This afternoon, I saw Avatar, directed by James Cameron. I saw it at a gigantic multiplex in Greenwood Indiana, in 3D in an IMAX format. I had an excellent seat – sixth row centre. The 3D glasses were large and comfortable.

My point is not to describe my experience of the film, although it is an important part of Avatar, and will play into some of my discussion of the film. I am not a film reviewer, nor am I much of a film theorist, but I feel this film requires my attention and focus for a variety of reasons that will come clear.

First off, people will ask “So what did you think of Avatar?” and “Did you like it?” These two things are not necessarily linked, and what Avatar is and does is very complex, and points directly at a number of critical issues in contemporary civilisation. What struck me on viewing the film, in terms of images, what I saw was a large number of references to films I very much like – and these references were seductive and interesting.

In the Home Tree, I saw the Camphor Tree in My Neighbour Totoro. This is where Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro. Totoro is a wood spirit and lives in the Camphor Tree – the Na’vi live in the Home Tree. The Tree is an ancient symbol of biblical proportions and esoteric meaning.

The general reference to Dances With Wolves is also obvious – a soldier who leaves European ways behind and goes to live with Native Americans. However, I see that actually as relatively uninteresting due to its obviousness, although that theme is something I will come back to.

The planet has floating mountains, which remind me of album covers for the Yes group by Roger Dean – covers like Close to the Edge

Close to the Edge: floating worlds...

and other images by Roger Dean from that period, such as flying dragons – looks a lot like a Banshee, no?:

Jungles floating in the air:

Alien landscapes:

Floating pastoral worlds:

And floating trees and rocks:

I could go on, but now, look at this preliminary concept art from Avatar:

and this still from the film:

and it is pretty clear that Dean’s playful organic fantasy artwork must have had some influence, which is fine by me. Dean is no Da Vinci, but his artwork reminds me of happy times in my adolescence, spent listening to music by Yes with my friends and arguing over the lyrics with precision I can best describe as Jesuitical. It was what teenage fans of ProgRock would often do in the mid 70s… When I was young, the floating jungles and weird landscapes of Dean were a fantasy space I would sometimes imagine myself inhabiting, especially the floating world of Close To The Edge. Seeing this realised in Avatar struck a comforting cord in me.

Another fond memory Avatar brought back with the Floating Mountains was that of Castles in the Sky, by Miyazaki. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki’s work – beautiful, lyrical, gentle and unalterably peculiar.

In these ways, the imaging was something I was immediately comfortable with and inclined to have “good feelings” about; they formed a seductive landscape.

The design of the extended starship in Avatar reminded me of the ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

Silent Running is a story that occurs before Avatar – In Silent Running, the “wild” world has been sent offworld into ships for its own protection. Of course, as soon as it became economically burdensome, the wild world bottled up in these ships is disposed of like so much useless baggage. Avatar talks about how the world the humans come from isn’t green – how it is dead and grey. That would be the world after Silent Running, and like Silent Running, whose name reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both films are warnings about the predations of industrial civilisation. Silent Running shows the imprisonment of the wild world, and its execution at the hands of capital. Avatar shows the pillaging of nature to feed the industrial war machine, as symbolised by the RDA corp. and the military goons it has brought along. In this way, I think Avatar is much more direct and accurate – Silent Running is a despairing work with a poignant ending of doom: a small robot must take care of the last remaining forest. In Avatar, direct action on the part of the Pandorans changes things and even defeats the industrial war machine (IWM).

In Avatar, the industrial war machine is only defeated when two things occur: the Na’Vi collectively band together and take up violent resistance to the IWM, and when knowledge of the Other is communicated and integrated into the world data system of the living Pandora planet. This idea of Pandora as a living planet reminded me of the film Solaris, first by Tarkovsky and then by Soderburg as produced by Cameron – only without the tedious psychology of the films or the book. Communication is a critical point in this film, and it is also important in my view of this film as an object in society.

This brings me to the essential contradiction of Avatar. The film is an extremely expensive, complicated, ultra-high technology story whose very existence is predicated on the industrial extraction and processing of resources that are, for all practical purposes, irreplaceable.  The story it tells is how a society based on such principles is, by even a cursory analysis, inherently evil and self-destructive. Evil, in that it practices direct violence upon those who stand between the IWM and the resources it requires. Self-destructive, as discussed earlier: the planet Earth in the year setting of the film (2154)  is a grey and dying place. Also, the system is logically self-destructive: such systems require continuous exponential growth; growth that is simply impossible on a finite planet in a materially finite universe.

So, here we are faced with a film, a commodity, that points directly at the industrial system that spawned it. It says that collective action can stop the unrelenting madness of the IWM, even as it is a product of the very same system. Just as the Na’Vi will never leave the Home Tree voluntarily, the IWM will no surrender peacefully. The IWM must simply be destroyed, which brings us to some rather interesting conclusions. The film takes place on Pandora. The story of Pandora is well known, so I will simply note that the result of Pandora’s foolishness was that while she unleashed all manner of madness upon the world, we still retain Hope.

Derrick Jensen’s essay in the book The Future of Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. 2007.), titled “Beyond Hope”, he directly attacks the notion of hope in our present circumstances:

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held  among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in mis fortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power ssurely as a belief in some distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more thana secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.

… hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

His is one particular angle on hope, one vision of Pandora. He accurately critiques the common notion of hope, one I frequently hear from students when they say “give me some hope.” Counter to both my students and Jensen, I prefer the idea of hope as articulated by James Howard Kunstler:

“and a lot of time, college kids say ‘can’t you give me some hope?’ Can’t you give me some hope. Well, here’s the deal. I’m not a hope dispenser, OK? You have to generate the hope. It’s got to come from you. And the way you generate it is by proving to yourself that you’re competent people, that you can deal successfully with the circumstances and the changes that reality is sending to you. That you’re successfully negotiating your living arrangement and your reality. And that you’re paying attention to the tasks that need to be done in your society. And you’re not just relying on wishful thinking and waiting to win the lottery, or sitting around thinking you’re going to get something for nothing, or wishing upon a star. People who are generating hope are the people who understand the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.”

I agree with Kunstler more than Jansen, in that Kunstler is re-defining hope for the age we are in, and giving us a process for creating hope. And it is that sense of hope that is demonstrated in Avatar. The Na’Vi band together and DO SOMETHING. Their cause is hopeless – they cannot successfully fight the blitzkrieg of the IWM, and their casualties are huge. The Na’Vi are only saved when the “Cavalry Arrives” in an inversion of the Cowboys and Indians.

Here, the indigenous Na’Vi (the “Indians”) are fighting the Cowboys. Normally, in the Western Genre, the Cowboys are faced by a brutal and implacable enemy in the Indians, and are saved at the last minute by the U.S. Military  – the Cavalry comes to save the day. In Avatar, the cavalry is the biosphere itself coming to the aid of the Indians, and the Cowboys, the IWM, are the implacable and brutal enemy. This inversion is underlined in the casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. She is a human – a member of the invasion force. An Alien. But she is an Alien who cares about those she has invaded, unlike Weaver’s foe in the film, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.), which was an implacable and brutal enemy. In both films she is employed by an interstellar corporation. In both films she is an invader of an alien world. In Alien, we are asked to sympathise with her and her invading team sent there to mine ore. In Avatar, we are asked to sympathise with her as she attempts to help the Na’Vi, while despising her “team”, the RDA corporation who sent them to Pandora to mine ore.

The success of the Na’Vi is predicated on the arrival of the Cavalry – the giant and ferocious animals that are commanded to come to the aid of the Na’Vi by Eywa, the Mother Goddess of the Na’Vi. Eywa was informed of the peril of the situation by Jake Sully in his Avatar form. Dr Augustine’s character had died and her memories absorbed into a kind of spiritual database in the The Tree of Souls. Examining Augustine’s mind and her memories of the devastated Earth and the brutality of the IWM, allowed Eywa to understand how desperate the situation was. The war was won through information that allowed for the  amassing of forces significant enough to repel the invasion.

So what message does this film have for us, today?

1. The destruction of the IWM can only be accomplished through direct action.
2. Key to this is the acquisition of substantial forces, which is accomplished through communication.
3. Hope (Pandora’s gift) is possible, however, it requires an enormous amount of work.

From Kunstler, we understand that it is precisely this work that creates the hope most needed in these desperate times, as civilisation faces the greatest transition and crisis it has ever faced in 10,000 years of indoor living, and humanity faces its greatest challenge to its very survival in 70,000 years.

This leads to the Necessary Contradiction of Avatar, and it is an instance of the Necessary Contradiction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as Avatar is simply an instance of ICT.

Per a Fox spokesman in an article by David Patten, Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million and an estimated $150 million for marketing, for a total of $387 million. To illustrate the size of that sum, For FY 2009, the budget for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was only $155 million. To fund this film, directly out of pocket, every man woman and child in the USA would have to pay $1.27. Obviously, this endeavor is something that American society deems to be of some importance, as it is willing to invest such significant sums in its development. Its development is that of a media commodity, one with significant and rapid profitability potential.

Media commodities exist in a commodity culture – the devices and systems that the media commodity is made on and distributed through are also commodities. These commodities are only possible through industrial production means and methods,and the resources that go into these systems are subject to thermodynamic losses and material dispersion. These systems, as commodities, exist in a system predicated on continuous growth. Any continuous growth operates by exponential mathematics and can be called exponential growth. Exponential growth, as it requires continuous exponential resource acquisition, is simply unsustainable on a finite planet.

In Avatar, the Earth of 2154 was unable to acquire a critical resource, comically named “unobtainium“. It is the exploitation of unobtainium – valued at $20 million a kilo – that has brought RDA corporation to Pandora, and put RDA and the IWM it is part of in opposition to the interests of the Na’Vi.

Science Fiction is often not about any actual future – it is usually a commentary on the present, and Avatar is no exception. As much as it is a classic tale of imperialism, restating the theme of “Dances with Wolves”, given the contemporary crises of peak oil, the impending peak of phosphorus and other critical materials, and the continuing growth of the human population creating a perilous condition of overshoot, films that engage the issues of peak oil, the disaster that is suburbia, the unsustainability of civilisation, or, if the film asks, “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Then we need to look at them differently, as all entertainment (ICT) systems are intimately connected to some of the most rapacious and destructive resource acquisition systems on earth, as well as being directly a creature and critical path creator of contemporary globalist economic systems. It is important to connect entertainment and ICT. Since the digitalisation of culture all such devices require electronic components and computational facilities, and these components and facilities are made from materials all over the globe, and the co-ordination of the production of these materials, their processing, and final manufacture into ICT commodities require the movement of digital data via ICT, we can only see ICT as both creature / creation of the global industrial war machine and its critical path creator, as without ICT, the co-ordination and manufacture of these globalised ICT systems would simply be impossible. As these systems are identical in both nature and function (a computer is a computer is a computer) we can only see our contemporary entertainment networks as creations of the IWM. The linkages between the I and the WM are well detailed by other theorists (viz. Virilio, Hardt, Negri, DeLanda, Jensen, Zerzan, and many others) and I don’t think it necessary to detail that here.

From this, ICT – as a critical path component of the IWM – brings this weight to any content it provides. So, a film, such as Avatar, that is critical of this relation, is then subjected to charges of hypocrisy. I do not agree with such charges. In fact, I stand opposed to such charges, and have put them into what I mentioned earlier: the Necessary Contradiction of ICT. It is not that  ICT embodies this contradiction (which it does, but not my point) as much as that it is necessary that we maintain ICT, even as ICT is such a destructive system to the earth and is part and parcel of the IWM. So, even as we decry the ongoing ecocide, we use ICT to decry the ecocide at the same time ICT is central to the ongoing ecocide.

Now, this is nothing new – above are links to media critical of the IWM, and you are presently reading some.

This leads to other ideas I have about the future of ICT and its relationship to society, but that is beyond this particular writing. All societies communicate with the systems they have at hand. Our system is predicated on the IWM, therefore, our communications are complicit to the actions of the IWM, even if they are inimical to the interests of the IWM. Avatar brings an anti-industrial message in the most advanced industrial method possible: large scale 3D digital cinema. Avatar is a product of the IWM, even as it satirises the IWM. This contestation leads to complex results: Avatar could be seen as Hollywood greenwashing, or the first blockbuster film celebrating the end of Industrial Civilisation, or, and this is very likely true: it is both.

Stuart Hall discussed these negotiated relationships people have with media, but this was largely around issues of content. Now we are faced with a radicalised McLuhanism, where the medium IS the message, and the medium is part and parcel, creature and creator, of the problem itself. Organised Networks rely on the technology developed by the IWM for their existence. At the Internet as Playground And Factory Conference in November 09, Christian Fuchs talked about a communist ICT infastructure. While an admirable goal, I don’t think it is either possible (politically or materially) or likely (due to the exigencies of resource extraction). This is a longer discussion that looks into an inherent weakness in Leftist theory and praxis, but the important point is to get the conversations started.

Avatar, a piece of blockbuster entertainment that brandishes a theme of anti-industrialism, and prescribes violent and bloody opposition to the IWM is, at root, entertainment. A fun story. However, given the crises we face, and the gathering storms of catastrophe on the horizon, its ecological message needs to be amplified and brought into public awareness. We, as a society, must make plans for a very different sort of existence in the next few decades, and use this huge transition as an opportunity to create a better, more humane and caring society. The easy road is one we have seen before in Rome, Central America, and Easter Island, and that road is a very sad and lonely Road. Avatar is deeply flawed in many respects (the reliance on Joseph Campbell formulae, the music was awful, the acting was wooden, and the story was predictable) but it stands in opposition to many other great Science Fiction Films. In 1984, the people are victims. In Blade Runner, the people are victims, even or especially when they’re artificial people. In 2001, Bowman is basically on a big ride – he has little agency. In Alien, we empathise with a crew who went someplace they had no business being. In Slient Running agency proves futile, and the biosphere is left in the hands of a small robot. In the Andromeda Strain, people are just disease vectors and victims. In Stalker, the Room in the Zone is all powerful, and personal agency is used against the agent. In Avatar, the people,as symbolised by the Na’Vi, rise up and smash the invading Industrial War Machine.

That they only succeed through the intercession of a “goddess” brings it to an interesting point, as the “goddess” is actually a material fact – it’s an organic data base held by the biosphere itself. It is the biosphere, the moon of Pandora istelf tht destroys the IWM on Pandora, and it is the biosphere on earth that wil smash the IWM on Earth, as we hit the wall of Peak Everything, and civilisation transitions to its next phase. Luckily we have had the luxury of the Golden Age of petroleum,  and we have seen glimpses of fairness and justice, and we need to preserve these ideas through the transition and build a better society on the other side. It may well prove to be a neolithic society, but the lives lived in it need not be nasty, brutish, and short.

My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

I wrote a response to Shaviro’s excellent analysis of a conference he attended that featured Zizek and Badiou.

It follows, with a few modifications:

Henry Warwick says:
March 15, 2009 at 10:47 pm

I would like to point out that capitalism has always operated at the expense of the commons. It is why the biosphere is as utterly screwed as it is.

From my research and perspective, contemporary capitalism is no more or less direct in its rapacious greed to ruin the world – to chew rocks and spit nails, computers, automobiles, plastic corn forks, and those stupid little cups you get to hold ketchup. God I hate those things.

Early capitalism took the most immediate and local “Commons”, and the result were the Enclosure Acts forcing land into the hands of the rich and the peasants into cities to work at factories. The Enclosures effectively removed the Commons from existence.

In North America in 1492 Europeans found 24,709,000 km^2 of “Commons”. Instead of peasants feeding and watering their livestock on it, they found several civilisations of Natives who had been using the land for tens of thousands of years. Like the peasants of the UK, they were quickly forced off their land to make way for European farmers, soon followed by Industrial machinery and shopping malls and the “beautiful new Trail Of Tears golf course”. Sometimes I wonder how much of the Enclosure Acts and their techniques were results of the North American colonial experiment.

So, Enclosures and Invasions provided land based capitalism the raw materials. Then, the metals and fossil fuels provided by the theft of the land, in turn provided the energy and resources to create much more complex social and technical organisations like the interweb thingie.

Frankly, I do not see the pollution in, say, China, as Chinese pollution, or, the exploitation of workers in China or Malaysia as Chinese or Malaysian exploitation. I see it as Western and American. This is my reasoning:

I own a factory here in Canada. We make Canadian Widgets for Canadians. Wages in Canada are not cheap and business taxes are tough here, so I relocate the factory to some banana republic, like, Oooh, Alabama where unions are weak. And set up factory there. And so the money flows from Canadian pockets to me and I send off a pile of it to Alabama to keep the Widgets flowing. Then I talk with a Chinese gentleman who tells me I can make Canadian Widgets in China for 1/10 the price, and he’ll help me set it up. Next thing you know, a bunch of Alabamians are unemployed and I have a factory going in China, stinkin’ the place up with pollution making my Canadian Widgets.

So, is it Chinese pollution? If I hadn’t been able to move the factories out of Canada, the pollution never would have left Canada, so I would argue, no, it is Canadian pollution that has been exported to China. In this way, the entire planet is rendered a “Commons” that is then cut up and divided for the sake of capital and profit. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) doesn’t make it “more direct” than before. If you were a peasant in the Lake District in 1710, and some sheriff came by saying “Sorry lad – but you’ll have to give up the farm and move to Liverpool, and if you don’t it’s off to jail with you, and you haven’t but nowt to say about it, so go along quiet like.” that’s pretty direct, IMHO, and there isn’t much more direct than that.

The creation of Immaterial Production was only possible with the energetic and materials production that is presently available. This is prima facie correct. The real problem is the irreversible transition to lower energy states and degraded materials conditions that will avail in the not so distant future. Can such a civilisation exist?

Some argue, no: we are going to go blindly off a cliff like the Reindeer on St. Matthew Island, where when they were introduced in 1944, their numbers increased increased from 29 animals to 6,000 by 1963 but then underwent a die-off the following winter to less than 50 animals from a collapse of the food supply and within a few decades had completely died out.

Most of these theorists (Hardin, Duncan, Bartlett) figure it won’t be a one year collapse, but perhaps a one or two generation (20 – 40 year) collapse beginning with the collapse of oil exports sometime in the 2010s/2020s.

The destruction of the “Commons” for the vanity of the ruling class is also seen as a driving factory in the collapse of Easter Island. The Commons in that case was the forest. They cut down all the trees and within a few generations their population collapsed into constant warfare and cannibalism.

Others, such as myself, see a die off as well, but not over a period of 40 years – more likely 100 – 200 years, depending on how stupid people are.

From my perspective, the supposed qualitative differences between production from land capital and Immaterial Production from digital infrastructure are not of real significance, nor is one more immediate and direct than the other. You still have the freedom to starve.

Freedom, by Art Bears:

After this I saw multitudes
Forced from the land,
Cleared for the wool.
Dispossessed, refugees,
Who were told
To be free -
Free to starve,
Or to Slave;
free to choose
A or B, as we offered.
To labour or die!

I saw cities explode with
This freedom, and
Covered my eyes!

I would submit that present capitalism is faced with several big problems:

1. An imminent and permanent decline in total energy production. Work requires energy. No energy, no work. no work, no profit, no profit – bye bye capitalism… The top of the elite has been well aware of this problem for a number of years, but really starting with Laherrere and Campbell’s article in March 1998 Scientific American on the imminent loss of cheap petroleum resources. Note, Matthew Simmons, a leading figure in Energy depletion analysis, was a key energy advisor to the Cheney Administration.

2. The collapse of many basic materials. Many elements in groups 10, 11, and 12 of the periodic table are especially stressed. GeoDestinies by Walter Youngquist provides more than enough info on this. My understanding is he is going to republish it with updated info soon. It’s not for happy making.

3. The inversion of Jevon’s paradox, where rather than conservation only resulting in increased use of resources and economic growth, economic growth will only be predicated on the conservation of resources at a rate greater than the loss of energy from the system. I think I have a PhD waiting for me in there somewhere…unless….

4. Even though ICT exists at the highest energy and resource level, it will be maintained long beyond its sustainability inflection point as its effects in providing data and information and pacifying billions with entertainment is worth the loss of resources, as it helps inform and temper society as civilisation skitters into what is shaping up to be a trainwreck of a transition to a sustainable society. hmmmm… that sounds more interesting….

You wrote: But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder.

and I agree with you that their hopes are unfounded. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was only possible when the objective conditions existed such that the reproduction of labour in a (nascent) capitalist system was possible. HOW people worked and survived and how this work was financed (both in terms of dollars and resources) had to come prior to any actual “capitalist” formations. The Romans had factories to make bread. HUGE factories that ran off water wheels. We don’t talk about Rome as some ancient capitalist state. And even if a Roman said “hey – we have factories and we are creating a new class of people enslaved to our machines and we use huge sums of money to finance this factory – let’s call ourselves capitalists!!!” They’d say he was crazy and feed him to the lions.

Same with “communism”. you’re not going to get communism out of computer networks. Networks can be used for progressive ideas, gestures, and programs, (viz Rossiter and Organized Networks) but these machines are made by giant corporations and only exist from the insane destruction of our ecosystem. When we can figure out how to make computers out of sand and sea water (two things I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of) and assembled by people who do so voluntarily for the joy of building them – no – I don’t see this as any kind of a stage for communism. Quite the contrary….

Monday, December 04, 2006
Crusade, Collapse, ‘n’ Stuff…

Our feerlez leedor had the unsurprising lack of intellect to brush the American response to the struggles in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Crusade. This puts an artificial superstructural excuse on a much more fundamental and dire grab for resources – much like painting lipstick on a pig.

Crusade is irrelevant.

What matters are resources and the control and production of them.

The vagaries of culture are simply accidents of history. If Mohammed had convinced millions of people of atheism, or if the Xians hadn’t completely mangled the golden rule from a double negative that encourages passivity to a double positive that recommends interference, I am sure the events would have played out differently, but the fundamentals would still have been the same.

What we are facing is something quite different.

If one insists on using the lens of Crusade, then one can see that the west seeks hegemony over the oil that the Islamic locals now enjoy.

As I said, I don’t think it’s relevant. Also, I am uncertain as to whether it is actual or reasonable to think of a Western Roman “collapse”, as much as it was a strategic withdrawal by the elite to more profitable places. Constantine could see, from his heinously expensive wars in Gaul, that Western Europe was a dud – a money pit, a black hole where wealth gets poured and little else comes back. In energistic terms, it had a negative ER/EI – Energy Return divided by Energy Invested. He went broke chasing the barbarian army around France, and converted to Christianity to loosen up the funds in a dominantly Christian run Treasury. This insight ran a hundred years earlier than Constantine – to Emperor Diocletian who initiated the divided between eastern and western Roman Empires.

And every rich family in Rome with any sense at all invested in the east. West of Roman Power? Celts. Illiterate pagan “savages”. To the north? Picts. Nutty people from Scotland who painted themselves blue, which gets them all hopped up and crazy. And the Northeast was populated by Huns and Goths and other unsavoury groups. To the South? The Sea, and beyond the sea? Excellent farms hard up against the largest desert on the planet. To the East? All The Money In The World. Big Rivers, and the ancient civilisations of what is now Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the Silk Road through Afghanistan… Let’s see, Celts vs. Greeks. Picts vs. India. Goths vs. Persians. Hmmmm. Not a hard choice to make there!

Within 200 years, Rome was done, but the Empire lived on: a few hundred years later it was still enough of a potent social notion that Charlemagne crowned himself the Holy Roman Emperor….

From a post in a Bay Area Energy group, by Dave Fridley, primary author of the SF City Council Depletion Protocol Study Proclamation (who deserves a medal, IMHO):

“In Roman times, 85-90% of the population were the energy producers–that is, the farmers–whose surplus energy supported the 10-15% of the population (including the emperor, army, musicians, artists, vagabonds, merchants and so forth) who were not directly involved in energy production. In the US today, 3% of the population (and vast amounts of fossil fuels) provides the surplus to support the 97% of the population not directly involved in energy production. In that regard, only the “elite” of the empire would have even noticed a material change with ‘collapse’.”

Today, North Americans and Europeans are the elites. Again: Fridley writes:

“Although some Roman historians lamented the passing of the Republic (which lasted for about 400 years–longer than ours–til about 40 BC), I’ve never read anything of a self-aware group that looked at the material conditions of the empire and predicted collapse over some centuries in the future. That, I think,would be pretty much unlikely at the time, since in Western civilizations, at least, it wasn’t until the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 that we ever viewed the future as a better place than the past, and thus see decline as something odd. Before then, the “Golden Age” of man–what civilizations aspired to, were always those of the past, and history was considered a process of degeneration. With this kind of world view, what exactly would “collapse” mean to one of the elite Romans and how exactly would it have mattered to the 90% of the population who lived in stasis?”

It’s also important to remember why the Romans would even bother invading England and Wales… Why? Tin. the Phoenicians were in Wales 1500bce. At the time, there was so much tin in Wales, it came up out of the ground in extremely rich ores of black, almost purely metallic, material. It was harvested and sent back to Phoenicia to make bronze. The Romans were Iron Age people, but bronze was still a vital metal, and tin had many other purposes. The production of tin peaked during Roman times and went into depletion. England became worth less to the Romans, and yet another reason to abandon Western Europe.

So, to talk of a “collapse” of the Roman empire, as Fridley notes, is an act of 20/20 hindsight. After Constantine gave up on it, it took centuries for Rome to be sacked and leveled by the people it had violently oppressed. The Romans had no sense of a “utopian future”, so calamity was always the word of the day.

Again Fridley:

“Compare this as well to the worldview of the Chinese, who developed a sophisticated view of rise and fall that came from thousands of years of dynasties rising then collapsing. To a Chinese, this was a natural phenomenon, and they created a whole phenomenology around it, including the concept of “mandate of heaven” (tianming) that gave the emperor his right to rule, and the withdrawal of the mandate that led to the collapse of the dynasty, usually indicated by natural disasters. It survived to the 20th century even…the massive Tangshan earthquake of July 1976 was commonly seen as the event that withdrew the mandate of heaven from Chairman Mao, and indeed, he died 2 months later and his regime overthrown.”

And a few years later the post-punk music combo The Gang of Four would sing:

Out on the street: assassinate all of them
look so desperate declare blood war
on the bourgeois state too!
Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen
The corpse is a new personality
Ionic charge brings immortality
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!

Fridley continues:

“…Kunstler (I believe) had a good insight into this as well. He remarked on the phenomenon of “temporal amnesia”–the fact that we forget how things were after a period of change, such as living in the same place for a long time. This building is replaced. Those trees are planted. Social security benefits are reduced. Copays go up. Food prices creep up. After 10 years, things are materially different, but do you really remember how it used to be? Over several hundred years of collapse, who in Rome or Mesopotamia or any of the other major civilizations that collapsed have had the historical context to talk about ‘collapse’?”

What we have, and the romans didn’t have, are the basic laws of physics that govern all energetic systems. One big rule is: you can’t get more energy out of a system than what is already there. There is no energy fairy. When most work is done by hand, your farmers are the energy producers. When most work is done by hand, most work is in energy production.

Another big rule is: In a closed system, energy is never lost, it simply degrades in quality (thermodynamics – entropy).

These facts speak far beyond any localised temporal curiosities of “culture” or “religion” or any quibbling about that. It’s all really very simple: look at yeast in a sugar/water solution. Do the math. The earth’s carrying capacity for humans has been exceeded (youngquist: Geodestinies). the remaining conflicts of civilisation will be over the remaining energy stores and metal deposits (Klare: Resource Wars) The total energy content of society will retreat. Per capita energy and resource consumption peaked in the early 1980s (per Colin Campbell). The west has been innovating to do more with less. however, this cannot continue indefinitely (see first big rule). The non-west (the so-called South) has been bearing the brunt of it all and if resources reduce too quickly, many of those nations will go into a Malthusian die off. Some (east Africa) already have: declining rainfall and increased population have produced a “Malthusian” situation where pressures on a less-productive resource base have exploded into conflict per understandingsudan.org), and some are quickly descending (Nigeria – New Yorker Article by George Packer – Lagos as the model of the city of the 21st century).

Without natural gas, there will be no miracleGro and the productivity of the planet’s farms will drop dramatically. Richer nations will have older populations and more resources to feed their people. The rest won’t and will die off. Nations with especially abundant food resources (such as N. America) will be using substantial amounts of food for fuel to power their heavy transport systems (trucks, trains, aircraft, mining equipment). Eventually that will be abandoned, due to population pressures.

Nations of the middle east, predominantly Islamic, will face an even tougher time – similar to those presently faced in Africa.

Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (former Prime minister of UAE):
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

Crusade models don’t really work: they presume the primacy of the superstructural cultural machine as guides for substructural resource exploitation. In fact, the superstructural issues (crusade, war against terror, jihad, “somebody’s got a bad case of the Mondays”, rock and roll, hip hop TV whatever…) is actually just the excuses proffered by the elites to motivate the workers to act against their own self interests and murder other members of the working/peasant class, in order that resources may be acquired in order to maintain the facade of civilisation that maintains socio-political hierarchies as linguistic amplifications of the social dominance patterns common to primates.

Thursday, September 28, 2006
Klare on Gas Prices

I have read Prof. Michael Klare’s book, Resource Wars, and found it to be a brilliant examination of exactly why we see the kinds of wars and conflicts today. If you haven’t read it, you can order it most anywhere.

The following article was written by Klare – it was emailed to me on a list to which I subscribe, so I am uncertain of its original sourcing. This article describes why we are seeing the low gasoline prices and the landscape of the immediate future of petroleum production. I agree with most of what is in the article. I disagree with his final point, “it will never get truly better until we develop an entirely new energy system based on petroleum alternatives and renewable fuels.” I don’t know what he means by “better”, so I am uncertain as to whether I can agree with that statement. but otherwise this is a smart and incisive article. enjoy.

What Do Falling Oil Prices Tell Us about War with Iran, the Elections, and Peak-Oil Theory

By Michael T. Klare

What the hell is going on here? Just six weeks ago, gasoline prices at the pump were hovering at the $3 per gallon mark; today, they’re inching down toward $2 — and some analysts predict even lower numbers before the November elections. The sharp drop in gas prices has been good news for consumers, who now have more money in their pockets to spend on food and other necessities — and for President Bush, who has witnessed a sudden lift in his approval ratings.

Is this the result of some hidden conspiracy between the White House and Big Oil to help the Republican cause in the elections, as some are already suggesting? How does a possible war with Iran fit into the gas-price equation? And what do falling gasoline prices tell us about “peak-oil” theory, which predicts that we have reached our energy limits on the planet?

Since gasoline prices began their sharp decline in mid-August, many pundits have attempted to account for the drop, but none have offered a completely convincing explanation, lending some plausibility to claims that the Bush administration and its long-term allies in the oil industry are manipulating prices behind the scenes. In my view, however, the most significant factor in the downturn in prices has simply been a sharp easing of the “fear factor” — the worry that crude oil prices would rise to $100 or more a barrel due to spreading war in the Middle East, a Bush administration strike at Iranian nuclear facilities, and possible Katrina-scale hurricanes blowing through the Gulf of Mexico, severely damaging offshore oil rigs.

As the summer commenced and oil prices began a steep upward climb, many industry analysts were predicting a late summer or early fall clash between the United States and Iran (roughly coinciding with a predicted intense hurricane season). This led oil merchants and refiners to fill their storage facilities to capacity with $70-80 per barrel oil. They expected to have a considerable backlog to sell at a substantial profit if supplies from the Middle East were cut off and/or storms wracked the Gulf of Mexico.

Then came the war in Lebanon. At first, the fighting seemed to confirm such predictions, only increasing fears of a region-wide conflict, possibly involving Iran. The price of crude oil approached record heights. In the early days of the war, the Bush administration tacitly seconded Israeli actions in Lebanon, which, it was widely assumed, would lay the groundwork for a similar campaign against military targets in Iran. But Hezbollah’s success in holding off the Israeli military combined with horrific television images of civilian casualties forced leaders in the United States and Europe to intercede and bring the fighting to a halt.

We may never know exactly what led the White House to shift course on Lebanon, but high oil prices — and expectations of worse to come — were surely a factor in administration calculations. When it became clear that the Israelis were facing far stiffer resistance than expected, and that the Iranians were capable of fomenting all manner of mischief (including, potentially, total havoc in the global oil market), wiser heads in the corporate wing of the Republican Party undoubtedly concluded that any further escalation or regionalization of the war would immediately push crude prices over $100 per barrel. Prices at the gas pump would then have been driven into the $4-5 per gallon range, virtually ensuring a Republican defeat in the mid-term elections. This was still early in the summer, of course, well before peak hurricane season; mix just one Katrina-strength storm in the Gulf of Mexico into this already unfolding nightmare scenario and the fate of the Republicans would have been sealed.

In any case, President Bush did allow Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to work with the Europeans to stop the Lebanon fighting and has since refrained from any overt talk about a possible assault on Iran. Careful never explicitly to rule out the military option when it comes to Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, since June he has nonetheless steadfastly insisted that diplomacy must be given a chance to work. Meanwhile, we have made it most of the way through this year’s hurricane season without a single catastrophic storm hitting the U.S.

For all these reasons, immediate fears about a clash with Iran, a possible spreading of war to other oil regions in the Middle East, and Gulf of Mexico hurricanes have dissipated, and the price of crude has plummeted. On top of this, there appears to be a perceptible slowing of the world economy — precipitated, in part, by the rising prices of raw materials — leading to a drop in oil demand. The result? Retailers have abundant supplies of gasoline on hand and the laws of supply and demand dictate a decline in prices.

Finding Energy in Difficult Places

How long will this combination of factors prevail?

Best guess: The slowdown in global economic growth will continue for a time, further lowering prices at the pump. This is likely to help retailers in time for the Christmas shopping season, projected to be marginally better this year than last precisely because of those lower gas prices.

Once the election season is past, however, President Bush will have less incentive to muzzle his rhetoric on Iran and we may experience a sharp increase in Ahmadinejad- bashing. If no progress has been made by year’s end on the diplomatic front, expect an acceleration of the preparations for war already underway in the Persian Gulf area (similar to the military buildup witnessed in late 2002 and early 2003 prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq). This will naturally lead to an intensification of fears and a reversal of the downward spiral of gas prices, though from a level that, by then, may be well below $2 per gallon.

Now that we’ve come this far, does the recent drop in gasoline prices and the seemingly sudden abundance of petroleum reveal a flaw in the argument for this as a peak-oil moment? Peak-oil theory, which had been getting ever more attention until the price at the pump began to fall, contends that the amount of oil in the world is finite; that once we’ve used up about half of the original global supply, production will attain a maximum or “peak” level, after which daily output will fall, no matter how much more is spent on exploration and enhanced extraction technology.

Most industry analysts now agree that global oil output will eventually reach a peak level, but there is considerable debate as to exactly when that moment will arise. Recently, a growing number of specialists — many joined under the banner of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil — are claiming that we have already consumed approximately half the world’s original inheritance of 2 trillion barrels of conventional (i.e., liquid) petroleum, and so are at, or very near, the peak-oil moment and can expect an imminent contraction in supplies.

In the fall of 2005, as if in confirmation of this assessment, the CEO of Chevron, David O’Reilly, blanketed U.S. newspapers and magazines with an advertisement stating, “One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over… Demand is soaring like never before… At the same time, many of the world’s oil and gas fields are maturing. And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically. When growing demand meets tighter supplies, the result is more competition for the same resources.”

But this is not, of course, what we are now seeing. Petroleum supplies are more abundant than they were six months ago. There have even been some promising discoveries of new oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico, while — modestly adding to global stockpiles — several foreign fields and pipelines have come on line in the last few months, including the $4 billion Baku-Tbilisi- Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, which will bring new supplies to world markets. Does this indicate that peak-oil theory is headed for the dustbin of history or, at least, that the peak moment is still safely in our future?

As it happens, nothing in the current situation should lead us to conclude that peak-oil theory is wrong. Far from it. As suggested by Chevron’s O’Reilly, remaining energy supplies on the planet are mainly to be found “in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically.” This is exactly what we are seeing today.

For example, the much-heralded new discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron’s Jack No. 2 Well, lies beneath five miles of water and rock some 175 miles south of New Orleans in an area where, in recent years, hurricanes Ivan, Katrina, and Rita have attained their maximum strength and inflicted their greatest damage on offshore oil facilities. It is naive to assume that, however promising Jack No. 2 may seem in oil-industry publicity releases, it will not be exposed to Category 5 hurricanes in the years ahead, especially as global warming heats the Gulf and generates ever more potent storms. Obviously, Chevron would not be investing billions of dollars in costly technology to develop such a precarious energy resource if there were better opportunities on land or closer to shore — but so many of those easy-to-get- at places have now been exhausted, leaving the company little choice in the matter.

Or take the equally ballyhooed BTC pipeline, which shipped its first oil in July, with top U.S. officials in attendance. This conduit stretches 1,040 miles from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, passing no less than six active or potential war zones along the way: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan; Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia; the Muslim separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia; and the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Is this where anyone in their right mind would build a pipeline? Not unless you were desperate for oil, and safer locations had already been used up.

In fact, virtually all of the other new fields being developed or considered by U.S. and foreign energy firms — ANWR in Alaska, the jungles of Colombia, northern Siberia, Uganda, Chad, Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East — are located in areas that are hard to reach, environmentally sensitive, or just plain dangerous. Most of these fields will be developed, and they will yield additional supplies of oil, but the fact that we are being forced to rely on them suggests that the peak-oil moment has indeed arrived and that the general direction of the price of oil, despite period drops, will tend to be upwards as the cost of production in these out-of-the-way and dangerous places continues to climb.

Living on the Peak-Oil Plateau

Some peak-oil theorists have, however, done us all a disservice by suggesting, for rhetorical purposes, that the peak-oil moment is… well, a sharp peak. They paint a picture of a simple, steep, upward production slope leading to a pinnacle, followed by a similarly neat and steep decline. Perhaps looking back from 500 years hence, this moment will have that appearance on global oil production charts. But for those of us living now, the “peak” is more likely to feel like a plateau — lasting for perhaps a decade or more — in which global oil production will experience occasional ups and downs without rising substantially (as predicted by those who dismiss peak-oil theory), nor falling precipitously (as predicted by its most ardent proponents).

During this interim period, particular events — a hurricane, an outbreak of conflict in an oil region — will temporarily tighten supplies, raising gasoline prices, while the opening of a new field or pipeline, or simply (as now) the alleviation of immediate fears and a temporary boost in supplies will lower prices. Eventually, of course, we will reach the plateau’s end and the decline predicted by the theory will commence in earnest.

In the meantime, for better or worse, we live on that plateau today. If this year’s hurricane season ends with no major storms, and we get through the next few months without a major blowup in the Middle East, we are likely to start 2007 with lower gasoline prices than we’ve seen in a while. This is not, however, evidence of a major trend. Because global oil supplies are never likely to be truly abundant again, it would only take one major storm or one major crisis in the Middle East to push crude prices back up near or over $80 a barrel. This is the world we now inhabit, and it will never get truly better until we develop an entirely new energy system based on petroleum alternatives and renewable fuels.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and the author of “Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum”, and “Resource Wars, The New Landscape of Global Conflict”.

Copyright 2006 Michael T. Klare

Friday, June 30, 2006
ER/EI

Over the past several weeks I have been rather focussed on ideas regarding Energy Return On Energy Invested, aka EROEI. I prefer the math version, ER/EI, as it is more to the point – it’s a ratio created by a simple division – Take your energy return and divide it by the energy invested. ER divided by EI.

My posts have been sporadic lately as I have moved back across the country, and between the jetlag and exhaustion of re-fitting myself into a more domestic existence, I’ve been keeping a lower profile than usual.

In my thinking, I am wondering if the entire ER/EI question is itself something of a red herring, and that perhaps there needs to be a better understanding of how we use energy in total.

Example: Nuclear power. A limited analysis would say that nuclear power is an extremely energetic system, far in excess per pound of fuel than any other, as (X) tons of plutonium or uranium fuel = (P) watts of power, and that this ratio P/X is rather astounding, hence: Nuclear power is a good value from the understanding of that ratio.

However, as many are quick to point out, there’s a lot more to nuclear power than (X) tons of fuel making (P) watts of energy, as there is the mining and processing of uranium and plutonium – an extremely energetic process. Then there is the building of a nuclear power plant; again, an energetic process. Then there is the amount of energy needed to keep the plant itself running, and the amount of energy needed to remove the fuel and dispose of it, and then, eventually dismantle the radioactive bits of plant itself. This significantly pulls a lot of value out of the X side of the X/P equation…

Then, there is what I’ve been looking at, which significantly impacts that X value as well, and it is what I call “secondary energy costs”. What are these? In the case of Nuclear Power, there’s a bunch of them. Let’s look at a nuke plant in terms of: Construction, Fuel, Maintenance, Fuel Disposal, and Decomissioning. Each of these are fraught with secondary costs.

Construction
The concrete doesn’t appear from nowhere. It has to be mined. The mining equipment requires energy. There are people who need to do the mining, and they have homes and families and these also require energy. The school where the kids go requires energy. The clothing the miners wear is made in factories thatrun on energy, and are shipped to stores in trucks thatuse energy, and the truck itself is made from metals that are mined by other miners who also have energy requirements. And the mining machines are made in factories that use energy and by people who also have energy needs and schools and hospitals and TV sets. And then there is the construction itself – exotic metals, concrete, rebar, all of these things require energy in their mining, processing, and construction, and each step of the way is a factory using energy, and people using energy to go to work in and live near those factories.

Fuel
The development of nuclear fuels is a hazardous and toxic process, and one that is highly energetic. It takes thousands of tons of unranium, and thousands of centrifuges running flat out for days, and huge factories full of raw and waste materials to make, process, and form the fuel for a nuclear power plant. These factories have thousands of workers, and each of them has families and homes and towns and cars and TV sets all needing energy. Then there is the fuel needed to transport the fuel to the plant, and the energy needed to build the machines that transport and store the fuel.

Maintenance
The nuclear power plant has a crew of people – people who are engineers that keep the place running, grounds keepers keeping it nice looking, management personnel to keep things organised and running, and of course, Mr Burns who owns the plant must be kept in the lifestyle to which he has become eminently accustomed, a cleaning crew that takes out the trash and sweeps up, security personnel, and at least one guy named Homer to nap on the job as the core goes critical…

Still, all these people have homes – Homer has Marge, Lisa, Bart, and Maggie. Homer has to drive to work, and that takes energy. He sucks down a foaming frosty mug of Duff Beer at Moe’s Bar and the beer is transported to the bar, the bar requires energy to be built and maintained and power the neon lights, and Homer needs energy to get to Moe’s, wash his clothes, get his kids to school, perm Marge’s hair, etc.

This is all just part of Homer’s life as a worker at the nuke plant, and each plant has many many Homers, and they all need energy as do all of Homer’s friend’s and acquaintances.

Fuel Disposal
Once the fuel is used up, it must be removed and disposed of, requiring no small amount of energy and effort by Homers who are hired to do this sort of thing, and who also have families and homes and cars.

Decomissioning
When the plant is done, it needs to be dismantled and disposed of, and that is also a highly energetic effort…

This deeper analysis points to an odd conclusion – that ER/EI is a relevant equation, but in a mixed fuel economy, it is functionally impossible to tease out accurate numbers, and even when these numbers are teased out, they may be of limited use. Hence ER/EI may not be the important question.

No matter what we do, we use all the energy we’ve got.

(Just as I typed that line, “Corsair” by Boards of Canada came on the random choice of iTunes… man is that creepy…)

I am not certain, but I am fairly well convinced that true ER/EI is not as crazy as an NP-hard problem, but due to the total inter-relatedness and dynamics of society and energy, I am fairly well convinced that an accurate ER/EI analysis is not practically possible.

This is a BIG problem. Pimentel et al have staked their authority on such analysis, and while my extension of the ER/EI analysis only serves their points that alternative energy systems sch as ethanol have very low ER/EI (and my view punches it well below 1:1) it also points out the deep and impenetrable fog at the edges of such analysis, which can be used by all sorts of people to both credit and discredit any given technology.

While symbolic system can be developed to represent these analyses (Odum et al) even these symbolic systems cave under the complexity of dynamic energy allocations and sourcings.

Example: let’s say Homer drives a 1988 Chrysler Imperial to work, and it gets 15 mpg. Sure, his energy source for driving doesn’t require energy from the nuclear plant, and so that energy input is not counted against X, but the pumping of the gas is, as is the electricity the gas station uses. The food may be delivered to the Springfield Safeway by truck, but the Safeway runs on electricity, and Marge’s time spent shopping there uses some portion of that, and that does count against X, as the food she bys there mostly goes into Homer’s gut. And the Dunkin Donuts cooks its donuts using natgas, but the rest of it operates on electricity, and Homer’s donut consumption is some part of that, and that also counts against X. And then, one day, Homer replaces his gas guzzling Imperial with a plug in Hybrid, and now THAT cuts into X.

I don’t see how these dynamic fluctuations can be properly accounted for in any symbolic quantitative system, especially as these dynamic systems influence each other’s behaviour and output. So, Homer and a jillion other Homers get plug in hybrids. These hybrids are more efficient per watt per mile than a gas engine, so it uses fewer watts per mile travelled. Then one day, Homer figures out that he can lose some weight by riding a bike, but he’s too old and fat to get over some of the hills, so he opts for an electric assist bike, which is even MORE efficient with watts per mile travelled, but is slower.

One plug-in Prius equals dozens, if not hundreds, of electric bikes, so the energy embodied and used by one plug-in Prius is radically less than the energy and material that went into building a 1986 Imperial, and the electric bikes (or even trikes) are even more radically efficient, and embody and use even less than a Prius. However, if Homer sells his Imperial and buys a 1996 Geo Metro, he will double (if not triple) his fuel mileage and rather than demand more minerals from the earth to build a new Prius, he will be re-using the minerals someone else demanded from the earth ten years previously, and, in so doing, will be doubling the use of those materials, rather than have them go to the crusher and be recycled at some future date.

The Metro aside, all these electric bikes being pedalled by the Homers at the Burns Nuclear Power Plant and all the electric bikes pedalled by the friends of all the Homers, and all the electric bikes that get the service employees for all the Homers (Moe at the bar, Apu at the QuickieMart, etc.) are powered by the nuke plant, so it affects the ER/EI of the nuke plant, but certainly less than if they had plug-in Priuses.

You get the picture – calculating the ER/EI of a given energy technology is not an exact science, and that is why I wonder if it isn’t something of a red herring.

Basically, I think the question of ER/EI is critical in a general sense, but I do not believe ER/EI can ever get beyond a general or vague number, due to the dynamism and vagaries of its component structures and subsystems.

I may be an artist, and I may be insane, but I am enough of a scientist to appreciate being wrong. Please prove me so.

Thursday, June 15, 2006
A post to a post

I found an interesting blog that I am going to add to my list at right. The writer discusses an article by Smil, and how he misses the point of Peak Oil awareness. Smil does have a point in that there are a number of people who approach this issue like a doomsday cult, but many people approach many valuable ideas in a less than optimal fashion. I posted the following as my response. To see the original post, go here:

http://www.energybrowser.com/

Hi!

Interesting blog, and interesting article. The continuing arguments between cornucopians like Smil, and nihilists like Hanson is, in my not so humble opinion, a significant problem for both sides of the argument.

Smil et al suggest that there will be some kind of an “energy fairy” that will save the day. Hanson et al suggest that not only will there be no “energy fairy”, but we are actually looking at an imminent die-off of catastrophic proportions.

What I have been advocating is a more balanced, middle pillar approach, where neither side of the coin is ignored, but neither side is accepted in total. I do think that technology will provide significant innovations that will help pull the right hand side of the resource depletion curve out a bit. At the same time, I think it is disingenuous to think that we can continue this industrial process of massive over-consumption of resources at the demand of massive over-population indefinitely.

As a consequence, there is a distinctive ideological component to the peak-oil discussion, and these ideological conclusions have very real and far-reaching results in terms of energy policy development and socio-cultural evolution.

Example – a society that is completely dependent on a form of energy that is of a limited variety will die off if they don’t shift to a renewable energy system coupled with social and cultural mores, ethics, values, and preferences that encourages the preservation of the resource base. A society that goes skipping down the lane of cornucopia disregarding the warnings will, eventually, run into a wall and fail. A society that looks at the resources available and then develops systems that can be used for millennia, and sets about developing the social and cultural preferences to enable such a permanent culture, will survive while the other dies off.

The problem is the loss of cheap petroleum energy is a global issue, and will require global solutions, as will the problems of resource depletion, climate change, and over-population in general. And this is where the likes of Smil are actually equally destructive to the likes of Hanson, et al., because following the lead of the nihilists results in paralysis, while the cornucopians advocate the unsustainable status quo.

I’ve also pointed out in my other writings that both sides are necessary – we need the concerned cornucopians to develop the new technologies, just as we need the nihilists to goad society into continuous re-examination of our directions and practices. Good Cop, Bad Cop. The problem is the citizenry of the industrial nations, both older and the newly industrialised, are used to cheap and plentiful energy and have built their expectations and infrastructure around it. These expectations and infrastructure lead to the cultural and social decisions that reinforce those expectations and infrastructure, creating a feedback of reaction and brutality.

The other problem is this: Smil et al are focussed on too short a term, while the nihilists are demanding too short a term. The Cornucopians will come up with technologies to mask the problem, but the fundamentals of expectations and infrastructure will still become increasingly manifest. In the meantime, the cornucopians get to discredit the Nihilists, while the Nihilists become increasingly distressed at the blinkered vision of the Cornucopians. Eventually, it will come to a head, and given the fact that petroleum is a limited resource, and industrial civilisation is structured around it and the society and culture it has produced is also dependent on it, it is, again, disingenuous for the cornucopians to argue for continued expansion of the human project over the back of petroleum.

Therefore, from my perspective, the only rational position is a middle position, one wher ethe dire warnings of the Nihilists are heeded, but immense investment and work should be devoted to the necessary technologies to achieve a smooth transition to a post-carbon society.

It is the cultural and infrastructural character of that society that I believe will prove most critical to the future of civilisation. It is that “criticality” that gives the nihilist position its strength, but it is the optomistic resourcefulness of the technologists and thinkers often found among concerned cornucopians that will manage the transition, as a nihilist position is no better than an unconcerned cornucopian position.

I discuss a lot of these ideas (in fact, I’ll be publishing this post there) on my blog, which is listed as my website. Let me know what you think.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Latest posting…

I posted the following as a comment to another blog:

http://entropyproduction.blogspot.com/2006/05/peak-oil-taxonomy-doombat.html

Where Mr McLeod has fun at the expense of Doomers, calling them Doombats.

My response to his post follows.

I think it is appropriate that I should follow Mr. Mathews’s comments. I would like to add another category, or subcategory, actually. I see myself (generally) in the traditionalist camp, but I am more than anything a realist and agnostic on most issues of metaphysics. Doomers are not: they are True Believers.

What the Doomers do have on their side is a correspondence between their vision and linear prognostication, i.e., IF nothing is done to ameliorate the situation, THEN we’re all cooked.

Once you start introducing variables into the equation, such as the curmudgeonly nurtured technologies that you favour and then combine them with the social and cultural changes I tend to advocate, then the Doomer Argument fails to predict much of anything.

Mr Mathews (with whom I have been in a running argument for the past few years on the Energy Resources Yahoo List) is a dedicated Doomer. Still, a stopped watch is exactly correct at least once a day, and he can speak the truth, and I’ll quote him:

“All species, including the Homo sapiens, will ultimately suffer extinction.”

And right there is his prejudice laid out for all to see: all species must SUFFER extinction. What if there’s no suffering to extinction? What if we evolve ourselves into smarter, incredibly elegant, creatures with superior social and ethical instincts, and it is all handled (at first) by in vitro fertilisation and genetics, so we will literally give birth to homo futuris? How is that (outside of the specious detail of childbirth itself) a SUFFERING extinction in any sense of the word? Not that I expect such a technological solution to human extinction, but what it does show is how in one simple stroke, the Doombat attitudes of the likes of Mr Mathews are simply and completely blown away. And: such a genetic solution actually *could* happen.

Hence, defeating the Doomer Mythos is like dynamiting fish in a barrel – it’s too easy. I’ll quote myself from the Energy Resources List:

“(They) want to spread the end times gospel, like some ecological Jim Joneses. (They) want the drug of (Their) misery to prevail, (They so deeply desire) the addictive and explosive rush of horror one garners from gazing into the abyss to dominate the vision of others who are less inclined to gaze so deeply into the dark.

I too have spent many years looking into the abyss, probably longer than (most of these doomers) have, and I no longer see an abyss. The future is not a black hole. It is transformation. Not to something “better” – it doesn’t really work that way – just something more adapted to the environment that obtains. “

And to the Doomers themselves, I would pose the followling:

“Your moral and ethical charge (as a responsible human being) is to allieviate suffering wher eyou find it. If you find yourself drawn to the suffering itself, then go to the suffering. I urge you to sell your possessions and go to Darfur or Bangladesh or on a more local basis – New Orleans or East LA or Camden NJ. Work with suffering. Work with the horror, and find some meaning in your pampered whiny existence.”

Sometimes I get tired of battling Doombats, but the stakes are far too high. The struggle for a dignified survival for our species is becoming more attenuated with each passing year, and while this seemingly gives more credence to the Doombats, this attenuation will necessarily result in appropriate and reasonable decisions being made by caring and inventive people. We can do it, because we must, and with a combination of technologies (such as you would advocate) and shifts in social and cultural systems (that I would advocate) a reasonable and dignified future can be built.

I also keep a blog on this and related subjects here:

http://early-warning.blogspot. com

I’ll definitely link to yours – kindly reciprocate!

Saturday, March 25, 2006
Cosmic
Some have described the human race as little more than yeast who wear bow ties. While it does go a long way to describing the ramifications and boundaries of human behaviour, it does little to provide solutions. I see it as little more than a meagre rationalistion for fatalism.

Personally, I think consciousness is extremely rare in the universe – lord knows it’s rare enough right here on earth. We have to remember that We Are Part Of The Universe. We are the part that thinks and knows it exists. This means *that the Universe itself is Conscious*. We are conscious and we are part of the universe: QED.

As we know that this consciousness is rare enough even among thinking humans, and is predicated on a vast variety of prerequisites of organic brain chemistry, we really do have a deep and abiding responsibility to keep this little light shining, as it is the one truly noble human function. The Universe lives and experiences itself through us and all sentient creatures. That the Universe will extinguish itself is not relevant: even flowers die. It’s the FLOWERING that matters. As creatures who live in time and are self aware, we bring the universe along with us and are part of its flowering.

I am sure there are other blossoms – what is both amazing and disturbing is how ours has bloomed so quickly. It would be a tragedy for our stem to die and vanish from the great flowering universe.

Buddha knew this: he transmitted his dharma to his successor, Mahakasyapa, by pulling up a flower and twirling it between his fingers.

That’s it: right there. Just like that.

Now, I twirl a flower between my fingers, and smile.

Monday, February 13, 2006
Another conversation
Greetings -

After my last post, I got REALLY sick. Last week SUCKED. I was in bed for three days straight. Now, I’m down to a miserable cough, but that’s a dramatic improvement.

A few years ago, I was posting on the Forums at newspeakdictionary.com under the name “Winston Smith”. I quickly tired of the dominant ideology of the conversation which was often of a rightwing Libertarian bent, and of a pigheaded variety at that.

Every six months or so, I’d go back and check it out, and find nothing improved. Last week, I went and found someone had re-kindled the Peak Oil conversation there – something I had tried to do at least 6 months ago.

A recent exchange went down, where I thought some basic points were covered in a very polite and reasonable way, and I am re-posting that post here. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to comment.

Hi Gold Rust.

I’ll do my best to ’splain answers to your points and questions.

You asked:

I’m not an expert in this or anything, so tell me if I’m wrong – but whats wrong with using solar or geothermal energy to do all that stuff? And who says the ER/EI has to be positive?

OK – sure – this one’s easy.

Let’s say you get (x) units of energy from burning hydrogen (H). But: you need energy to MAKE the H, and that value (due to the laws of physics regarding hydrogen) is *always* greater than (x) units. So, if you are cracking petroleum to get the H (Petroleum is MUCH easier to crack than water, and provides a lot more H per kilo), you’re better off just burning the petroleum. If you’re cracking water, you need electricity. And the electricity you’re using to crack the water comes from somewhere. If it is coming from petroleum, again: you’re better off burning petroleum than using it to make H. However: if you’re using solar power to crack the water to make the H, then you’re technically getting most of the electricity for “Free”. At that point, the ER/EI ratio gets much more favourable, and H makes sense as a kind of chemical battery. The problem is, Solar / Geothermal / Wind / etc. only accounts for a microscopic portion of the planet’s energy production, and this doesn’t account for another monstrous problem: H is extremely low density. To get it to a useful density for transport, it has to be reduced to liquid. The problem with that is it takes enormous amounts of power to liquify H, so we’re back to the ER/EI problem. Also, H is reactive and tends to make containers very brittle, and due to is tiny molecular weight is prone to leak from ANY container. To fight these problems requires more energy, and you’re back to an ugly ugly ER/EI.

ER/EI *must* be positive. Otherwise it’s not a fuel. Think of it like food. If you have food that costs more energy to eat than you get from eating it, you’ll starve. It’s basic physics.

The way I see it happening is, as petro runs low, it will rise in price, forcing people to look into alternative methods, that may not be as effecient at first but will be better than what they are using. It probably won’t be hydrogen, or maybe it won’t be any of the ones you mentioned as alternatives – maybe it will be a combination of several of them.

This explains the failure of “free market” solutions fairly well, from:

KURO5HIN

“We would like to believe that progress into new energy and more efficient use thereof is slow merely because not enough money is being put into it. As the price of oil rises, therefore, more money will go into such research, more progress will be made, and new technology will then be implemented and deployed to preserve our way of life. A common slogan is “the stone age didn’t end for lack of stones, and the oil age won’t end for lack of oil.” This faith is utterly misplaced, and comes from a misunderstanding of the free market.

While facile solutions to our energy predicament may emerge, taking faith in that scenario is foolish. It implies that you believe in the All Too Convenient Anthropic Principle – the principle that the laws of nature are tuned not only to cause the emergence of life on our planet and its evolution to include the appearance of our species, but also that the laws of nature are conducive and will forever be conducive to our species enjoying a Western consumerist lifestyle from now to eternity. Don’t count on it.

Gold Rust then says:

I agree that ethanol could not possibly be a single replacement for petro, but I have no hard time envisioning it in hybrid cars that run on it and solar, etc.

The problem is the production of ethanol requires industrial farming techniques that depend on pertoleum. Also, there is the ethical question re: using food to “bring Muffy to Soccer practice…” Especially as food costs skyrocket (I discuss that below).

I think your problem is that you don’t look at the whole picture – the world isnt going to just wake up one day and say “Oh my gosh, theres no more fossil fuels!” – it will be gradual.

I agree – which is why I am not a “Fast Crash Nihilist” like many peak oil researchers.

As petro becomes less common in the ground, prices will rise – ever heard of supply and demand?

I dismantled that argument with the kuro5hin quote.

Why can’t we just where sweaters in the winter? Thats what they do in Russia, and I still do it today – a sweater can keep you just as warm as a heater, at a fraction of the cost.

I do to. BUT: drive out to some suburb in say, Indiana, and go up to some McMansion – you know – one of those new big ugly houses with the SUVs in the parking lot, and all the lights on – and tell these people (often dupes of the Republican Party) that they

a: have to start wearing sweaters around the house
b: sell their SUV and buy a tiny toyota hybrid, or better yet, a used Toyota Echo, and ride their bicycles as much as they can – get a trailer for the bike and use it to buy things at the market
c: put timers on their lights
d: stop using the gas fireplace, and plant some trees in back for fuel in 15 years, and install a wood burning firebox/stove NOW.
e: stop using a gas range for cooking
f: forget the clothes dryer – set up clothes lines in the back and drying racks in the garage
g: buy a high efficiency front loading washer
h: learn to do the dishes by HAND
i: Abandon the TV set and read books to each other for entertainment, and learn a bunch of card and dice games
j: Install a solar PV panel set up for daytime electricity to power their new hyper efficient refrigerator
k: get used to Much Higher Indoor Temperatures in the summer, because their central AC is done for.
l: Open cans by hand
m: learn to chop food with a knife not a processor
n: learn to COOK food, from raw materials that do not require freezing or refrigeration
o: dedicate a corner of the basement as a root cellar for the winter storage of potatoes, parnsips, turnips, and rudabagas.
p: install a solar hot water heater on their roof
q: start a food garden.

Now, those are just SOME of the things people are going to have to get used to post peak oil. Sweaters in winter are just a tip of the iceberg. The suburbs (at least those that are not on a train line) are completely screwed. The loss of petroleum is going to effect every aspect of modern living, no exceptions, and no sympathy given. It’s going to be, as the book title suggests: A Long Emergency.

Cooking requires relatively little energy it could be supplied to a whole neighborhood by a solar panel or a wind turbine down the street. This obviously wont be the most likely solution, but I don’t think a lot of trouble will be in this area.

Sure. Tell that to the restaurant industry. The shift in cooking and food production will prove to be the most difficult, as it directly impacts everyone – the rich and poor alike will face the same problem. The restaurant industry will shrivel up, but not disappear. See it return to more of a “cafe” system, with electrically heated water for beverages, and wood powered onsite baking. Haybox and sun box cooking will provide more efficient hot dinners but many hours of cooking will reduce capacity and increase expense.

Winston Smith said:

Materials: All our high tech materials are dependent on the long molecular chains so easily produced from Petroleum. Our mining machines are dependent on petroleum.

And Gold Rust asked:

Recycling?

Recycling isn’t permanent. There is continuous loss in recycling due to oxidation of resources. Metals rust, plastics crumble, etc. We’ll be able to mine our landfills for years, but eventually they will also give out. It is the loss of metal resources that threatens industrial civilisation the most in the long term.

If certain steps will be taken, doesn’t it follow that we will continue to take steps to supply people with fuel?

IF and only IF: there is fuel to supply. As we go down the back side of the peak, petroleum will accellerate in price, and the fuel that’s left will be needed to develop more sustainable energy sources. None of the energy sources, outside of fusion, has nearly the power and none, including fusion, has the transportability and density of petroleum.

Basically, we’re looking at the loss of a one time gift of dense, transportable energy, and with it, the certain end of our style of civilisation. Because we use 7 – 10 calories of petroleum for every calorie of food we eat (farm equipment, fertiliser, harvesting equipment, transport to the food processor, transport from food processor to market, energy to keep market open, transport of consumer to and from market) we’re looking at a dramatic loss in the ability for society to feed itself. Example: Almonds. Almost all the almonds consumed in the USA are grown in Southern California (just drive around anywhere outside of Bakersfield – you’ll see). These almonds get to places like MAINE by way of truck. Add a zero to the cost of fuel for the truck and watch almonds get scarce in Maine, quick. Now, do that to the entire food industry, AND combine that stress with ever more mouths to feed from over population. Results: starvation in poorer countries, and massive re-alignment and rationing of the farming system in richer countries to prevent food riots.

Once petroleum is so scarce and expensive, fertilisers will disappear and desertification will rise exponentially. Permaculture farming will be the only sustianable alternative, but the yields aren’t high enough to feed the 10 billion people on the planet. Result? Malthus.

Winston Smith:

I would prefer a Die Down – where we depopulate peacefully and gracefully. But a depopulation is INEVITABLE. It’s not a matter of IF – it’s a question of HOW and WHEN.

and Gold Rust replied:

I quite agree – but HOW, most likely wont be from petro shortages, and WHEN will most likely be… erm, sometime between now and 500 years.

No, it has to be this coming century, and it has to be orderly, peaceful, and with dignity.

If we don’t depopulate as described, the results will be:

Duncan’s Olduvai Theory

I wish this peak oil issue was a point we could argue and make it go away. But it isn’t. It’s the real deal – a true crisis in Civilisation. I think we can manage it and make it a less bumpy road, but unless someone pulls fusion out of their butts in such a way that it is possible and practical, industrial civilisation is OVER.

Orwell’s 1984 will be seen as a quick signpost on the way down as we die off into something more resembling ancient Rome. If we don’t want to collapse back into a late iron age slave state system, we need to begin implementing post peak policies NOW, so we can pull the right hand side of the peak out – changing a crash into a slope.