ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Seattle artist Chris Jordan has posted some of his current work from his series “Running the Numbers“. It’s very cool, and very powerful. He cautions that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended, as  their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in the little web images.

Here’s how he describes the pieces:

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

Really, it’s awesome. Check it out.

Amanda Kovattana at the Energy Bulletin reviews Dmitry Orlov’s new book Reinventing Collapse. She finds one of his most pungent observations is that what holds America together – our common denominator as a people, what defines our membership in the middle class – is nothing more than everyone owning a car.

“Not education, not equal opportunity or equal rights, but the one-ton behemoth that we must have to get around the wasteful geography created by suburbia.”

Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the middle class.

Our ideologically indoctrinated minds are so invested in the American way of life that we regard it as “non-negotiable. Our minds are so closed to change we will be

“unable to retreat from the overextended, oil fueled, debt based economy which is poised to come crashing down, financed as it is by foreign investment that will eventually decide that we are not a good credit risk.”

The U.S. at the end of World War II produced half of all the world’s goods and services. Our oil wealth powered the West’s armies and the post-war boom. But U.S. oil production peaking in 1971, we changed from being a lender to a borrower nation in the early 1980s, and the U.S. is now a net debtor nation to the tune of about $2.8 trillion as of 2006 and getting farther and farther in debt at the rate of about $800 billion a year.

The time when the rest of the world will decide we’re no longer a good credit risk will come sooner rather than later.

Writer, poet and farmer Wendell Berry has an article in Harpers reminding us that confronting the phenomenon of “peak oil” means confronting the end of our customary delusion of “more.”

The article is behind a paywall, but excerpts are posted at the Energy Bulletin. Here are some highlights.

“The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

“. . . Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine.

“. . . It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.” Read the rest of this entry »

Charles Hall has the second of his five-part series on EROI at The Oil Drum.

One point in particular he makes caught my attention. As the EROI of energy sources fall,

“Intensification of effort is often counter productive, leading to little or no more resource but an increase in energy used to get the fuel. Thus market incentives may have a counter productive effect.”

Hall’s conclusion is reiterates a point discussed in at this blog earlier in a piece titled Peak oil, load shedding, and the energy system paradox.

“A crash program to bring some new energy source online in a hurry could paradoxically drain enough energy, raw materials, labor, and money out of an already fragile system to drive it over the edge into economic and political collapse.”

Replacing oil with other energy sources requires more than finding a substitute fuel. It requires replacing the entirety of our energy system, from the way energy is produced to how it is used to do work. That requires huge investments of money, energy, and raw materials for new infrastructure.

If the EROI falls too low, it’s like the Red Queen’s Race in Alice in Wonderland, where Alice run faster and faster but remain in the same spot.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

At least Alice was still standing.

The downhill slope of peak oil takes us right down the rabbit hole.

Carolyn Baker at Speaking Truth to Power has posted a deeply provocative review of Mike Byron’s The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide To Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation In A World Gone Mad.

It’s pretty lengthy, so I’m just going to quote a bit. I urge you to visit her site and read the whole thing.

“It is now far too late,” he says, “to prevent our looming petro-collapse and all of its environmental consequences. Like the Titanic approaching the iceberg, collision with our attractor is now both inevitable and imminent. The difference is that, unlike the Titanic, we are actually speeding up as we approach our ‘iceberg’.” (34)

“This paragraph is so momentous, so poignant that the reader must ponder it carefully. Please let it sink in: We cannot prevent catastrophe, the pace with which we are plummeting toward it is accelerating. When the impact of these two statements sinks in, how can anyone reading these words assume that his/her own or the planet’s “business as usual” can continue?

“But the author does not leave us there because he quickly adds:

“However, it is possible for many of us to survive the catastrophe and to sow the seeds for civilization to be renewed with all of the learning of past ages relatively intact. This is because at the very center of it all are the ordered patterns of memes from which our minds emerge and interact with the minds of others. We can ensure that the lessons learned from this impending collapse are firmly incorporated into the minds and culture of our successor civilization’s citizens and into their institutions and laws.”

The Alliance for Climate Protection and Current TV sponsored a video contest to get folks involved in solving the climate crisis.

The Grand Prize Winner is Dave Schlafman’s video “Sky is Falling.”

Click here watch all of the winners and runners-up.

William Kötke’s book The Final Empire (first published in 1993) is now available in new hardback and paperback editions. The book’s republication has prompted Carolyn Baker to write a review which she calls perhaps “the most important article I’ve ever written in my life.”

Kötke rails against what we have been taught all our lives: that materialistic values of civilization and the accumulation of wealth is progress. The material wealth of the civilization is derived from the death of the earth, the soils, the forests, the fish stocks, the “free resources” of flora and fauna. The ultimate end of this is for all human species to live in giant parasitical cities of cement and metal while surrounded by deserts of exhausted soils.

Kötke traces the environmental scars of civilization through the ages. Empire after empire, desertification of the top soil winds its way around the globe in an erosive helix from China to India to Mesopotamia to Italy to North America.

You may ask what relevance Kötke’s book and Baker’s review have to do with land use. What got my attention was that the attitudes of empire as described by Kötke are embedded in Oregon’s land use planning statutes and goals. Resources exist for no other purpose than to be exploited for economic gain.

“No one in the empire advocates long-term gain in soil fertility when the short-term gain of profit margins or production quotas are the whole point of the effort. This is the reason that nothing real will be done to avoid the final collapse of civilization. The structure of empire is to enrich the emperor/elite at the expense of the earth and society, not to manage affairs for the benefit of the whole life of the earth.”

Kötke’s book is a direct challenge to humankind – a demand for radical change a primer for the recovery of the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most frequent advice dispensed to people trying to behave more responsibly? Buy green. It’s advice that encourages still more consumption as means to address the problem of over-consumption.

Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff takes on the shop/consume/dispose culture.  It’s ruining the world – while capturing us in a cycle of dissatisfaction.

Her message is that we can step off the work/consume treadmill and change toward a fair, sustainable society.  We’ll be happier, to boot.

This short film has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. Take twenty minutes and watch The Story of Stuff.

Recently, in a light-hearted mood, I posted this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. But the more I think about it, the more I realize this captures or political and economic situation in a most profound way.

Picture our politicians in the driver’s seat. Following the advice of the best and brightest of the country’s economists, the issue is not where we’re going. The sole objective is to keep a steady foot on the pedal, so the rate of acceleration is neither too fast or too slow. As economist James Hamilton exults, it’s “a fun day to be a macroeconomist” when the Fed is frantically pulling the levers, trying to maintain a “real economy” where “growth” is always positive.

Within the economists’ fantasy world, there are no physical constraints of fuel or of the mechanical systems of car, and where we’re headed doesn’t matter. Everything works out due to the wondrous “free market” that ensures this is always the Panglossian best of all possible worlds. As Kurt Kobb points out, this cornucopian delusion is he result of magical thinking.

Brad DeLong in a recent post described economics as the most and perhaps sole scientific discipline:

“Economics is the hyper-positivist of social science disciplines: believing that everything of interest can be reduced to law-like theoretical and empirical propositions modeled after classical mechanics; that what cannot be reliably, repeatedly, quantitatively, and empirically demonstrated does not really exist as knowledge; that the only good social science is a deductive, analytical, model-based, general, experimental science.”

DeLong has thus described economics as a discipline where the most important questions are not asked because the answers are not amenable to their “scientific” method.

The ironic consequence of this stance is that economists’ reliance on the “magic” of “free markets” is really nothing more than blind faith. Growth is our God, and Free Markets his prophet. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has become the hand of God.

As Nietzsche pointed out more than a century ago, God is a concept we use to fool ourselves and others, merely a tool to exert power over others. It’s a projection of ourselves, of our values. Our gods are but mirrors revealing our innermost psyches. Our god of growth reveals infinite our greed and extraordinary hubris.

Yet we pretend that economics does not embody a moral stance. How can today’s economists forget that Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher? It’s only within the context of a socially established moral system that a free market can operate, so as best to achieve desired ends.

We have turned our backs on our responsibilities as moral beings.

As Yogi Berra said, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” We’re finding out that “somewhere else” is over the cliff of climate change which threatens not only humanity, but the stability and integrity of all of Earth’s ecosystems and their inhabitants.

And what will the folks who now berate us for being “anti-growth” say if those of us who question the dogma of growth prove prescient? I can hear them now:

“This is all your fault. You wanted us to fail.”

Kurt Kobb at Resource Insights has posted a review of the documentary Manufactured Landscapes (Zeitgeist Films). Here’s the synopsis:

“MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.”

Here are Kobb’s concluding remarks:

It is hard enough to imagine North America and Europe coming to their senses and embarking on a crash program for creating a sustainable society. After seeing Manufactured Landscapes, it is all but impossible to imagine China embarking on such a course. With a population of 1.3 billion of which tens of millions stream each year from the countryside into the cities; a hypercaffeinated growth rate of 10 percent which is necessary to create jobs for all those urban arrivals; and greenhouse gas emissions now surpassing those of the United States would it be unfair to say that as goes China, so goes the world? That is the stuff from which nightmares are manufactured.

The film is available at Netflix. I’ve added it at the top of my queue.

How could a First Lady best use her high-profile status to bring her president/ husband over to the urgency of the climate crisis? A national sex strike complete with city bus advertisements and a PR campaign might just be the ticket.

This is the premise of Kathryn Blume’s one-woman show The Boycott, in which the main character is the U.S. president’s wife, Lyssa Stratton. The play is a contemporary incarnation of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, in which women from Athens and Sparta refuse to consort with their husbands until the men have stopped their warring.

Amy Seidl reviews Blume’s play in the January/February 2008 issue of Orion magazine:

“What’s so captivating about The Boycott, and the perhaps preposterous notion that the global warming movement uses it to garner momentum, is that it jettisons assumptions about what environmental activism should look like; door-to-door canvassing and marches on Washington appear passé in comparison. Indeed the play’s titillating leitmotif combined with its spot-on statistics may even eclipse Al Gore’s infamous PowerPoint presentation.

“Ultimately, The Boycott is successful because it entertains and it lands its punches; one moment we are laughing at a giant phallus impeding proceedings in the U.S. Senate, and the next we are realizing our undeniable complicity as airplane travelers. What Blume reveals is just how much creativity, humor, and pathos it will take to move us beyond the global warming message and toward embodying the artistic license needed to do something about it.”

The Boycott will be on tour in 2008 – see The Boycott for dates and venues. Unfortunately the nearest geographical location so far is Anchorage Jan. 11-27, with a two-day interregnum in Homer AK Jan. 22-23.

Just in time for Xma$$

RealClimate – after first dismissing it, unread, as just another “popular science literature” – has just reviewed Mark Lynas’ new book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. The verdict?

“[I]t doesn’t tend to go beyond the published literature. This is what Lynas claims at the outset — “all of the material in the book comes from the peer-reviewed scientific literature” – and I think he does an admirable job.

And that brings us back to the question I promised to raise at the beginning, which is this:

If a reading of the published scientific literature paints such a frightening picture of the future as Six Degrees suggests – even while it honestly represents that literature – then are we being too provocative in the way we write our scientific papers? Or are we being too cautious in the way we talk about the implications of the results?

Steven Pizzo has posted a really funny piece at The Smirking Chimp – at least it’s funny if, like me, you have the kind of warped sense of humor that makes you a social outcast. I’m going to quote just the end, but be sure to read the whole thing.

“I would wager that, if you waterboarded them, even the most cockeyed, biblically lobotomized, American Enterprise Institute, US Chamber of Commerce types would admit that there’s no way on earth – literally — that the world’s remaining resources could feed, cloth and energize 9 billion humans, without turning the Earth into a smoking cinder. And that was before adding in the affects global warming will have on our ability to produce and transport food and energy around the globe. It just ain’t gonna happen. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve finally gotten a copy of Richard Heinberg’s new book, Peak Everything. He starts off in the introduction pulling no punches:

“it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have caught ourselves on the horns of the Universal Ecological Dilemma, consisting of the interlinked elements of population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction – on a scale unprecedented in history.”

The growth – economic and otherwise – that we have come to take for granted as the natural order of things is over. Most of us just haven’t realized it yet. Rather than expansion and the increase in complexity we’ve come to expect, the 21st century will see contraction and simplification. Heinberg poses the question that we’ve got to come to grips with:

“The only question is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.”

For humans, decline isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Heinberg lists a few of the things that might actually lead to a better, more satisfying life in the times to come: community, personal autonomy, satisfaction from honest work well done, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, leisure time, happiness, ingenuity, artistry, beauty of the built environment.

He lays out our task:

“People will not willingly accept the new message of “less, slower, and smaller,” unless they have new goals toward which to aspire. They must feel that their efforts will lead to a better world, with tangible improvements in life for themselves and their families. The massive public education campaigns that will be required must be credible, and will therefore be vastly more successful if they give people a sense of investment and involvement in formulating those goals. There is a much-abused word that describes the necessary process – democracy.

I’ll be giving a chapter-by-chapter report over the next few days.

Greg Craven is an Oregon science teacher who has created a YouTube video about global climate change. This video looks at the 4 different scenarios – whether or not global climate change is real, and the implications of taking or not taking action.

George Monbiot has written a review at The Guardian Unlimited of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road, published in 2006:

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans. . . his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

Read Monbiot’s whole piece, which goes on to talk about the UN’s new report on the state of the planet and faltering global food production. And the forecast is for a huge population increase, against a backdrop of a warming climate and increasing water shortages.

Then read the book. I’ve got it on hold at the Albany library.

Mick Winter at DryDipstick reviews the new movie What a Way to Go – Life at the End of Empire – and gives it its highest five-rig rating.

“What a Way to Go” is a two-hour poem of great power and beauty. It is the story of a personal journey, yet a journey that is also deeply universal. A journey that encompasses ignorance, awareness, fear, depression, denial, grief and despair. But when denial can no longer be maintained, and grief and despair can no longer be endured, there remain two options. Once is self-destruction; the other action. The narrator chooses action.

Winter sees the movie as a call to action: Read the rest of this entry »

From Andy Singer via Jan Lundberg at Culture Change Letter #169