logic of the Cassandran position must always be a few years away – not next year – maybe five, 10, 25 years away – much like the cornicopian brags of plenty. (I’m thinking of Kurzweil’s idiotic notions of the SIngularity occuring around 2030 – very convenient for it to happen AFTER HE’LL LIKELY BE DEAD.) These projections have to be in the future – if they were immediate and imminent, then there would be the loss of face and credibility should they not occur.

This brings me back to my point earlier about perception. If we define the crash as “no grid, all food locally and organically grown, a reduced self powering communications infrastructure, decentralised government and currency” and it takes 30 years to get there, IS IT A CRASH? If it happens so slowly that it takes two or three or five generations to complete, the perception of any given generation will be one of great hardship, but not “Crash”.

That’s why I think it is of critical importance that there be a debate about Crash and Victory Conditions. The sooner we get that out of the way, the sooner we can set about correcting or at least managing the situation.