Not too long ago, I had an argument with another peak oil writer about what level political action on peak oil and climate change should proceed. I suggested that perhaps the municipal level was thinking too large - that what we need are neighborhood groups, he argued in favor of city levels. Now I'm not at all sure that this is an either/or issue - I suspect we need both. But the discussion was useful for helping me clarify some thoughts I've had about what might be needed to move the "peak oil" and "climate change" groups from their present role - as thinly spread "special interest" groups and towards becoming a larger, and more powerful network.
The fact is, historically speaking many large scale social changes have worked best on a neighbor to neighbor, very intimate scale, either instead of or in conjunction with larger scale practices. For example, food and gas rationing during WWII were being flouted until neighborhood pledge groups were started, and block captains became responsible for helping people adhere to new policies. The same programs were used to manage civil defense and volunteer labor groups. The reality is that top down management is very difficult without some micro-level programs to work with - which is why in times of war, women's groups, and other social and cultural institutions were always among the first groups mobilized.
Please understand, I begin this with no implied critiques of any of the response groups out there - on the contrary, I admire what all these groups have accomplished, and believe their work to be of the utmost importance. But there are several limitations to such in-person programs - first of all, unless you live in a population center, they are thin on the ground. The nearest such groups to me are 15-30 miles - an awfully long drive for someone committed to cutting emissions.
And such groups suffer from the same problems almost all political/special interest groups do - small membership and heavy burdens on the few people willing to do the work. If, in fact, we're in the process of sliding off the plateau, as the data suggests, we are going to need to get more people involved, and quickly. Moreover, these groups reinforce the notion that community is something you mostly create with "like minded" people who agree with you about peak oil and the Bush administration. But there's simply no chance that most of us are going to spend the coming decades working primarily with people who live 15 miles from us - we are going to have to get local - real local. That is not to say that I don't see the real and practical value of spending time with people who already "get it," or of devoting some time and energy to exchanging ideas about approaches with others in person, but our primary work must be local - perhaps on the municipal level, but if we're really returning to a foot economy, probably even more so at the neighborhood level.
So I began to consider what would be required to start neighborhood groups that might engage people within our existing communities, and enable those communities to start preparing for climate change and peak oil. And instead of looking at leftist community groups, I started by asking myself what the most successful social organizations are in my area - successful at attracting membership, but also successful at getting members to do their share of the work.
So far, peak oil and climate change groups have focused on the other people who have figured out what is going on. But right now, in the early stages of the crisis, there are simply too few people who have put all the pieces together. With another decade to prepare and teach, such an approach might work. With only a short time, the odds are against it. Compare this to churches or synagogues or mosques, who invite in nearly everyone in a given community, opening their doors as widely as they can.
If we are to have success we are going to have to use a different model, one that I call “the church model” – I say this not to be alienating to those who are not religious, but in recognition that religious communities have been far more successful at building community structures than any secular organization, and that if we are to create overarching community organizations that sustain us in hard times, and enable us to manage our communities in the face of crisis, we’re going to have to use a successful model.
The “church model” has three factors that are very different from groups like the Relocalization and similar groups I’m familiar with. They are:
1. Low Barriers to Entry
2. They have something to offer immediately
3. They have a plan and a routine for dealing with crises
The first factor is enormously important if we are to move beyond regional groups to the local level. Right now environmental groups tend to have a fairly high entry barrier – that is, you have to be fully aware of climate change or peak oil, and aware enough to consider working on these issues a high priority. Given that the majority of the country still considers these problems secondary to others, that’s fairly unusual. It is unlikely that in a crisis involving energy shortages, we’ll have the gas to drive the distances between usch groups. This means that we need to engage not a few aware people half an hour from us, but our neighbors.
How do we do that? We lower the barriers to entry. Instead of having “peak oil” or groups for the climate change aware, we have “neighborhood coops” or “community preparedness” groups. Robert Waldrop, founder of the Oklahoma City Food Coop, observes that he doesn’t talk much about “peak oil” with the people he works with – instead, he talks about how good local food tastes, and about how hard it is to make ends meet. The name doesn’t matter (except in the sense that a cool one would be helpful - suggestions?) – the common ground does.
We also have to lower political barriers - the truth is that environmentalism is associated with the American left. But the left has been too powerless too long to bring about massive social change in most regions. The nation is too politically divided for that. Thus, for these groups to thrive, they must avoid political purity tests - it doesn't matter whether your neighbor hates Bush or loves him. What matters is that the two of you have common ground in other areas. I don't deny this can be tough - but it is necessary. In some regions, the political idea of environmentalism will be a positive advertisement - in other places, the emphasis will have to be on personal security, autonomy, conserving what we have, saving money. We will need to be culturally flexible to create such a network.
The second and perhaps most important thing that such groups have to do is offer members an immediate reason to work together. There are some of us, who will do thankless work for long periods with no reward, but most of us join groups for selfish reasons – we want to find community, we want support, friendship, a platform for our ideas. We may also care about the larger world, but we get some gratification from being together and doing the work. Churches do this well – when people join a church, eventually they are asked to do their share of the work, to donate money and volunteer, but initially, they are offered something – friendship, a pleasurable worship experience, a meal, religious education for their kids. We need our groups to provide something now, not just hypothetical help in the future.
This is even truer because we are now in the early stages of a crisis, and many of the people who join with us may be undergoing personal difficulties and troubles. It is not feasible to have a “climate change” group that has no support or solutions for the victims of climate change now, for example. That doesn’t mean we have to be able to fix everything, or that we have to immediately have the funds for major investments, but we do have to be able to offer emotional support, a lift for someone out of gas, a casserole for a neighbor dealing with illness. We need to start where we are again. We also need plans for the longer term, but we have to start small, with the ordinary work of human exchange – I think too often, our community building efforts have ignored the importance of these small things.
Finally, such groups need to begin creating a plan for the longer term. How will people in your neighborhood get water? Who has space in their yard to grow food? How will you check in on the elderly and disabled? Where will the kids go to school if the buses stop running? Your first steps should take you towards your next ones – today, a carpool to get neighbors to the grocery store, tomorrow a bulk buying club and a Victory garden group to make fewer shopping trips necessary.
Right now there are municipalities dealing with some of these questions - the Transition Towns initiative, spearheaded by Rob Hopkins is a particularly inspiring example. But we need to have a model available for those who cannot get their towns on board, and we will need neighborhood groups to make door to door and ground level social change - that is, the issue is not "municipal vs. neighborhood" - the two enable one another. Particularly when we are talking about basic issues - where to get food, how to conserve water, how to care for seniors - policy level programming can't work without direct, grassroots, person to person networks. That is, it is possible to imagine a town instituting food rationing policies, but not possible for those to be adhered to without lots of practical help in cooking, obtaining supplies, protecting the interests of the powerless, etc...
I am, of course, ignoring the thing that churches and other religious organizations offer that peak oil and climate change groups probably can't offer - the link to G-d, or to G-d in oneself (depending on your faith). I am not claiming that such groups can take the place of churches, or that they can achieve what religious communities are often able to achieve. And yet, there has been a consistent tendency in many religious communities around the US to move towards faith-lite - religion with a strong emphasis on fixing your personal problems, rather than on submission to a larger belief (I'm making no judgement about which is better here). That is, to some degree, it seems that there are a lot of people seeking comfort and the chance to dance in a circle, rather than a deep relationship with G-d. Perhaps that community, or those who have a deep relationship with G-d and time for another community, might be engaged, as well as the secular and concerned.
It is worth a shot.
Sharon
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
All the News...
Here are some stories you may have missed. The first one was particularly interesting - Eric was listening to NPR last evening when he heard another version of the following story on "Marketplace" - only to be followed by a comment roughly along the lines of "If you weren't worried about our infrastructure, you should be."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8U5TMDG1.htm
"President Hugo Chavez ordered a halt to Venezuela's asphalt exports, which go largely to the U.S., to improve his country's roads.
"In the biggest U.S. cities, there are highways completely paved with our asphalt," said Chavez, whose nation remains the fourth-largest oil supplier to the U.S.
"Why do we have to export asphalt if the highways of Venezuela don't work?" he said on his Sunday television program. "If we didn't have resources, I'd understand, but we do."
Venezuela produces 27,000 barrels of asphalt a day, exporting about 63 percent, or 17,000 barrels, Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said."
In the context of the study that came out this past summer http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117867434198996732.html?mod=googlenews_wsj , which reported it would cost 1.6 trillion dollars simply to bring existing bridges, roads and sewer lines up to code, this is an interesting bit of data - first of all, it suggests that the export land model that Jeffrey Brown has so carefully established for oil will probably apply to other systems - foods (some more evidence here: http://www.bbj.hu/main/news_34793_russia+raises+grain+export+duties+to+40%25.html - another good reason to store food), fertilizers, trace minerals, other materials. That is, we are likely to see more and more nations retaining natural resources for their own use rather than exporting them.
It is also an example of why I think it is unlikely that we will have very many massive public works mitigation projects - resources will end up used to mitigate crises, rather than on larger investments as things get tougher.
The plus of this, of course, is that shortages of asphalt would only be a good thing for the death of car culture. I wish I believed that rising asphalt prices would create incentives to invest in rail and public transport, but I think we'll need stronger incentives than that.
Next comes two NY Times financial articles that I think are important for two reasons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/business/14spend.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&sq=consumer%20spending&scp=1
The first suggests that we may be seeing the beginnings of a real decline in consumer spending, in part due to heating and gas prices.
"American Express and the Consumer Federation of America say that consumers are buying just as many gallons as ever, but paying more for them, and that has forced cutbacks in other purchases. Gasoline prices usually drop after the summer driving season, but this year they shot up, from $2.85 a gallon on average in September to $3.07 in December and $3.15 in the first week of January.
A similar trend is evident in the cost of natural gas, electricity and home heating oil. “We built these big houses in the suburbs, which need a lot of energy to stay warm and a car to go shopping,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation. “And we can’t change that quickly.”
Combined with the following, the two constitute a troubling pattern:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/business/12charts.html?ref=business
"The Federal Reserve reported this week that the amount of revolving consumer credit that is outstanding hit $937.5 billion in November, seasonally adjusted, up 7.4 percent from a year earlier.
The annual growth rate has now been over 7 percent for three months running, the first such stretch since 2001, when a recession was driving up borrowing by hard-pressed consumers."
What is happening is that consumers are spending more of their money on heat, gas and food, and far less on retail - and they still can't pay for it - that is, people aren't just cutting back on consumer spending to meet their growing food and energy costs, they are going into further (deeper) debt, while also cutting back. This is not a good sign for anyone.
Stuart Staniford has done it yet again, this time doing an analysis of how much mitigation subsistence farming can be expected to have on the biofuels created food problems. The analysis is interesting, perhaps not complete, but the beginning. I think Staniford is most acute when he observes that larger farmers may be able to mitigate their circumstances, but the billions of very small farmers who also have to buy some foods are in big trouble. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3495.
Also a note - 2007 officially ties with 1998 for the warmest year on record. I can't link to Hansen's GISS report, because Adobe Acrobat makes my computer go insane, but a quick google will take you to the full report. Cheery.
Sharon
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8U5TMDG1.htm
"President Hugo Chavez ordered a halt to Venezuela's asphalt exports, which go largely to the U.S., to improve his country's roads.
"In the biggest U.S. cities, there are highways completely paved with our asphalt," said Chavez, whose nation remains the fourth-largest oil supplier to the U.S.
"Why do we have to export asphalt if the highways of Venezuela don't work?" he said on his Sunday television program. "If we didn't have resources, I'd understand, but we do."
Venezuela produces 27,000 barrels of asphalt a day, exporting about 63 percent, or 17,000 barrels, Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said."
In the context of the study that came out this past summer http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117867434198996732.html?mod=googlenews_wsj , which reported it would cost 1.6 trillion dollars simply to bring existing bridges, roads and sewer lines up to code, this is an interesting bit of data - first of all, it suggests that the export land model that Jeffrey Brown has so carefully established for oil will probably apply to other systems - foods (some more evidence here: http://www.bbj.hu/main/news_34793_russia+raises+grain+export+duties+to+40%25.html - another good reason to store food), fertilizers, trace minerals, other materials. That is, we are likely to see more and more nations retaining natural resources for their own use rather than exporting them.
It is also an example of why I think it is unlikely that we will have very many massive public works mitigation projects - resources will end up used to mitigate crises, rather than on larger investments as things get tougher.
The plus of this, of course, is that shortages of asphalt would only be a good thing for the death of car culture. I wish I believed that rising asphalt prices would create incentives to invest in rail and public transport, but I think we'll need stronger incentives than that.
Next comes two NY Times financial articles that I think are important for two reasons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/business/14spend.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&sq=consumer%20spending&scp=1
The first suggests that we may be seeing the beginnings of a real decline in consumer spending, in part due to heating and gas prices.
"American Express and the Consumer Federation of America say that consumers are buying just as many gallons as ever, but paying more for them, and that has forced cutbacks in other purchases. Gasoline prices usually drop after the summer driving season, but this year they shot up, from $2.85 a gallon on average in September to $3.07 in December and $3.15 in the first week of January.
A similar trend is evident in the cost of natural gas, electricity and home heating oil. “We built these big houses in the suburbs, which need a lot of energy to stay warm and a car to go shopping,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation. “And we can’t change that quickly.”
Combined with the following, the two constitute a troubling pattern:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/business/12charts.html?ref=business
"The Federal Reserve reported this week that the amount of revolving consumer credit that is outstanding hit $937.5 billion in November, seasonally adjusted, up 7.4 percent from a year earlier.
The annual growth rate has now been over 7 percent for three months running, the first such stretch since 2001, when a recession was driving up borrowing by hard-pressed consumers."
What is happening is that consumers are spending more of their money on heat, gas and food, and far less on retail - and they still can't pay for it - that is, people aren't just cutting back on consumer spending to meet their growing food and energy costs, they are going into further (deeper) debt, while also cutting back. This is not a good sign for anyone.
Stuart Staniford has done it yet again, this time doing an analysis of how much mitigation subsistence farming can be expected to have on the biofuels created food problems. The analysis is interesting, perhaps not complete, but the beginning. I think Staniford is most acute when he observes that larger farmers may be able to mitigate their circumstances, but the billions of very small farmers who also have to buy some foods are in big trouble. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3495.
Also a note - 2007 officially ties with 1998 for the warmest year on record. I can't link to Hansen's GISS report, because Adobe Acrobat makes my computer go insane, but a quick google will take you to the full report. Cheery.
Sharon
Monday, January 14, 2008
52 Weeks Down - Week 33 - Do It In the Road and Scare the Mules
No, no, I'm not talking about *that* . This week's project is to do a little more to let others know about what changes you are making and why.
A lot of what all of us struggle with is looking "weird" and drawing uncomfortable attention to ourselves. In the privacy of our own homes, it might be easy to do something unconventional, but sooner or later someone comes over and asks "why are you doing *that* - and the part of us that really does care what people think (and most of us have that part to some degree or another) starts squirming. We all grew up being told that being normal was important. Heck, my Grandma actually used to say "They can do what they want as long as they don't do it in the road and scare the mules." She was lying of course - few people on earth have ever been as interested in what people did in the privacy of their homes ;-). But now's the time to scare a few mules.
But here's the thing - the only way we'll stop feeling weird for not flushing every time, or hanging our laundry or living with a cube fridge or using cloth menstrual pads is if other people join the club, or at least start thinking of this as within the normal range of behavior. And that means that people have to know that other people are doing these things.
Which is why this week's project isn't so much an energy cut but an advertising campaign. Take the time this week to do something to tell/show others about the changes in your life - and why you've made them.
What should you do? Start a blog with a cool theme "52 weeks of funky clothesline pictures" or whatever. Talk to your friends, neighbors and family - bring it up by saying "you know, heating oil prices have been really high, and our family has found..." or "Here's our latest project..."
Give a talk at your community center, church, synagogue, mosque, temple, school or senior center about lower energy living. Emphasize the monetary savings, the better food, the better health. I give you permission to take anything you want from this blog to help people get th idea.
Give someone the gift of a new idea - I can't be the only one who has had a complete "duh" moment or two when it comes to finding solutions to energy problems. I once asked how I should handle the lint problem without a dryer, only to have someone tell me the completely obvious fact that if I seperated lights and darks, I wouldn't have little white fuzzies on my navy shirt. Duh - but sometimes you need someone to open your eyes. So be that person - if someone says they can't by local because it isn't nearby, suggest that you carpool, or pick a few things up for them or that they find a CSA that delivers. If someone is telling you that they'd use their clothesline except that jeans are too stiff, point out that you could start by drying them on the line and then throw them in the dryer for 5 minutes to soften.
If you are a shy sort, it is difficult to be the one who speaks up, who draws attention to themselves. But every time you do this, it'll be easier next time, and easier on the next people in the line. Refusing to feel weird begins, in part, by accepting that this is the new normal - the way that we are going forward. We're not weird, we're cutting edge. Let other people know you know this.
Cheers,
Sharon
A lot of what all of us struggle with is looking "weird" and drawing uncomfortable attention to ourselves. In the privacy of our own homes, it might be easy to do something unconventional, but sooner or later someone comes over and asks "why are you doing *that* - and the part of us that really does care what people think (and most of us have that part to some degree or another) starts squirming. We all grew up being told that being normal was important. Heck, my Grandma actually used to say "They can do what they want as long as they don't do it in the road and scare the mules." She was lying of course - few people on earth have ever been as interested in what people did in the privacy of their homes ;-). But now's the time to scare a few mules.
But here's the thing - the only way we'll stop feeling weird for not flushing every time, or hanging our laundry or living with a cube fridge or using cloth menstrual pads is if other people join the club, or at least start thinking of this as within the normal range of behavior. And that means that people have to know that other people are doing these things.
Which is why this week's project isn't so much an energy cut but an advertising campaign. Take the time this week to do something to tell/show others about the changes in your life - and why you've made them.
What should you do? Start a blog with a cool theme "52 weeks of funky clothesline pictures" or whatever. Talk to your friends, neighbors and family - bring it up by saying "you know, heating oil prices have been really high, and our family has found..." or "Here's our latest project..."
Give a talk at your community center, church, synagogue, mosque, temple, school or senior center about lower energy living. Emphasize the monetary savings, the better food, the better health. I give you permission to take anything you want from this blog to help people get th idea.
Give someone the gift of a new idea - I can't be the only one who has had a complete "duh" moment or two when it comes to finding solutions to energy problems. I once asked how I should handle the lint problem without a dryer, only to have someone tell me the completely obvious fact that if I seperated lights and darks, I wouldn't have little white fuzzies on my navy shirt. Duh - but sometimes you need someone to open your eyes. So be that person - if someone says they can't by local because it isn't nearby, suggest that you carpool, or pick a few things up for them or that they find a CSA that delivers. If someone is telling you that they'd use their clothesline except that jeans are too stiff, point out that you could start by drying them on the line and then throw them in the dryer for 5 minutes to soften.
If you are a shy sort, it is difficult to be the one who speaks up, who draws attention to themselves. But every time you do this, it'll be easier next time, and easier on the next people in the line. Refusing to feel weird begins, in part, by accepting that this is the new normal - the way that we are going forward. We're not weird, we're cutting edge. Let other people know you know this.
Cheers,
Sharon
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Greenpa and his Outhouse are Kicking My Behind...
...Over at Crunchy Chicken's "who is the craziest, most out-there environmental blogger." Greenpa is way, way out ahead, with almost everyone mentioning his three holer. Quick, Eric, get a shovel - we have to dig an outhouse!!! Peer pressure, peer pressure!
http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/01/those-crazy-environmentalist-nut-jobs.html
Cheers (and Thanks Crunchy!!!),
Sharon
http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/01/those-crazy-environmentalist-nut-jobs.html
Cheers (and Thanks Crunchy!!!),
Sharon
Saturday, January 12, 2008
But Honey, the Crazy Woman on the Blog Made Me Do It!
The moment I realized that I was a bad influence was when my co-author Aaron reported that his wife Jennifer had, during some dispute over environmental practice, suggested that Aaron should "Just go live in a cave with Sharon." Or maybe it was when I was sharing a ride from the train to the Community Solutions Conference with Matt Mayer, who told me that his wife had thought him nuts when he came home with bushels of apples, but that he showed her my writings on the subject - and then she thought *I* was crazy. Or maybe it was when I got this email from Leah,
I just want you to know how much I love your blog. You've totally changed my life - we've started gardening, storing food and staying home more. Ican't say "we" love your blog, though - after I asked if we could turn off the fridge hubby actually asked me, as a Christmas present to him, "to stop listening to that crazy-environment woman with all the weird ideas." I got him a hand drill instead, though. And we just turned off the fridge"
May I officially apologize to Leah's hubby? To Jennifer, to Wifey and all the other spouses who feel like I'm an evil influence on their husbands and wives? You see, you have a point. And not only do you have a point, but my husband kind of agrees with you. In fact, the only consolation I can offer you all is this - just be glad you aren't married to me!
Every so often I list off all the radical changes in our lives since Eric and I have been together. He's not a guy who likes change, and I enjoy asking him "So, if you knew that 12 years later you'd be living on a farm with four kids, and trying to get your energy usage down to the same as your average Cuban while shovelling manure and growing your own food, would you have married me?" My husband's answer generally comes out like this "Not only no, but -obscenity deleted- No!!!!!"
That's not to say he isn't happy now - he is (yes, I know, I would say that, but really). But the sum total of all those changes sounds so overwhelming - even now that we've done them. And living with someone who has "cool" ideas about how to use less and do more for a living is a severe trial on the kind of guy who, left to himself, was perfectly content to think about peak oil and climate change as an abstract problem that "someone" should do "something" about. Marrying a woman who thinks that "someone" always means her, and "something" means inconveniencing him is, well...tiring. Occasionally even just a weensy bit annoying.
I'm lucky - my husband is an incredibly good sport, and secretly (ok, maybe not so secretly) likes being dragged along by his nutcase wife. In fact, just last night he admitted he didn't totally hate the idea of transforming our farm into a place where we could run sustainability classes. There wasn't even any eye rolling involved - but it is still early days yet.
So I'm perfectly able to imagine the expressions on the faces of various husbands and wives when their beloveds approach them with an excited grin and a printout with my name on it. More than one person has mentioned that their helpmeets have suggested that the words "Sharon says" might be uttered less often - like once every decade or so. Again, my sympathies. All I can say is that when I seem an unbearable burden, again, remember how fortunate you are not to have to live with me. (Note, I realize that I recently suggested that some people on the internet *should* come live with me, and this pretty much means that no one will ever want to. Pity - I'm really not that...oh, wait, yes I am ;-))
The thing is, I'm pretty comfortable in the role of wacko-environmental Svengali. It isn't easy running against the mainstream in our society, much less against a spouse, who, committed as they are to the environment, doesn't necessarily think that the desire to be clean, warm and eat in a restaurant once in a while is so ridiculous. Everyone needs someone to take the blame when their spouse gets frustrated. Heck, anyone who has been married realizes that part of the secret to a happy marriage is deny, deny and blame others.
So why not blame me? After all, I'm conveniently far away, and available only through the internet, whereas the actual spouse who is suggesting that you should eat only what is available locally in Saskatchewan all winter is right there. If I can prevent a single divorce, night spent in the car or intra-marital knifing, I'm glad to do my part.
Besides, this is the first time in my whole life that I've ever gotten to be a bad influence. How cool is that? You mean I'm now, at 35, the kind of person spouses don't want their husband or wife hanging around with? If only I could have figured out how to be that cool at 15!
Sharon
I just want you to know how much I love your blog. You've totally changed my life - we've started gardening, storing food and staying home more. Ican't say "we" love your blog, though - after I asked if we could turn off the fridge hubby actually asked me, as a Christmas present to him, "to stop listening to that crazy-environment woman with all the weird ideas." I got him a hand drill instead, though. And we just turned off the fridge"
May I officially apologize to Leah's hubby? To Jennifer, to Wifey and all the other spouses who feel like I'm an evil influence on their husbands and wives? You see, you have a point. And not only do you have a point, but my husband kind of agrees with you. In fact, the only consolation I can offer you all is this - just be glad you aren't married to me!
Every so often I list off all the radical changes in our lives since Eric and I have been together. He's not a guy who likes change, and I enjoy asking him "So, if you knew that 12 years later you'd be living on a farm with four kids, and trying to get your energy usage down to the same as your average Cuban while shovelling manure and growing your own food, would you have married me?" My husband's answer generally comes out like this "Not only no, but -obscenity deleted- No!!!!!"
That's not to say he isn't happy now - he is (yes, I know, I would say that, but really). But the sum total of all those changes sounds so overwhelming - even now that we've done them. And living with someone who has "cool" ideas about how to use less and do more for a living is a severe trial on the kind of guy who, left to himself, was perfectly content to think about peak oil and climate change as an abstract problem that "someone" should do "something" about. Marrying a woman who thinks that "someone" always means her, and "something" means inconveniencing him is, well...tiring. Occasionally even just a weensy bit annoying
I'm lucky - my husband is an incredibly good sport, and secretly (ok, maybe not so secretly) likes being dragged along by his nutcase wife. In fact, just last night he admitted he didn't totally hate the idea of transforming our farm into a place where we could run sustainability classes. There wasn't even any eye rolling involved - but it is still early days yet.
So I'm perfectly able to imagine the expressions on the faces of various husbands and wives when their beloveds approach them with an excited grin and a printout with my name on it. More than one person has mentioned that their helpmeets have suggested that the words "Sharon says" might be uttered less often - like once every decade or so. Again, my sympathies. All I can say is that when I seem an unbearable burden, again, remember how fortunate you are not to have to live with me. (Note, I realize that I recently suggested that some people on the internet *should* come live with me, and this pretty much means that no one will ever want to. Pity - I'm really not that...oh, wait, yes I am ;-))
The thing is, I'm pretty comfortable in the role of wacko-environmental Svengali. It isn't easy running against the mainstream in our society, much less against a spouse, who, committed as they are to the environment, doesn't necessarily think that the desire to be clean, warm and eat in a restaurant once in a while is so ridiculous. Everyone needs someone to take the blame when their spouse gets frustrated. Heck, anyone who has been married realizes that part of the secret to a happy marriage is deny, deny and blame others
So why not blame me? After all, I'm conveniently far away, and available only through the internet, whereas the actual spouse who is suggesting that you should eat only what is available locally in Saskatchewan all winter is right there. If I can prevent a single divorce, night spent in the car or intra-marital knifing, I'm glad to do my part.
Besides, this is the first time in my whole life that I've ever gotten to be a bad influence. How cool is that? You mean I'm now, at 35, the kind of person spouses don't want their husband or wife hanging around with? If only I could have figured out how to be that cool at 15!
Sharon
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Why Is this Apocalypse Different than All Other Apocalypses: Making the Case for Peak Oil and Climate Change Now
A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they are struggling to grasp the implications. So sometimes, we need to back up, and make the case for something that is always new to some people. The truth is that if my writing is to be anything other than preaching to the converted, we have to answer the skeptics.
That’s why I was so delighted when I got an email from Frazzlehead who asked me why this particular energy crisis was different than the one of the 1970s. She observed that she’d been reading 1970s back to the land texts, and finding the exact same narrative in them – that we’re running out of oil, that soon the economy will crash and we’ll need to go back to farming. Why, she asked, is it right this time?
“I look at the date it was written and think, see? They’ve been saying this for ages – and it hasn’t happened. Still, something in my gut tells me that it’s different this time, that this isn’t just a robot waving it’s silly arms saying “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Danger!” … that something really is wrong and things will change dramatically.
What I can’t quite put my finger on is the evidence for *this* time being the *real* time.
Is the Boy just crying wolf again? Or is there really a wolf?
Can you help me see why *this time* it is for real?”
This is an extremely important question – the fact is, ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when we recognized we really can have “World” wars, since the advent of the military capacity to destroy the lives of billions, since we recognized our impact on the earth, we’ve been afraid we’d destroy it. How do we know that this time, we really are?
And of course, this is a good question for climate change as well. Because, there’s a small grain of truth in the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age – only a small one but still. The fact is, many people remember these predictions of the end of everything, and remember Y2K as well, and then think “the evidence is against those who say things are going to change.” This is a reasonable critique, and one that requires a good answer – or a series of them. That is, it isn’t enough to say “Well, this time we’re right.”
The reason we want multiple answers here is that there are several questions. The first one is this “What are the differences between the scientific and technical cases for peak oil now, and climate change now, vs. then.” But that’s only part of the answer. Because most of us aren’t climate scientists or petroleum geologists, and we’re not going to read every single bit of information on this subject, so to some degree, we have to rely on our own analysis. We can weigh the credibility of the technical analyses to one degree or another, but we also need grounds for distinguishing between those analyses.
The ideal grounds would be that we completely understand everything the scientists are saying, but since that’s not true, we need another set of analytic tools.
So the next question we have to answer is this – what present day evidence do we have for each case? How can I see this with my own eyes? And how do the various available accounts I’m being offered match up with both the scientific evidence and the evidence of my eyes? That is, both the “disasters are coming” and the “it’ll never happen” crowds are telling stories – they are giving an account of the past and the future. Picking the right story depends on our being able to match up evidence with the narrative being provided to us.
And while those two data points are convincing, they aren’t everything we need to know to make a decision – we also need to ask ourselves how to apply an imperfect case for something. That is, assuming that very few things about the future can be known with absolute certainty, we need to know what the case for action is – that is, how should we use the information above? What tools of analysis will get us the best results?
I’m going to go through these questions, one at a time, to the best of my ability. Because the subject is such a long one, this will appear in two parts.
First, the technical analysis:
First of all, what was the evidence for 1970s style depletion analyses? I’m going to admit here that I am somewhat handicapped on this question by having been born during the 1970s oil crisis – that is, I have no direct experience of the data that was coming in during that period – I was busy analyzing the comparative merits of growing up to be a garbage collector (cool truck) or a vet (cool puppies and kittens), and thus not paying much (any) attention to petroleum geology.
I’ve done no real research into the accounts coming in during that period, either. So I honestly can’t personally tell you how good the 1970s accounts actually were. That is, I haven’t seen them. I’ve seen the same accounts Frazzlehead has, popular narratives in which we were “running out of oil” but not any scholarly accounts that make that same claim. This is not to say that there weren’t any, just that I’m unfamiliar with them.
In fact, peak oil theory doesn’t make the claim that “we’re running out of oil” either, except in the sense that whenever you make any use of a non-renewable resource, you are reducing the amount that’s left and contributing to the larger process of “running out.” The peak of oil production occurs at the moment that we have used ½ of the oil in the ground. No peak oil scholar that I’ve ever seen has suggested that we are in immanent danger of having the world run out, but rather that demand (how much oil we’d like to burn) will exceed supply (the amount we can get out of the ground). Some consequences under the current systm of this difference between demand and supply would be higher prices, spot shortages, poor people being priced out of the market altogether, and gradually more and more people being priced out or having their usage dramatically reduced. But that’s not the same as actually running out.
It is safe to say that if people in the 1970s were claiming that we were in immanent danger of running out, they were really, really deeply mistaken – and that that mistake can’t be chalked up to improvements in science. But I suspect that most scholars weren’t saying that – instead, they were saying something more complicated and nuanced, and, as is often the case, complicated, nuanced ideas got dumbed down to something less accurate but more exciting sounding.
To get some evidence of this, let’s look at _The Limits to Growth_ which was perhaps the single most famous text that said we were “running out of oil” in the 1970s. But, of course, that’s not what it said at all. I’m going to quote here Richard Heinberg’s analysis of TLTG, because I think he covers all the salient points:
“Several economists have attempted to debunk the conclusions presented in LTG. For example, in _Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse_, Ronald Bailey wrote that “In 1972 The Limits to Growth predicted that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.” _Facts Not Fears: A Parents Guide to Teaching Kids about the Environment_ by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw repeated part of this list and pointed out that “The world did not run out of gold by 1981, or zinc by 1990, or petroleum by 1992, as the book predicted.”
However, these were not predictions contained in the book. The reference for these claim is Table 4…The table lists three sets of numbers: a static reserve index (how long known reserves would last at 1972 rates of consumption); an exponential reserve index (how long known reserves would last at an exponentially increasing rate of consumption); and an expontential index calculated using five times the known reserves (that is, assuming substantial new discoveries of the resources in question). Criticisms of LTG focused only on the second, ‘exponential reserve’ set of numbers which was the most pessimistic, even though the authors clearly stated that this did not constitute a prediction, but merely a statistical extrapolation.” (Powerdown, 93-94)
That is, critiques of _The Limits To Growth_ were made out of context. The authors knew that it was very, very unlikely that we would have massive growth of consumption without any new discoveries, and weren’t proposing that would happen – they were providing context for their larger conclusion that we are at risk of overshoot.
In fact, _The Limits To Growth_ was probably fairly accurate in their overall claims, as the updates have demonstrated.
It is important to note that TLTG made the claim, to the extent it claimed things, rather than observed them, that collapse was likely to come not in the 1970s, but at the very end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st century.
That is, they claimed that *overshoot* - the point at which we were exceeding the capacity of the earth to sustain us would happen earlier than that – and in fact, there’s compelling evidence they were right. But they never claimed that the crisis point would be reached at the same moment we reached overshoot – instead, they suggested otherwise. This is an important distinction. That is, TLTG emphasized how urgent it was that we begin to make policy and practical changes that would abate the crisis in the 1970s – that was the time to respond. But those policy changes were designed to avoid an outcome that would occur decades later – and they are occurring decades later as predicted.
Richard Heinberg has actually claimed that he hasn’t been able to find a single example of any peer reviewed paper predicting we were actually going to run out of oil in the 1970s – and yet, many people “knew” that this was the case. I don’t know if that fact is still true – even if there are some, that doesn’t mean they were right. But there certainly aren’t a large number of them.
What was true in the 1970s, is that *American* oil prediction hit its peak. In 1970, American production peaked, just as M.King Hubbard said it would. At the time, nearly everyone denied that Hubbard was right – after all, we’d just produced more oil than we ever had before – why would we expect shortfalls? Well, the reality is that that’s just how it works – the peak is the point at which you produce more than you ever have – or ever will again. So America actually was experiencing serious oil shortfalls, and because of the OPEC embargo, was unable to meet demand.
Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can’t depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s – we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were “running out of oil” because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result – but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been “running out” that is, supplies of oil aren’t just absolute, but the ones you have access to.
That’s an important point on peak oil – because access has as much effect as absolute reserves. So, for example, an oil crisis could arise because of our inability to increase imports, or because of structural failures in refining capacity that cause shortages before the absolute peak, or because of geopolitical issues. On the one hand, peak oil is a very simple idea. On the other, if you interpret the term to mean “the point at which supply can no longer meet demand” it gets very complicated. For example, many poor nations can no longer afford to import oil at all, and are suffering because of that. For them, peak oil is already a reality.
In fact, the 1970s oil shocks offer a useful kind of support for the claims of peak oil in the present. The oil shocks were fundamentally political in nature, but they also offer proof of the fact that a. there are peaks, and b. such peaks are inherently disruptive. The reduction in available oil in the US after its peak left us in a tough spot, politically speaking, and vulnerable to supply constraints caused by outside forces. Several peak oil scholars have correlated regional peaks with periods of societal disruption – that is, when we experience substantial declines in resource access, it causes major problems.
The same argument can be made about the frequently quoted claim that in the 1970s, scientists were predicting an ice age, and now they are predicting catastrophic warming. In fact, in the 1970s, there was some discussion of the possibility of a new ice age, for several reasons. The first is that in the 1970s, particulate emissions, that is, pollution, was so severe that it caused a considerable cooling of the planet. So it seemed possible that we were entering a cooling cycle.
We were also statistically at the end of a period of climate stability, and the possibility that there might be an ice age was discussed. But even Richard Lindzen, one of the formest Global Warming skeptics, has admitted that this was never more than the equivalent of scientists batting an idea around. That is, there never was any strong scientific consensus that we were entering into a period of global cooling *and* most research on this subject was speaking only of natural cycles.
For example, perhaps the most famous article on this subject appeared in Science in 1976, and included the phrase “in the absence of human perturbation of the climate.” That is, the prediction that global cooling would occur was *explicitly* made with the caveat that if we mess with the climate this probably won’t happen. But, as usual, the nuance was removed, and what we get is the idea that we once were really sure we were going to have global cooling.
It is also very important to note that scientists *also* were predicting Global Warming well before the 1970s. A Swedish chemist named Arrhenius discovered and predicted global warming at the turn of the last century, documenting that it was already underway. Charles Keeling was doing work on Global Warming in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to do this work until his death in 2005. In 1979, as Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report was being compiled, anthropogenic global warming was cited as one of the most serious problems of the century. So it would be more accurate to say that in the 1970s, there was considerable debate over whether warming or cooling would be the primary concern, and by the end of that decade, there was a growing consensus that global warming was far more likely.
In both cases, one of the most important bits of evidence is the degree of scientific consensus – that is, the sheer number of scholars and researchers that agree that they are seeing evidence of something. Since these scientists will generally come at this issue from different directions – one person studying ice melt in the arctic, another sea level rises, one petroleum geologist studying future projections, another talking about the history of discovery. So while hardly infalliable, scientific consensus matters.
And in both cases, we can claim that there is an enormous difference between scientific consensus now and scientific consensus then. For example, consensus on global warming is overwhelming. The oft-stated claim that there are no peer-reviewed scholarly articles that cast real doubt on the anthropogenic (human caused) nature of climate change is probably not quite true, but there are very few of them - a handful at best, mostly in minor journals, and compared to 10,000 and more such articles in peer reviewed scholarly journals that take the other position. There are a few real scholars (and a bunch of paid shills for the energy industry) who sincerely believe that climate change is not anthropogenic (there’s no one who doesn’t believe the climate is changing, btw), but the reality is that there are tiny, dissenting minorities on every scholarly community. It is still possible, for example, to find a few doctors who don’t believe cigarettes cause cancer. It is still possible to find some historians who don’t think the Holocaust ever happened. But these are few, and they don’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority believe otherwise, and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of the evidence supports anthropogenic global warming.
In regards to peak oil, the scientific consensus is actually harder to figure out. Every once in a while I run into someone who is a peak oil believer and a global warming skeptic, which I find quite funny. That is, the scientific evidence for global warming is so much greater than for peak oil (which in no means implies that both are not true, merely that there is less certainty and less research in regards to peak oil) that it seems odd to me that one could evaluate the evidence for the less certain one, agree with it, and then dismiss the evidence for the other.
But saying that there’s more controversy in the study of peak oil that climate change is not to say that there is no scientific consensus on peak oil. In 2007, the General Accounting Office of the US Congress released a report that argued that a majority of relevant scholars and oil experts now believe that a peak has already happened or is immanent. There are still significant dissenting viewpoints – notably Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), but both are showing chinks in their armor as oil prices rise and as we get several years away from what seems to be our production peak, in 2005. The IEA, for example, this year admitted they anticipate supply constraints into the 2040s – which is effectively an acknowledgement of peak oil, since virtually no serious assessments put the peak that late – the US Geological Survey, for example, puts the world peak at 2023.
The truth is that it is very hard to predict an oil peak, except in hindsight. At the 2006 ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference, I heard peak oil researchers give dates that ranged from 2012 or later to 2005 – so even the experts who do believe in peak oil are uncertain. Because there is no reliable reserve data on total available oil, we can only look at the history of our discoveries (that is, discoveries peaked in the 1960s – since then we’ve been finding a dramatically decreasing amount of new oil each year, despite all the people who hype each new discovery as the answer), how much of the globe has been mapped for oil (the vast majority) and estimate likelihoods. And also, we can do the math showing current rates of decline (most of the major producers are declining significantly), and look at how much oil we’d need to find in order to put off the problem. The answer is “a hell of a lot” – that is, as Matthew Simmons put it, even if we found a massive oil field, as big as the North Sea, for example, it would only delay the whole world’s oil peak by a matter of months.
The next question would be how well the predictions, model and data match up with what we’re actually seeing right now. For example, in regards to peak oil, while we don’t know whether or not the Saudi giant oil fields have actually peaked, we can look and see what is actually happening in the world. Some Saudi authorities claim that the peak is a long way out, others that it is very near (many oil company executives now openly admit peak oil). But right now, oil prices are at very nearly the world record. When prices are extremely high (and they have been for several years now), generally speaking the laws of economics would suggest that people have the incentive to make as much money as they can, by producing as much of this high priced stuff as possible. In fact, however, the Saudis have made “voluntary” cuts now several years in a row. It is possible that OPEC and the House of Saud has said, “We’re rich enough – we simply don’t want any more money.” But how likely is that? More credible is the idea that they cannot increase production due to physical constraints.
The fact is that overall, world oil production is either stagnating or falling in most areas. Explaining this fact requires a credible reasoning. Market forces certainly aren’t driving the decline – anyone with oil has an incentive to sell it now. In some cases, there are technical problems with extraction, or other limits that can explain this, but these explanations are insufficient to describe the overarching trend. On the other hand, peak oil theory explains it in two ways. The first is that actual output has plateued or is beginning to decline. The second is that if we know that, more nations will withhold some of their oil for the longer term, both for their own use, and to sell later on. If we have plenty of oil, it would be crazy of producers not to take advantage of record high prices. If we don’t, we can assume that in fact, high prices will continue, and even rise higher. Peak oil theory fits the facts.
The same is true with climate change theory. For example, climate change dissenters often argue that the sun is sending more heat our way. But if that were true, we’d be seeing more warming in the upper atmosphere as well as closer to the earth. But in fact, the opposite is true – the upper atmosphere is cooler. Since the sun’s rays have to go through the upper atmosphere to get to the earth, that’s not consistent. But if the earth itself is trapping carbon and increasing heat, it would make sense that we would find the upper atmosphere cooler than the lower.
The correlation of manmade C02 levels with planetary warming is another place we can see the evidence of global warming. The ice reductions in the arctic, and the thinning of the edges of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are another.
That is not to say that there is no inconsistency in climate systems – we are talking about a large, enormously complex system, being modeled by thousands of researchers. It is not an easy thing to figure out, and not every bit of data is going to be perfect. But the overwhelming reality is that the story here fits the data extremely well – the account of anthropogenic global warming fits what we are seeing – if anything, we have tended to underestimate our impact.
We can also see the evidence of our own eyes in both cases - we can see the rise in food prices, gas prices, the warming of our regions, the changes in planting zones and snowfall, the increased frequence of drought. These are not sufficient evidence - any one year, any one locality can be explained. But there is no doubt that billions of people around the world are seeing these things, and that our vision is a small piece of the picture.
Going back, for a moment, to _The Limits to Growth_, one of the things that appears a lot in later modeling, in, for example, the 30 Year Update of TLTG, is that feedback loops and intersections are a bigger problem than any individual problem. And for those people wondering whether these problems are really as bad as they think they are, this is probably the most important thing to know – in the 1970s, we were worried about individual problems – a shortage of oil, for example, or about pollution, or a coming ice age. Right now, the biggest concern we have is of the intersection of inter-related problems. That is, the problem is not our ability to respond to one problem, but our ability to respond to multiple, overwhelming simultaneous crises.
_The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update_ found that almost all its “business as usual” scenarios led to collapse , *EVEN IF* the sheer quantities of resources available were *DOUBLED* over what we have any evidence at all for – that is, even if we had enough energy to go along, pollution built and cancer rates skyrocketed, while soil erosion rose to make food production fail to keep pace with population growth. That is, these scenarios don’t depend on a shortage or crisis in any single place – they operate as a system of feedback loops influencing one another. As the authors put it,
A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)
In the 1970s, environmental activists were responding to the very first warning signs of depletion and climate change. Many of them interpreted scientific warnings on these points to mean that we were facing an immediate, definite crisis down to the particulars. But that’s not what they were being told. Instead, people were being warned about the longer term consequences of their actions in no uncertain terms. And in fact, our ability to cope managed to push these issues off, in many cases for decades, but again, as we put our limits further off, we drew our resources down further. Soon, the bill comes due.
Now this is all a fairly compelling case, but it isn’t all the truth that ever was, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is, there is absolutely no point in exaggerating scientific evidence to pretend we know everything with perfect, utter certainty. So my next post will be about the question of how we use this data – that is, if we think the odds are strongly in favor of something, but we don’t have perfect certainty, how do we know what to do? There are logical tools for that, and my next post on this subject will discuss them.
That’s why I was so delighted when I got an email from Frazzlehead who asked me why this particular energy crisis was different than the one of the 1970s. She observed that she’d been reading 1970s back to the land texts, and finding the exact same narrative in them – that we’re running out of oil, that soon the economy will crash and we’ll need to go back to farming. Why, she asked, is it right this time?
“I look at the date it was written and think, see? They’ve been saying this for ages – and it hasn’t happened. Still, something in my gut tells me that it’s different this time, that this isn’t just a robot waving it’s silly arms saying “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Danger!” … that something really is wrong and things will change dramatically.
What I can’t quite put my finger on is the evidence for *this* time being the *real* time.
Is the Boy just crying wolf again? Or is there really a wolf?
Can you help me see why *this time* it is for real?”
This is an extremely important question – the fact is, ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when we recognized we really can have “World” wars, since the advent of the military capacity to destroy the lives of billions, since we recognized our impact on the earth, we’ve been afraid we’d destroy it. How do we know that this time, we really are?
And of course, this is a good question for climate change as well. Because, there’s a small grain of truth in the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age – only a small one but still. The fact is, many people remember these predictions of the end of everything, and remember Y2K as well, and then think “the evidence is against those who say things are going to change.” This is a reasonable critique, and one that requires a good answer – or a series of them. That is, it isn’t enough to say “Well, this time we’re right.”
The reason we want multiple answers here is that there are several questions. The first one is this “What are the differences between the scientific and technical cases for peak oil now, and climate change now, vs. then.” But that’s only part of the answer. Because most of us aren’t climate scientists or petroleum geologists, and we’re not going to read every single bit of information on this subject, so to some degree, we have to rely on our own analysis. We can weigh the credibility of the technical analyses to one degree or another, but we also need grounds for distinguishing between those analyses.
The ideal grounds would be that we completely understand everything the scientists are saying, but since that’s not true, we need another set of analytic tools.
So the next question we have to answer is this – what present day evidence do we have for each case? How can I see this with my own eyes? And how do the various available accounts I’m being offered match up with both the scientific evidence and the evidence of my eyes? That is, both the “disasters are coming” and the “it’ll never happen” crowds are telling stories – they are giving an account of the past and the future. Picking the right story depends on our being able to match up evidence with the narrative being provided to us.
And while those two data points are convincing, they aren’t everything we need to know to make a decision – we also need to ask ourselves how to apply an imperfect case for something. That is, assuming that very few things about the future can be known with absolute certainty, we need to know what the case for action is – that is, how should we use the information above? What tools of analysis will get us the best results?
I’m going to go through these questions, one at a time, to the best of my ability. Because the subject is such a long one, this will appear in two parts.
First, the technical analysis:
First of all, what was the evidence for 1970s style depletion analyses? I’m going to admit here that I am somewhat handicapped on this question by having been born during the 1970s oil crisis – that is, I have no direct experience of the data that was coming in during that period – I was busy analyzing the comparative merits of growing up to be a garbage collector (cool truck) or a vet (cool puppies and kittens), and thus not paying much (any) attention to petroleum geology.
I’ve done no real research into the accounts coming in during that period, either. So I honestly can’t personally tell you how good the 1970s accounts actually were. That is, I haven’t seen them. I’ve seen the same accounts Frazzlehead has, popular narratives in which we were “running out of oil” but not any scholarly accounts that make that same claim. This is not to say that there weren’t any, just that I’m unfamiliar with them.
In fact, peak oil theory doesn’t make the claim that “we’re running out of oil” either, except in the sense that whenever you make any use of a non-renewable resource, you are reducing the amount that’s left and contributing to the larger process of “running out.” The peak of oil production occurs at the moment that we have used ½ of the oil in the ground. No peak oil scholar that I’ve ever seen has suggested that we are in immanent danger of having the world run out, but rather that demand (how much oil we’d like to burn) will exceed supply (the amount we can get out of the ground). Some consequences under the current systm of this difference between demand and supply would be higher prices, spot shortages, poor people being priced out of the market altogether, and gradually more and more people being priced out or having their usage dramatically reduced. But that’s not the same as actually running out.
It is safe to say that if people in the 1970s were claiming that we were in immanent danger of running out, they were really, really deeply mistaken – and that that mistake can’t be chalked up to improvements in science. But I suspect that most scholars weren’t saying that – instead, they were saying something more complicated and nuanced, and, as is often the case, complicated, nuanced ideas got dumbed down to something less accurate but more exciting sounding.
To get some evidence of this, let’s look at _The Limits to Growth_ which was perhaps the single most famous text that said we were “running out of oil” in the 1970s. But, of course, that’s not what it said at all. I’m going to quote here Richard Heinberg’s analysis of TLTG, because I think he covers all the salient points:
“Several economists have attempted to debunk the conclusions presented in LTG. For example, in _Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse_, Ronald Bailey wrote that “In 1972 The Limits to Growth predicted that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.” _Facts Not Fears: A Parents Guide to Teaching Kids about the Environment_ by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw repeated part of this list and pointed out that “The world did not run out of gold by 1981, or zinc by 1990, or petroleum by 1992, as the book predicted.”
However, these were not predictions contained in the book. The reference for these claim is Table 4…The table lists three sets of numbers: a static reserve index (how long known reserves would last at 1972 rates of consumption); an exponential reserve index (how long known reserves would last at an exponentially increasing rate of consumption); and an expontential index calculated using five times the known reserves (that is, assuming substantial new discoveries of the resources in question). Criticisms of LTG focused only on the second, ‘exponential reserve’ set of numbers which was the most pessimistic, even though the authors clearly stated that this did not constitute a prediction, but merely a statistical extrapolation.” (Powerdown, 93-94)
That is, critiques of _The Limits To Growth_ were made out of context. The authors knew that it was very, very unlikely that we would have massive growth of consumption without any new discoveries, and weren’t proposing that would happen – they were providing context for their larger conclusion that we are at risk of overshoot.
In fact, _The Limits To Growth_ was probably fairly accurate in their overall claims, as the updates have demonstrated.
It is important to note that TLTG made the claim, to the extent it claimed things, rather than observed them, that collapse was likely to come not in the 1970s, but at the very end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st century.
That is, they claimed that *overshoot* - the point at which we were exceeding the capacity of the earth to sustain us would happen earlier than that – and in fact, there’s compelling evidence they were right. But they never claimed that the crisis point would be reached at the same moment we reached overshoot – instead, they suggested otherwise. This is an important distinction. That is, TLTG emphasized how urgent it was that we begin to make policy and practical changes that would abate the crisis in the 1970s – that was the time to respond. But those policy changes were designed to avoid an outcome that would occur decades later – and they are occurring decades later as predicted.
Richard Heinberg has actually claimed that he hasn’t been able to find a single example of any peer reviewed paper predicting we were actually going to run out of oil in the 1970s – and yet, many people “knew” that this was the case. I don’t know if that fact is still true – even if there are some, that doesn’t mean they were right. But there certainly aren’t a large number of them.
What was true in the 1970s, is that *American* oil prediction hit its peak. In 1970, American production peaked, just as M.King Hubbard said it would. At the time, nearly everyone denied that Hubbard was right – after all, we’d just produced more oil than we ever had before – why would we expect shortfalls? Well, the reality is that that’s just how it works – the peak is the point at which you produce more than you ever have – or ever will again. So America actually was experiencing serious oil shortfalls, and because of the OPEC embargo, was unable to meet demand.
Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can’t depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s – we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were “running out of oil” because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result – but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been “running out” that is, supplies of oil aren’t just absolute, but the ones you have access to.
That’s an important point on peak oil – because access has as much effect as absolute reserves. So, for example, an oil crisis could arise because of our inability to increase imports, or because of structural failures in refining capacity that cause shortages before the absolute peak, or because of geopolitical issues. On the one hand, peak oil is a very simple idea. On the other, if you interpret the term to mean “the point at which supply can no longer meet demand” it gets very complicated. For example, many poor nations can no longer afford to import oil at all, and are suffering because of that. For them, peak oil is already a reality.
In fact, the 1970s oil shocks offer a useful kind of support for the claims of peak oil in the present. The oil shocks were fundamentally political in nature, but they also offer proof of the fact that a. there are peaks, and b. such peaks are inherently disruptive. The reduction in available oil in the US after its peak left us in a tough spot, politically speaking, and vulnerable to supply constraints caused by outside forces. Several peak oil scholars have correlated regional peaks with periods of societal disruption – that is, when we experience substantial declines in resource access, it causes major problems.
The same argument can be made about the frequently quoted claim that in the 1970s, scientists were predicting an ice age, and now they are predicting catastrophic warming. In fact, in the 1970s, there was some discussion of the possibility of a new ice age, for several reasons. The first is that in the 1970s, particulate emissions, that is, pollution, was so severe that it caused a considerable cooling of the planet. So it seemed possible that we were entering a cooling cycle.
We were also statistically at the end of a period of climate stability, and the possibility that there might be an ice age was discussed. But even Richard Lindzen, one of the formest Global Warming skeptics, has admitted that this was never more than the equivalent of scientists batting an idea around. That is, there never was any strong scientific consensus that we were entering into a period of global cooling *and* most research on this subject was speaking only of natural cycles.
For example, perhaps the most famous article on this subject appeared in Science in 1976, and included the phrase “in the absence of human perturbation of the climate.” That is, the prediction that global cooling would occur was *explicitly* made with the caveat that if we mess with the climate this probably won’t happen. But, as usual, the nuance was removed, and what we get is the idea that we once were really sure we were going to have global cooling.
It is also very important to note that scientists *also* were predicting Global Warming well before the 1970s. A Swedish chemist named Arrhenius discovered and predicted global warming at the turn of the last century, documenting that it was already underway. Charles Keeling was doing work on Global Warming in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to do this work until his death in 2005. In 1979, as Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report was being compiled, anthropogenic global warming was cited as one of the most serious problems of the century. So it would be more accurate to say that in the 1970s, there was considerable debate over whether warming or cooling would be the primary concern, and by the end of that decade, there was a growing consensus that global warming was far more likely.
In both cases, one of the most important bits of evidence is the degree of scientific consensus – that is, the sheer number of scholars and researchers that agree that they are seeing evidence of something. Since these scientists will generally come at this issue from different directions – one person studying ice melt in the arctic, another sea level rises, one petroleum geologist studying future projections, another talking about the history of discovery. So while hardly infalliable, scientific consensus matters.
And in both cases, we can claim that there is an enormous difference between scientific consensus now and scientific consensus then. For example, consensus on global warming is overwhelming. The oft-stated claim that there are no peer-reviewed scholarly articles that cast real doubt on the anthropogenic (human caused) nature of climate change is probably not quite true, but there are very few of them - a handful at best, mostly in minor journals, and compared to 10,000 and more such articles in peer reviewed scholarly journals that take the other position. There are a few real scholars (and a bunch of paid shills for the energy industry) who sincerely believe that climate change is not anthropogenic (there’s no one who doesn’t believe the climate is changing, btw), but the reality is that there are tiny, dissenting minorities on every scholarly community. It is still possible, for example, to find a few doctors who don’t believe cigarettes cause cancer. It is still possible to find some historians who don’t think the Holocaust ever happened. But these are few, and they don’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority believe otherwise, and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of the evidence supports anthropogenic global warming.
In regards to peak oil, the scientific consensus is actually harder to figure out. Every once in a while I run into someone who is a peak oil believer and a global warming skeptic, which I find quite funny. That is, the scientific evidence for global warming is so much greater than for peak oil (which in no means implies that both are not true, merely that there is less certainty and less research in regards to peak oil) that it seems odd to me that one could evaluate the evidence for the less certain one, agree with it, and then dismiss the evidence for the other.
But saying that there’s more controversy in the study of peak oil that climate change is not to say that there is no scientific consensus on peak oil. In 2007, the General Accounting Office of the US Congress released a report that argued that a majority of relevant scholars and oil experts now believe that a peak has already happened or is immanent. There are still significant dissenting viewpoints – notably Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), but both are showing chinks in their armor as oil prices rise and as we get several years away from what seems to be our production peak, in 2005. The IEA, for example, this year admitted they anticipate supply constraints into the 2040s – which is effectively an acknowledgement of peak oil, since virtually no serious assessments put the peak that late – the US Geological Survey, for example, puts the world peak at 2023.
The truth is that it is very hard to predict an oil peak, except in hindsight. At the 2006 ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference, I heard peak oil researchers give dates that ranged from 2012 or later to 2005 – so even the experts who do believe in peak oil are uncertain. Because there is no reliable reserve data on total available oil, we can only look at the history of our discoveries (that is, discoveries peaked in the 1960s – since then we’ve been finding a dramatically decreasing amount of new oil each year, despite all the people who hype each new discovery as the answer), how much of the globe has been mapped for oil (the vast majority) and estimate likelihoods. And also, we can do the math showing current rates of decline (most of the major producers are declining significantly), and look at how much oil we’d need to find in order to put off the problem. The answer is “a hell of a lot” – that is, as Matthew Simmons put it, even if we found a massive oil field, as big as the North Sea, for example, it would only delay the whole world’s oil peak by a matter of months.
The next question would be how well the predictions, model and data match up with what we’re actually seeing right now. For example, in regards to peak oil, while we don’t know whether or not the Saudi giant oil fields have actually peaked, we can look and see what is actually happening in the world. Some Saudi authorities claim that the peak is a long way out, others that it is very near (many oil company executives now openly admit peak oil). But right now, oil prices are at very nearly the world record. When prices are extremely high (and they have been for several years now), generally speaking the laws of economics would suggest that people have the incentive to make as much money as they can, by producing as much of this high priced stuff as possible. In fact, however, the Saudis have made “voluntary” cuts now several years in a row. It is possible that OPEC and the House of Saud has said, “We’re rich enough – we simply don’t want any more money.” But how likely is that? More credible is the idea that they cannot increase production due to physical constraints.
The fact is that overall, world oil production is either stagnating or falling in most areas. Explaining this fact requires a credible reasoning. Market forces certainly aren’t driving the decline – anyone with oil has an incentive to sell it now. In some cases, there are technical problems with extraction, or other limits that can explain this, but these explanations are insufficient to describe the overarching trend. On the other hand, peak oil theory explains it in two ways. The first is that actual output has plateued or is beginning to decline. The second is that if we know that, more nations will withhold some of their oil for the longer term, both for their own use, and to sell later on. If we have plenty of oil, it would be crazy of producers not to take advantage of record high prices. If we don’t, we can assume that in fact, high prices will continue, and even rise higher. Peak oil theory fits the facts.
The same is true with climate change theory. For example, climate change dissenters often argue that the sun is sending more heat our way. But if that were true, we’d be seeing more warming in the upper atmosphere as well as closer to the earth. But in fact, the opposite is true – the upper atmosphere is cooler. Since the sun’s rays have to go through the upper atmosphere to get to the earth, that’s not consistent. But if the earth itself is trapping carbon and increasing heat, it would make sense that we would find the upper atmosphere cooler than the lower.
The correlation of manmade C02 levels with planetary warming is another place we can see the evidence of global warming. The ice reductions in the arctic, and the thinning of the edges of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are another.
That is not to say that there is no inconsistency in climate systems – we are talking about a large, enormously complex system, being modeled by thousands of researchers. It is not an easy thing to figure out, and not every bit of data is going to be perfect. But the overwhelming reality is that the story here fits the data extremely well – the account of anthropogenic global warming fits what we are seeing – if anything, we have tended to underestimate our impact.
We can also see the evidence of our own eyes in both cases - we can see the rise in food prices, gas prices, the warming of our regions, the changes in planting zones and snowfall, the increased frequence of drought. These are not sufficient evidence - any one year, any one locality can be explained. But there is no doubt that billions of people around the world are seeing these things, and that our vision is a small piece of the picture.
Going back, for a moment, to _The Limits to Growth_, one of the things that appears a lot in later modeling, in, for example, the 30 Year Update of TLTG, is that feedback loops and intersections are a bigger problem than any individual problem. And for those people wondering whether these problems are really as bad as they think they are, this is probably the most important thing to know – in the 1970s, we were worried about individual problems – a shortage of oil, for example, or about pollution, or a coming ice age. Right now, the biggest concern we have is of the intersection of inter-related problems. That is, the problem is not our ability to respond to one problem, but our ability to respond to multiple, overwhelming simultaneous crises.
_The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update_ found that almost all its “business as usual” scenarios led to collapse , *EVEN IF* the sheer quantities of resources available were *DOUBLED* over what we have any evidence at all for – that is, even if we had enough energy to go along, pollution built and cancer rates skyrocketed, while soil erosion rose to make food production fail to keep pace with population growth. That is, these scenarios don’t depend on a shortage or crisis in any single place – they operate as a system of feedback loops influencing one another. As the authors put it,
A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)
In the 1970s, environmental activists were responding to the very first warning signs of depletion and climate change. Many of them interpreted scientific warnings on these points to mean that we were facing an immediate, definite crisis down to the particulars. But that’s not what they were being told. Instead, people were being warned about the longer term consequences of their actions in no uncertain terms. And in fact, our ability to cope managed to push these issues off, in many cases for decades, but again, as we put our limits further off, we drew our resources down further. Soon, the bill comes due.
Now this is all a fairly compelling case, but it isn’t all the truth that ever was, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is, there is absolutely no point in exaggerating scientific evidence to pretend we know everything with perfect, utter certainty. So my next post will be about the question of how we use this data – that is, if we think the odds are strongly in favor of something, but we don’t have perfect certainty, how do we know what to do? There are logical tools for that, and my next post on this subject will discuss them.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance
I'm going to be asking all of you to do some hard work today - this is not going to be a short post, or an easy one, particularly if you read the referenced piece and the hundred or more relevant comments. We all have limited time and energy, and I'm not necessarily famous for my brevity, so I understand if this looks overwhelming to you, but I'd like people to try and get through it, because this is damned important.
The one time I saw Stuart Staniford speak, at ASPO Boston in the fall of 2006, he ended his analysis of oil peak data with something along the lines of "Peak Oil isn't the end of the world, folks." I'd tend to guess he may actually have changed his mind on this one. He's a guy who tends to be conservative in his estimates, and, as far as I can tell (I don't know him at all) someone who doesn't believe things until he's figured them out to his satisfaction. Since he's a brilliant data analyst, to his satisfaction is quite a high standard. But becuase he's not someone who leaps to conclusions, I tend to trust Staniford's thinking. That is, when he gets worried, I worry. When he says, as he does here, that he was "floored" - I sit up and pay attention. And in fact, I was too.
This is a very long, difficult and important piece, on the impact of biofuels on the food supply, world hunger and the future. I've been arguing intuitively from the perspective of someone whose interest is not in data analysis, that peak oil's first and deepest effects will appear in world hunger, but Staniford has pushed it further. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431#more. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing when you can, but his conclusion is this:
Here the value for the lower-income 2/3 of the world's population is about +0.7. What this means is that a 10% reduction in income has about the same effect on food consumption as a 10% increase in food prices. This suggests that we can use the global income distribution (shown above) to roughly estimate the impact of a doubling or quadrupling of food prices. We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. On the income distribution (one graph back), the 12% mark corresponds to $1020/year in income (shown as the lowermost green dot). By looking at the $2040 level (36% of the global population - second green dot up), and the $4080 level (61% of the global population - third green dot up), we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.
These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of biofuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.
The core problem is that gasoline price elasticity in the US is about -0.05, versus the -0.7 price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers. This makes clear who is going to win the bidding war for food versus biofuels in a free market.
And
I wouldn't claim to be very knowledgeable on this, but I struggle to imagine how someone who wasn't meeting minimum dietary guidelines already can continue to exist on half as much food, or a quarter as much food, as food prices come into equilibrium with the current oil price level, or perhaps double again should oil prices double again. I would imagine that if you are hungry all the time you would already be devoting most of the skills and resources available to you to the problem of eating, and you would have limited ability to increase that in the face of large increases of food prices
For those of my readers who don't spend a lot of time reading scholarly papers, let me translate a little bit. What Staniford is saying is that there will be strong economic incentives to continue biofuels growth at the expense of the world's poor, and that mass starvation could occur quite rapidly, even as he states early on in the paper, as soon as 5 years from now and under existing policies. That is, if we don't act now, we may "accidentally" starve billions of people in our quest for oil substitutes. Staniford says,
"I will use a mixture of existing data,[..] to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for biofuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly - quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes."
Even the most jaundiced viewer of the rush to biofuels, (including myself) has probably underestimated the dangers of biofuel growth without external constraints. My own analysis was that some significant percentage of the population might starve - I admit, I didn't guess half. Here's my own work on what an ethical model of biofuel production would look like: http://www.energybulletin.net/24169.html
If this is true, how do we apply those constraints? That is, if we don't think it is morally acceptable to feed our cars at the expense of other people's children, how do we get that message across?
This, of course, is the central question of just food distribution. While practical data on yields and output of various organic and polyculture practices provides ample evidence that we can continue to produce similar, even increasing quantities of food for some time, the question of distribution offers a constraint that is deeply difficult to overcome. That is, there seems to be little doubt that we can produce enough food to create a stable decline - that is, to feed the population until it stabilizes and falls via voluntary self-limitation. But that does mean that we would have little human food to convert to meat or biofuels, and we would have to not only have more equitable distribution, but a cultural passion for justice and equal distribution.
I know people who believe that latter is utterly impossible to achieve. We are not like that, we are told. We are too selfish. We will not change until we have to.
And perhaps that's even true, but perhaps there are multiple versions of "have to" - that is, the idea that we won't do anything until it is absolutely necessary implicitly sets a real bar for what constitutes absolute necessity. One of the places we tend to set that bar is at our compassion for others as a collective people. That is, we tend to believe that things that affect us personally might move us to action, but things that mostly affect others will not.
There is no doubt that a massive move to biofuels will affect us - is affecting us now. Rising food prices are hurting Americans who have to pay for gas and food and mortgage, and have little flexibility in both. But there is also, as Staniford notes, little doubt that the biggest victims will be the poor of the world, people far away who we do not know. What would make it possible for us to care so much about them that we are willing to change our lives in profound and difficult ways to preserve their lives? Is that entirely unthinkable.
I think to many of us, it is. That is, we look at the way we live now, and do not see or recognize a part of ourselves that cares so deeply about distant others.
Which is why I think the following information is so important - we once did care that much, and not so very long ago.
As Amy Bentley documents in _Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity_, there was a time, about 60 years ago, when Americans were prepared to endure food rationing and hardship in order to keep other people alive. No, I'm not talking about World War II, but about the last time in our history that a signficant percentage of the world faced death from famine.
At the end of World War II, in 1945, the US was thriving, but up to 1/4 of the rest of the world's population was facing hunger. Whole economies had been destroyed by the war, and a subsequent drought dramatically reduced crop yields. In 1945, food production world wide was 12% below pre-war levels, and the 1946 harvest was similarly affected.
Europe's harvest levels were 25% below normal. Mexico was in the grips of massive inflation, with tortilla prices out of reach of many - more than half of all Mexicans were spending 90% of their income on food. In Korea, the whole year's food donation supply was consumed by June. Rations in Japan were at 520 calories per per person, per day, vastly below the 2800 calorie norms. 500 million people faced death by starvation. Only a few nations, most notably America, were in any position at all to export grains for relief.
Meanwhile, the US was newly released from wartime rationing, and food consumption rose to 3300 calories per day on average. People celebrated unlimited meats, sugars and fats that they'd been denied during the war. And Americans were preoccupied with the return of family and the recreation of American society - they did not care very much about the starving masses, if they even knew they existed.
In the winter of 1946, Harry Truman made a radio address on the world situation asking Americans to help conserve food in order to earmark 16 percent of the total US harvest for food relief. Among his policies were included the prohibition of wheat use in alcohol production and strict limitations on feeding grains to livestock. He also asked Americans to voluntarily restrict their food consumption, to free up more food to be sent for relief.
What is remarkable is that when Americans turned their attention to the subject, they showed willingness to endure even stronger restrictions than the voluntary ones that Truman and his Aid czar, Herbert Hoover, proposed. 70% of Americans indicated their willingness to endure shortages of meat, butter, sugar, gas and other goods to give food to the hungry in Europe.
Herbert Hoover gave the following speech, after travelling to famine struck regions:
"I have seen with my own eyes the grimmest spectre of famine in all the history of the world. Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one named War has gone, at least for a while. But Famine, Pestilence and Death are still charging over the earth...Hunger hangs over the homes of 800 million people - over one-third of the people on the earth. "
Americans were further moved by this - and by the recognition that much of the world viewed them as gluttonous and selfish. Millions of Americans recognized that critics who claimed that America could only meet its commitments to provide food aid with rationing demanded its reinstitution, in face of the powerful opposition of Hoover and the Famine Emergency Committee. Americans wanted to see rationing instituted to ensure fairness, as they reduced their consumption.
In 1944, in the heart of World War II, 85% of all Americans believed that rationing should be retained after the war to prevent hunger and shortages. In March, 1946, 59 percent of the American public was willing to reinstitute full scale rationing to be able to relieve hunger in other nations. After Truman spoke eloquently about the world's suffering, the numbers rose to 70%.
Women's consumer groups spoke out in favor of national rationing. The OPA consumer Advisor Committee, made up of many well known and powerful women castigated Truman for not reinstating rationing, saying,
"The first step is immediately to withdraw large quantities of these foods from the domestic market for shipment abroad...Simultaneously measures must be taken to so allocate the domestic supply so that all the people will be able to get their share at home...Voluntary rationing is patently inadequate..."
More than 700 women's groups signed a letter demanding the reinstatement of rationing. 300 presidents of women's colleges did the same. It is worth noting that women took a leading role here - they they consistently demonstrated greater support for the reinstitution of rationing than men. Since the burden of food rationing fell more heavily on women, this is important - the people who would to give up the most were the most anxious to help
Perhaps the most astounding statistic was that almost 1/3 of the American public acknowledged a willingness to reinstitute rationing *to save the starving Japanese* - that is, despite national fury at those who bombed Pearl Harbor, at the most demonized enemy we may ever have had, fully 1/3 of the American population was willing to give up food to save the lives of their enemies.
In fact, voluntary rationing didn't work very well - America failed to make its food commitments, and people did starve. When America finally did meet its goals, it was because of a growing security threat from starving people in Russia. But that doesn't change the fact that Americans effectively begged their government to help them help others. That is, what matters most in this statistic is this - we not so very long ago believed that we would do a great deal in order to help others.
Does this stand as conclusive proof that we won't starve half the world? Absolutely not. And of course there are real and practical differences between the people who lived during World War II and ourselves. And yet, those differences are not so very vast that they might not be overcome, that we too might stand up, and perhaps do so with greater success, and demand that the need of others to be fed exceed the rights of the internal combustion engine.
Sharon
The one time I saw Stuart Staniford speak, at ASPO Boston in the fall of 2006, he ended his analysis of oil peak data with something along the lines of "Peak Oil isn't the end of the world, folks." I'd tend to guess he may actually have changed his mind on this one. He's a guy who tends to be conservative in his estimates, and, as far as I can tell (I don't know him at all) someone who doesn't believe things until he's figured them out to his satisfaction. Since he's a brilliant data analyst, to his satisfaction is quite a high standard. But becuase he's not someone who leaps to conclusions, I tend to trust Staniford's thinking. That is, when he gets worried, I worry. When he says, as he does here, that he was "floored" - I sit up and pay attention. And in fact, I was too.
This is a very long, difficult and important piece, on the impact of biofuels on the food supply, world hunger and the future. I've been arguing intuitively from the perspective of someone whose interest is not in data analysis, that peak oil's first and deepest effects will appear in world hunger, but Staniford has pushed it further. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431#more. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing when you can, but his conclusion is this:
Here the value for the lower-income 2/3 of the world's population is about +0.7. What this means is that a 10% reduction in income has about the same effect on food consumption as a 10% increase in food prices. This suggests that we can use the global income distribution (shown above) to roughly estimate the impact of a doubling or quadrupling of food prices. We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. On the income distribution (one graph back), the 12% mark corresponds to $1020/year in income (shown as the lowermost green dot). By looking at the $2040 level (36% of the global population - second green dot up), and the $4080 level (61% of the global population - third green dot up), we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.
These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of biofuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.
The core problem is that gasoline price elasticity in the US is about -0.05, versus the -0.7 price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers. This makes clear who is going to win the bidding war for food versus biofuels in a free market.
And
I wouldn't claim to be very knowledgeable on this, but I struggle to imagine how someone who wasn't meeting minimum dietary guidelines already can continue to exist on half as much food, or a quarter as much food, as food prices come into equilibrium with the current oil price level, or perhaps double again should oil prices double again. I would imagine that if you are hungry all the time you would already be devoting most of the skills and resources available to you to the problem of eating, and you would have limited ability to increase that in the face of large increases of food prices
For those of my readers who don't spend a lot of time reading scholarly papers, let me translate a little bit. What Staniford is saying is that there will be strong economic incentives to continue biofuels growth at the expense of the world's poor, and that mass starvation could occur quite rapidly, even as he states early on in the paper, as soon as 5 years from now and under existing policies. That is, if we don't act now, we may "accidentally" starve billions of people in our quest for oil substitutes. Staniford says,
"I will use a mixture of existing data,[..] to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for biofuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly - quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes."
Even the most jaundiced viewer of the rush to biofuels, (including myself) has probably underestimated the dangers of biofuel growth without external constraints. My own analysis was that some significant percentage of the population might starve - I admit, I didn't guess half. Here's my own work on what an ethical model of biofuel production would look like: http://www.energybulletin.net/24169.html
If this is true, how do we apply those constraints? That is, if we don't think it is morally acceptable to feed our cars at the expense of other people's children, how do we get that message across?
This, of course, is the central question of just food distribution. While practical data on yields and output of various organic and polyculture practices provides ample evidence that we can continue to produce similar, even increasing quantities of food for some time, the question of distribution offers a constraint that is deeply difficult to overcome. That is, there seems to be little doubt that we can produce enough food to create a stable decline - that is, to feed the population until it stabilizes and falls via voluntary self-limitation. But that does mean that we would have little human food to convert to meat or biofuels, and we would have to not only have more equitable distribution, but a cultural passion for justice and equal distribution.
I know people who believe that latter is utterly impossible to achieve. We are not like that, we are told. We are too selfish. We will not change until we have to.
And perhaps that's even true, but perhaps there are multiple versions of "have to" - that is, the idea that we won't do anything until it is absolutely necessary implicitly sets a real bar for what constitutes absolute necessity. One of the places we tend to set that bar is at our compassion for others as a collective people. That is, we tend to believe that things that affect us personally might move us to action, but things that mostly affect others will not.
There is no doubt that a massive move to biofuels will affect us - is affecting us now. Rising food prices are hurting Americans who have to pay for gas and food and mortgage, and have little flexibility in both. But there is also, as Staniford notes, little doubt that the biggest victims will be the poor of the world, people far away who we do not know. What would make it possible for us to care so much about them that we are willing to change our lives in profound and difficult ways to preserve their lives? Is that entirely unthinkable.
I think to many of us, it is. That is, we look at the way we live now, and do not see or recognize a part of ourselves that cares so deeply about distant others.
Which is why I think the following information is so important - we once did care that much, and not so very long ago.
As Amy Bentley documents in _Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity_, there was a time, about 60 years ago, when Americans were prepared to endure food rationing and hardship in order to keep other people alive. No, I'm not talking about World War II, but about the last time in our history that a signficant percentage of the world faced death from famine.
At the end of World War II, in 1945, the US was thriving, but up to 1/4 of the rest of the world's population was facing hunger. Whole economies had been destroyed by the war, and a subsequent drought dramatically reduced crop yields. In 1945, food production world wide was 12% below pre-war levels, and the 1946 harvest was similarly affected.
Europe's harvest levels were 25% below normal. Mexico was in the grips of massive inflation, with tortilla prices out of reach of many - more than half of all Mexicans were spending 90% of their income on food. In Korea, the whole year's food donation supply was consumed by June. Rations in Japan were at 520 calories per per person, per day, vastly below the 2800 calorie norms. 500 million people faced death by starvation. Only a few nations, most notably America, were in any position at all to export grains for relief.
Meanwhile, the US was newly released from wartime rationing, and food consumption rose to 3300 calories per day on average. People celebrated unlimited meats, sugars and fats that they'd been denied during the war. And Americans were preoccupied with the return of family and the recreation of American society - they did not care very much about the starving masses, if they even knew they existed.
In the winter of 1946, Harry Truman made a radio address on the world situation asking Americans to help conserve food in order to earmark 16 percent of the total US harvest for food relief. Among his policies were included the prohibition of wheat use in alcohol production and strict limitations on feeding grains to livestock. He also asked Americans to voluntarily restrict their food consumption, to free up more food to be sent for relief.
What is remarkable is that when Americans turned their attention to the subject, they showed willingness to endure even stronger restrictions than the voluntary ones that Truman and his Aid czar, Herbert Hoover, proposed. 70% of Americans indicated their willingness to endure shortages of meat, butter, sugar, gas and other goods to give food to the hungry in Europe.
Herbert Hoover gave the following speech, after travelling to famine struck regions:
"I have seen with my own eyes the grimmest spectre of famine in all the history of the world. Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one named War has gone, at least for a while. But Famine, Pestilence and Death are still charging over the earth...Hunger hangs over the homes of 800 million people - over one-third of the people on the earth. "
Americans were further moved by this - and by the recognition that much of the world viewed them as gluttonous and selfish. Millions of Americans recognized that critics who claimed that America could only meet its commitments to provide food aid with rationing demanded its reinstitution, in face of the powerful opposition of Hoover and the Famine Emergency Committee. Americans wanted to see rationing instituted to ensure fairness, as they reduced their consumption.
In 1944, in the heart of World War II, 85% of all Americans believed that rationing should be retained after the war to prevent hunger and shortages. In March, 1946, 59 percent of the American public was willing to reinstitute full scale rationing to be able to relieve hunger in other nations. After Truman spoke eloquently about the world's suffering, the numbers rose to 70%.
Women's consumer groups spoke out in favor of national rationing. The OPA consumer Advisor Committee, made up of many well known and powerful women castigated Truman for not reinstating rationing, saying,
"The first step is immediately to withdraw large quantities of these foods from the domestic market for shipment abroad...Simultaneously measures must be taken to so allocate the domestic supply so that all the people will be able to get their share at home...Voluntary rationing is patently inadequate..."
More than 700 women's groups signed a letter demanding the reinstatement of rationing. 300 presidents of women's colleges did the same. It is worth noting that women took a leading role here - they they consistently demonstrated greater support for the reinstitution of rationing than men. Since the burden of food rationing fell more heavily on women, this is important - the people who would to give up the most were the most anxious to help
Perhaps the most astounding statistic was that almost 1/3 of the American public acknowledged a willingness to reinstitute rationing *to save the starving Japanese* - that is, despite national fury at those who bombed Pearl Harbor, at the most demonized enemy we may ever have had, fully 1/3 of the American population was willing to give up food to save the lives of their enemies.
In fact, voluntary rationing didn't work very well - America failed to make its food commitments, and people did starve. When America finally did meet its goals, it was because of a growing security threat from starving people in Russia. But that doesn't change the fact that Americans effectively begged their government to help them help others. That is, what matters most in this statistic is this - we not so very long ago believed that we would do a great deal in order to help others.
Does this stand as conclusive proof that we won't starve half the world? Absolutely not. And of course there are real and practical differences between the people who lived during World War II and ourselves. And yet, those differences are not so very vast that they might not be overcome, that we too might stand up, and perhaps do so with greater success, and demand that the need of others to be fed exceed the rights of the internal combustion engine.
Sharon
Monday, January 07, 2008
52 Weeks Down - Week 32 - Acclimate Gradually
A couple of weeks ago, I annoyed some people by suggesting that people might turn their heatingthermostats back to 55F. Now it is worth noting that I used this as an example, not an absolute truth - I'm not at all inclined to embark on a campaign for a mandatory single temperature. A number of people mentioned that it was completely impossible to imagine living at that temperature, while others announced that this was normal for them. So what's the difference between them?
Some of it is probably physiology, and the place your body grew up in. Some people run warm, some run cold, some have enough extra fat to keep warm, some have little personal insulation. Some of us grew up in cold places, others in warm. As we get older, we often feel the cold more, and some people have health problems that make them less tolerant than others of the cold weather. But a large portion of this is probably acclimation. That is, they've gradually accustomed their bodies to lower temperatures, and now those temperatures feel comfortable to them.
And I think acclimation is relevant not just to winter heating, but to a host of other things. Hot weather tolerance, for example, is physiologically a matter of acclimation - your body develops more capacity to sweat and cool itself as it is exposed to more heat. So, for example, someone who spends a lot of their time in air conditioning will feel the heat quite literally more than someone who spends less.
The fact is, my heat didn't go directly to 55 degrees - first, we didn't put our heat on until November, and while days stayed up in the 40s and sun warmed the house much higher, nights got cold even then. So we got used to cool temperatures indoors gradually - as the season grew cooler, we did too. At first, cold nights in the 40s felt like they were freezing, since our bodies were so accustomed to summer warmth. Now, after several months of night temperatures regularly in the teens, a 40 degree night like last night feels very pleasant, and we wander outdoors with just a sweater on. I think most people in both cold and warm climates can identify - in the fall, a day in the 40s feels cold and crisp. By springtime, going outside on a day that hits 45 feels like a luxury, and we start shedding clothes - that is, we've acclimated. The same is true of heat - if your daytime temperatures are over 100 regularly, you find an 85 degree day refreshing. On the other hand, in my climate, which rarely breaks 90, 85 is awfully warm and sticky.
We also try and spend a lot of time outside. We go out to haul wood, to feed the animals, to play in the snow, to take walks. A house that feels chilly at 55 when you've spent the whole day inside, suddenly feels toasty warm after a walk out in the 20 degree day. Because we heat with wood, we also have warm spots in our house - further away from the woodstove, we are colder. If we need a few minutes to warm up in front of the stove, that's a pleasure. If we have to sit and work for a while, often we try and do it there - in fact this kind of heating brings the family together.
We use other techniques to acclimate - we find the places where we lose heat and retain it, wearing hats sometimes even indoors, wool socks on cold feet and multiple layers that we can take off when we're up and moving around, and cuddle into when we're sitting. We use psychological techniques as well - when everyone around you lives in a 70F home, 55 seems shockingly cold. When you think that through most of human history, people's homes were heated by fires - and not that many of them, we have to realize that most people went through their lives acclimated to much colder temperatures than we have now. If they did, most of us can. There are those who really do need that place in front of the stove, or the space heater in the room they work in - infants, for example cannot regulate their body temperatures until they hit 10lbs. Some ill and disabled people cannot manage lower temperatures. But this is an argument often for spot heating - for making people comfortable where they must be most of the time, rather than for spreading heat inefficiently over a whole home.
But acclimation applies to more than heating and cooling - it applies to the whole process of becoming environmentally aware. Like our family at the beginning of the cool season, at first change feel like a shock to the system. Just as a cold day in September may feel bitter, intolerable, the first time you tell someone you aren't buying supermarket food, or you won't drive long distances, it may seem overwhelming, as though you could never get comfortable in this new way of existing. But time passes, you keep practicing, you keep doing it, and suddenly, you realize you are comfortable. The new food seems delicious, the new habit of taking public transportation starts to have unexpected joys.
It is well outside my range of interest to tell people exactly what temperature they should be living at. But most of us know that our first reaction to trying something isn't necessarily representative of the experience we will have over the long term. The process of acclimation can be hard sometimes - but the result is a new normal, coming to be content at a lower state, and that's worth a considerable effort, at least to me.
Sharon
Some of it is probably physiology, and the place your body grew up in. Some people run warm, some run cold, some have enough extra fat to keep warm, some have little personal insulation. Some of us grew up in cold places, others in warm. As we get older, we often feel the cold more, and some people have health problems that make them less tolerant than others of the cold weather. But a large portion of this is probably acclimation. That is, they've gradually accustomed their bodies to lower temperatures, and now those temperatures feel comfortable to them.
And I think acclimation is relevant not just to winter heating, but to a host of other things. Hot weather tolerance, for example, is physiologically a matter of acclimation - your body develops more capacity to sweat and cool itself as it is exposed to more heat. So, for example, someone who spends a lot of their time in air conditioning will feel the heat quite literally more than someone who spends less.
The fact is, my heat didn't go directly to 55 degrees - first, we didn't put our heat on until November, and while days stayed up in the 40s and sun warmed the house much higher, nights got cold even then. So we got used to cool temperatures indoors gradually - as the season grew cooler, we did too. At first, cold nights in the 40s felt like they were freezing, since our bodies were so accustomed to summer warmth. Now, after several months of night temperatures regularly in the teens, a 40 degree night like last night feels very pleasant, and we wander outdoors with just a sweater on. I think most people in both cold and warm climates can identify - in the fall, a day in the 40s feels cold and crisp. By springtime, going outside on a day that hits 45 feels like a luxury, and we start shedding clothes - that is, we've acclimated. The same is true of heat - if your daytime temperatures are over 100 regularly, you find an 85 degree day refreshing. On the other hand, in my climate, which rarely breaks 90, 85 is awfully warm and sticky.
We also try and spend a lot of time outside. We go out to haul wood, to feed the animals, to play in the snow, to take walks. A house that feels chilly at 55 when you've spent the whole day inside, suddenly feels toasty warm after a walk out in the 20 degree day. Because we heat with wood, we also have warm spots in our house - further away from the woodstove, we are colder. If we need a few minutes to warm up in front of the stove, that's a pleasure. If we have to sit and work for a while, often we try and do it there - in fact this kind of heating brings the family together.
We use other techniques to acclimate - we find the places where we lose heat and retain it, wearing hats sometimes even indoors, wool socks on cold feet and multiple layers that we can take off when we're up and moving around, and cuddle into when we're sitting. We use psychological techniques as well - when everyone around you lives in a 70F home, 55 seems shockingly cold. When you think that through most of human history, people's homes were heated by fires - and not that many of them, we have to realize that most people went through their lives acclimated to much colder temperatures than we have now. If they did, most of us can. There are those who really do need that place in front of the stove, or the space heater in the room they work in - infants, for example cannot regulate their body temperatures until they hit 10lbs. Some ill and disabled people cannot manage lower temperatures. But this is an argument often for spot heating - for making people comfortable where they must be most of the time, rather than for spreading heat inefficiently over a whole home.
But acclimation applies to more than heating and cooling - it applies to the whole process of becoming environmentally aware. Like our family at the beginning of the cool season, at first change feel like a shock to the system. Just as a cold day in September may feel bitter, intolerable, the first time you tell someone you aren't buying supermarket food, or you won't drive long distances, it may seem overwhelming, as though you could never get comfortable in this new way of existing. But time passes, you keep practicing, you keep doing it, and suddenly, you realize you are comfortable. The new food seems delicious, the new habit of taking public transportation starts to have unexpected joys.
It is well outside my range of interest to tell people exactly what temperature they should be living at. But most of us know that our first reaction to trying something isn't necessarily representative of the experience we will have over the long term. The process of acclimation can be hard sometimes - but the result is a new normal, coming to be content at a lower state, and that's worth a considerable effort, at least to me.
Sharon
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Scenes from the Growing Food Crisis: On Finding My Work
Regular readers will probably have noticed the quiet here this last week. That's because the last five days were spent in intensive work with my co-author, Aaron Newton, on our book _A Nation of Farmers_. This is our only chance to be in the same room before the book is completed this spring, so we felt obligated to spend every moment focusing on how we as a society are to keep ensuring that we all eat.
Not only were we driven by limited time together, but by the rising pressure of food insecurity that is playing out all over the world. Here are just a few of the news stories that have come across my desk in the last week or so. Individually and collectively they point to a real, deep, and serious food crisis.
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
'As world food prices continue to surge, 37 countries are facing critical food crises due to conflict and disasters, according to a report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
FAO's global food price index rose 40 percent this year to the highest level on record. Food costs in the world's poorest countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, and 20 African countries — rose 25 percent to $107 billion.
"Urgent and new steps are needed to prevent the negative impacts of rising food prices from further escalating and to quickly boost crop production in the most affected countries," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf in a press conference last week at FAO's Rome headquarters.
"Without support for poor farmers and their families in the hardest-hit countries, they will not be able to cope. Assisting poor vulnerable households in rural areas in the short term and enabling them to produce more food would be an efficient tool to protect them against hunger and undernourishment." '
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1951495520071219
"Asian nations, many at risk from climate change, must invest more in urban and indoor farming to help feed the hundreds of millions of people in their growing cities, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Wednesday"
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=213343
"A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a74e1668-ac42-11dc-82f0-0000779fd2ac.html
Global food prices will come under further pressure today as benchmark prices for cereals at much higher levels come into operation, making it almost inevitable that a second wave of food price inflation will hit the world's leading economies.
In Chicago wheat and rice prices for delivery in March 2008 have jumped to an all-time record, soyabean prices are at a 34-year high and corn prices at an 11-year peak.
Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies. Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies."
And
"The US Department of Agriculture has predicted that global corn stocks will fall to a 33-year low of just 7.5 weeks of consumption, while global wheat stocks will plunge to their lowest level in at least 47 years at 9.3 weeks."
Just as I once wrote that over the last year I have shifted my rhetoric on peak oil and climate change from talking about what may be to speaking of what is, it is now time for all of us to stop speaking of hypotheticals when we are thinking about famine. We are not now short of food - fair and just systems of distribution could still avert the worst outcomes. But those are not the systems we have in place.
So the question becomes, both for Aaron and I in our book, and for our society as a whole, how do we change that? How do we change our food systems so that what we eat and what we grow keeps justice in mind? How do we put new systems in place that maximize food production and minimize inputs? How do we do this quickly, but with minimal destruction?
Those are incredibly hard questions to answer in many ways. And while we have some ideas and solutions for some of those questions and a host of others, we don't claim to know everything. A lot of times, we feel like we don't know anything at all. Which is why I will be writing a lot about food over the coming months here, throwing ideas out to my readers for comment and critique, thinking the questions through with your help.
I wonder sometimes if it is crazy for the two of us to take up the most basic questions of our society, to act as though we know enough to find a solution for such a vast problem. My training is in Shakespeare, poetry, language, history. Aaron's is in landscape architecture and journalism. Shouldn't this job be being done by someone more famous, more important, better trained, more knowledgeable? And, of course, it is being done by some people who fit those descriptions.
But when I feel least certain that we can do the things that are needed, when I most see myself as inadequate to the task, I'm reminded of four quotations that I'd like all my readers to look at, and think a little on. The thing is, I suspect a lot of us are in the same boat - we spent our lives preparing for a different world and life than the one we're faced with. And now we know this stuff about peak oil and climate change and the world, and we have to do something. But how can we? How can *WE* do something, when we're not trained, or prepared, or ready? When we're not activists or leaders by nature? When we have fears and doubts and weaknesses?
There's so very much work that needs to be done that it can get overwhelming. How do we narrow things down? None of us can do it all, so how do we know what to do, when to step up? How do we put ourselves forward into places we weren't fully prepared to go, into roles we aren't wholly ready for?
The first three are very short, the third, longer:
"We are what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut
I have loved Kurt Vonnegut's writing since I was a teenager, but this quotation particularly has always struck me. When I became a peak oil writer, instead of a weird chick with a crazy blog (which, let us note, is a process, not a moment, and still has not happened in many circles), and people started listening to me, I didn't see any difference in me that would make anyone take me seriously. I still don't. I still don't know everything I need to. I still make stupid mistakes. I'm still not perfectly trained for this work. I'm faking it. But maybe all of us are faking it a little. Maybe the line between real and pretend isn't that thick, and if I go about pretending, not that I have all the answers, but that I am doing this work and learning on the job, and that's sufficient, maybe that will be enough.
"She did not cry, 'I cannot, I am not worthy,'
Nor 'I have not the strength.'
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illuminated her." - Denise Levertov
I came across this poem in the same place I found the following one, in one of Annie Lamott's wonderful, funny books. Levertov is talking about Mary, mother of Jesus, and Annie Lamott quotes this poem, and then follows it with the line "This is so, so not me." Well, it isn't me either. I'm not real holy here, and not much of a Mariologist. But I like very much the notion that consent can illuminate us. I think sometimes simply consenting to do the work may be the big transition - we go along thinking hard about ourselves as one sort of person, doing one sort of thing, and suddenly, we have to find a new way to understand ourselves.
Sometimes we know what we want to do, but often, the work finds us. This was how it was for me - like many of us, maybe most of us, here I was growing my family's food and writing about that, and about a few other things. It was a hobby at most, I, like millions of other people, was putting down my thoughts on a particular passion of mine on the internet. And when it came time to sit down and figure out (only a couple of years ago) what I would do when the kids got a little bigger, "Writer" wasn't even on the list. "Peak Oil Writer" wasn't a job, as far as I knew. So to say I didn't plan to embark on the career I'm on doesn't even begin to describe it - I didn't know this career existed. I had read people like Heinberg, Darley, Kunstler - but the idea that they too wandered into their work by confronting an idea and coming to see it as theirs never occurred to me.
Two years later, I'm a peak oil writer (as well as a host of other things), doing this job I didn't know existed. The work found me. And I would bet that some of you are have been found by some of this work. I hope you will take it up.
"...one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people." - Annie Lamott
Could this possibly be true? That is, could it be true that we some how, trusting our intuitions and our guts, know what our proper work is, what we can contribute to the world? None of us can do everything we need to in the world. Trying to do so will drive us mad. But all of us can find a piece of the project, a limited part of what desperately needs to be done, can trust the part of us that says "this is my proper work in the world" and pick that up and go on with it.
I don't know what your work is - heck, I didn't know what mine was. Maybe your job is to start a small, local seed company that will serve your area, or to help families in need in your spare time. Maybe your work is to spread the word about climate change to your friends and family, or to write position papers for a Senator. Maybe your work is a very small piece of everything - to tend this patch of ground, to care for these particular people who need you. Maybe your work is much larger - to transmit this idea or make this policy change. Maybe your work will change over time - maybe right now you are head down in a medical crisis, or new fatherhood or school and your work is to get yourself to a place where you can take on a little more later - and then you'll find what else there is. Or maybe you are moving from one kind of work to another to match your interests or your needs. Some of us will have a single immutable project, others a host of them, or a shifting pattern of pies we put our fingers in.
But, I would argue, all of us are the right people for some work. All of us have the obligation to show up, to the extent of our abilities, to stretch ourselves a little, to take on a piece of this, and maybe just a little more than we can possibly achieve.
Finally, a long quote that I may have used before here, but that I repeat because I believe it is so important.
I discovered in my earlier research on international conflict resolution that however intractable an intersocietal conflict may be, there are always people working on the solution. Pick the direst time in the Middle East conflict, for example, and you can find someone hidden away in a basement drawing up maps for the water and sewer lines, the lines that will connect the two societies and that must be built when peace is reached, as inconceivable as that tis at the time. Someone else is sketching the constitution for the new country, the one that is also inconceivable at the time. And someone else is outlining the terms of trade for the as yet unproduced goods that will traverse the two societies' border....Surrounded by intense conflict, hatred and violence, these people appear the fool, idealists who do not know or can not accept the reality of their societies' situation. If they really knew that situation, others would say, they would be 'realists;' they would concentrated their efforts on hard bargaining, economic incentives and military force. But, in practice, when a threshold is passed, when leaders shake hands or a jailed dissident is freed or families from the two sides join together, everyone casts about for new ways to organize. - Thomas Princen
I came to this by accident. I was interested, and I noticed "I don't think anyone has ever written about this" and "I wonder if this might be helpful." And it turned, oddly enough, into part of a career. But even if it hadn't, it would still have been my right work. The moment I noticed that no one was doing something that needed doing, I had begun the process of entry into the great project of ameliorating and regenerating. Because the answer to "this needs doing" is almost always "Great, why don't you get started." I didn't know where getting started would take me. Sometimes I still wonder if I'm the right person, often consent does not illuminate me, sometimes I'd just as soon do something else. But the truth is this - the work must be done by someone, and why not me?
And why not you? Perhaps food isn't your thing, but water systems, or energy policy, or conflict resolution or green education is. Perhaps food is your thing, and you don't have the slightest idea what to do - do you buy a farm, do you join a CSA, start a community garden, begin a coop?
I can't tell you. I can only tell you this. The work is out there, and it is as much as all of us can do. And the right people are the ones, illuminated by consent, who take on a project, and a vision of the future, claim it as their own, and go forward, in all our limitations.
If you feel inadequate to the job, welcome to the club! If you feel you don't know enough, have enough strength or courage or skill, I'm glad to meet you - we're in the same boat. If you think that this is a job for someone with authority, I'm going to tell you my secret. The week before I was a farmer, I was a grad student with a seed and some dirt I had no idea what to do with. The day before I was a peak oil writer I was a Mom with grubby children and dirty dishes and a blog. The transition from inadequacy to authority is only this - one more day of trying, one more experiment, one person who knows even less than you do, the willingness to try, at least, to help them, and the illumination of consent.
I wish you all good work.
Sharon
Not only were we driven by limited time together, but by the rising pressure of food insecurity that is playing out all over the world. Here are just a few of the news stories that have come across my desk in the last week or so. Individually and collectively they point to a real, deep, and serious food crisis.
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html
'As world food prices continue to surge, 37 countries are facing critical food crises due to conflict and disasters, according to a report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
FAO's global food price index rose 40 percent this year to the highest level on record. Food costs in the world's poorest countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, and 20 African countries — rose 25 percent to $107 billion.
"Urgent and new steps are needed to prevent the negative impacts of rising food prices from further escalating and to quickly boost crop production in the most affected countries," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf in a press conference last week at FAO's Rome headquarters.
"Without support for poor farmers and their families in the hardest-hit countries, they will not be able to cope. Assisting poor vulnerable households in rural areas in the short term and enabling them to produce more food would be an efficient tool to protect them against hunger and undernourishment." '
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1951495520071219
"Asian nations, many at risk from climate change, must invest more in urban and indoor farming to help feed the hundreds of millions of people in their growing cities, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Wednesday"
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=213343
"A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a74e1668-ac42-11dc-82f0-0000779fd2ac.html
Global food prices will come under further pressure today as benchmark prices for cereals at much higher levels come into operation, making it almost inevitable that a second wave of food price inflation will hit the world's leading economies.
In Chicago wheat and rice prices for delivery in March 2008 have jumped to an all-time record, soyabean prices are at a 34-year high and corn prices at an 11-year peak.
Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies. Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies."
And
"The US Department of Agriculture has predicted that global corn stocks will fall to a 33-year low of just 7.5 weeks of consumption, while global wheat stocks will plunge to their lowest level in at least 47 years at 9.3 weeks."
Just as I once wrote that over the last year I have shifted my rhetoric on peak oil and climate change from talking about what may be to speaking of what is, it is now time for all of us to stop speaking of hypotheticals when we are thinking about famine. We are not now short of food - fair and just systems of distribution could still avert the worst outcomes. But those are not the systems we have in place.
So the question becomes, both for Aaron and I in our book, and for our society as a whole, how do we change that? How do we change our food systems so that what we eat and what we grow keeps justice in mind? How do we put new systems in place that maximize food production and minimize inputs? How do we do this quickly, but with minimal destruction?
Those are incredibly hard questions to answer in many ways. And while we have some ideas and solutions for some of those questions and a host of others, we don't claim to know everything. A lot of times, we feel like we don't know anything at all. Which is why I will be writing a lot about food over the coming months here, throwing ideas out to my readers for comment and critique, thinking the questions through with your help.
I wonder sometimes if it is crazy for the two of us to take up the most basic questions of our society, to act as though we know enough to find a solution for such a vast problem. My training is in Shakespeare, poetry, language, history. Aaron's is in landscape architecture and journalism. Shouldn't this job be being done by someone more famous, more important, better trained, more knowledgeable? And, of course, it is being done by some people who fit those descriptions.
But when I feel least certain that we can do the things that are needed, when I most see myself as inadequate to the task, I'm reminded of four quotations that I'd like all my readers to look at, and think a little on. The thing is, I suspect a lot of us are in the same boat - we spent our lives preparing for a different world and life than the one we're faced with. And now we know this stuff about peak oil and climate change and the world, and we have to do something. But how can we? How can *WE* do something, when we're not trained, or prepared, or ready? When we're not activists or leaders by nature? When we have fears and doubts and weaknesses?
There's so very much work that needs to be done that it can get overwhelming. How do we narrow things down? None of us can do it all, so how do we know what to do, when to step up? How do we put ourselves forward into places we weren't fully prepared to go, into roles we aren't wholly ready for?
The first three are very short, the third, longer:
"We are what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut
I have loved Kurt Vonnegut's writing since I was a teenager, but this quotation particularly has always struck me. When I became a peak oil writer, instead of a weird chick with a crazy blog (which, let us note, is a process, not a moment, and still has not happened in many circles
"She did not cry, 'I cannot, I am not worthy,'
Nor 'I have not the strength.'
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illuminated her." - Denise Levertov
I came across this poem in the same place I found the following one, in one of Annie Lamott's wonderful, funny books. Levertov is talking about Mary, mother of Jesus, and Annie Lamott quotes this poem, and then follows it with the line "This is so, so not me." Well, it isn't me either. I'm not real holy here, and not much of a Mariologist. But I like very much the notion that consent can illuminate us. I think sometimes simply consenting to do the work may be the big transition - we go along thinking hard about ourselves as one sort of person, doing one sort of thing, and suddenly, we have to find a new way to understand ourselves.
Sometimes we know what we want to do, but often, the work finds us. This was how it was for me - like many of us, maybe most of us, here I was growing my family's food and writing about that, and about a few other things. It was a hobby at most, I, like millions of other people, was putting down my thoughts on a particular passion of mine on the internet. And when it came time to sit down and figure out (only a couple of years ago) what I would do when the kids got a little bigger, "Writer" wasn't even on the list. "Peak Oil Writer" wasn't a job, as far as I knew. So to say I didn't plan to embark on the career I'm on doesn't even begin to describe it - I didn't know this career existed. I had read people like Heinberg, Darley, Kunstler - but the idea that they too wandered into their work by confronting an idea and coming to see it as theirs never occurred to me.
Two years later, I'm a peak oil writer (as well as a host of other things), doing this job I didn't know existed. The work found me. And I would bet that some of you are have been found by some of this work. I hope you will take it up.
"...one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people." - Annie Lamott
Could this possibly be true? That is, could it be true that we some how, trusting our intuitions and our guts, know what our proper work is, what we can contribute to the world? None of us can do everything we need to in the world. Trying to do so will drive us mad. But all of us can find a piece of the project, a limited part of what desperately needs to be done, can trust the part of us that says "this is my proper work in the world" and pick that up and go on with it.
I don't know what your work is - heck, I didn't know what mine was. Maybe your job is to start a small, local seed company that will serve your area, or to help families in need in your spare time. Maybe your work is to spread the word about climate change to your friends and family, or to write position papers for a Senator. Maybe your work is a very small piece of everything - to tend this patch of ground, to care for these particular people who need you. Maybe your work is much larger - to transmit this idea or make this policy change. Maybe your work will change over time - maybe right now you are head down in a medical crisis, or new fatherhood or school and your work is to get yourself to a place where you can take on a little more later - and then you'll find what else there is. Or maybe you are moving from one kind of work to another to match your interests or your needs. Some of us will have a single immutable project, others a host of them, or a shifting pattern of pies we put our fingers in.
But, I would argue, all of us are the right people for some work. All of us have the obligation to show up, to the extent of our abilities, to stretch ourselves a little, to take on a piece of this, and maybe just a little more than we can possibly achieve.
Finally, a long quote that I may have used before here, but that I repeat because I believe it is so important.
I discovered in my earlier research on international conflict resolution that however intractable an intersocietal conflict may be, there are always people working on the solution. Pick the direst time in the Middle East conflict, for example, and you can find someone hidden away in a basement drawing up maps for the water and sewer lines, the lines that will connect the two societies and that must be built when peace is reached, as inconceivable as that tis at the time. Someone else is sketching the constitution for the new country, the one that is also inconceivable at the time. And someone else is outlining the terms of trade for the as yet unproduced goods that will traverse the two societies' border....Surrounded by intense conflict, hatred and violence, these people appear the fool, idealists who do not know or can not accept the reality of their societies' situation. If they really knew that situation, others would say, they would be 'realists;' they would concentrated their efforts on hard bargaining, economic incentives and military force. But, in practice, when a threshold is passed, when leaders shake hands or a jailed dissident is freed or families from the two sides join together, everyone casts about for new ways to organize. - Thomas Princen
I came to this by accident. I was interested, and I noticed "I don't think anyone has ever written about this" and "I wonder if this might be helpful." And it turned, oddly enough, into part of a career. But even if it hadn't, it would still have been my right work. The moment I noticed that no one was doing something that needed doing, I had begun the process of entry into the great project of ameliorating and regenerating. Because the answer to "this needs doing" is almost always "Great, why don't you get started." I didn't know where getting started would take me. Sometimes I still wonder if I'm the right person, often consent does not illuminate me, sometimes I'd just as soon do something else. But the truth is this - the work must be done by someone, and why not me?
And why not you? Perhaps food isn't your thing, but water systems, or energy policy, or conflict resolution or green education is. Perhaps food is your thing, and you don't have the slightest idea what to do - do you buy a farm, do you join a CSA, start a community garden, begin a coop?
I can't tell you. I can only tell you this. The work is out there, and it is as much as all of us can do. And the right people are the ones, illuminated by consent, who take on a project, and a vision of the future, claim it as their own, and go forward, in all our limitations.
If you feel inadequate to the job, welcome to the club! If you feel you don't know enough, have enough strength or courage or skill, I'm glad to meet you - we're in the same boat. If you think that this is a job for someone with authority, I'm going to tell you my secret. The week before I was a farmer, I was a grad student with a seed and some dirt I had no idea what to do with. The day before I was a peak oil writer I was a Mom with grubby children and dirty dishes and a blog. The transition from inadequacy to authority is only this - one more day of trying, one more experiment, one person who knows even less than you do, the willingness to try, at least, to help them, and the illumination of consent.
I wish you all good work.
Sharon
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Doctor, It Hurts When I Do This....
Motherhood, I'm convinced, has unfit me for understanding politics. Dealing with small children has clearly given me the mistaken impression that simple, accessible solutions are better than complicated ones, and that it is possible to avoid many ill consequences simply with the application of common sense. This will clearly never do.
Small children have no common sense at all, something that most of them will grow out of, unless they run for office. So when my five and three year olds come to me sobbing, because they've conceived an elaborate game involving huring a small, hard ball at the stairs and catching it (some of the time) , as it races back at their faces...except on the cruel and inexplicable (not more than one time out of two) occasions in which it whacks them in the eye...and tell me that it *hurts* when the ball hits them in the eye, and how could anyone have predicted that this might happen, Mommy understands.
In fact, she's got a solution - they could...gasp!...stop throwing the ball at the stairs. The children are stunned, and appalled at the ridiculousness of this solution. Throwing the ball at the stairs is fun!! Why on earth would Mommy ever think that the problem is inherent in the activity, rather than that one, mean ball that swung back and whacked Isaiah in the eye...? What horrible spoilsports Mommies are, they tell me, and, properly united in their contempt for my solution, go off to malign me for not letting them do anything fun.
The reason mothers don't actually eat their young (tempting thought it occasionally is) is that we know their brains simply haven't developed enough yet to apply things like reason and common sense. They simply lack maturity. And most of the time, they are so cute that it is hard to mind too much. Most world leaders, on the other hand, are not cute, but seem to suffer from an intellectually stunting medical condition that one would think would unfit them to lead anything larger than a small goat.
Politics, seen through the lens of motherhood, looks remarkably stupid. So, for example, the hardly surprising news that Saddam Hussein would have taken a big wad of cash and gone into exile http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162 seems merely another depressing bit of evidence that the world is run by idiots. Duh - you mean the mass murdering tyrant (let me clarify - I refer to Saddam, here, not *our* mass murdering tyrant) would rather have taken a billion dollars and gone to parties in Paris than been hunted down in a filthy hole, tried and killed by a vastly superior military force? Shocking, really shocking. You mean we didn't have to spend a ton of China's...er...our money blowing up Iraq to bring "democracy"? Next you'll be telling me that some Washington insider, like Alan Greenspan has admitted this had something to do with oil!?!
I'm not much more impressed by the discussions of how to get the carbon out the atmosphere. For example this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162. Let's see...it might take CO2 out of the atmosphere...or it might flood the atmosphere with additional CO2 now locked up in the ocean, potentially rushing us towards an environmental tipping point. Certainly, up until now, we've done so very well playing with technological solutions whose long term effects we simply don't understand...let's just go with another one and see what happens.
Small children have no common sense at all, something that most of them will grow out of, unless they run for office. So when my five and three year olds come to me sobbing, because they've conceived an elaborate game involving huring a small, hard ball at the stairs and catching it (some of the time) , as it races back at their faces...except on the cruel and inexplicable (not more than one time out of two) occasions in which it whacks them in the eye...and tell me that it *hurts* when the ball hits them in the eye, and how could anyone have predicted that this might happen, Mommy understands.
In fact, she's got a solution - they could...gasp!...stop throwing the ball at the stairs. The children are stunned, and appalled at the ridiculousness of this solution. Throwing the ball at the stairs is fun!! Why on earth would Mommy ever think that the problem is inherent in the activity, rather than that one, mean ball that swung back and whacked Isaiah in the eye...? What horrible spoilsports Mommies are, they tell me, and, properly united in their contempt for my solution, go off to malign me for not letting them do anything fun.
The reason mothers don't actually eat their young (tempting thought it occasionally is) is that we know their brains simply haven't developed enough yet to apply things like reason and common sense. They simply lack maturity. And most of the time, they are so cute that it is hard to mind too much. Most world leaders, on the other hand, are not cute, but seem to suffer from an intellectually stunting medical condition that one would think would unfit them to lead anything larger than a small goat.
Politics, seen through the lens of motherhood, looks remarkably stupid. So, for example, the hardly surprising news that Saddam Hussein would have taken a big wad of cash and gone into exile http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162 seems merely another depressing bit of evidence that the world is run by idiots. Duh - you mean the mass murdering tyrant (let me clarify - I refer to Saddam, here, not *our* mass murdering tyrant) would rather have taken a billion dollars and gone to parties in Paris than been hunted down in a filthy hole, tried and killed by a vastly superior military force? Shocking, really shocking. You mean we didn't have to spend a ton of China's...er...our money blowing up Iraq to bring "democracy"? Next you'll be telling me that some Washington insider, like Alan Greenspan has admitted this had something to do with oil!?!
I'm not much more impressed by the discussions of how to get the carbon out the atmosphere. For example this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162. Let's see...it might take CO2 out of the atmosphere...or it might flood the atmosphere with additional CO2 now locked up in the ocean, potentially rushing us towards an environmental tipping point. Certainly, up until now, we've done so very well playing with technological solutions whose long term effects we simply don't understand...let's just go with another one and see what happens.
Why is it when I read about solutions to climate change that I feel like I'm listening to my children explain why the problem isn't throwing the ball, its the mean old ball's habit of misbehaving - and we could just persuade it to stop. The solution to climate change is this - stop burning the damned stuff. Not easy, especially if you really like the games you've been playing. But it is the answer.
But then, what do Mommies know?
Shalom,
Sharon
Friday, December 28, 2007
You Heard It Here First...Sadly
Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million
Guess what - I'm starting to wonder whether I do have magic powers to predict the future (yeah, like common sense ;-)) - this blog, which has been going on for months about the notion that we have to cut emissions faster and harder than anyone has acknowledge turns out to have beaten even James Hansen and Bill McKibben to the punch. Why is it, I wonder, that my predictions are only right about things that suck?
"It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.
And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.
That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.
Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.
But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know."
McKibben is being cheery about the bad news, so I will be to. We've been given a huge and perhaps exciting challenge - how to entirely stop producing more industrial carbon emissions. And believe it or not, I've got a few ideas (doesn't she always you say, rolling your eyes ;-)).
Or rather, they are the same ideas. It turns out that Monbiot was far too conservative - he was trying to keep things at 450. This is going to require a fast and serious drop in our fossil energy use down to near 0. The fast part means we're going to have to prioritize - think hard about where we want to put our very limited carbon emissions. Building more renewables, keeping medical care and food supplies coming, enabling an educated populace - that's where they need to go, and that's where they should go.
I've been working on trying to create a model of life of some sort for a few years - not a perfect life. If I were perfect I would have had 1.5 kids, started before I was 30 and would be pedalling everywhere. But a model of an imperfect life in transition, making do with what I've got, the best I can. When I try and think about what my role in this is, it comes down to that - I'm an ordinary person, ordinarily selfish and cranky and lazy, greedy and flawed. So what I can do with my imperfect life, from my imperfect start, in my imperfect home with my limited funds and energies I believe others can do - or they will do it some other way and tell me, and I can tell others, so that there's one more model out there. It isn't a perfect solution, and maybe there's other work to be done that I should be doing. But maybe this is mine.
After we reallocate, our personal use is going to have to be done by our limited supply of renewables (that means we all get a little bit of energy to use) and our hands and feet, some animals and a complete change in our way of life. There is no model I've ever seen that enables us to do a very rapid (under a decade) build out of renewables, and keep the global economy going as is. We're simply entering uncharted territory. If we become serious about this, everything is going to change.
And everything will remain the same - we'll still be the people we are. We'll still care about the things we care about most - the people we love, keeping people healthy, cared for and fed, giving our kids a decent education, having good and honorable work to do. We'll do different work, different play, live different lives, but we'll still be us, and the things we always say we really care about - those will still be the things we can have.
We can do this. We have to, but more, we can.
Sharon
Guess what - I'm starting to wonder whether I do have magic powers to predict the future (yeah, like common sense ;-)) - this blog, which has been going on for months about the notion that we have to cut emissions faster and harder than anyone has acknowledge turns out to have beaten even James Hansen and Bill McKibben to the punch. Why is it, I wonder, that my predictions are only right about things that suck?
"It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.
And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.
That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.
Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.
But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know."
McKibben is being cheery about the bad news, so I will be to. We've been given a huge and perhaps exciting challenge - how to entirely stop producing more industrial carbon emissions. And believe it or not, I've got a few ideas (doesn't she always you say, rolling your eyes ;-)).
Or rather, they are the same ideas. It turns out that Monbiot was far too conservative - he was trying to keep things at 450. This is going to require a fast and serious drop in our fossil energy use down to near 0. The fast part means we're going to have to prioritize - think hard about where we want to put our very limited carbon emissions. Building more renewables, keeping medical care and food supplies coming, enabling an educated populace - that's where they need to go, and that's where they should go.
I've been working on trying to create a model of life of some sort for a few years - not a perfect life. If I were perfect I would have had 1.5 kids, started before I was 30 and would be pedalling everywhere. But a model of an imperfect life in transition, making do with what I've got, the best I can. When I try and think about what my role in this is, it comes down to that - I'm an ordinary person, ordinarily selfish and cranky and lazy, greedy and flawed. So what I can do with my imperfect life, from my imperfect start, in my imperfect home with my limited funds and energies I believe others can do - or they will do it some other way and tell me, and I can tell others, so that there's one more model out there. It isn't a perfect solution, and maybe there's other work to be done that I should be doing. But maybe this is mine.
After we reallocate, our personal use is going to have to be done by our limited supply of renewables (that means we all get a little bit of energy to use) and our hands and feet, some animals and a complete change in our way of life. There is no model I've ever seen that enables us to do a very rapid (under a decade) build out of renewables, and keep the global economy going as is. We're simply entering uncharted territory. If we become serious about this, everything is going to change.
And everything will remain the same - we'll still be the people we are. We'll still care about the things we care about most - the people we love, keeping people healthy, cared for and fed, giving our kids a decent education, having good and honorable work to do. We'll do different work, different play, live different lives, but we'll still be us, and the things we always say we really care about - those will still be the things we can have.
We can do this. We have to, but more, we can.
Sharon
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Here Be Dragons: Predictions for 2008
Ok, last year I made some (quite tongue in cheek) bets, and it is interesting to me to see how they stood up - you can see them here:
History and the New Year
Generally speaking, my predictions (which weren't exactly going way out on a limb or anything) were pretty much right, except for Israel and Syria - it was Iran, not Venezuela, and the interest rate hikes were met by later cuts, but overall, I called it - more or less. I promise, this surprises me more than anyone. And I suspect that "the year of hanging on by our fingertips" wasn't a bad way to describe the last year.
My intuition is that in 2008, we'll no longer be able quite to hang on. I'm going to call 2008 "The Year of Dragons" - that is, the year we get off of all the maps we've had and enter uncharted territory. once upon a time, the parts of the maps that were unknown bore the sign "Here be Dragons" - I think this is the year we'll begin getting to know the dragons on the other side of our understanding.
So here are my predictions - and again, let me reiterate that the thing that I hope makes me marginally credible is this - I do not believe that every single idea I pull out of my ass...er head is the absolute truth. And if I don't, you certainly shouldn't.
But here goes.
1. This year, the words peak oil will go mainstream, but this mainstreaming will not be matched by a subtle or nuanced understanding of what the words mean. That is, peak oil will be used for political purposes, and not necessarily ones anyone will approve of.
2. By the end of the year, there will begin to be runs on preparedness equipment and food storage, a la Y2K.
3. The NeoCons will not go gently into that good night - there will be at least one serious surprise for us. G-d willing, it won't involve the word "nukuler" or any of its cognates.
4. Hillary will not win the 2008 election. Neither, despite all the people who keep sending me emails saying he will, will Ron Paul.
5. The economy will tank. Yup, I'm really going out on a limb here.
6. Many of us will find we are being taken more seriously than we ever expected. We will still be taken less seriously than any celebrity divorce, however.
7. We'll see food riots in more nations and hunger will increase. The idea of Victory Gardens won't seem so crazy anymore.
8. The biofuels craze will begin to be thought the better of - not in time to prevent the above.
9. We will see at least one more image of desperate people, walking out of their city becuase there's no other alternative. And a lot of images of foreclosures.
10. TEOTWAKI, if it ever happens, will be delayed long enough for my book to be released this fall and to make back at least the advance, so my publisher won't have any reason to try and sue me ;-).
Ok, that last is more of a prayer than a prediction - the bad thing about writing books for a publisher that deals a lot with peak oil and climate change is that the words "if everything doesn't go to hell in a handbasket" are actually included in the legal documents (ok, I'm joking).
Those are my bets, folks. We'll reconvene in late December of next year to make fun of me and my predictions. In the meantime, a happy, safe, healthy and hopeful New Year to all!
Shalom,
Sharon
History and the New Year
Generally speaking, my predictions (which weren't exactly going way out on a limb or anything) were pretty much right, except for Israel and Syria - it was Iran, not Venezuela, and the interest rate hikes were met by later cuts, but overall, I called it - more or less. I promise, this surprises me more than anyone. And I suspect that "the year of hanging on by our fingertips" wasn't a bad way to describe the last year.
My intuition is that in 2008, we'll no longer be able quite to hang on. I'm going to call 2008 "The Year of Dragons" - that is, the year we get off of all the maps we've had and enter uncharted territory. once upon a time, the parts of the maps that were unknown bore the sign "Here be Dragons" - I think this is the year we'll begin getting to know the dragons on the other side of our understanding.
So here are my predictions - and again, let me reiterate that the thing that I hope makes me marginally credible is this - I do not believe that every single idea I pull out of my ass...er head is the absolute truth. And if I don't, you certainly shouldn't.
But here goes.
1. This year, the words peak oil will go mainstream, but this mainstreaming will not be matched by a subtle or nuanced understanding of what the words mean. That is, peak oil will be used for political purposes, and not necessarily ones anyone will approve of.
2. By the end of the year, there will begin to be runs on preparedness equipment and food storage, a la Y2K.
3. The NeoCons will not go gently into that good night - there will be at least one serious surprise for us. G-d willing, it won't involve the word "nukuler" or any of its cognates.
4. Hillary will not win the 2008 election. Neither, despite all the people who keep sending me emails saying he will, will Ron Paul.
5. The economy will tank. Yup, I'm really going out on a limb here.
6. Many of us will find we are being taken more seriously than we ever expected. We will still be taken less seriously than any celebrity divorce, however.
7. We'll see food riots in more nations and hunger will increase. The idea of Victory Gardens won't seem so crazy anymore.
8. The biofuels craze will begin to be thought the better of - not in time to prevent the above.
9. We will see at least one more image of desperate people, walking out of their city becuase there's no other alternative. And a lot of images of foreclosures.
10. TEOTWAKI, if it ever happens, will be delayed long enough for my book to be released this fall and to make back at least the advance, so my publisher won't have any reason to try and sue me ;-).
Ok, that last is more of a prayer than a prediction - the bad thing about writing books for a publisher that deals a lot with peak oil and climate change is that the words "if everything doesn't go to hell in a handbasket" are actually included in the legal documents (ok, I'm joking).
Those are my bets, folks. We'll reconvene in late December of next year to make fun of me and my predictions. In the meantime, a happy, safe, healthy and hopeful New Year to all!
Shalom,
Sharon
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