Lester Brown on Peak Oil

Here's a good article on the impacts rising oil prices will have on us, written by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. He sees the biggest impacts on transporation and food. He notes that people living the suburbs will probably face some tough adjustments.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch02_ss6_7.htm

Gold, politics, our economy and the dangers ahead

Here is a good overview of what the price of gold tells us about the sickness of the US dollar...and what that might mean for our country. As usual, the bad news is that the "little guys" will be hit the hardest.

This is the text of a speech by Rep. Ron Paul from Texas. I don't know anything about his politics other than what is in this essay, but I do agree with his thoughts expressed here.


http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2006/cr042506.htm

Living in an era of Peak Oil: Are you "insured?"

I have decided to post occasional blog entries on what it mean to live in this era of Peak Oil and how to prepare for it. At different times I will look at the issue from perspective of an individual or family, a commuity or neighborhood, and a state or nation. Changes are needed at all levels.

But my approach will be pragmatic: it would be nice to hope that our government will invest billions of new dollars in alternative energy, but that probably won't happen soon...and perhaps until it is too late. Instead I will look at what could be done today.

I am motivated both by the fear of what could happen in our country if we do not take our oil dependency more seriously (e.g. food shortages, economic collapse) and by the vision of a beautiful more balanced world.

Different people have different words for this goal: permaculture, bioregionalism, ending the "tapeworm" economy, relocalization, ecovillages, etc. But they all really point in the same direction.

The more I have thought about, the more I have realized how unique the oil era was. The energy we were able to tap was incredible...and of course limited. Growth and development have occurred at dizzying rates yield many advances, and many problems.

Peak Oil is an opportunity for global reflection and choice. Things cannot contine as they have, so where do we want to go? This is what I will be exploring from my own perspective.

I will talk about everything from:

• what kind of car/vehcile is my best option
• how to organize ourselves into self-supporting neighborhoods and communities
• achieve personal food security
• what towns should do to prepare for gas price spikes
• what the federal government can do

Economists like to talk alot about "shocks" to an economy and how they can throw things out of equilibrium. They are particularly fond of discussing the pitfalls of oil shocks. Well, reaching peak oil is going to greatly increase the number and frequency of shocks like this.

We will not be running out of oil tomorrow, but as demand continues to increase and supply begins to level off, potentially huge spikes in oil prices will begin to happen. Think of the incredible electricity price spikes California had a couple years except extend the impact over the entire globe...and perhaps lasting for months. Oil is used in everything from transportation (gas) , to most products we use on a daily basis (plastics and processing energy), to food (transportation and fertilizers). The impact of these price spikes could be severe.

Imagine living in a city like New York if all the sudden oil prices even temporarily doubled or tripled. Would there be enough food? How many companies would go out of business? How widespread would rioting and looting get? How many billions of dollars would evaporate into thin air? A town like Los Angeles has more land for urban agriculture, but that doesn't help you in the short term if there's no food in the grocery down the street. And getting anything in that city without using a car would be a major challenge because it is so dispersed.

Even if oil prices don't double permanently for another decade, the potential for them spiking that high in the next year or two for a week or more seems pretty likely to me. All it would take is a fairly simple terrorist attack on a processing facility in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria. (Other people have written about these possibilities elsewhere.)

What is our insurance policy?

We have no insurance to deal with this problem. In fact, I don't think anyone could buy (with money) this insurance, or any company that tried to offer it would probably go bankrupt the first time such a spike occurred. Insurance companies work by spreading risk across a broader population. The idea is that only a few people will need their insurance at a given time. But the homeowner insurance companies in Florida and Louisiana know that this model doesn't work in situationsl like this (e.g. Hurricane Katrina). In fact, these homeowners insurance companies are not refusing to issue policies where they once did. Will people take a hint and move somewhere else? Probably not. Who will end up paying for this "insurance"? The federal government will, meaning you and I. Unfortunately, the prepared and careful few will end up paying for the ignorance and stubborness of the many. This cannot continue for long leading to unsupportable federal deficits, bankruptcy, internal strife and chaos. (It doesn't help that our country is already in debt up to its eyes.)

When oil prices spike, they will spike for almost everyone on the planet at the same time. Unless we can find some extraterrestrials to go in on some insurance with us, we will all need the insurance at the same time, which means that it's not something that can be bought. What about oil futures and hedging against this scenario, you say? Unfortunately these derivatives markets are not capable of delivering for everyone in such a case. Instead they will collapse. It will be a like the runs on the banks back in 1929. This is something people like Warren Buffet have warned about for years.

So what can we do? Is there no hope?

Yes, there is hope, but we must begin making preparations now. We must build our "Noah's Arks." Material preparations are the only insurance available to us now. We're not going to be able to buy ourselves out of this problem: the only way out is to prepare for potential problems. Some of these things are simple and easy to do, others require changing where and how we live, what we do with our time, and other similarly major shifts.

At the personal level we need to be thinking about things like:

• Having stored nonperishable food and water enough for a week or two to survive a short but serious gas price spike
• A car that runs on biodiesel or ethanol or electricity in addition to gas
• Solar panels so we can run some of our appliances (and maybe our car)
• Seeds native to our area and the knowledge, tools and space to turn it into food in a pinch
• Relationships with your immediate neighbors so you can support each other
• etc.

I know this may start to sound survivalist. Perhaps we will never need these preparations. But what is YOUR assessment of the potential risk? What could happen to your life if gas doubled or tripled or a week? A month? A year? If gas prices increased by 10 times? Once you have decided for youself what the risk are, and your tolerance for them, you in a position to decide what to do (or not do).

Personally, I am looking forward to this transition. I think the future will be better (more balanced, more sustainable, more healthy) than the past...if we are prepared and can weather the changes in the short term. What scares me is how unprepared we all are and how ugly things could get. I didn't put a gun on my list of necessaries above...but even that may be naive oversight.

On that cheery note, until my next installment! :)

Retaking control of our reality starts with recognizing who is in charge

I believe that human reality is socially constructed. It's not such a radical idea, really. Culture as a concept is an implicit recognition of this fact. Groups who have more interactions with each other than with outsiders are bound to develop particular cultural constructs that in turn begin to shape how people in that culture interact. It's like the cultural equivalent of the differentiation Darwin found in the Galapagos islands: these "islands" of culture are related but distinct adaptations. People have started talking in terms of "memes" (like genes) in recognition of this parallel.

Of course there are external realities that are beyond culture, but even these are profoundly shaped by culture. Think about the western view of nature as a "resource" compared with a more indigenous view of nature a "home" and the creatures in it as "brothers and sisters." This view of nature creates a radically different relationship to nature, which then gradually begins to shape nature in different directions through human interventions. Global warming may be the greatest example of how our human culture can affect even the seemingly most distant and untouchable realms like the weather.

So then our reality is socially constructed. Who does the constructing? Of course we all do, but some people and organizations have a disproportionate voice. Just think of your own group of friends: who shapes your way of being together? You all do through your consent, but more accurately there are probably a few individuals who are given more attention. Either they speak more or when they do speak people internalize it more. Who hold our collective attention in our modern world?

I would argue that corporations and other large institutions get most of the attention through the simple fact that they have the money and other resources to speak the most frequently and most loudly. Of course an institution is made up of people, but the people the institution tolerates must be mostly aligned with its goals. Those that serve its goals best are promoted and those that frustrate them are fired or otherwise marginalized. In this way, these institutions become more important than the constituent "parts" (i.e. people). When this happens, that institution becomes a living organism in a very real sense. It has a will and will grow until it dies or splits into subentities. We are like cells in this organism, just as mitochondria were incorporated into cells many, many years ago. (Fritjof Capra talks about some of these ideas in The Hidden Connections.)

And we must remember that we first created these institutions: they were our ideas. These ideas over time have literally taken on a life of their own independent of us, and in many ways incorporating and using us as resources to their ends.

As a thought experiment, imagine that there is another dimension (or several) to life that that we cannot see with our 5 senses but that are intertwined with the normal 4 dimensions we are used to (3 dimensions plus time). In these Like an iceberg, what we normally see of these institutions is just the tip: much of their bulk can only really be appreciated through a transformation of our normal space into idea space. The ideas live in idea space, but they manifest themselves in our normal space physically, as corporate buildings, factories, transportation lines, etc.

It is not hard begin to pay attention to idea space, but it does require making connections that me might not ordinarily make. It requires seeing the world through the lens of ideas. Which are powerful and widespread? Which are small and struggling? Which are growing and which are dying? Which are competing over the same resources (our minds)? Where are the fault lines of interaction and struggle/assimilation?

Like a dense and fertile jungle, idea space is a mess of life living on life living on life. Large and widespread ideas like Christianity and Islam interact and live - sometimes symbiotically and sometimes parasitically - on other ideas like capitalism, socialism, democracy, justice, freedom, right and wrong, nature and man, money, intellect and emotion, etc. Some idea lifeforms are "higher" in the sense that they have assimilated and internalized other ideas. And WE (our minds) are the base nutrients on which all of this feeds.

You may have even felt this yourself: like there are larger forces at work, bouncing you around, using you, making you walk and talk in certain ways that, when you stop to think about it, concern you. You find yourself doing things that don't make sense, that seen self-defeating. Who's in charge here, you wonder? It's the ideas: they have grown very powerful and are now living off us like parasites.

Of course, we first created these ideas because they were useful: and in many ways they are. What is the problem is how we have lost control over them. Think for a moment about the physical manifestation of these ideas in our world: corporations and institutions. Some corporations have annual budgets larger than many nations! These ideas are clearly growing and reshaping the world we live in in major ways.

There is even a Supreme Court ruling in the US that officially recognized corporations as "people" capable of owning property, acting in their own self interest, etc. Now that was a very bad idea...but again not very surprising because by then corporations were already very powerful and vital life form. There was another Supreme Court ruling that said that money is the same thing as speech: in other words, giving legitimacy to notion that those with more money should be able to TALK LOUDER and DEMAND MORE ATTENTION!!! than the rest of us. Put these together and you have just given corporations all the tools they needed to begin shaping our reality at a much more profound level. Decisions like these are like flipping the growth gene in their DNA to "cancerous."

I saw the movie Thank You for Smoking recently and it illustrated how corporations are shaping our reality, even to the point of moving beyond the protections normally afforded by Reason and Science. (I don't mean to target corporations alone: megachurches and government bureaucracies like the Pentagon are no better.) I saw clearly that the repetition, reach and access that comes with huge sums of money, coupled with advanced doublespeak, has the power to plant subconscious poisonous ideas, confuse and muddle us, leaving us marching in directions that don't serve us: we serve the ideas. We may catch glimpses of this happening, but may be frustrated to find it very difficult to escape. Like another movie, we can start to see through "The Matrix." (Note: these movies are indications that human will has not totally lost out to institutional and idea-based mind control. Some people are clever enough to know how to get messages like these out there under the defenses of the institutions...But before I rejoice too much, I must say that I have worried that although Thank You for Smoking appears to be an anti-smoking movie, it may in fact be a pro-smoking movie. Looking through the lens of attention and repetition, this movie may in fact help to relegitimize smoking. Especially by using the current culture preference for hip self-referential irony, smoking can reassert itself.)

So I started out talking about how we socially construct our reality, and I am ending talking about the ideas we first created may now be out of our control and are reconstructing and living off us! It's an incestuous business.

But the good news is that independent human will still exists (or at least I believe it does). As we begin to observe what is happening, recognizing patterns we did not see before new opportunities for intervention and reasserting our control over our lives and destinies begin to come to light. Once we see what is happening, we can slowly begin doing things differently, wiggling our way out of the slimy, tentacled embrace of the ideas we once gave birth to. (If only we knew they'd grow up to be such monsters! :)